"Toxic" Gaming Culture at its Whine-est
Michael Scott
Gaming culture and online gaming culture are among the most interesting subcultures in the world today. Not only are they technology driven, and therefore in a constant state of flux, but they are both globally reaching and growing fast.
But there is often a point where a subculture reaches a critical mass when the bubble splits. A moment where fans turn on each other for reasons, real or imagined. This has been bubbling near the top of the gaming stew for a while but with the bombastic success of Overwatch, it has really come to a head.
You may remember seeing these articles from two months ago.
So where did all these articles come from? Well, Blizzard itself kind of let the dogs loose on this one.
If you chose not to watch the video I can summarize. Jeff Kaplan, Overwatch's game director, basically talks about the new reporting feature the game has and the positive impact it's had on problem players in the game. What impact specifically is never said, but we can assume these punishments take the form of temporary bans as they do in the majority of online games.
But he ends the video with a plea that everybody just gets along and not call each other names. He speaks about the power anonymity grants to people that in many cases cause them to feel fine in calling someone awful names or insulting them.
In a game that's purely based in teamwork, you can see how this would be a problem. But every game has problem players, so what's up with this "toxic" word?
Do not consume.
I feel like "Toxic" is a pretty strong word. Toxic makes me think of poison or radiation. Something that has a skull and cross bones on the label. Something you don't want to get within 100 feet of. But in gaming culture, it seems that toxic has become shorthand for problematic members in the community, and this is often not even limited to online play.
Let's step away from Overwatch for a second and talk about a little game called Portal.
You dangerous, mute, lunatic.
Ah yes, it's been a while since you thought about this one huh? Cast your mind back to the year 2009. Obama was president, Minecraft had just entered alpha, and people still held out hope that Half-life 2: Episode 3 would be the greatest game ever. What a strange world it was...
This is also around the first time when I encountered a "toxic" gaming community. Even if you're unfamiliar with Portal you probably have heard the phrase "The cake is a lie." used either as a non sequitur or as a metaphor for some forced socio-political statement.
The quote is from a wall scrawling easter-egg in the game Portal, in which a progressively more vindictive AI puts you through death trap after death trap promising you a delicious cake if you beat all the levels.
It became an early meme in the modern sense, which basically means online joke. Internet memes originally had some clout as an odd repeated format that could be manipulated for varied effect. But the "cake" quote was almost always just deployed by itself in its original form. No creativity, just parroting.
Hearing the same "joke" over and over online, in videos, forums, and quite a bit in person as well was enough to cause me to develop an allergy to the joke and to Portal itself. Even though I was a few levels from the end of the game I quit playing because it had been spoiled for me. This strain of a toxic community, one that beats a dead horse until they start driving prospective community members away is really just a variation of Hype Aversion. TV Tropes has a pretty good summary so I'll just link that here.
Portal 2 was a little less meme friendly and therefore didn't scare me as much and I ended up really enjoying it. Far more than the original. And that's not to say that making jokes about a game is inherently bad. It's just that there's no value in copy/pasting the same joke ad infinitum.
You can also see another strain of this toxicity on twitter posts and Youtube comments. Often times in relation to triggery-content or social-justice related issues but occasionally not. Take for example the comment section of the trailer for the Nintendo Switch version of Runner 3, the sequel to the indie darling Bit Trip Runner.
Ya'll should be using Youtube Dark mode. ;) ;)
Within the top comments there was not a single one complaining that the game was too similar to an endless runner mobile game. Although, let's face it, it is. But it was full to the brim with people complaining about the nonexistent complaints.
You see this preemptive behavior crop up when people assume others will react negatively to their "thing" and you end up getting the immune reaction to a backlash without the backlash itself. In the end you get something that looks like a controversy, but doesn't have two sides. It's just one group of people getting mad at nobody.
Commander Video would not approve of this nonsense.
The last and oldest strain of a toxic community are the hostile ones. The ones where unless you follow a group of unofficial cool-rules, or meet a certain criteria gamers are ganged up on by other members of the community either in-game or online.
While Call of Duty doesn't have as large of a hardcore audience as it used to, I can remember the days when because I preferred playing by run-and-gunning instead of quick scoping, I was insulted and called a try-hard.
Now this sort of thing happens in MMOs, MOBAs, shooters, fighting games and more. It's a variation of the "Stop having fun, guys." mentality. The idea that everyone has to play the game the same way you do, or they're not playing it right.
So after analyzing the three major strains of toxicity in gaming:
Overhyping
One-sided Controversies
and Unwelcoming behavior
It's pretty clear which one is the worst offender.
AH SHIT.
Don't get me wrong, I'll still hate you if you come to my house to play Soul Caliber 2 and you insist on being Kilik, but that doesn't make me right.
Overwatch represents not only a test bed for a lot of new ideas in gaming, but also a great microcosm of the gaming subculture as a whole. You have all kinds:
People upset that Mei isn't fat, even though she never was supposed to be and just wears a thick coat (;¬_¬)
You have people who endlessly repeat "I NEED HEALING". (both in-game and out)
And lastly there will always be the people who will blame losing on everyone but themselves. Their team, the character you chose, when and where you used your ultimate, and whether or not you have a headset.
The gaming community still has a lot of growing up to do, but calling something that happens in gaming "toxic" might be an exaggeration. In the end, we're all just here to have a good time and the sooner people, both the toxic players and the good ones, realize that, the sooner we can put this crap past us. So maybe Mr. Kaplan has a point here.
Oh and by the way, if you actually beat Portal, you know that the cake ISN'T a lie.
That's a fine looking pastry.