The cringiest things about gamers

[Syaoran Li]

The cringiest thing is how "gamer" is an identity, mostly of overweight manchildren and edgy not-super-duper-attractive women, engaging in a perpetual childhood of mindless entertainment and corporate intellectual property. Rarely do they appreciate anything of real art, cinema, literature, etc. I know I sound pretentious, but it's all the same shit with them. Learn how to play the piano or discover 80s funk and soul music or whatever, just try to be a more diversified person. If the piece of "art" that made you cry the most in your life was the Aeris death scene then you're a fucking faggot that needs to grow up.

OK Hipster

You do have a point about some people take it way too seriously, but the whole "real art" bullshit is pretentious and cringe-inducing in its own equal and opposite way.

Really, the people who take vidya way too seriously and the pretentious "true art" culture crowd are two sides of the same coin in my opinion.

But then again, I'm just a common man with common tastes and believe insufferable faggots are extremely common in every subculture, hobby, and medium.

Like, I may dislike the MCU and the consoomer vidya, but that doesn't mean I want to be some fart-huffing pseudo-intellectual snob who only likes the most pretentious boring indie films and music. Fuck that shit too.

Yeah, I'll admit I enjoy video games and anime and other "mindless entertainment", but I also enjoy reading about history and old-school movies of both the low-brow grindhouse fare and the kind of stuff like Scorsese does. I also love me some classic rock and heavy metal, and I also enjoy disco, 70's funk and soul, pop hits from the 1950's-1970's, and stuff like bluegrass and traditional folk and country music.

But to end the post on a more positive note so I don't come across as MATI, I admit your post does illustrate two good points.

One is how the Millennials and Gen Z have both substituted their hobby for an actual identity and personality, and the other is that we don't seem to have any "middlebrow" pop culture anymore.

Like they don't make the kind of movies that are more sophisticated than the typical consoomer capeshit flick, but aren't pretentious indie arthouse snob fare either. The only one I can think of who still does that type of stuff is Martin Scorsese, and only because he's been consistently at it since the 70's.

I think the demise of middlebrow pop culture and the deepening chasm between "lowbrow consoomer trash vs. highbrow pretentious indie trash" in pop culture had a lot to do with the demise of mid-budget entertainment after the 2008 recession, and that's something that can be felt in movies, TV, books, and video games.

 

[Harbinger of Kali Yuga]

OK Hipster

You do have a point about some people take it way too seriously, but the whole "real art" bullshit is pretentious and cringe-inducing in its own equal and opposite way.

Really, the people who take vidya way too seriously and the pretentious "true art" culture crowd are two sides of the same coin in my opinion.

But then again, I'm just a common man with common tastes and believe insufferable faggots are extremely common in every subculture, hobby, and medium.

Like, I may dislike the MCU and the consoomer vidya, but that doesn't mean I want to be some fart-huffing pseudo-intellectual snob who only likes the most pretentious boring indie films and music. Fuck that shit too.

I enjoy video games and anime, but I also enjoy reading about history and old-school movies of both the low-brow grindhouse fare and the kind of stuff like Scorsese does. I also love me some classic rock and heavy metal, and I also enjoy disco, 70's funk and soul, pop hits from the 1950's-1970's, and stuff like bluegrass and traditional folk and country music.

But to end the post on a more positive note so I don't come across as MATI, I admit your post does illustrate two good points.

One is how the Millennials and Gen Z have both substituted their hobby for an actual identity and personality, and the other is that we don't seem to have any "middlebrow" pop culture anymore.

Like they don't make the kind of movies that are more sophisticated than the typical consoomer capeshit flick, but aren't pretentious indie arthouse snob fare either. The only one I can think of who still does that type of stuff is Martin Scorsese, and only because he's been consistently at it since the 70's.

I think the demise of middlebrow pop culture and the deepening chasm between "lowbrow consoomer trash vs. highbrow pretentious indie trash" in pop culture had a lot to do with the demise of mid-budget entertainment after the 2008 recession, and that's something that can be felt in movies, TV, books, and video games.

I don't give a shit about highbrow and classical music bores me and frankly I think a lot of pop culture (60s-80s, as I always say) was absolute genius. I'm not trying to sound so artsy-fartsy, I'm mainly just talking about self-growth in areas other than "omg nerdom lol". I'm talking about anything different... listen to 80s pop music, prog rock, write a non-fanfiction book, learn video editing, watch foreign films that aren't just fantasy or sci-fi, just stop liking all the stereotypically "gamer" things. Stop listening to only electronic or chiptune music. Learn how to cook a meal instead of devouring Taco Bell. Enjoy art more than just fan art of some corporate intellectual property. Decorate your house with things other than kitsch like Funko pop garbage easily marketed-to materialistic manlets collect. Just don't make mindless entertainment and consumerism your entire being. There's more to life than just video games and anime. I've known too many gamer that was just that, a Gamer, their personality was playing video games and doing traditionally nerd things. I'm disgusting by the number of times I've had to talk to people about what the best Final Fantasy is. I did all that shit for years when I was a kid, it's time for millennials to move on a little. I game and embarrassingly enough watch some anime, but I don't make that the core of who I am anymore than I make masturbating the core of who I am.

It's basically the difference between The Red Letter Media guys vs. someone like Jim Stering, or the RLM crew doing "Nerd Crew". Go into a video commentator's video and look at what their room is like. Something like the background of a Yong Yea or Boogie1488 is exactly what I'm talking about. It's fine to like that shit, but when it defines your life completely and makes you who you are it's kind of pathetic. It's just mindless consumerism and play. Getting better at a game isn't self-development like learning how to weld or brew beer unless you're one of the vanishingly few e-sports pros.

Hell Boogie is probably the best example of exactly what I hate, but blown up to the extreme.

There is "Gamer" as an identity (see: Gamergate) and it's juvenile and retarded. Everything they love in their lives is corporate IP-related and they live a life of sloth. And then there is "gamer" like someone who just plays video games here and there. I'm talking about the former. The Boogie1488s.

 

[augment]

That there's "gamer culture" is bad enough I guess.

 

[Syaoran Li]

I don't give a shit about highbrow and classical music bores me and frankly I think a lot of pop culture (60s-80s, as I always say) was absolute genius. I'm not trying to sound so artsy-fartsy, I'm mainly just talking about self-growth in areas other than "omg nerdom lol". I'm talking about anything different... listen to 80s pop music, prog rock, write a non-fanfiction book, learn video editing, watch foreign films that aren't just fantasy or sci-fi, just stop liking all the stereotypically "gamer" things. Stop listening to only electronic or chiptune music. Learn how to cook a meal instead of devouring Taco Bell. Enjoy art more than just fan art of some corporate intellectual property. Decorate your house with things other than kitsch like Funko pop garbage easily marketed-to materialistic manlets collect. Just don't make mindless entertainment and consumerism your entire being. There's more to life than just video games and anime. I've known too many gamer that was just that, a Gamer, their personality was playing video games and doing traditionally nerd things. I'm disgusting by the number of times I've had to talk to people about what the best Final Fantasy is. I did all that shit for years when I was a kid, it's time for millennials to move on a little. I game and embarrassingly enough watch some anime, but I don't make that the core of who I am anymore than I make masturbating the core of who I am.

It's basically the difference between The Red Letter Media guys vs. someone like Jim Stering. Go into a video commentator's video and look at what their room is like. Something like the background of a Yong Yea or Boogie1488 is exactly what I'm talking about. It's fine to like that shit, but when it defines your life completely and makes you who you are it's kind of pathetic. It's just mindless consumerism and play. Getting better at a game isn't self-development like learning how to weld or brew beer unless you're one of the vanishingly few e-sports pros.

Hell Boogie is probably the best example of exactly what I hate, but blown up to the extreme.

Agreed, although I'm of the opinion that you can geuninely like both stereotypical "gamer" things and like other things just as much.

Like, I'm not ashamed that I like video games and anime and I don't try to cloak my enjoyment in irony or snark.

But I'm also a bit of an armchair historian and I love reading and researching about history. I can also cook and bake some, and I'm also currently trying to learn how to distill my own whiskey and learning more about self-publishing so I can write and publish my own original novel that I've begun working on

But I still enjoy fan art and fanfiction in addition to original non-corporate entertainment, and I don't have a room decorated in Funko Pops or other consoomer trash.

Now, if you want to buy nerdy merch every now and then and even have a side room for that type of stuff, I'm fine with that. Like, if you want to just have a small room dedicated to the geek culture stuff with posters and merch where you can decompress once in a while, I get that.

Everything in balance, as it were.

As a late Millennial, I think my generation has a problem with moderation or finding a good middle ground with anything. Overall, we tend to be a very "absolutist" generation where you have to be either a total consoomer like Boogie or a pretentious fart-huffing indie hipster punk, with no middle ground in between, it's all "one or the other"

I'd say this generational trend also ties into a lot of sociopolitical bullshit that our generation is associated with, where centrists and moderates are reviled and heavily strawmanned by both the far right and far left, but that's neither here nor there.

As always, there are exceptions to the rule as with any generation.

 

[Harbinger of Kali Yuga]

I agree it's okay to like them. Just not exclusively like them, over all other things. The problem I got with most nerds is they're too easy to figure out. I've seen your posts before and you seem reasonably versed in things like music and such far beyond the Geek Orthodox Church, you're definitely not the kind of person I'm talking about. Again, I'll reference Boogie1488, who is pretty much just a hog at the trough of cheap and shitty pop culture and cheap and shitty food.

Also, millennials in general just have awful taste in music.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

That was the good Sinclair keyboard. The other one was this abomination.

View attachment 1329237

The painful feeling of realizing that the games were programmed using that keyboard.

 

[The Penultimate Warrior]

Gatekeeping difficulty, that you're not a "real" gamer unless you play everything on the hardest setting. Games are about enjoyment, some like a challenge and some for the experience, so play how you want.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

As a late Millennial, I think my generation has a problem with moderation or finding a good middle ground with anything. Overall, we tend to be a very "absolutist" generation where you have to be either a total consoomer like Boogie or a pretentious fart-huffing indie hipster punk, with no middle ground in between, it's all "one or the other"

As I see it part of the problem is "why do you like [thing]" in a sort of accusatory manner, that puts people on the back foot and they have to defend themselves and justify their interest. Variations of "it amuses me" is no longer enough, there needs to be more to it so it can be defended. You need a PHD in film to justify owning a $15 Russ Meyer boxset these days.

 

[Syaoran Li]

As I see it part of the problem is "why do you like [thing]" in a sort of accusatory manner, that puts people on the back foot and they have to defend themselves and justify their interest. Variations of "it amuses me" is no longer enough, there needs to be more to it so it can be defended. You need a PHD in film to justify owning a $15 Russ Meyer boxset these days.

I know, right?

For me, "it amuses me" or "I find it fun" is more than enough.

Honestly, I'd love a return to sincerity and a shift away from pretentiousness in our culture. The big debates over "geek culture" and "true art" over the past ten years reminds me of when I used to lurk /cow/ back in 2012-2013 and I was just getting into lolcows.

They'd outright have threads about what was and wasn't acceptable to be a fan of, and it all just boiled down to some variation of "liking things is for spergs" unless it was super-stereotypical "normie" like sports or Law & Order, or whatever.

The irony in all of it was that obsessing over whether liking something makes you a sperg or not is a pretty spergy thing to do.

 

[Berrakh]

One is how the Millennials and Gen Z have both substituted their hobby for an actual identity and personality, and the other is that we don't seem to have any "middlebrow" pop culture anymore.

There are games I think make good middlebrow culture but have atrocious fanbases. So there is that. Pretty much any game that has a fun or decent story is middlebrow but you have fanboys for whom it is still way above their reasoning faculties and people who pretend it's actually incredibly deep because it lets you figure out or fill in some details here and there.

But I guess that's the problem. Because middlebrow properties are not a thing what little there is gets torn between the two camps. Maybe it's just the nature of the internet that the middle gets ripped between two simple extremes.

 

[Berrakh]

Double posting but it's been long enough. I can't be the only one but isn't it dumb how, to own the sjws, gamers are increasingly acting like genuine coombrains?

 

[Thiletonomics]

Another thing I don't understand when it comes to gaming is why some people are obsessed with making and stockpiling absurd amounts of in-game currency, just for the sake of having it. I can understand that if you're spending that currency on some big-ticket items, but it's not being rich in a game will lead to anything other than just bragging rights. When it comes to currency in-games, I believe that people should go wild and spend spend spend on stuff in-game, as it's just a game after all, a form of escapism, and it's not like you have to do stuff like managing budgets like with real-life money.

 

[Neet Tokusatsu]

The anti-emulator crowd. They go around acting like emulators are illegal even though that isn't true. Never see them have a problem with DOSbox or any other computer emulators. Just console ones. When they aren't wishing Sony won the lawsuit against Bleem, they're outraged over one teeny tiny crumb of emulator showing. Oh no, a mouse cursor over Panzer Dragoon! Litcherally shaking right now!

No one in their right mind wants to spend 1000 dollars on a CD that's rotting.

Many people seem to flat out fetishize original hardware, i've seen people even disregarding "legal emulation" like the Virtual Console by saying "You played Super Metroid on Wii!? that's not how it was meant to be played!!!", some people are just way too attached to their rotten CDs and corroded carts

 

[BR55]

Many people seem to flat out fetishize original hardware, i've seen people even disregarding "legal emulation" like the Virtual Console by saying "You played Super Metroid on Wii!? that's not how it was meant to be played!!!", some people are just way too attached to their rotten CDs and corroded carts

This is off topic but all this talk about emulation reminds that OG Xbox emulation really needs to get it's shit together.
Buying a game for mine is a crapshoot of hoping that the disc will work. Having a mini anxiety attack every time you hear the disc drive stutter isn't fun.
Apparently hardware purists have never heard of this thing called time.
It's kind of a bitch.

 

[Neet Tokusatsu]

This is off topic but all this talk about emulation reminds that OG Xbox emulation really needs to get it's shit together.
Buying a game for mine is a crapshoot of hoping that the disc will work. Having a mini anxiety attack every time you hear the disc drive stutter isn't fun.
Apparently hardware purists have never heard of this called time.
It's kind of a bitch.

I doubt most hardware purists play the shit they buy

 

[H&K Hates You]

Isn't there a problem with Sega Saturns having universally failing lasers, so the only way to play those games on original hardware after a while will be through some kind of SD card mod thing? So you'll only be able to play pirated games?

Funny that you brought up the Saturn Rhea/Phoebe SD card thing. That disaster is the only thing I can think of that's more autistic than screeching at some guy on youtube because he didn't actually pay for Panzer Dragoon Saga.

 

[Pissmaster]

Funny that you brought up the Saturn Rhea/Phoebe SD card thing. That disaster is the only thing I can think of that's more autistic than screeching at some guy on youtube because he didn't actually pay for Panzer Dragoon Saga.

What's the story behind it? I didn't know anything about it other than that it exists

 

[Duncan Hills Coffee]

PC gamers that are incapable of accepting that older games have limitations. I've seen some complain about some 15-20 year old game can't be played at like 120 frames per second because it breaks the game. Oh boo fucking hoo, the game that runs perfectly fine at 60 can't go any higher than that because the developer didn't have the fortune telling powers to know that frame rates will go higher than that. If it's because of vertical sync issues or modern hardware playing the game too fast, I can understand that, but it baffles me when someone complains because they can't use their ultra powerful rig to make X game from 2005 run at insanely high FPS because the game breaks after that.

Also, just a personal pet peeve, but I don't get the obsession with widescreen mods. Is it really so hard to play the game at a 4:3 resolution? Half the time it looks wrong because, again, the game wasn't designed for those kinds of resolutions.

 

[H&K Hates You]

What's the story behind it? I didn't know anything about it other than that it exists

I stopped following it a year ago and I'm on my phone, dude created the sd card reader for the system but had no idea on how production or running a webstore works. What little stock he had would go on sale in the middle of the night, be snapped up in minutes by scalpers and sold on ebay weeks later for prices that would rival Panzer Dragoon. I decided on a 100 pack of CDs and a binder instead.

 

[Love Machine]

The thing I hate about "gamers" is that its just normies now, and normies ruin literally everything they touch. Its not a term for a hobbyist, it would be like calling everyone in the cinema a "movier". The problem of this being that they present incentive for game studios to cater to them, because by definition, they are more numerous. Since they arent hobbyists, they wont bother dedicating time to learning in depth game mechanics, and thus wash out any series they flock to upon further iterations. I am not saying that there cant be games for a mass audience, but normies dont usually stick to that since they are usually follow ecelebs looking for attention and clout. The only games immune to this being the most obfuscated of the bunch. Like Dwarf fortress, in depth sims, and complex 4x stuff, or pretty much anything that uses DnD-esque rolling mechanics. Blizzard franchises also being the perfect example of what happens when the normie locusts come.

Ultimately, its a lack of base level gate keeping that caused this. Retards can flood in and start demanding changes they dont understand. and they drown out the minority that understand what the fuck is going on. Even if the devs are smart enough to see though this, there is no possible way they can look through the haze of war to get anything valid. /tg/ stuff thankfully has a semi-shield against this because "ewww yucky books and numbers" but even then, there has been some corrosion due to the random clout chasing eceleb to be. There is a reason normies try to vilify the term "gate keeping", and thats because its literally the only way to have a chance to stop them. They dont want to have to put in effort to have their opinion validated.

Just look at what happened to e3 over the years, you can literally see the ruination.
TL;DR
If you have a niche gaming series you like and it has a healthy community. the only way to keep it good is to HOLD THE FUCKING LINE.