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The Venn diagram of shitty gamer dudes who think it’s “weak” to play a game on easy mode and shitty gamer dudes who scream about it being “too hard” to learn consent and boundaries around women is a circle.
Guys who beat their chests and preen about how hardcore they are for playing games on the hardest setting but who can’t hack the very simple real-life challenge of learning how not to be a shitbird are the epitome of dogs barking loudest when they’re on the leash.
As someone who is currently teaching a 6yo boy how not to throw a tantrum every time he loses at a video game, I’m also gonna go out on a limb and say that grown dudes who screech when asked to lean good manners have never learned resilience from playing their games on hard mode.
Rather, they’ve trained themselves to throw controllers, scream into headsets, punch their possessions and otherwise throw big boy tantrums when confronted with adversity - but having done this largely in *private,* they can’t handle being mocked for doing the same in public.
Which, sidebar, I could write an entire essay about how the technological age gap led to a generation of parents not teaching their kids how to control their emotional responses to video game losses like they would sport losses or other such, instead dismissing the entire form -
- so that now we have a generation of adult gamers overflowing with dudes who unintentionally built and learned from a culture of rage around losing at games, which tied into feeling persecuted for liking them in the first place, and. Well. We all know how that’s worked out. 🙄
The irony is, there’s nothing inherent to video games themselves, as a medium, that made this culture inevitable. It’s just a digital Lord of the Flies situation, where the island was an unmoderated Internet populated by kids whose parents didn’t know what was happening.
The point being, dudes who pride themselves on playing games on hard mode but who throw tantrums if asked to grow as people IRL don’t actually like the challenge of hard work; they just like taking risks without consequences and feeling entitled to scream when it goes wrong.
