Morning Folks! Today represents the first day of what will hopefully be 31 days of writing prompts to hopefully give you some ideas as we ease into this “low key” Blaugust event. As a result I have recruited a bunch of other bloggers to help me share the prompts with you, and since I made this thing up… I get the honor of kicking things off. For those who have not been following along at home, Blaugust is an event that we run every year where originally I challenged folks to write 31 posts in a single month. Given the times we are living in, we moved this original event up to April and had Blapril this year as a way of hopefully giving folks something else to think about while we were all in lockdown.
However now that we are finding ourselves still several months in living in lockdown mode, the greater community wanted to do something to mark the normal running of Blaugust. As a result each day a new blogger is going to share a prompt with you, and each day that blogger is going to lead you to the blog of the person who will post the next prompt in sequence. For more information you should really just check out my guide post. It should give you a better run down of exactly what is going to happen. If you want to participate, all you have to do is grab the prompts that interest you and write your own posts based on them. I technically wrote most of the prompts, but I threw them in a randomizer and assigned them out so that I didn’t exactly know which one I would be getting.
Blaugust Promptapalooza – Prompt 1
If you could change anything about one of your core fandoms, what would it be?
Blaugust as a whole started as a game blog thing, and over the years I have been trying to make tweaks to open it up to bloggers of other fandoms. However for me… my core fandom will likely always be gaming, more specifically video games. If you want even more specificity… then I am probably most attached to online gaming in the form of MMORPGs. So if I could change anything about gamer culture, it would be to make it a whole lot more inclusive. As a whole gamers can be a horrible toxic lot, and it is really hard to justify this to anyone looking from the outside in. That said there are also amazing pockets of pure joy that take place within gaming, and it is really hard to reconcile how both exist and can often times shift on a dime.
I think we have a few problems that escalate the issue. For starters, there is still a chunk of gaming that does not view themselves as being part of the mainstream. They define themselves as being a niche culture and fight hard to protect anything that tries to change that. This insular attitude tries to push anything out that might serve to endanger their “fun”. This has so many different representations but one of the biggest that you see is the “battle between like objects”. I legitimately randomly picked a screenshot, but it will serve as an illustration. This is The Division 2, it lives in the genre known as the looter shooter… and has major competition from Destiny 2 and Warframe each with their own very stratified communities.
In the case of all three games, they are more or less fighting over the same pool of players to some extent and this is absolutely felt by the player base. So instead of playing all three and determining which one fits the specific tastes of a player, you will see segments of these communities actively bashing the other two. You see a lot of reactionary posts on Reddit or YouTube videos talking about how this is the game you should be playing and cataloging all of the wrongs with the others within the peer group. I mean I feel like this comes from the very real fear that you need players in a game to keep it active and for it to survive, but unfortunately pushing other players away is not exactly a great way of accomplishing the goal of a thriving community.
Another type of exclusion that I see an awful lot is what can be collectively termed as “Git Gud” culture. There is a constant thread of trying to push “scrubs” out of the community and force them to play better. I think in some ways this starts off as a somewhat toxic altruism… like that players are being “bad” because they don’t know any better so folks will take it upon themselves to “educate the bads”. I mean there is an awful lot of hyper cringe content in the early years of this blog that would fall into this category. The problem however is that this does not take into account that folks often times come to a game for different reasons. There is the false assumption that every player is playing a game for the exact same reasons you are.
For example I don’t play games these days to optimize my skill rotation or to be better than every other player. I play games as an escape from the rigors of my very real obligations and have a moment to chill out in a world where I feel powerful, and that does not have any of the stresses that my daily life does. I am a bad player, or at least I am in the eyes of those who feel like optimal play should be a requirement for entry. I am honestly a fairly decent player to be truthful, but I feel so much stress at the thought of doing anything with other players because I might run into someone who is going to get all up in my shit because I pushed the wrong button at the wrong time. I realize this is mostly a mental block on my part, but it is one influenced by lots of real life experiences with very toxic players.
On this last point, gaming is very much still struggles with anything other a White CIS Male Hetero narrative. I am using this image as an example because you notice, whoever compiled this… did not include the Shepard voiced by Jennifer Hale in this image. So much of the advertising around Mass Effect also focused on the male character arc, so much so that it feels like they are intending that to be the default state even though everything I have heard is that the female arc is just plain more enjoyable. Gaming struggles at representation in a way that is natural and organic and has this bad habit of tokenism.
Another reference point, this week footage of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla started circulating showing two male warriors “embracing”. I’ve seen a lot of backlash over this, including one twitter threading going on about how “no one asked for this” and to “leave politics out of video games”. The thing is… so many have begged for more casual and natural representation of something other than the hetero-normative over the course of the last few decades. The fact it still invokes an outrage is the sign of how desperately we need it woven into the tapestry of our stories. In gaming there is such a long way to go before there is a clear “default” path and a clear “other” path.
All of these things are about less gate keeping in video games, and more inclusion of different viewpoints. The players need to evolve, but at the same time the games need to keep pushing us to evolve. It is important that we focus on what we enjoy, and less on what games are doing to make sure others are enjoying themselves as well. One of the other important points of view that I have reached over the years, is that it is okay if you decide a game “just isn’t for you”. You don’t have to play everything, and god knows with as much content as being released each year there is no way you will ever be able to in the first place. I would love us to reach a point where we can just be happy that nice things exist for other people even if we don’t want to partake of them ourselves.
The Next Blogger
Tomorrow you will be able to find the next prompt in Blaugust Promptapalooza over at Azerothian Life. This is a really great blog by @Dragonray and focuses primarily on her adventures in the World of Warcraft. There is often times a side focus on glorious transmoggy goodness that I definitely appreciate. We all know that is the TRUE end game of MMORPGs, and I personally end up transferring gold over to alts just so I can afford to keep up appearances. So check Azerothian Life out tomorrow to continue this “blog crawl”
- 08/01/2020 – Dragonray – Azerothian Life
The ‘Git Gud’ stuff I see as having many parallels to the older ‘Carebear’ vs. ‘Full PvP’er debates. In many cases it was more in-fighting than exclusionary of outside forces (although that was mostly because outside forces just weren’t a consideration whatsoever).
But the main parallel I see is that it became so hostile because there was a feeling that the goals and desires of each group were so opposed that there was no way to co-exist. One side would become a definitive loser and the other the winner.
In the PvE vs. PvP battle there was UO as the key example of that. Then every MMO in development post that (and at that time, there was a number!) became a battleground between the two factions. Crossing the lines into enemy territory and trying to suggest changes in favour of the opposing faction within a particular game (e.g., restrictions on PvP in Shadowbane or Darkfall) was met with incredible hostility.
Well written, and always insightful ᕦʕ •ᴥ•ʔᕤ