Chamomile wrote:To the extent that nerd gatekeeping can be justified, it's in a resistance to nerd poseurs, people who have adopted a sub-culture as a fashion statement and thus lack even a cursory understanding of the subject material they're aping. Musically, they're people who wear a band's t-shirt and claim to have gotten it from a concert when their understanding of the band is limited to a skim of their Wikipedia article. Nerd poseurs specifically are a more recent phenomenon, but the basic concept is decades old.
Poseurs are dangerous to a sub-culture because it means that markers used to signal genuine interest in something can become drowned out by people imitating those markers in order to try and cash in on the cultural capital that interest has recently acquired, but who have no genuine interest. It gets harder to find people who actually care, and the search becomes emotionally taxing beyond the time investment because poseurs are naturally predisposed to treat an attempt at conversation on the subject they claim to have interest in as an attack and respond aggressively. They don't have any deeper knowledge, but they're pretending to, so an earnest attempt at conversation on the subject is met with contempt and hostility. People who use the community in good faith to discuss a subject they enjoy are inherently threatening to poseurs, who have an automatic incentive to lash out at them. As the number of poseurs makes up a larger portion of the community, they can start to support one another by establishing contempt for genuine interest in the subject they claim to love as a social norm of the community originally built around that subject, making it easier to get away with posing without much effort.
People who gatekeep to try and prevent poseurs from drowning the hobby are applying a really shitty solution to that problem, both in the sense that it doesn't work very well (if a hobby has enough social capital to draw in poseurs at all, it's probably going to draw in enough of them to outnumber the gatekeepers and foil any effort at gatekeeping anyway) and in that it's a shitty thing to do, like, as a person. They are at least reacting to a real problem caused by other shitty people, though.
A less justifiable, but not openly xenophobic reason for nerd gatekeeping is that as an interest goes mainstream, it experiences sudden, massive growth in its communities, which can have an Endless September effect. Rather than a steady trickle of new members who adapt to the community because they're outnumbered, the community gets a massive influx of new members whose superior numbers allows them to set cultural norms, often without even realizing they're doing so, and drown the original culture. Because this massive new audience usually has proportionately more money to spend, creators in the relevant hobby adapt their work to appeal to them. From the perspective of the original community, this results in a steady decline in quality of virtually all products or performances related to the hobby they loved so much they formed a community around it.
The position of the nerds who become gatekeepers at this point is still sympathetic. The people who most love the hobby and whose initial support allowed it to grow large enough to catch the attention of the mainstream are being abandoned in favor of catering to the mainstream who just barely showed up. It seems treacherous and disloyal. The thing is, "the mainstream" is not a single entity or even a coherent group of people. It's far past a single Dunbar's number of people, which means it's far past the point where its individual members can possibly coordinate actions between themselves without a formal bureaucracy, which means no one individual in the mainstream can reasonably be held responsible for it. At this point gatekeepers are either making the false accusation that this amorphous mass of people called "the mainstream" are somehow conspiring together to invade the hobby, or else they simply don't care that the people they're harming to defend their hobby have no individual responsibility for the negative side effects of going mainstream. They're assholes, and they're not even assholes as an indiscriminate response to problems caused by other assholes, but as a problem that arises as an unfortunate side effect of unintentional, emergent incentive structures that encourage individuals to collectively act in a way that is bad for the hobby and its community despite no one individual doing anything directly harmful to either.
And also some gatekeepers are just sexists who don't want any girls in their clubhouse, who are assholes because obviously they are. If nerd gatekeepers weren't predominantly made in this mold to begin with, they definitely are now, because the narratives that caught on when nerd gatekeeping first got going were things about "fake geek girls," which means gatekeepers who became gatekeepers for reasons unrelated to sexism gravitated towards sexist narratives to justify their actions. That's been going on for like eight years now, and now that nascent culture has well and truly metastasized.
Well this has often been my hill to die on discussionwise so:
Chamomile wrote:To the extent that nerd gatekeeping can be justified, it's in a resistance to nerd poseurs, people who have adopted a sub-culture as a fashion statement and thus lack even a cursory understanding of the subject material they're aping. Musically, they're people who wear a band's t-shirt and claim to have gotten it from a concert when their understanding of the band is limited to a skim of their Wikipedia article. Nerd poseurs specifically are a more recent phenomenon, but the basic concept is decades old.
Poseurs are dangerous to a sub-culture because it means that markers used to signal genuine interest in something can become drowned out by people imitating those markers in order to try and cash in on the cultural capital that interest has recently acquired, but who have no genuine interest. It gets harder to find people who actually care, and the search becomes emotionally taxing beyond the time investment because poseurs are naturally predisposed to treat an attempt at conversation on the subject they claim to have interest in as an attack and respond aggressively. They don't have any deeper knowledge, but they're pretending to, so an earnest attempt at conversation on the subject is met with contempt and hostility. People who use the community in good faith to discuss a subject they enjoy are inherently threatening to poseurs, who have an automatic incentive to lash out at them. As the number of poseurs makes up a larger portion of the community, they can start to support one another by establishing contempt for genuine interest in the subject they claim to love as a social norm of the community originally built around that subject, making it easier to get away with posing without much effort.
People who gatekeep to try and prevent poseurs from drowning the hobby are applying a really shitty solution to that problem, both in the sense that it doesn't work very well (if a hobby has enough social capital to draw in poseurs at all, it's probably going to draw in enough of them to outnumber the gatekeepers and foil any effort at gatekeeping anyway) and in that it's a shitty thing to do, like, as a person. They are at least reacting to a real problem caused by other shitty people, though.
A less justifiable, but not openly xenophobic reason for nerd gatekeeping is that as an interest goes mainstream, it experiences sudden, massive growth in its communities, which can have an Endless September effect. Rather than a steady trickle of new members who adapt to the community because they're outnumbered, the community gets a massive influx of new members whose superior numbers allows them to set cultural norms, often without even realizing they're doing so, and drown the original culture. Because this massive new audience usually has proportionately more money to spend, creators in the relevant hobby adapt their work to appeal to them. From the perspective of the original community, this results in a steady decline in quality of virtually all products or performances related to the hobby they loved so much they formed a community around it.
The position of the nerds who become gatekeepers at this point is still sympathetic. The people who most love the hobby and whose initial support allowed it to grow large enough to catch the attention of the mainstream are being abandoned in favor of catering to the mainstream who just barely showed up. It seems treacherous and disloyal. The thing is, "the mainstream" is not a single entity or even a coherent group of people. It's far past a single Dunbar's number of people, which means it's far past the point where its individual members can possibly coordinate actions between themselves without a formal bureaucracy, which means no one individual in the mainstream can reasonably be held responsible for it. At this point gatekeepers are either making the false accusation that this amorphous mass of people called "the mainstream" are somehow conspiring together to invade the hobby, or else they simply don't care that the people they're harming to defend their hobby have no individual responsibility for the negative side effects of going mainstream. They're assholes, and they're not even assholes as an indiscriminate response to problems caused by other assholes, but as a problem that arises as an unfortunate side effect of unintentional, emergent incentive structures that encourage individuals to collectively act in a way that is bad for the hobby and its community despite no one individual doing anything directly harmful to either.
And also some gatekeepers are just sexists who don't want any girls in their clubhouse, who are assholes because obviously they are. If nerd gatekeepers weren't predominantly made in this mold to begin with, they definitely are now, because the narratives that caught on when nerd gatekeeping first got going were things about "fake geek girls," which means gatekeepers who became gatekeepers for reasons unrelated to sexism gravitated towards sexist narratives to justify their actions. That's been going on for like eight years now, and now that nascent culture has well and truly metastasized.
Well this has often been my hill to die on discussionwise so:
Keys to the Contract: A crossover between Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Kingdom Hearts.
RadiantPhoenix wrote:
TheFlatline wrote:Legolas/Robin Hood are myths that have completely unrealistic expectation of "uses a bow".
The D&D wizard is a work of fiction that has a completely unrealistic expectation of "uses a book".
hyzmarca wrote:Well, Mario Mario comes from a blue collar background. He was a carpenter first, working at a construction site. Then a plumber. Then a demolitionist. Also, I'm not sure how strict Mushroom Kingdom's medical licensing requirements are. I don't think his MD is valid in New York.
Seriously, anyone who can write that fourth section is someone who you can safely dismiss as an idiot.
"Hey guys, what if actually, men join D&D to play the game, but women join looking for mates because their biological desire to have children is the only thing that exists and they have no interest in storytelling or playing games?"
"Alternative Theory: You are a dumbass sexist, and are wrong this time too."
Last edited by Kaelik on Mon Mar 26, 2018 12:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Yeah, that's rather sexist. And also doesn't even apply to large scale things where most people involved don't know each other and would be doing things different anyway.
I just don't think I can wrap my head around the idea that women joining my hobby solely to find mates WOULD be a bad thing.
Like, if I'm not particularly interested in dancing, but I take up dancing to meet women, that's not particularly weird or unusual, and I might enjoy myself while I'm there. If instead, women were joining D&D groups to find ME I'd get to do the thing I love anyway AND MEET WOMEN. Like, why wouldn't that be better than doing the thing I love and NOT MEETING WOMEN?
deaddmwalking wrote:I just don't think I can wrap my head around the idea that women joining my hobby solely to find mates WOULD be a bad thing.
Like, if I'm not particularly interested in dancing, but I take up dancing to meet women, that's not particularly weird or unusual, and I might enjoy myself while I'm there. If instead, women were joining D&D groups to find ME I'd get to do the thing I love anyway AND MEET WOMEN. Like, why wouldn't that be better than doing the thing I love and NOT MEETING WOMEN?
But I don't know, maybe I'm the weird one.
I think the ladies are joining to attract the non-core casual scum gamers, not the real gamers, who are too real to be attractive to women. Or something.
So if I understand this right, the established gaming group gets a female player. The female chooses to hook up with a male player that is cooler/better looking/richer/nicer/has a better car than a DIFFERENT player who thinks that the woman should date him (for no reason he can articulate) so he thinks women shouldn't be allowed to play because he's forced to confront the fact that he is, in the ways that matter to that individual woman, inferior to another selection. I mean, I guess if you're so filled with self-loathing that you want to avoid the presence of the opposite sex I can KINDA understand, but it still seems weird.
I’m pretty sure gatekeepers are just assholes and behind every argument in their favor it just comes back to being an asshole. In some cases sexist assholes as Pariah Dog demonstrated but assholes all the same.
Even in extreme cases where audience may be argued to be altering new content like Sugar Ray going from Mean Machine to their fru-fru sound, fuck it. Things change. If 4e or 5e were actually successful by somehow appealing to the lowest common denominator then fine. At least that is more people in the tabletop hobby who can be introduced to better games. If some small percentage supports the things I enjoy then we are all the richer for it.
deaddmwalking wrote:I mean, I guess if you're so filled with self-loathing that you want to avoid the presence of the opposite sex I can KINDA understand, but it still seems weird.
By extension, if you are a real gamer, you are assumed to be this type of person automatically.
deaddmwalking wrote:I just don't think I can wrap my head around the idea that women joining my hobby solely to find mates WOULD be a bad thing.
Like, if I'm not particularly interested in dancing, but I take up dancing to meet women, that's not particularly weird or unusual, and I might enjoy myself while I'm there. If instead, women were joining D&D groups to find ME I'd get to do the thing I love anyway AND MEET WOMEN. Like, why wouldn't that be better than doing the thing I love and NOT MEETING WOMEN?
But I don't know, maybe I'm the weird one.
Because women have cooties. And if they get close to you they can infect you with their cooties.
Whipstitch wrote:in this gif the 4th stick man represents Caesar crossing the Rubicon
More like Caeser pissing in the Rubicon.
Last edited by hyzmarca on Mon Mar 26, 2018 3:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.
That seems likely to be hilariously super offensive.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
Whipstitch wrote:in this gif the 4th stick man represents Caesar crossing the Rubicon
I was thinking that despite all the overt sexism, it's funny that the stick guy who seems to be the tipping point for the first two guy's enjoyment is the brown one.
I'm not saying that was included in there for racist reasons, and the rampant sexism is bad enough, but it makes the argument look just that much more shitty.
Besides the 4chan-grade misogyny and possibly racism, nerd gatekeeping is also stupid because it assumes that between the masses of normies there won't be more people as hardcore as the original users.
@ @ Nockermensch
Koumei wrote:After all, in Firefox you keep tabs in your browser, but in SovietPutin's Russia, browser keeps tabs on you.
Mord wrote:Chromatic Wolves are massively under-CRed. Its "Dood to stone" spell-like is a TPK waiting to happen if you run into it before anyone in the party has Dance of Sack or Shield of Farts.
nockermensch wrote:Besides the 4chan-grade misogyny and possibly racism, nerd gatekeeping is also stupid because it assumes that between the masses of normies there won't be more people as hardcore as the original users.
Possible racism? It literally says that things start going wrong as soon as a "brown" shows up.
It's not true of all women. There are some that enjoy this tabletop gaming, my old group had 2 married couples in it (one broke up when she got cheated one and they dumped him out of the group for it, haven't heard from the other two since I moved.)
Others on the other hand are manipulators, looking for free shit and attention like the one that basically financially drained my little brother then when he was broke, emotionally manipulated him into attempting suicide twice. All while fucking her dudebro boyfriend and telling "You just need to do (this) for me and we can be together."
Koumei's motives pretty consistent. She's not gonna show up to some joint with a bunch of sweaty dudes unless they're at least going to pretend to fight. Preferably with dropkicks.
People joining a hobby not for the hobby is always bad.
And no, i do not accept the "more exposure to potential real players!" argument.
If you join a hobby, then you join the hobby for the hobby.
And you do not try to change the hobby for everybody who is already in the hobby either.
Because they probably joined and stuck with the hobby because they like the hobby as is.
Yes, that means no casualization of the given hobby just to please the people that want to say they are part of the hobby but do not want to be part of the hobby proper.
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.
Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
I was this close to having a conversation about this subject that wasn't immediately transformed into a discussion of the distorted sexist narratives used to explain the phenomenon. This close.
Whipstitch wrote:Koumei's motives pretty consistent. She's not gonna show up to some joint with a bunch of sweaty dudes unless they're at least going to pretend to fight. Preferably with dropkicks.
Nothing wrong with that. I enjoyed watching wrestling when I was younger. Haven't watched it in about 15 years. Hell, I was named after a pro wrestler.
Chamomile wrote:I was this close to having a conversation about this subject that wasn't immediately transformed into a discussion of the distorted sexist narratives used to explain the phenomenon. This close.
I'm sympathetic, but I don't know what else there is to say. As you said policing how people outside of your immediate play group behaves really isn't all that practical or desirable. I mean, fuck, you could broadly apply the whole endless September concept to old people and etiquette. Defying it is like trying to fight the wind.
Pariah Dog wrote: Hell, I was named after a pro wrestler.
Don't tell me who. In my head I've already decided on Disco Inferno.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Mon Mar 26, 2018 11:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Chamomile wrote:I was this close to having a conversation about this subject that wasn't immediately transformed into a discussion of the distorted sexist narratives used to explain the phenomenon. This close.
Then we can ignore those narratives and instead analyze how Nerddom is its own worst enemy, then.
Personally, I find the idea of people who aren't engaged with the media engaging with the community for social cache to be absurd.
People generally go to concerts because they like the music. Whether or not they "get" the music is immaterial. Likewise, people usually discus television shows on the internet because they watch those shows. They might not get the minutia, but they're at least interested and engaged.
Personally, I don't feel like lynching people because they watch Game of Thrones but haven't read the novels, and that's ultimately what geek gatekeeping amounts to.
The last couple weeks I watched collectively a few hours of GoT youtube excerpts which I guess rocked me. I've almost run out of recommended Game of Thrones snippets, so I figure I've seen everything good now, minus nudity because Youtube.
I feel like I got the cliffnotes version enough to be a Game of Thrones fan. Come at me gatekeeper bros.
Stahlseele, how are people supposed to join a hobby "for the hobby" before they know what it entails? I don't even know what "for the hobby" means. I imagine it tends to mean different things for different people anyway. Everyone starts somewhere, and maligning newbies as poseurs is just stupid. No true scotsman is a shit hill to die on.
