I hope you’re sitting down, because this news could rock you to your very core: a new study shows that people who identify as “gamers” are more likely to act in racist and sexist ways.
I kid, of course, because this is not a new finding: a stack of studies in recent years have found that gamers tend to be more racist and sexist; that women are more likely to endure abuse during online gaming than men; that some games can actually make you more racist; and that online gaming can be a world of festering toxicity all around.
The problem is not the games in themselves — violent games don’t make you more violent in real life, for example. No, the problem is with those who play them; like Soylent Green, online gaming toxicity is people — you know, the ones shouting slurs and abuse in voice chat on Xbox Live and sexually harassing anyone who’s identifiably female. Hell, you don’t need to conduct any studies to know this; all you have to do is spend a few minutes listening to the voice chat in Call of Duty.
And so it’s alarming but hardly surprising that an assortment of studies and investigations have found that white supremacists and other extremists use the online video gaming community as a recruiting ground. Indeed, it’s not far-fetched to say that the rise of the far right in the United States in the past few years was initially kick-started by the toxic Gamergate campaign against women in video games.
What is new in this most recent study is its emphasis on the identity of “gamer.” Not everyone who games calls themselves a gamer, and those who do are rather snobby about who gets to claim the label — those who play on easy mode or who are addicted to puzzle games on their phones need not apply, and in many cases don’t want to because they see themselves a much more than simply gamers.
As Rachel Kowert, research director at gaming mental health nonprofit Take This, told Vice News:
When the gamer identity is very core to who you are as a person, that seems to reflect what we call toxic gamer culture, tends to reflect more exclusion than inclusion—so things like racism and sexism and misogyny. … All these things that we know exist in gaming spaces seem to be internalized by those who very closely identify as being part of that community.
Kowert did the research with Bill Swann, a University of Texas at Austin psych professor, and grad student Alex Martel, for publication in the journal Frontiers in Communication.
Among other things, the research contrasted the online communities surrounding Call of Duty and Minecraft. And guess what? The Minecrafters were much less racist and sexist.
“This can vary across communities depending on what kind of people that you are spending a lot of your time with,” Kowert explained to Vice. “I don’t think it’s necessarily about content but about the community in which you’re being immersed.”
In their paper, Kowert and her colleagues described gamer communities as a “double-edged sword.” They can provide
a sense of connection and purpose for individuals who suffer from loneliness and insecurity. On the other hand, they may expose gamers to hateful speech and social toxicity that can increase their susceptibility to extremist propaganda.
The gamers aren’t alright.
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
I’m actually pretty deeply involved in a community of StarWars:GalaxyOfHeroes players. I like to think we’re a pretty good bunch (though we have had people we’ve had to kick out and others we’ve … pushed a bit closer to the edge of the community’s space, hoping they’d fall over the border), but I’ve definitely see toxic “gamers” show up trying to be part of our community b/c they’ve heard good things about it and didn’t realize that the best part about our community was that they weren’t in it.
Minecrafters! My people! <3 Just a shout-out to the disabled and LGBT+ Minecrafter community, it’s huge! I wouldn’t be able to finish my PhD without that community.
I’ve played video games for the majority of my life. I was 6 when I got my first Kirby game, played split screen with every friend I ever had and even now, I’m counting the days until I get to play the next Yoko Taro game.
But the people who call themselves ‘gamers’ these days… I want nothing to do with them. They’re a drain on the medium, utterly unaware of what ruins games (it’s capitalism) or what makes their lives worse (it’s toxic masculinity and misogyny).
Oooh, I forgot to say!
There’s a game called “Club Penguin”, but when I first heard of it I thought the person said, “Club Penguins” and I ended up with a really, really incorrect mental image of it.
This is my shocked face.
It probably divides between “people who really love playing video games a lot” vs.
(mostly AMAB) assholes who have made GAMER their entire personality/worldview/self-ID.
I’m so horrible at games (going back to Pong) that I’ve never bothered. And my brain can’t translate 2D things into 3D things, so even Minecraft boggles me. But it sounds like a lot of fun.
The games I have played were back on the Atari 2600, the Wii (although even those controllers aren’t intuitive for me all the time), and some one-player PC games where I found all the cheat codes online and hacked my own copy to make it easier. But, no depth perception, some ataxia, long-term brain fog, and now arthritis (plus occasional finger twitches just when you don’t want them) makes them all tough; usually the demo level is the limit of my ability before my brain shorts out and says “How about a movie or a book?”
My online communities tended to be more along the MUD/MUSH lines. All words.
These assholes aren’t encouraging decent people to start gaming, that’s for sure.
I haven’t dealt with any of this personally, as I rarely played online games with anyone but family, but for a time I did live next to a gamer who apparently thought at 3AM because he was wearing headphones nobody could hear him yelling about pwning noobs and such. Not so racist or sexist, but not exactly helpful when trying to sleep
@ crip
Rip club penguin and all the hours I spent decorating my igloo
I feel like pretty much everyone who isn’t comfortable with racism and misogyny stopped using the term when gamergate got famous.
Casual gamer here. Playing with friends only, because i mainly play to have fun and wash away the stress of a working day, and i would like to avoid people sniggering the usual “git gud” or yelling at me because i missed something.
We do not slur at each other, but we do sometimes at the computer. The question is : is sluring at a computer can sometimes increase our tendency to slur at real people ?
@.45: I see you live next to my ex.
@hammerofglass
Hmm, you know, just from anecdotal experience I think you might be right. I have a number of friends that might have been considered “gamers” before then that are just… not, now. They struggle a bit with identity a bit, even, some of them, but won’t latch on to that one.
I do know people use the term gaymer though still.
@occasional reader
I would tend to think it would. It reinforces that, in some circumstances, it is ok to say these words. I have seen, as people grow older and start to have dementia/strokes, their grasp on which circumstances become more and more tenuous, until they appear to be the most heinous racists/misogynists that ever lived. Is that who they really were coming out, or is that a sad function of disease progression eating away at linguistic control?* In any case, from my experience, I would tend to encourage the building of absolute controls around such things, so there is more to eat away.
*In at least one case, it’s definitely who they really were, since he also repeatedly attacked women with a knife and in his life prior to disability had threatened multiple women with guns and had shot himself multiple times in lieu of shooting his third ex-wife.
I’m a female gamer and I don’t play the first person shooters (FPS) online for these reasons. MMOs have their toxicity too, but you can find good and bad gamers in them. My husband used to hop in and play some of the FPS online , but the toxicity drove him away too. It’s like those games devolve into the worst people by both radicalizing the players and pushing out anyone who isn’t radicalized by the constant racial and sexist slurs being uttered. It isn’t fun, which is sad because we really enjoyed the games when we played together.
And this sort of thing is exactly why at least one of the MMOs I’m involved with has a separate ‘child-friendly’ server which is canned chat only. Or for that matter, there’s another online board game which only allows for canned chat (though that one is also because canned chat means all the chat can be internationalized).
@ occasional reader & Big Titty Demon
I can’t speak for others, but the more I even hear a word being repeated, the more likely it is to be on the tip of my tongue. I try to tune out selective parts of rap music I come in contact with for this very reason.
(I sometimes wonder how unusual this is, as one of my siblings practically doesn’t believe me when I say that. To them, once they know something is offensive, they can simply decide not to say it or even think it. The idea that I can’t just flip a switch in my head like that is foreign to them.)
@ Mimi Haha
Perhaps. He seemed friendly enough aside from that endearing character trait.
Yeah, people who play video games (around half of whom are women) are a wide spectrum of people, mostly good. Gamers are a specific kind of men.
I’ve known people to exclaim things at the NPCs in single-player games – my favourite was a coworker who played Phoenix Wright on her phone and used to mutter “oh, I’m going to cross-examine you so hard!” at the characters on the witness stand.
@milotha:
I’m told that Team Fortress 2 has had a problem for the last couple of years with bots that somebody deliberately created to log into the game, yell slurs at players, cheat and generally ruin the fun for everybody. Fans of the game put out a call early this year for the parent company to try and solve the problem; not sure where things stand at the moment.
I’ve been playing RPGs (mostly roguelikes) since I was like 12, and honestly hacking the open source ones is why I now have a tech career. But never liked to ID as a gamer, despite all the hours playing, modding, and testing games. Exactly because of this stuff.
The thing is, the roguelike community was IME better than other game communities, I remember it being pretty safe and friendly for me as a kid. But even then there was stuff that made me uneasy, and it’s always been mostly a thing for and by adult cis men, and like… that showed. It’s still a mixed bag too; there’s an Angband maintainer who came out as trans, but also there was the Orc Breeding Pits fiasco in Tales of Maj’Eyal. (Don’t look that up unless you have a strong stomach.)
For other games, well. I tried FPS and other PvP games briefly and they felt very not okay. Gave up entirely after someone RPed sexually assaulting me in the game chat one time. My handle was obviously masc too, they didn’t care – I stood up to them, so I became a target. From the stories I’ve heard, this is the norm for PvP anything, to the point that fans dislike PvP support being added to games due to the influx of scumbags.
The QAnoner mumbles something about mushrooms. -more-
You are confused.
@Surplus
Thank you, I needed that today.
@Cyborgette: I do not even consider playing a game with PvP, never have, even before GG. Single-player all the way through or GTFO.
You want bad on the gamer front…one of my regular customers has custody of her grandson, and allows him to play Minecraft when he’s being good. She had no problem with allowing him access to the chat channels, until the day she found out that one/some of the guys on there convinced the boy (who was around 5 years old when this happened) to take a smartphone and take a picture of his grandmother’s chest.
Mission failed, as you could guess. The grandmother then arranged things so all the chat messages went to her phone instead, and allowed the boy to see only the messages she approved of to prevent a reoccurrence. When she was telling me about this later, she said she was shocked at the raw sewage she was reading from those other players.
And before you ask, no I don’t know if the guy(s) who set the boy up knew he was 5(ish), but they had to know he was a minor who wasn’t an older teenager. The vast majority of kids in that age range aren’t quite experienced enough in worldly matters to fool an adult for longer than a few minutes at best. Assuming, of course, that the kid(s) in question were trying to fool an adult for some odd reason.
I live next door (in a terrace house built in 1913, so the walls are a single brick and some plaster thick) to a gamer. He shouts all sorts of slurs all night sometimes. He’s in his 30s and lives with his mum; this isn’t a problem, I lived at home until 34 and was forced to move out by family circumstances. I’ve heard him shouting at her too. I have brought it up with her, since he never answers the door, but she just shrugs it off as him getting enthusiastic about his gaming. From what she’s said, they’re both Autistic, like I am.
@Redsilkphoenix
WTF, that’s so incredibly vile. Literally five years old – barely more than a toddler! Who even are the men who do these things, I want to dig them out of their holes and make them hurt.
@R J Dragon
One of my neighbors pre transition was like that, sort of. IDK about his gaming habits, but after his dad died he got abusively angry at his mom – at one point he threatened to kill her, so loudly I could hear from my place. I tried to talk to him, and got nothing but insults about my lack of masculinity. Wound up going to the police, who yelled at me for endangering myself and then proceeded to do nothing.
From what I hear he and his mom are doing better now, but after the stuff I heard him say it’s hard for me to forgive.
@GSS ex-noob
Wish I’d had your wisdom honestly. PvP games brought me nothing but misery and exhaustion.
Hmmm… I played a few freebie fantasy MMOs back in the day and don’t recall them being particularly bad, though I was fairly well liked for my tendency to play support roles in cooperative PvE areas and didn’t make too many enemies.
Essentially it seemed most people I met forming parties to take on the AI appreciated a heavily armored tank that held aggro or a healer that kept them from dying (Though my builds did not do well in PvP areas, basically dying the instant some DPS minmaxing clown would glance in my direction). I imagine the more competitive PvPers were more likely to be toxic assholes, but I didn’t much associate with them