Moments when a piece of entertainment completely rocked you.

[Chamomile]

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.

This kind of attitude is why I wish the conversation didn't get so easily derailed. Just because lashing out randomly didn't work doesn't make a problem unsolvable. Indeed, you wouldn't expect the button mash-y approach of your standard gatekeeper to be very effective in any context.

I’m pretty sure gatekeepers are just assholes and behind every argument in their favor it just comes back to being an asshole.

Gatekeepers aren't the orcs of Mordor. They aren't crafted by Sauron to blight the free peoples of the internet, they arise from specific conditions and understanding how and why they come about can plausibly result in an action plan to make sure that we have fewer of them going forward. Plus, the problems which create them are real and worth discussing.

Personally, I find the idea of people who aren't engaged with the media engaging with the community for social cache to be absurd.

I don't know what to tell you. Insincere people demonstrably exist, it's hardly controversial to say that "I was into [thing] before it was cool" is frequently a marker of status, and that nerddom went mainstream in the last couple of years, which meant quite a few people could honestly say things like "I was reading Avengers since the 90s" at a time when that made you cooler. From that, it shouldn't be a huge shock that there were also people who said that even though it was a bald-faced lie. I have met some. They're basically the guy who learns to play one song on guitar so he can strum at parties and pretend to be brooding and mysterious, but instead of guitar it's video games and Star Trek, and instead of brooding mystery he's trying to put on a facade of quirky intelligence. They don't just have a shallow understanding of the hobby, they have a shallow understanding acquired for the specific intent of pretending to have a deeper understanding to people who don't know any better. I'm pretty sure the moment for this has mostly passed. When the Into the Spider-verse trailer came up at a recent YouTube watch party, my friends were all divided into people who already knew who Miles Morales was and people who didn't care. Six years ago, that wouldn't have been true, and not just because Miles was newer on the scene.

Now, I am skeptical of the ability of poseurs to wreck a hobby by installing themselves in positions of power and subsequently drive the community into the ground, because when that happened to rpg.net, it was at the hands of people who'd been in the hobby for decades and I don't see how poseurs could amass enough power and influence in communities (except in some edge cases) when almost by definition they have no long term interest in the hobby. Building up enough influence to install oneself and one's croneys into leadership positions and then use that power to push exclusively the projects of your friends no matter how morally repugnant they are seems like the kind of long term project that wouldn't be undertaken by someone who sets out to fabricate a long history of geekiness but can't even be bothered to read Ready Player One in order to sell their deception.

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.

What about any of my posts made you think that I thought gatekeeping was a reasonable or effective response to the problems it attempts to combat? I assume it wasn't the part where I said it was an unreasonable and ineffective response to the problems it attempts to combat. Just because gating community membership behind purity tests is a stupid response to the problem doesn't mean that the problem doesn't exist.

[Thaluikhain]

Just because gating community membership behind purity tests is a stupid response to the problem doesn't mean that the problem doesn't exist.

What problem though? Now that the cool kids are doing it, people are doing it (or pretending to do it) in order to be cool? Well, yes, but so what? Or rather, how is that different from more or less anything else, people are forever pretending to be more knowledgeable about things than they are to impress people, often failing rather badly.

When dealing with fictional works like most nerd stuff (in context), surely that's an irritation, not really a problem. Worse that can happen is someone who doesn't know any better persuades you to watch a DC movie or something.

[Chamomile]

The problem of poseurs isn't actually very hard to deal with, because they sort themselves out of healthy communities on their own. The problem of new, casual fans massively diluting the number of people with a strong and genuine interest is a bigger problem. The massive injection of people and money that comes from mainstream attention can result in fan communities growing massively, and then collapsing when the mainstream moves on, leaving a shell that no longer has the intimate shared experience of a small and devoted following, nor the high energy of a massive community. It's worth asking why this happens to some communities and not others and how to make sure a community can de-escalate back to a smaller scale when the mainstream moves on. At the very least, it's worth being aware that this will at some point happen and that you shouldn't bet the ongoing existence of community infrastructure on always having a hundred thousand people using it.

[Pariah Dog]

Don't tell me who. In my head I've already decided on Disco Inferno.

Fortunately, no. Was born before Glenn started wrestling.

Gatekeepers aren't the orcs of Mordor. They aren't crafted by Sauron to blight the free peoples of the internet, they arise from specific conditions and understanding how and why they come about can plausibly result in an action plan to make sure that we have fewer of them going forward. Plus, the problems which create them are real and worth discussing.

Very much this. As I think I mentioned before some nerds see this as an invasion of their hobby by the same people that left them as bitter, hateful assholes in their formative years and the response is "THIS IS MINE, GO AWAY! REEEEE!" When us bitter fuckers die off things might normalize.

[Longes]

nerddom went mainstream in the last couple of years, which meant quite a few people could honestly say things like "I was reading Avengers since the 90s" at a time when that made you cooler.

You know, I'm not actually convinced that this is true. Yes, Marvel Cinematic Universe became wildly popular recently, but honestly - superhero movies have been popular for a while now. Or more broadly, action hero movies have been popular for a while. Blade was a box office success in 1998. Batman had like a million movies about him since the 40s. I don't think we are seeing the rise of nerddom, we are seeing the rise of special effects movies that make adapting special effects heavy comic books possible. Superhero movies aren't a special new emergence - they are just a flavor of always popular action hero movies.

And as comic book sales show, reading comic books is still uncool.

[Chamomile]

Reading comic books is uncommon, but knowing who White Wolf is gets you four million views and you can get one million just out of talking about how well the Black Panther movie matches the comics. People like superhero movies and want to talk about them, and if you can tell them things about the movies that weren't immediately obvious, they want to hear it.

[deaddmwalking]

TThe problem of new, casual fans massively diluting the number of people with a strong and genuine interest is a bigger problem.

No it isn't.

First off, it's only a 'problem' for someone who uses it to define their identity. If you're in a group of friends and you're the 'slutty one' or the 'nerdy one', when someone joins and they have the same schtick it's more difficult to assert your identity. But no matter how attached you are to the label, it doesn't define you. If you're in a room and 1000 other people claim to participate in the same hobby, but they're doing it wrong, it might make it harder to communicate how much of your identity comes from that thing, but that's only a problem for you. If you need a reductionist identity, you can add qualifiers like 'the smart D&D player' or 'the D&D player that reads Sci-Fi and crochets'. But you should also realize that defining yourself in that way doesn't affect the hobby, and simply limits the number of people you can 'accept' into your social circle in part to make yourself feel more unique and special.

If you're the first person to create something, you can feel a sense of ownership - likewise if you're an early adopter. But everyone is going to interact with that thing in a different way. You and your friends approach it from a similar place, so you're going to interact in a similar way. It's going to feel like others are 'disrespectful' when they enjoy it in a different way. And this isn't just true of hobbies. The same is true for 'MAGAs'.

They have a particular understanding of this country that works for them and they are uncomfortable with other people having a different relationship with the same country. They literally want to keep people out because they don't want it to change. But even if they did limit it to the same people that started out, it WILL CHANGE.

If I was part of a hobby that nobody else entered and nobody else left, it would change as my life does. In college I could game 3-4 nights per week until the early hours of the morning. Now that I'm married with children I basically play irregularly once per week on Sundays from 12-5. My participation in the hobby changed. Demanding that everyone accommodate me is unfair. If my gaming group wanted to play the same characters 4 nights/week, I wouldn't play because I'd feel disconnected and out of touch. But the hobby is big enough for 'serious' and 'casual' players, and the fact that I can't play with 'everyone' in the hobby is a feature, not a bug. I've played with some unsavory people - the fact that we had a hobby in common shouldn't have been enough to get them in the door.

[Stahlseele]

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.

Sorry, just woke up . . urg, 2 days into one week of holiday and already my sleep/awake schedule is schot to hel x.x

I mean, you look at something. You go "Huh, this looks interesting! Lets try this!"
And then you try it. And if you do not like it . . you stop. Look for something else.
If you at any one point think to yourself:"This sucks, but i can capitalize on the people that like this. I can get me some attention/validation here!", then you are, to me at least, a toxic influence the hobby can do very well without.
And it usually shows by:
a.) such people whining about the hobby being stupid in some kind of way.
b.) such people trying to change the hobby to better suit them no matter what the original people in the hobby may think about it.
c.) such people trying to make the entire hobby into something a "cooler crowd" than the people originally in the hobby may be drawn to.

And thus the hobby(whatever it may be!) is fucked up for the people who enjoyed their hobby just fine untill such people come around, decide the hobby is not for them but decide to stick around for some other kind of gain than enjoyment of the hobby with a group of likeminded peers.

[erik]

Sorry, just woke up . . urg, 2 days into one week of holiday and already my sleep/awake schedule is schot to hel x.x

I mean, you look at something. You go "Huh, this looks interesting! Lets try this!"
And then you try it. And if you do not like it . . you stop. Look for something else.

Yeah. If you’re a quitter. sometimes i play games and be like “man this would be way better if I changed X and Y.” And then try it again with changes. I have been spreading my changes to card games the inlaws play, explaining why my scoring system makes for a more fun game over theirs for example.

And I empathize on the sleep schedule. I was awake til 3 am for no ghostdamned reason last night. And about a month ago I didn’t sleep for 3 about 72 hours again for no reason.

I have no problem with a, b, or c in your scenarios. I view them either with indifference (a) or positivity (b and c).

The only valid criticism of new players that I see is when you describe narcissists trying to make games change to be all about themselves. I don’t see this happen but I’m sure it does happen on occasion. But if gatekeepers are only concerned with narcissists then they need to narrow their gaze.

[deaddmwalking]

I disagree with Stahlseele. That position assumes a 'perfect state'.

Let's take Warhammer, for a second.

I like painting minis. I like the idea of building an army. I like the idea of fighting with other people. There are people that play that game and enjoy that hobby. As someone interested in the hobby, I choose to play. Then I find that I don't like the game. The rules about touching bases and the fiddlyness of movement take all the fun out of it.

I find myself in the position where I enjoy 80% of a hobby, but not 20% of it. So I keep the 80% I like and I do something else. Maybe I play individual scale combat with my Warhammer minis using different rules. Now, maybe my changes are super-popular and in a year you can't find anyone to play the 'real version' of the game and that sucks for you. But for everyone else that's having MORE FUN, it's fine.

Believing that they're changing it 'just to capitalize on the people already playing' ascribes a false motive. Even if that has EVER happened, it still doesn't justify gate-keeping. Since the 'hobby' only exists in so far as individuals choose to participate, you have no more ownership of it than I do - I don't have to approve of your 'changes' and you don't have to approve of 'mine', but in neither case do we have the right to force the other out - or even to try. Our only excuse to do so is being a shitty person.

[Maj]

Gatekeepers aren't the orcs of Mordor. They aren't crafted by Sauron to blight the free peoples of the internet, they arise from specific conditions and understanding how and why they come about can plausibly result in an action plan to make sure that we have fewer of them going forward. Plus, the problems which create them are real and worth discussing.

Very much this. As I think I mentioned before some nerds see this as an invasion of their hobby by the same people that left them as bitter, hateful assholes in their formative years and the response is "THIS IS MINE, GO AWAY! REEEEE!" When us bitter fuckers die off things might normalize.

It's all about blasphemy. Old guard players find certain things sacred, and when new people come in and don't show reverence, they kick the OGs' puppy. And it sucks. Watching your puppy get kicked is horrific. On the other hand, maybe to the new player, that puppy won't stop humping their leg and biting their toes. Fuck, yes, I'd kick the puppy, too (or, at least, shake it off my leg and try to find a closet to keep it away).

The way to prevent as much of this as possible (you won't ever be able to prevent it entirely), is to incorporate into the game the value of change/individualization/experimentation/however-you-want-to-call-it. That way, welcoming new ways of play and new kinds of players is what's sacred.

But there will always be fundamentalists who pick their favorite part of the game and insist that it's the one true way to play, regardless of what the rest of the game actually says.

[DSMatticus]

I have a compromise; we all continue being puzzled by Pariah's horrifically sexist comic, but we also go back to using THAC0.

[Kaelik]

I have a compromise; we all continue being puzzled by Pariah's horrifically sexist comic, but we also go back to using THAC0.

I'm going to be an iconoclast, and say we are horrified by the sexism, and we don't go back to using THAC0.

[Whipstitch]

Some puppies gotta go, like variable target numbers and negative bonuses.

[Chamomile]

words

That's a very lovely strawman. It does not, however, have anything at all to do with anything that I said. It just kind of assumes I have severe character defects that would plausibly lead me to lie about why I think this is a problem, rather than actually address what I actually said. That, or you genuinely cannot tell the difference between a hobby changing over the course of decades and a hobby changing over the course of months, and why the second one is more likely to upset people, but considering you're also happy to make assumptions about my proposed solutions (feel free to quote anything I've written that even implied that no quality other than level of interest in a hobby should matter at all as to whether someone is welcome in a community), I'm pretty confident that you're just confident in your psychic powers and don't need to bother with actually reading what I've written to see if any of your accusations are remotely valid.

[deaddmwalking]

More words.

If you have a group that you participate in a hobby with, the additional presence of other people who profess to share an interest in your hobby, even falsely, does not need to impact you. You do what you do and have fun.

You don't have to care about 'the hobby' as a whole. It's an imaginary construct. Nobody can 'ruin it'. At least, not unless they can change the way you and your friends interact with the hobby.

I mean, what are you even saying? You like buying one type of thing and hope to keep buying that type of thing forever and ever, but that thing will go away because new people like different things and that's what is going to be made? That's stupid. If your 'hobby' was sufficiently popular, the thing you want to keep buying would keep being made. Everything made for your hobby up to the point it changes is still potentially available.

Do you have anything like a concrete example of where a mass influx of new people 'ruined' a hobby?

[angelfromanotherpin]

Do you have anything like a concrete example of where a mass influx of new people 'ruined' a hobby?

I think letting the Hun into White Supremacy was pretty ruinous.

[hyzmarca]

Think of the hobby like a street gang. Ideally, you'd want your membership to be dedicated to your hobby, which is why you require then to murder someone in order to get in, once they cross that like they're firmly separated from the rest of society and have to be loyal to the hobby, because they can't undo their crime no matter how much they might regret the decision.

Once the hobby goes mainstream, you lose the ability to use such extreme initiation rituals, and new members will likely be more invested in the greater society than they are with the hobby. Meaning that they're more likely to snitch and then the core members end in in a supermax prison.

[Chamomile]

If you have a group that you participate in a hobby with, the additional presence of other people who profess to share an interest in your hobby, even falsely, does not need to impact you. You do what you do and have fun.

Sure, if. If you don't, if the group you participate in the hobby with at any point falls apart or seeks new members or if it was intrinsically tied to a common meeting ground for that hobby such that it will be flooded by the incoming new members simply by their showing up in the hobby at all, then your ability to find new members for the group or find a new group is going to be drastically shaped by the state of the hobby as a whole. General congregation sites (online or off) that used to reliably be full of people you do want in your specific group are now full of people you don't want in your specific group (and who probably don't want you in theirs). There's still exactly as many people who might be interested in joining your group as before - in fact, thanks to the extra visibility of the hobby brought about by its popularity, the absolute number of such people is actually higher - but the proportion of them is much lower, which makes them harder to find. Because it's harder for the smaller, more dedicated fans to find each other, they are more likely to start trying, which is why when the mainstream leaves it doesn't always result in the fandom just de-escalating back to where they were before the mainstream arrived. Sometimes the communities just completely implode, because the dedicated core fans have given up trying to find one another and wandered off to do something else, or else they've retreated into a small, stable group of like-minded fans and stopped trying to interact with the larger fandom. Great for them, but it means that people trying to find a new group have a harder time.

I mean, Jesus, look at your own Warhammer example, and consider how incredibly anti-social your own reaction to that hypothetical is. At one point, people found it easy to find a way to play a game that they loved. Then, after a rapid change in the community, it became very hard. The specific mechanism in this case wasn't a sudden influx of new people but rather the sudden dominance of an alternative game, but the end result is still that people who used to be able to easily find people to play their favorite game with are now having difficulty finding people to play that game even though they need only one other person to play that game. Unless there is literally only one person who wants to play original flavor Warhammer, there are still enough people to sustain that style of play, but they have trouble finding each other because the Warhammer community is flooded with the new format.

And your reaction to this is literally "fuck those people for having an unpopular interest." You are unambiguously declaring your moral outrage for me for having the audacity to even talk about that problem and want to fix it. Your latest post hasn't made it clear, but you either remain convinced that I am secretly pro-gatekeeping despite having condemned it as both ineffective and generally anti-social multiple times, or else your opposition is not to gatekeeping but rather to any attempt to preserve the original community when a hobby goes mainstream, regardless of what effects that attempt has on other people, presumably out of some bizarre hatred for people who liked a popular thing thing better before it was popular, regardless of how they express that opinion or what they do about it.

[Whipstitch]

Really, I think the best argument for "outsiders" ruining things in an obvious manner is simply that product developers often start catering to them if they think that's where the money ultimately lies. With TTRPGs that only moderately rustles my jimmies given that it's a DIY hobby that you can participate in and develop for the cost of some graph paper and some elbow grease but for other hobbies it can be pretty ugly given the costs involved. I mean, it's by no means easy to convince randos to give After Sundown a whirl--brand names are a powerful tool, after all--but it's a lot less painful than plunking down a bunch of money on wargame minis and then having the whole scene move in a different direction with shiny new rules on how all of your old shit needs to be brought up to spec before you can participate at the big meet up.

[DSMatticus]

First they came for THAC0, and I did not speak out, because it's just normal math upside down and that's stupid.

Then the huns invaded Rome, and I did not speak out, because I couldn't find it on a map of Faerun.

Then they came to put me in the supermax because I stabbed a guy in '96 for being a fucking munchkin, and there was no one left to speak for me, which in hindsight may be because I'm an obnoxious jerkwad who uses Holocaust metaphors to talk about how awful it is to have people I don't approve of sneaking into my hobbies.

I feel like we're really going places with this, guys. I mean, not Chamomile and ddmw - they're clearly just low effort shitposting. But the rest of us, we're really figuring stuff out, you know?

Good talk.

[nockermensch]

So many words, and all them are REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

[Omegonthesane]

Gatekeepers aren't the orcs of Mordor. They aren't crafted by Sauron to blight the free peoples of the internet

"But then the Dark Lord learned the craft of shitposting, and made the master meme"

...which could totally be construed as commentary on the 2016 elections

[deaddmwalking]

And your reaction to this is literally "fuck those people for having an unpopular interest."

If you have an unpopular interest, definitionally finding people will be harder. But if the absolute number of people participating in your hobby increases and there are more people you would want to participate with, that is a good thing, even if it's harder to find them. The fact that you're dedicated to your hobby implies you should be able to do the work. If 'committed members' leave because of the influx, it's hard to accept that they're committed - or at least committed for the right reason.

Nobody in 'the hobby' owes anything to anybody else. It's built entirely on mutual-self-interest. If I want to play and I need someone to play with and you want to play and you need someone to play with, we're using each other.

'Filthy outsiders' don't ruin a hobby. At worst, they make it somewhat more difficult to find like-minded people (ie, you have to be more selective in who you participate with), but that is not even a bad thing. Participating with people that enjoy the hobby in different ways or for different reasons might actually increase your overall enjoyment. Or anyone's enjoyment.

I've never seen an example of people who get upset about new people joining their hobby that goes beyond 'I built my identity around this and now I don't feel special'.

Let me give a real example... When I was in high school and college I watched anime. I participated in distribution of fan subs. Many people weren't aware of Japanese animation other than Voltron or other 70s cartoons. It was a 'hobby' composed of a small, dedicated group of people. Due in part to their efforts, a demand for anime was recognized and large companies began releasing titles in the United States on a massive scale. Suddenly you could get EVERYTHING. There are some people who believed that 'if you didn't have to sweat for it, it doesn't count'. For them, the easy access seemed like a disappointment. But hypocritically, that's why they participated in the subtitling - they justified their action as trying to build a larger audience for the hobby they love in part to increase their access. Now watching anime is super-easy. You can buy DVDs at Best Buy or FYE, you can stream on CrunchyRoll, and you can even watch series streaming on Netflix. In every objective measure, the hobby is 'better', but some people aren't happy because 'anyone can watch anime' and they feel less special. And if that's the case, I do say, 'Fuck 'em'.

If you want to keep people from joining your hobby, develop it yourself and keep it to yourself. If you want to share your hobby, it will change. It doesn't exist as a static object but as people relate to it. Every person will relate to it differently.

Even if you're 'priced out of the hobby' it's hard to make a claim for any type of injury. We vote with our wallets, and if you're outvoted, that's the way things are supposed to work. If there is a market for the things YOU WANT, someone will make it. If there's not a market for the things YOU WANT, you're on your own, and that's OKAY. If you want ease of access, you need a large diverse community. You can't have ease of access and have everything tailored specifically to your whims. That's crazy.

[Stahlseele]

Anime is the worst example you could have chosen really . .
Because there is no interaction there.
Nobody can change what anime you get.
Nobody can change how you consume anime.
There is no way for people to demand it to change to their tastes.
If you have a different taste in anime, you go and watch something else!
There is no "make this less complicated!", "make the characters different!",
"change the fluff because it does not include me and that offends me!"