What Men and Women Consider Hardcore Gaming Are Not The Same
Ignoring the graphs, curious how much of this is just a response to community. Anecdotes abound, beware.<p>Even as an older (for gaming, anyway) white male, the community in some competitive games is just really unappealing - it basically reminds me of middle school, and I guess I&#x27;m not really into that anymore. Lots of things said just to get a reaction (e.g. racial slurs), lots of weird discussions about women, lots of puffed chests the second there&#x27;s an opportunity to, etc.<p>I don&#x27;t really have the time to be competitively good at any of these games, and the community kinda sucks unless you <i>are</i> competitively good, so it&#x27;s kinda like what&#x27;s the point? At least with rec sports the community is generally nice even if you&#x27;re terrible (probably because you&#x27;re in-person).<p>Sure, you can just mute people usually. But if you&#x27;re muting everyone all the time, you might as well just be playing a single-player game. You can just play with friends, but that requires you to have friends who haven&#x27;t also gotten sick of these communities.<p>Conversely, the community in games more oriented towards completion&#x2F;design are usually great - because your success doesn&#x27;t detract from someone else&#x27;s, and they&#x27;re not usually depending on you for their own success. Feels much more like a community.<p>Anyway, my point being that I wouldn&#x27;t be shocked to learn that women (and likely people of color) feel the same way - once you&#x27;re not really part of that core group of young white men, competitive games start feeling really unappealing unless you&#x27;re just really into the game itself.