You may be in a Toxic Community without knowing

 

Hello, everyone.

I was originally going to make this into a short video essay but

I decided against "poking the hornet's nest" by not creating a video

and so this will just be a casual blog to simply bring awareness.

With the state that the gaming community is, I can safely say
that we all deserve a response
in order to finally squash out our toxic gamers / people online
who have had more than a long time to voice
their complaints, their nitpicks, their absurd
tantrums about modern gaming.

I'll start off first by placing you guys in a scenario
for just a second, imagine

you so happen to enjoy a videogame, and dare i say,
were a fan of games made by a gaming studio.

then you go online to see more content about that
special game you so loved

only to be surrounded by a sea of nitpickers,
complainers, insults, all negative commentary under
the pixel sun.

how would you feel if every time you wanted to enjoy
more content about your favorite game
you had to undergo filtering through so many
negative people.

i would imagine, like myself, much of online hatred
would eventually sink into your skin and cause you
some form of depression or loss of humanity

when your favorite videogame is literally riding
the hate train where everyone is an expert
and your love of a game, is not only wrong,
but you should feel ashame to not also be enraged
as some choose to be these days.


this is nothing new. this is the internet in 2023
going forward where we live in the time of reddit
clickbait, twitter gossip, youtube closet ranting,
and all forms of influencers telling people what
they should love prematurely, and what they should
hate prematurely.

like, some people wonder why gaming is dead now
and it was better in the 2000s than now,

and i can say its definitely not because of our current 4k gaming
or our current library of amazing games we could
only dream about as a kid,
no,
its all because unlike gaming in the 2000s
now we have people to tell us what to like and
what to hate.

sure back then we had console wars as we do today,
but there was no social media influence to stop
gamers from trying out games for themselves.

that was the beauty of why most people discovered
the plethora of games being made at the time.

people tried out horror games like left 4 dead
or amnesia,

people tried out slice of life games like yakuza
vice city, driver or god father.

people tried out racing games and fighting games
and this one obscure alien area 51 game
for no reason one night playing with friends.

people bought pokemon games simply because they were
the newest games with content they wondered they could
discover.

yet,
for all this, imagine how many games people would not
try out for themselves if they had someone on their
phone telling them to not try it.

how many games would people make premature judgements
and premature bias hate before they even think for
themselves?

i mentioned this is my blog, that its no dang wonder
so many despise a game the minute they go through a
tutorial now.

many people in 2023 attempt to inform themselves beforehand
yet, doing so often puts us at an easy reach
to all the negative reviews, absurd comments
and rantings
that exist all across the internet.

too many times have i seen people play a new game now
with a whole essay in their head about all the negative
things they heard about, and now when they are the ones
to try out a videogame,

its not wonder so many start off with such a bad attitude, like
a oh my goshhhhhh this sucks this sucks this sucks
and comments like wow, thats it? yawnnnn.

this is the state of where we are as gamers that play
videogames with an underlining bias

in a time, where even game influencers simply b line
to finish the main story, b line to rack the most hours,
or b line to make a grocery list of the most absurd, tiniest,
insignificant who even cares and how does this affect anything
list of quote on quote "problems."

that the issues we think exist deserve the front page news
because heaven forbid someone found a barrel without collision
physics, or someone found a tree that doesn't break apart,
or someone says that the ui has too many menus and options now.

like, i dont cater to most reviews anymore because just like gaming
journalist, i have to allow myself to think for myself
in order not to develop a bias.

and when it comes to youtube, social media, and the internet trolls,
i have to be careful not to stand too close to the tv
and end up being like them.....negative, spoiled, doom and gloom,

and its sort of odd how comforting it is for people to get hooked on
a negative community because its like being next to smokers when you
want to quit drinking, these negative communities allow people to feel
frustrated because that's what they are about...negativity, listening
to rants, allowing more venting, and providing a safe zone for people
to continue.....to feel....negative.

when we should not be making communities around "venting our whiny
complaints, but making communities to heal our doom-like perspectives"

in an age where so many youtubers, clickbaits, and forums have already
done so much damage to people that gamers truly believe
videogames are dead, all companies are bad, if i cant afford a game
i should turn to piracy and so forth, so

i just want to say, videogames are not boring or dead now, not all
companies output the same endgame, and if you feel the need to pirate
just remember maybe you are in the wrong price range, look for games
in your budget, borrow a game from a friend, rent out a game,
or look at all the free games already available.

so
why am i telling you guys all this? what am i getting at?

im telling everyone to stop and look at a mirror and check your
toxicity levels because we allow so many influencers to tell us
what we should believe that now
we cant even think for ourselves anymore.


we live under layers of sponserships, bias, and mockery emojis.

as a gamer, i know why i love videogames, and i have played enough
to realize differences between one game over another.

i just find all these so called gaming experts to just be toxic
when i hear someone say
"bethesda is outdated. they make buggy games"

oh really?
outdated?

do you know game companies focus on different
features and all use different engines? are they all suppose to move
our productions to unreal engine now? will that solve the outdated
complaints?

maybe games arent outdated as much as they are different in how they
are designed.

like i hear a lot of people say bethesda games are outdated
but nobody goes online to say the yakuza games are running
outdated engines
or persona5 is running an outdated engine,
or zelda tears of the kingdom is running an outdated engine
or elden ring / armor core is running an outdated engine
or hogwarts legacy running an outdated engine

in fact, can you just imagine if people nitpicked hogwarts legacy
as much as we do with our hatred for bethesda?

does hogwarts legacy have dynamic npc routines?
is it able to customize your character to the smallest detail?
does it have a complex catelog of quest systems to store?
etc

all this to remind you all that its absurd to even begin to
believe that gaming engines all have to focus on the same feature
in order to not be laughed at for being "outdated"

so many games are called outdated just because rockstar did
something
or gears of war do something cool, etc

those that call any videogame "outdated" really havent gotten to
the point that all videogames play differently and are designed
for seperate reasons...

you know what, heres a bonus. ive always hated driving a vehicle
in call of duty, but im not going to go saying their engine is bad
and outdate

or when i first played cyberpunk, i literally crashed my car
because i was learning how to drive their vehicle for the first time.

i knew fully well that i wasn't playing no gta driving, or forza
game.

thats just how videogames are, they all are designed by people
and all with different ways they code a car to drive.

and unless you are playing a dedicated racing realism simulator
dont expect your videogame cars to be designed so precisely.
just be glad you even have the option to drive and that driving
is even a thing in your new game.

lastly, all that this video is boiling onto is highlighting
the simple fact, that gamers today have been allowed to cater
and nurse too much to the toxic minority.

sure, some pvp lobbys have always had some toxic gamers, but
now, it seems like its everywhere. between console wars,
between following certain influencers and what they think,
and with your good ole clickbaits that gossip drama without
context.

i know im not alone in this, i just happen to be a fan of bethesda
games and by being a fan i also have to go through all the basement
nerd ranting everything from morrowind elitest saying morrowind
is the best thing since apple pie, and bethesda haters that say
the game is bad, boring, sucks, yay for mods, boo bethesda.

like honestly, i feel bad for all bethesda fans that are undergoing
some form of depression these days

because it sort of feels like our lowest
with not only youtubers pushing the hate trends, people on ps
hating bethesda for now being on xbox, uh people that still hate
bethesda simply because theyre stuck on fallout 76 launch,
people that hate starfield even though starfield was mid
it wasnt bad, it was great, but boy does it get nuked like its
the worst thing ever in gaming, and even in skyrim,
the latest update has stirred the worst toxic people in our community
to openly hate both bethesda and modders who even think of
supporting themselves with both free mods and paid mods.


it all makes me stop to wonder, man i really know how cyberpunk fans
felt for the last three years. if you so happen to be a fan
of the games, you went through so much bullying because lets be honest
it was just trendy to blindly hate cyberpunk because youtube told me to
or tick told told me to or social media told me to.

no i do not like the gaming community today because the trolls are
out and in hordes more than ever. while actual gamers are enjoying
their games,
the horde of doom and gloom, and toxic gamers
are busy complaining and spreading
more negative and easy venting conversations about why they dont
like this, and why they dont like that, and im worried about this

like stop, i dont support any "its okay to voice your concerns"
because most concerns now, are just ignorant opinions
and i believe

if you're going to complain your concern online,
you better have a "because."
if you dont
then you are just venting nothing.

if you do have a complaint followed by a logical "because"
then you're actually just curious and are trying to educate
yourself, which is respectable.

the only problem is, many people make dumb "because" responses
that are able to be corrected with a simple google search

and when people are sometimes corrected, they feel attacked
like

how dare you correct my frustration, cant you handle different
opinions?

no, your opinion has to be a valid point
otherwise you might as well just say whatever like
cats speak english like this if you agree.


who ever said that there aren't any wrong questions
have clearly never heard wrongs answers.

so there you have it, my long and pointless logical video.
no i do not get any brownie points for stating the obvious
please do not attempt to praise me for simply using
common sense.


the problem in gaming, is us. we are the spoiled ones
now complaining about ray tracing reflections, trees
that dont have collision physics, npcs that don't have
hi poly facial emotions with human likeness,

all things that before in the 200s we didn't care about
and we were just having fun enjoying a game
rather than fighting over game of the year and console wars

like

did you know call of duty was game of year in 2003
gee, who cares, i was busy playing tony hawks underground
to care about such titles. its good that games earn their awards
like with elden ring last year, but
its bad if people develop a hate cloud around it like
its game of the year because all the other nominees are "trash"

so
thanks for reading. in conclusion, the main thing you should

get from this theme is to remember that

The reason toxic communities continue
is because they're made up of the same like-minded people
all telephoning each other
rather than have actual help correcting their own misinformation
/ testing their own logic.

If you find yourself in a negative community, you might be seeing

similar patterns where people just write ignorant news comments,

vent / mock about the opposition, and leave their own commentaries open

without anyone to correct their flawed statements / addressing their poor logic.

 

If you find yourself in such negative communities without any main admin to 

assist people's problems, it might be a huge red flag to leave a community

that is only bent on being their own one-sided cesspool. 

That, the best way to handle a negative community, is to not give them any

more publicity and attention. 

 

Red flags:

-foul language

-bad attitudes

-mockery remarks

-cynical stubborn elitists

-doom perspectives

-egos

-continuing to post negative gossip

-repeating concerns without testing their concerns

-using weak premature logic to validate their opinions

-not being consistent and using their own logic on their own opinions

 -further gossiping about issues without debating their own views in house