256: Hardcore Maleness

[PiCroft]

I love games that challenge male stereotypes as well as female. I personally can't stand games like Army of Two, Gears of War etc because the macho testosterone tanks that are the male characters are utterly alien. They don't represent manhood, they represent the kind of thing 13-year-olds think is manhood. I find it difficult to care about a story if I don't care about my character, and if I don't care about my character, why am I playing a single-player game? (Obviously this principle depends on the game and genre)

I believe single-player games are becoming more and more devoid of truly human characters, replaced with one-liner spouting walking cliche's. Even my all-time favorite male character, Garret from the Thief series fell into this unbreakably smug and arrogant persona, which, while key to his personality, was irking to some extent. However, Garret showed fear, and even love at points in the game, going against his established persona and demonstrating that, for all his ego, he was still human.

 

[chibiev]

Empowerment RIP.

This article's not feminist, it's reinforcing and expanding gender stereotypes. Games about guns, blood, engines, sports... the article says these things are for BOYS ONLY in case anyone missed the memo.

I agree with the above statement completely. I kept waiting for the author to say that these stereotypes are false, but he didn't and it frustrates me to no end that someone would write a supposedly feminist critique of gaming without recognizing that women like me do play hardcore games. Several female friends of mine are hardcore gamers. The manager of the Gamestop I shop at is also a hardcore female gamer.

 

[chibiev]

Hardcore - PEOPLE who play games hard, daily, take them (too)seriously, are part of a clan, have multiple systems, or have been playing games for a very long time.

Casual - PEOPLE who don't play games often, don't have any technical abilities, are younger, family oriented gamers, don't play often, have only been gaming this generation.

I think this is a more accurate definition of the terms hardcore and casual gamer. That's why I, as a woman, define myself as a hardcore gamer while several of my male friends would define themselves as casual gamers. I also agree that the terms are becoming popular because dedicated gamers want to separate themselves from the growing number of people who only play games occasionally and vice versa.

 

[NamesAreHardToPick]

First, there's a difference between "male" and "masculine," likewise "female" and "feminine." The former is a physical attribute. The latter is are the qualities which are associated with those attributes, ie, the stereotypes. Men supposed to be violent, logical, and physical. Women are supposed to be caring and emotional. By "masculinity" or "maleness" I don't necessarily mean men, but I do think these stereotypes exist in our society.

None of the terms I can think of with their proper roots in hardcore gaming are sexual... "ownage", "griefing", "ganking", even recent memes like "u mad?" As a hardcore gamer, this hardcore = masculine argument comes completely out of left field. Gaming is a horribly nerdy hobby, there's nothing macho about it even at the hardcore extreme. It's only a boys club - as far as I understand it - to the extent that the typical gamer is percieved as a creepy pent-up manbaby good for free in-game items and dorky stalking and women - on average - have no interest in being associated with us. That's changed over the last few years but basically gaming has always been home to the least manly of the men and the suggestion that online attempts at machismo corresponds to anything less than hilarious fail is like calling me Cassanova because of the amount of porn I wank to. The concept of 'e-peen' shows that the perception of online aggression as being entirely dickless has been around for about as long as the internet.

Also bear in mind that sexual and racial terms are used for offense precisely because they're subjects American culture is sensitive about. If your article was based on quebecois gamers you would think hardcore = "religious" because their most offensive terms revolve around religion. Male name-calling is really juvenile in comparison to what women will whip out. A guy might call you a ******. A female will make up a term like cum-dumpster, which assumes you're gay as the entry point to a nuclear burn about the many poor anonymous sources for the semen you spend all day having pounded into your body. Vive la difference.

Second, I don't think that acknowledging that these stereotypes exist reinforces them. That's analogous the people who say that acknowledging economic differences between races is racist, which is not something I believe. Your mileage may vary, I suppose.

You say you're "acknowledging" these stereotypes, but it looks more like "inserting" them to me. Some economic divides might be entirely unrelated to race... projecting racism on to unrelated problems distracts people from the real issues in play and the dishonest presentation damages the credibilty of alleged racism where it is justified.

 

[mutantmagnet]

First I'm going to quote someone else from another forum because they touch on a lot of my thoughts.

The article is definitely overthinking it, and makes a ridiculous examples to back up its claims. In reality, "casual" versus "hardcore" merely implies "easiness and accessibility" versus "difficulty and accomplishment."

As they've said, Bejeweled is a game that is extremely simple in concept, and could be considered casual. You're not going to find the depth in Farmville as you might have had in say, Harvest Moon. It's a casual game because it involves the player clicking plots over and over in order till, plant, and harvest. Some guy runs a spreadsheet to find the most efficient crops, but there's no goal, no time limit; merely simple interaction, no exploration of the game environment, and that same guy gets bored in a month. Rewards derive not from skillful cooperation or time management, but a large friend list and an alarm. Just because you wake up at 3 AM to take a piss doesn't mean that taking a piss at 3 AM is as hard is it takes to play a piano. Plants vs. Zombies was incredibly fun, but you'd be kidding yourself if you believed to be at the difficulty of Warcraft 3.

"E-peen" is a derogatory term, and proper common usage isn't even considered without a degree of sarcasm. Is the author really familiar with the material? You can make an argument with the word "raped," but where does that really fit in the hardcore versus casual debate? Yes, it implies dominance resulting in horrible humiliation of the victim, but that's a term that both "casual" players and "hardcore" players use. Might the author suggest more appropriate hyperbolic metaphors?

In the example of WoW, which the author seems fond of (and yet not entirely familiar with), the term "casual" merely is primarily associated with players advocating the decline of difficulty, and the increased accessibility of a lot of content. In the forums, "casual" is as much a derogatory term as "elitists." And of course, there are people who feel that MMOs in general are casual. It's really a spectrum of perceived difficulty and achievement; you're not going to give the works of R.L. Stine the same credit as say, the works of Lovecraft.

The entire article seems poorly done, along the vein on high school and introductory university writing assignments where a possibly exciting claim needs to rely on a tad too much extrapolation as supporting arguments.

I also feel this article went to far trying to attribute to the terms hardcore and casual as subtext for feminine and masculine strongly.

Hardcore and casual has always been more about elitists vs plebeians.

The elitists in essence are the establishment and the establishment developed from a pool of 6-17 year old males who grew up. So it's not out of line to say people who consider themselves hardcore are prone to expressing stereotypical masculinity and shun feminine characteristics but the elitists as a block are roughly divided, and IMO the minority of that group are prone to making their e-peens bigger. (Now I have recent news to link to that makes my point even more salient.) [http://www.penny-arcade.com/paxbbresults/]

Other than that very big misstep I really enjoyed the article. It made me think about how I should address the gaming community since I have a desire to be part of the industry. I hope for more content like this from the escapist or any other gaming related publication.

 

[lanoger]

[T]here's a difference between "male" and "masculine," likewise "female" and "feminine." The former is a physical attribute. The latter is are the qualities which are associated with those attributes, ie, the stereotypes.

Hardcore gaming certainly has masculine attributes (competitiveness etc.) whether you are talking about the types of games or how they are played, but the reverse is not true of casual gaming. Casual means 'occasional' or 'haphazard' or perhaps 'non essential' to daily life. None of those things are feminine attributes. The only way to come to that is to put it opposite hardcore in the sense of being 'weaker'. That comparison is both sloppy and boring.

I just can't wait for the day when it is OK for me to be proud to be a male and proud of my masculinity without being labelled as a misogynist...

The article and later people in this thread talking about the prevalence of the term rape equaling victory (and boys being boys) isn't about being proud of your masculinity, it's about rape culture. It's assuming sexual violence as a fact of life, something that is funny. It's a product both of the demographic (young males, but others too) and the society that created them, and I find it both horrifying and disgusting.

Listening to people throwing around those sort of terms on game forums or over TeamSpeak makes me feel physically ill.

 

[darknight910]

I like to think of myself as a "Pre-Hardcore Gamer", a sort of balance between Hardcore and Casual gamer who was around during the "old school" period. I'm 24, I was born in 1986 yet I feel more in tune with kids growing up in the 80's then those who were born during the time. My first system was the original Nintendo, I played games about the most craziest of subjects like uber-cool amphibians that fight alien pigs, rats and robots that are lead by a femme-fetal hottie named The Dark Queen, I helped twin Martial Art masters fight off hordes of gang members to save a damsel in distress and made sure a plucky little Italian plumber save a kingdom inhabited by mushroom people from a giant demonic looking turtle king in a colorful world filled with bushes and clouds that looked exactly the same. When I was pre-teen, I had both a Sega Genesis and a Super Nintendo and was able to see the value of both systems instead of playground debates on wither Sonic could beat the ass of Mario or not.

You see, from my point of view, I'm having a hard time seeing all of this as the problem of the older generation of gamers or because a majority of them were male. I think it has more to do with the mentality gamers of this generation. If any of you are a watcher of MovieBob's Game Over-Thinker podcasts then you might get where I'm coming from this. Back in the early 90's, gaming was pretty much made exclusively towards the tastes of a younger audience and also the slightly older, more geekier aspects of school kids. Gaming was not only a hobby, it was a comfort-zone, a safe haven from school yard bullies and "cool kids" who viewed gamers to be ridiculed like any other nerd. This changed, however, when the Sony Playstation came out, directly targeting less of the typical gamers of the niche market they were in to teenagers and the "youth market demographic". This was when gaming took a turn from the whimsical, inventive mindset to trying to target "Realism".

Gamers who are teenagers now or got into gaming roughly after 1995 are who I call "Hardcore" gamers because of their tastes for "mature" titles and a frankly greedy mentality for the most realistic graphics. The problem is, most of the games considered to be in the Hardcore are kinda killing the industry, making it impossible for newer gamers to get into the hobby (and quite honestly detested by Hardcore gamers in the first place) and also making the creation of new games so high in development costs that major companies like Activision and Electronic Arts can't make money off their product, even with the millions of sales from one of their Must-Buy items. Though one could call me a bit of an old school gamer, I gladly welcome Casual gaming because it takes games back to its roots more then any 8-bit style game could try to do, a game that's easy to play, difficult to master, easily addictive, artistically varied and cheap to make.

And besides, if the writer is correct on his male and female equivalent of names, then anything that get's a "casual" to wanna come over and play some games at my place is an A+ to me.

 

[Eldarion]

While you argue your points well my own feeling is that this is a load of bollocks. The transference of the silly game labels to genders just reinforce stereotypes. While there may be trends within genders to support this, there are enough females (and, come to that, males) who do not fall under the pretense shown in this article.

Then again that opinion may be influenced by the people I hang around with, so there.^^

It annoys me that everything has to "genderized" like this.

I agree. It sucks that our sociaty has these pre concieved notions of how boys and girls are supposed to behave. It seems so socialy backwards to me.

 

[Tekkawarrior]

Hardcore-ness in my opinion has nothing to do with gender or game genres, as I have met hardcore people from both genders and all gaming styles.

I'll give a few examples of those people, A female friend of mine is PvP server nut, she wouldn't miss a raid if her life depended on it, and considers her DPS to be epic above all proportions, she usually has nothing else to talk about except the way she wooped someones ass in a raid, and how all the other people in the party are 'noobs'.

Another surprising one is a guy at work who plays Plants vs zombies extensively, he would rather spend his entire weekend after a hard weeks work playing Plants vs zombies, than take a load off on the balcony and soaking in some sun.

I've specifically used those two real life examples of a girl playing a 'man game', and a man playing a 'girl game', which I consider them both to be Hardcore.

 

[chinangel]

While you argue your points well my own feeling is that this is a load of bollocks. The transference of the silly game labels to genders just reinforce stereotypes. While there may be trends within genders to support this, there are enough females (and, come to that, males) who do not fall under the pretense shown in this article.

Then again that opinion may be influenced by the people I hang around with, so there.^^

It annoys me that everything has to "genderized" like this.

here here. I'm not a girl who teabags (I find the act childish) and I don't smacktalk. This being said, I'm more than happy to pick up a gun in call of duty and shoot at other people. I admit i'm not the best at the game, but i'm competent enough to realize which end the bullets come out of.

I don't believe that games and gamer lingo need to be genderized. there is enough of 'these games are for girls, these games are for boys' going on. Girls things are pink with pony's and boys are red with giant gattling guns and lasers and stuff, and honestly? This isnt' really inviting us girls into the club.

Ah, I better stop before I enter rant mode

 

[maninahat]

Wow, people really are reacting negatively to the idea that games are genderised. But it's true. Obviously, it's true! There is no way you would describe God of War as anything other than a man's game, much like you know Die Hard and Scarface are manly movies. That doesn't mean girls can't enjoy them, but that doesn't change the fact that these examples appeal to a specific gender. Likewise "hardcore" games all have strongly masculine themes about masculine indeavors. Most of the slang used is about dominance (specifically, implications of prison rape), not that any of this hardcore culture is a problem.

This is all elementary stuff. It isn't psuedo-intellectualism to point this out; you don't have to be an intellectual to notice it in the first place. This article was a good summary of gender in gaming, though I feel it wasn't saying anything particularly insightful or original.

 

[maninahat]

While you argue your points well my own feeling is that this is a load of bollocks. The transference of the silly game labels to genders just reinforce stereotypes. While there may be trends within genders to support this, there are enough females (and, come to that, males) who do not fall under the pretense shown in this article.

Then again that opinion may be influenced by the people I hang around with, so there.^^

It annoys me that everything has to "genderized" like this.

I agree. It sucks that our sociaty has these pre concieved notions of how boys and girls are supposed to behave. It seems so socialy backwards to me.

Ironic that you use the word "suck" whilst complaining about gender stereotypes; That word equates sexual submissiveness with inferiority (as in, "this thing is like a person who has to suck dicks...like a woman, or a prison *****!"). Gender types are so deeply ingrained, people don't even notice when they use a term that stems from gender stereotypes.

(Don't worry, I'm only being tongue in cheek).

 

[GrrWolfie]

Thought provoking thankyou.

Loved the Conan reference!

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

I don't think I've ever seen so much bullshit crammed into one article before! A video game is a video game, get over it. I can enjoy myself just as well playing a puzzle game compared to shooting people in Bad Company 2.

 

[Weaver]

I wholly and entirely disagree with the very premise of the article. To me Call of Duty is a very casual game, but it's seen as entirely masculine.

Nethack is, for example, a hardcore game; but it brings little connotations of gender to it.

 

[12th_milkshake]

and heres the rest of the world taking them for what they mean

- casual - not really bothered, will do X activity now and again, Irregular

- hardcore - regular, takes it seriously, looks to be ahead of the curve. Immersed

And if you think gender is involved your an idiot.

 

[Kahunaburger]

Alternately, "hardcore" games are marketed at people who have played many other games, and "casual" games are marketed at people who have not played many other games. Because of demographic trends in gaming, the former tends to be heavily male, the latter tends to have an even gender balance. Games are packaged and marketed accordingly. But I guess that makes for a less controversial article.

 

[Mike Fang]

To be perfectly honest, I found this article a bit confusing. I wasn't clear on the overall point that was supposed to be made: that "hardcore" has become a male-centered term? That the personality qualities associated with the term "hardcore" are generally negative ones but are being treated like good qualities for a man to have? Really this article felt a bit unfocused and rambling.

That said, I will say that some of the points raised here are legitimate ones. Why have we allowed success or defeat in a game to become so indicative of personal value? Now we've all done a victory dance or gone "YES! BOO-YAH!" or something to that effect in, say, Team Fortress 2 after getting revenge on someone who got a domination on you, or managed to score a kill on an opponent in any multiplayer game who was topping the scoreboard. Everybody likes to celebrate a victory, I don't think that's necessarily an indication of being aggressive and belligerent in a way typically associated with overly-aggressive men.

That said, some people take it too far. Teabagging, snide comments over the game's chat system, these sorts of expressions are often seen and just accepted as being part of the generally accepted behavior in a game. But should they be accepted? In football, nobody begrudges a player who made a touchdown from doing a victory dance (okay, they did come up with the 'excessive celebration' penalty but I think we can all agree it's stupid) but they'd definitely have a problem if the same player ran up to the opposing team's bench and started dry-humping their water boy or mooned their fans. He'd have several cleated shoes up his butt before the ref could throw the yellow flag.

Then there are the players who are ill-tempered to their team mates. I'm sure any of us who have played a multiplayer game have been saddled with this kind of player at least once; the take-charge type who starts giving people instructions and, if they're not followed to the letter, bites people's heads off. They act like the entire game's success hinges on everybody accepting him or her as their lord and master and failure to submit to his or her will is going to bring about the end of life as we know it.

Sorry, guess this is a sore spot for me. But that should just go to show how annoying this kind of player is. It's another form of expressing over-aggression and domination that's typically associated with masculinity; a desire to be in control of other people and feel important by having others submit to you. I don't think I know a single person who doesn't resent this kind of behavior, yet at most people just ignore them rather than actively try to oppose this kind of behavior by, say, voting to kick the player from a game session. Granted people playing on a team should help each other out and work together, and sometimes a team does need a leader to come up with a strategy and coordinate things. But a good leader doesn't crack a whip and doesn't lose sight of the fact that if things don't work out, it -is- just a game.

So why should we be willing to tolerate such behavior in video games? Beats the hell out of me. I admit I'm no stranger to the frustration and thrill of success that comes with a competitive multiplayer game, but I try not to get petty and disrespectful over it. I may not have always been successful, but I think I can say honestly that I don't make a point of lording my successes over my opponents. It could be the gaming community needs to start expecting better of its members, showing more good sportsmanship and less macho posturing.