The gamer is suffering from an identity crisis as modern journalism balkanizes public perceptions. While the majority of people who play video games are women both here and in the UK, the majority of ‘gamers’ are men. While this may seem strange, it is a predictable consequence of our culture, and a symptom of a much larger problem. The media has made a caricature of the gamer in our minds which distances many who game from the word. Even the dictionary qualifies the word as being ‘especially someone who plays video games regularly,’ proving that word has taken on a life of its own. Gamers are not alone in this, the internet is full of shallow articles constructing straw-men which distance the people they are supposed to represent from their own identity.
What’s wrong this time? A rift has formed between our perceptions and reality which cheapens the conversation to a counter-productive blame game. After all, the industry is already rife with women’s issues, which are compounded by associating the word gamer with a particular gender and personality. When the media then begins to harp on the mutterings etched in a few miscellaneous twitter accounts it serves to, at best, distract from the real issues which reflect on a cult of testosterone casting shade across the medium. It gets foggy when you’re in the cloud. There is a lot of static buzzing about the internet and it’s impossible to see through it all. This exacerbates the problem of commentary-journalism, as it creates a one-sided conversation. When Kanye West is reported on, at least he can respond; where informal groups such as ‘gamers’ lack the autonomy to do so.
I tweet therefore I am newsworthy. As the media has made a habit of using internet comments for everything from fluff pieces to debate questions; we have reached a point where everyone is speaking on behalf of every group they are perceived to be a part of; classifying entire groups in 140 characters or less. While some articles use tweets to make real points about society; most only serve to give credibility to what someone muttered on the bus, that is twitter.
Avenue Q got it wrong, the internet is for comments. Content made of commentary existing to be commented upon. Allowing the sort of speech which would naturally be filtered by the real world to instead be broadcast to the whole world. The media seems to love getting trolled; distracting itself from the issues with fluff disguised as news. I mean we have spent the last nine or so months talking about a wall, and it isn’t even the Great Firewall.
The internet has allowed us access to the full spectrum of modern rhetoric, from which we can easily build shallow arguments amounting to straw-men. This is not to says that twitter is inherently un-newsworthy, there are times when trends and escalations in the medium merit our attention and consideration. However, in a space where we can find ourselves subjected to every imaginable form of hate; we should avoid spreading it further. Filter out the vitriol and focus on the issues, because as they say: haters gonna hate.
The Life Programmable 