Games Journalism 2018: We're taking it back!

There’s plenty to say about how do we make online interactions less toxic, although I don’t have any idea myself. I certainly didn’t mean to shut that conversation down here.

Call me weird but I have perhaps read two or three Penny Arcade comics like ever.

Anonymity is an enabler, amongst several, for avoiding consequences. Certainly, people are every day quite horrible on social media using their real names, and the lack of consequences follows from the inaction of Twitter or Facebook. So the Social Media giants reluctance to get rid of certain users is an enabler, very much as anonymity is.

To try to bring this back on track:

I agree with this, although I think the same thing would likely happen with any internet community with a large population of hypercompetitive 15 year old males. If I can make up an example without it falling flat like every other one I’ve tried recently, I expect if streaming competitive wallpapering became huge among 15 year olds that it would quickly become incredibly toxic too.

I think teenagers and 15 year olds are getting rather unfairly tarred here. In my experience the worst offenders are actually older men. But regardless we are veering into “blame millennial’s” territory here.

I am much more comfortable blaming baby boomers for this and pretty much everything actually :)

I don’t actually know what age is most toxic in gaming, to be honest, so once again I’m guilty of imprecise language. Read “hypercompetitive people” for “hypercompetitive 15 year old males” in what I wrote and it probably still applies.

No worries. As the father of a 15 year old hyper competitive male, it hit a little close to home is all :)

As the father of a competitive 3 year old males, I’m probably 12 years behind you. :)

My god have mercy on your soul. :)

Seriously, enjoy the ride. Being a dad is awesome.

You can be in your 50s and behave like a 15 year old or a toddler. It’s true that associating anti social behaviour to a particular age bracket isn’t fair, though.

Punching Nazis in the face is a moral imperative. .

Unless that’s an ironic example of the point, it’s a pretty toxic statement itself.

Only if you’re a Nazi. Otherwise it’s just enforcing the social contract for the good of humanity.

Congratulations on lacking the insight to understand that you’re exemplifying what other people on this thread are talking about.

The problem, as with most statements of the sort, come in the definition of “Nazi”. As there are very nearly no actual National Socialists around these days, it’s either a statement without a subject or it’s a threat against anyone to the right of, say, Lenin.

Again, this is only a problem if you’re a Nazi. The rest of us don’t find it that hard to identify the people with swastika tattoos advocating violence and oppression of minorities as Nazis.

Your echo-chamber is here, you seem to have mistakenly ended up in the Games Journalism thread!

I’d have more sympathy for that statement if people on the left hadn’t just spent a year claiming Trump was a Nazi against all evidence that he’s what would have been called a centrist democrat in the 1990s.

It’s not at all clear to me which of us you’re responding to here.

I totally agree. Kids are the most numerous offenders, but the guys who are 30 and still can’t get through a round of Battlefield without going into an unsportsmanlike rage are the worst. (Yeah, I’m talking about you, ONYX. I never would have played on your server if there was another one running that game mode!)

The guy who suddenly dropped in to start talking about punching Nazis out of the blue.

I see the problem. You’ve been dead for 14 months. Ask God for a newspaper. Turns out he is an ignorant, racist, misogynist, malignant narcissist suffering from dimension and delusions of grandeur posing the greatest threat to humanity since a certain dapper Austrian took the Wermarch by storm.