I play a lot of online video games, particularly team-based shooters. There’s something so compelling about coordinating team fights, calling out targets, managing the team’s collective resources, and fighting beside and against a bunch of weird passionate nerds on the internet for nought but digital laurels. Team coordination, as one might expect, is key to the success (and fun) of any good team-based shooter, and it’s a pure joy to experience the rush of a half dozen sets of adrenal glands blasting straight out of your headphones. I have many fond memories playing Overwatch with my friends every day after school, just hanging out and chatting on a Discord call about whatever the hell we used to care about.

The Lockdowns and Whatnot

Overwatch and other online games did a lot to help me through the social isolation of the 2020 and 2021 COVID lockdowns. I had my driver’s, but where was I supposed to go? I didn’t want to get sick, and my friends didn’t either; in retrospect, I wish we hadn’t cared quite so much. It would’ve been so much healthier for us all to come up with safe(r) ways to keep hanging out an spending time with each other than to force ourselves into such isolation, and I think I knew that at the time, too. COVID just always seemed a little scarier than whatever sort of nebulous social damage might accrue. Looking back, it’s easy to see how harmful that sort of social isolation really was, but I don’t think I was really able to see it until recently; hell, I’m only beginning to unpack my traumas! At this rate of insight I’ll have fucking ascended in a decade or two.

Many of my friends from high school sort of fell away after graduation. Everyone sorta went our own way, and since many of us were only really friends-by-circumstance in the first place, our friendships dried up when we grew out of those shared circumstances. This seems like a pretty common experience, at least in my circles. It feels like I never learned to build the closeness and intimacy needed to keep a friendship, or any other sort of relationship, healthy and happy long-term.

Community Culture Under Capitalism

Where’s the New Shit??

It’s really fucking difficult to find new shit lately, hey? My Spotify is really trying to push their advertiser-driven “recommendations,” in the form of algorithmically-generated playlists (filled with many of the same songs as similar playlists in the same genre) designed to be similar to what I’ve listened to in the past, and as recommended artists or albums, even continually pushing artists I’ve set it not to play. I want new and interesting music and not the same fucking shit forever. The AI DJ shit really pisses me off LOL. You could be listening to Tinzo spin actual burning embers over on Book Club Radio right now!! And check out their other DJs too!– there’s enough talent on that channel to keep you entertained for a looong time ;)

This problem of finding new shit seems to pervade much of the internet lately. Search engines are infested with LLM-generated SEO slop shitsites. Large corporations control more and more of the internet itself, and they seem to be unable to keep links alive for longer than about 6 months each, degrading accessibility to old shit, too. Image aggregation sites are filled with genAI nonsense and repost bots.

Even internet subcultures are affected by this, it seems. Among many online communities, it’s the norm to enforce strict moral codes, ostracizing those who are deemed to have committed an immoral act or professed an immoral belief. Can such a group even be called a “community”, or would “friendship club” maybe be more fitting? Communities should welcome a diversity of thought, especially if those expressing it appear to be doing so in good faith, with the intent to engage genuinely with other members of the community. Additionally, many online groups will be aligned with some identity label that members of that group may associate more strongly with than non-members; e.g., queer community, linguist community, conservative community. This identity may be better described as a “role” than a “label” in some communities; e.g., art community. Due to these and other factors, it really seems like online subculture communities favour a well-defined in-group exclusive to some identity label.

What I’d Like to See Instead

In my mind, a healthy community is one that exists for the sake of the people and relationships it contains. A community is not a club, or work colleagues, or some other group that exists to accomplish something. The moral policing in internet subcultures (in particular, groups aligned with left-leaning moral values) seems to stifle thoughtful conversation and communication, particularly on touchy or controversial subjects. A community should encourage thoughtful discourse, and should engage with criticism in good faith. I want to see healthy communities built on relationships, not on purposes.

And… Why Was This Bad Again????

Aside from the obvious stuff, this sort of exclusionary attitude in online subcultures seems to be symptomatic of a larger issue. The commodification of attention online is what drives this sort of shit, I think. We’ve realized that our attention is highly valuable online, and we’re getting better at identifying time-wasting bait posts. The ability to quickly recognize and ignore bait posts online also saps our willingness to engage with difficult ideas generally, though. It can often be very difficult to determine if something is worth thinking about before thinking about it and we’ve been trained to associate difficult thought with useless thought. I refer mainly to young (15–30 years old) left-leaning internet people here, and I recognize that this is absolutely not necessarily representative of any larger population; I only reflect on my personal experiences as someone who floats around these circles. I think it’s fair to say that many internet-users have developed some degree of skill in identifying bait, but this demographic in particular seems to embody it for me.

Anyway, another consequence of this in-group culture that pervades the internet is the odd phenomenon of the “gamer girl.” This term has complex connotations, like many terms for women and girls. It is used as a tool of oppression and a platform for empowerment. Such is the burden of all language related to women: when women are a complex political topic, every word and phrase uttered by a woman, for a woman, or about a woman is a political statement.

On the “Gamer Girl”

The reason I’m thinking about this lately is that I’ve been pretty consistently identified as a “woman” by my voice when I speak in-game for the past couple months. I’m approximately woman-aligned myself, but most of my childhood was spent not knowing that, so I’ve got the lovely privilege of having what I like to think is a pretty neat perspective on gender and youth and personhood in our society…. anyhoo, when I make video game callouts, my team will reflexively attempt to fit my voice to either male or female, as they’ve been trained to do by a cultural and societal obsession with gender. For most of my gamer life, my team would identify my voice as male, and I blended into the sea of male voices making callouts, and nobody really said anything at all. Lately, like in the past few months especially, I’ve been consistently identified as female; you may be asking how I could possibly know. If this is the case, you must not make video game callouts with a perceived female voice. My team makes it very clear that they know I’m a woman. Here’s a good clip of what I mean. Content warning for sexual harassment. It’s real bad out here, folks.

I think I’ll have to come back to the Gamer Girl label in another post, so stay tuned for that! I’ll edit this post to include a link to it when it’s published. <3

Am I a Gamer Girl?!

A few days ago I said something very minor and inconsequential in-game, and my team did the full-on fucking “oh my god, a woman??” shit in response. It felt so dehumanizing in a way that I hadn’t really come face-to-face with before. These people just fully ignored everything I said in that short callout and instead harassed me for my voice. Last night I was called the team mom, which was actually kind of cute!– but I have never been called the team dad. Going back a few paragraphs, it feels like the exclusionary nature of many online groups leads to this exact sort of weird othering behaviour. It feels like cyclical trauma to me, like the pain of exclusion leads to further exclusionary behaviour as a defense mechanism.

This is all to say that my teammates were not responding with malice, but with ignorance and negligence. Until recently, I had no idea how bad this shit really was for gamers with fem voices, or for people with fem voices in general. I’m not the typical case for most gamers, though, so how can we encourage the same sorts of realizations that I had without necessarily needing to directly experience all this? I really believe that many (especially very young, <20 yo.) gamers just get excited about talking to women, and this is the only way they know how to interact. On the other hand, I’ve seen kids regurgitate some real fucking vitriol; it can be difficult to even consider engaging. It’s painful as hell that the only way to make progress is to engage genuinely, in good faith, and it’s unfair for society to place that burden on marginalized and oppressed groups. And yet, it must still be done.

The Burden of Marginalization

In a society focused on its own self-preservation and the diligent maintenance of the status quo, it’s clear to see that the burden to change bad things falls upon those directly affected by the bad things. Oppression is a key theme in our Western colonial world, and the status quo is very much a harmful state of society for many who fall into marginalized groups, whether self-labelled or not. Ultimately, we should strive to develop a society which fosters thoughtful engagement with ourselves, others, and our environments generally. Such a society should tend away from marginalization and othering-tendencies, instead engaging with every person genuinely and without bias. How do we get our current exclusionary society onto the path of diversity and inclusion, on a meaningfully deep cultural level? And yet, it’s the marginalized who must be agents of change.

I’m Tired

Life has been moving so scarily lately. I’ve been realizing so much pain and trauma in my life, and I’m seeing new hardship and suffering around me, and I’m seeing how pervasive this pain is. I’m one person in a world of tragedy and atrocity, and I can barely even take care of myself some days. There’s just so much pain. What am I supposed to do about this? The world has always been in pain, and the world may always be in pain; what is pain? Is pain our natural state? Why, then, must we label it painful?

Anyway, I’m not alone in my thoughts here. If the world has always been in pain, and people have always been in pain, how the hell did we make it this far? My conclusion is that pain is just kinda ok. We should obviously still work to improve the world or whatever, like, this pain is still not nice and should be reduced as much as possible, but this isn’t something that any one person should take on. We’ve always been in pain, and we’ve been thinking on it the whole time, too; maybe my pain is normal, actually, and haven’t people always been able to recover in the past? Maybe the pain I see isn’t quite as insurmountable as I thought.

Wrapping up

Long one today… actually, I started this one last night and picked it up again today to finish it. I hope to write much more along these lines! I have a lot of thoughts on this shit, and publishing them on here really helps me polish them up into beautiful gems of ideas!

Take care of yourselves! I love you all 💜