I’m certainly not going to say you’re wrong on that first part. I’ve been online since 1996. At that time, the internet was the domain of white, heterosexual, nerdy, generally well educated guys. And me being a white, heterosexual, nerdy, well educated guy… well… going online felt like coming home. Those were my people. I still really miss those days.
But I also know that the experience of someone not like me would’ve been wildly different. I learned a bajillion slurs on COD lobbies after all. It’s a good thing that more people now feel welcome online, as it led to platform growth and functionality that we otherwise wouldn’t have had if it was just ‘my kind of people’.
The current safe, sanitised, gentrified gaming sphere also has benefits: COD lobbies these days are very pleasant by comparison. You even have to sign a code of conduct to get on multiplayer. It feels more welcoming, less hostile. Of course, companies certainly have been financially incentivized to attract as wide an audience as possible. For example, the very first GTA game sold about 6 million copies. GTA V has sold 200 million. And with ever-increasing development budgets, you can’t afford to cater to a niche, you want to cast as wide a net as possible to recoup those costs.
Bro here in Brazil, we have slurs in the millions since gaming took of in the 90s
The number reaches the Brazillions
I don’t think I’ve met any Brazilians back in those days; (online) gaming is really expensive there from what I heard, right?
One fun thing in the old COD lobbies was always to teach others slurs and general cursing in your language. I learned how to curse folks out in like 50 languages. Each country also has its own unique style of cursing. We Dutch really like to incorporate diseases for example.
“the internet was the domain of white, heterosexual, nerdy, generally well educated guys. And me being a white, heterosexual, nerdy, well educated guy… well… going online felt like coming home. Those were my people”
Thank you for putting it so clearly. Yes, it is completely valid to long for a time where the own niche was the in-group. As someone who’s been on the web from early on but a woman, it wasn’t really “my people”. It was never a safe space for me, but I totally understand where you are coming from. It’s great to be on the side of the “default”.
The only spaces I genuinely miss are phpbb forums. I honestly believe they are better than reddit, or the fediverse for that matter. Smaller interest groups have a self selection mechanism and better moderation. I think they could still foster a great environment today that would welcome nerdy educated people on a shared interest without specifically speaking to just one type of educated nerds.
