The worst part of being a fan of video games is being associated with fans of video games. That’s less true today than it used to be, but there’s still some stigma and some of it for good reason.

The article is interesting, if a bit shallow in its touching on the dynamics in play. From the “gamer” end of things, I find there’s a frustrating tension that goes on. A lot of game companies frankly suck and are designed to extract as much money out of the player as possible, in as manipulative ways as you can imagine. Many games are designed more like casinos now than they are about anything else. And many a game is just bad in way one or another, whether egregious bugs or obvious design flaws. All of these things and more help create an antagonistic relationship between player and company, and of course capitalism is to blame to a large degree, as it often is.

But if only the relationship were as simple as being antagonistic. If that were the case, players could simply quit video games and go find things to do that are less wrecking of their wallets and psychology. If only. Instead, there’s another side to it. Players can have life-changing, incredible moments through games. They can learn things through them, meet lifelong friends, in rare cases even meet someone who becomes a spouse. They can fall in love with a design and want to shower developers in praise for their hard work and incredible creativity.

A game can be something that gets them through difficult life moments and helps them out for something to immerse in when they’re down and out. It can also be something that tries to manipulate them into overspending, into going broke, so that a shareholder can make a bit more money. It can help them overcome fears and help create new ones.

It’s no wonder with all this going on that emotions can run high surrounding video games. Sometimes this is perplexing to people who are observing, even among “gamers” themselves. It’s just a game, right? But it’s not, is the problem. “It’s just a game” is a convenient idea to drag up when people react in ways that seem disproportionate to the serious of video games, relative to “real life.” In practice, too much is expected of such people. Sure, some of them do straight up dysregulate and have clear maturity problems. But I don’t think that explains it all. When a game “community” is in flames for the nth time after a company has done something that “most people could have foreseen would be angering to do but they did it anyway because capitalism”, it’s real easy to run to the defense of developers who are allegedly getting death threats and forget the stakes involved.

That people who grow staggeringly attached to these virtual creations are having something they love warped in ways they weren’t consulted on, by an entity they have no control over. It’s easy to resent them when they’re immature, look down on them when they get reactionary with it, and generally think of them as people who lack perspective on the world. Even as a “gamer” (god, I hate that term), I am compelled sometimes to despise the people in my orbit.

What commies need to understand, I think, is the realness going on. That “gamers” are not caricatures; that is a necessary step to get anywhere it. They are neither grotesque nor are they exceptional. All the more so nowadays, they are an increasingly diverse group of people. But even if they weren’t in “demographic”, they are still a kind of diverse that matters. There is still nuance to who these people actually are, where they come from, and why they act in the ways that they do. They aren’t a religion, they’re just people who enjoy playing the same games some of the time. Sometimes they align on enjoying the same games and sometimes they stop aligning and friends drift apart and populations playing a game dwindle.

In some sense, they are one of the most meaningfully meaningless distinctions of a group there is. That is to say, they are distinct in some ways, but it is also extremely exaggerated how distinct they are as a subculture of people. For the most part, they are just people.

So what do you do with people? Talk to them, like anyone else. Befriend them if reasonable to do so, like anyone else. Find out what they struggle with and see if you can do anything about it, like anyone else. And if they act like a reactionary shit, set boundaries like anyone else. You can point out why their game just did a suck while you’re at it (capitalism, imperialism, etc.), but they may not want to hear it. Some of them are there precisely because they want to insulate from the world during that period.