[paganel]

There's something very wrong with the game community.

I've learned enough during stupid internet fights I have had on reddit to never continue a conversation with an avid gamer, no matter the subject. Stories like this one you linked to on merkur.de (read via Google Translate, but I think they got it right) confirm to me that that was the correct call.

[staticassertion]

I've been playing more games online lately and I've found two things:

1. Lots of really nice people. I just spent an hour playing a game with a man in Brazil and we used Google translate to chat and teach each other our respective languages while we played.

2. It's actually really easy to get angry. Like, I'm an adult and even I have to be like "hey it's a game chill" to myself - I've never blown up at anyone but... holy shit, it's kind of insane how bad some people are lol. And it's frustrating. Like go to the objective, the game is literally blaring that you should go there, why are you going elsewhere????? over and over again.

With regards to gaming it's just a sort of "worst case" for human collaboration. It's fast paced, high pressure, and communication is both the most important part and also by far the hardest. It is absolutely no surprise to me, whatsoever, that anyone who plays a lot of video games might get angry easily.

Also, as someone who grew up very "on the internet", there's a lot of bitter and angry people out there. They're kind of relatable in a way. Like the whole "I want to fucking die" meme is sort of a meme but also sort of real and relatable, but when you smash that into your brain every day it stops being a meme, and I think that's the case with most irony poisoned internet discussions.

[firtoz]

Why game community?

It's more like all of the world enjoy games, including these sociopaths.

You are chasing a red herring.

[paganel]

> Why game community?

At some point you have to blame the community itself, that example OP linked to is not an isolated incident, unfortunately.

Later edit: This [1] is a very sick and not ok community, a very sick one. Harassing a person in his own village, in his own house, on the streets of his own physical community, it's not ok. I didn't know who that Drachenlord person was until seeing OP's link, I'm left wondering how come all of that is legally possible, how come those persons that physically harass him are not in prison by now.

[1] https://youtu.be/-__r5B84Ymg?t=488

[staticassertion]

I think you have to be really in denial if you think that, on average, gamers are not a more toxic community than others. I think it's not that video games make people bad or something like that. But you probably have some demographics - like young men, for example - who have a lot going on in their lives and aren't always well equipped to handle it. The internet desensitizes everyone and I think that that can be a really bad mix with some people who spend time online and might have a hard time in their actual lives.

Online harassment would presumably be cathartic for some of those people. People lash out for a reason and this is just lashing out at scale.

[toxicFork]

This can be generalized to any passionate interest community. Like body builders. Young men will be toxic. You just see gamers more because they spend more time on the internet by default.

[staticassertion]

Being on the internet more is a key factor when talking about toxicity on the internet.