It isn't really that clever...

May 29, 2008 11:07 AM

Gaymover tag? Really? <sarcasm>I mean... that's so gay!</sarcasm> In all seriousness, can we maybe keep the casual homophobia to a minimum? Or if I'm missing the joke, please let me know.
posted by OverlappingElvis to etiquette/policy at 11:07 AM (82 comments total)

You just lost the game.
posted by carsonb at 11:11 AM on May 29 [2 favorites]

What's homophobic about referencing a gay-owned and operated moving and storage relocation company?

_{Oh wait, now I get it.}
posted by burnmp3s at 11:18 AM on May 29

I agree with OE. Not cool, unless the subject is big, nice-smelling men who take your furniture to your new house in a big pink van.
posted by jtron at 11:20 AM on May 29

Just flag it with the "offensive/sexism/racism" rejoinder. If posts of a misogynist or anti-Semitic flavor get culled, certainly this one should qualify.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:21 AM on May 29

OE-800, man, that's my brand.
posted by box at 11:22 AM on May 29

Besides, it's actually "GAEM OVAR!!!LOL!111"
posted by gnomeloaf at 11:22 AM on May 29

Poster can keep the tag if he agrees to change his username to "aftermarketcasualhomophobia."
posted by [NOT HERMITOSIS-IST] at 11:23 AM on May 29

Blazecock, I think this warranted a callout/message to the admins because I mean if you had flagged that post as offensive, I wouldn't have any idea what you were talking about.
I saw the post and hadn't noticed the tag.
posted by CitrusFreak12 at 11:23 AM on May 29

Sorry, CF, I didn't mean to imply that this post shouldn't call out the thread in question. Just that people who read this post could consider flagging the problem thread so that it gets dealt with faster.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:26 AM on May 29

I've nixed the tag on account of it being pretty dumb and not actually helping the post in any clear way. This could also be handled pretty well by just sending us a note from the contact form, btw.
posted by cortex at 11:33 AM on May 29

Ah, my mistake Blaze.
posted by CitrusFreak12 at 11:34 AM on May 29

Here comes the curtain!
posted by Mister_A at 11:35 AM on May 29

I get incredibly wound up by the use of 'gay' to mean 'rubbish'. It's the only thing I have in common with old duffers who get incredibly wound up by the use of 'gay' to mean 'gay'.

Anyway, the tag should go, and we can all make a mental note that aftermarketradio is a bit of a knob.
posted by jack_mo at 11:36 AM on May 29 [1 favorite]

Oop, should've previewed.
posted by jack_mo at 11:37 AM on May 29

Yeah -- wasn't cool.

BTW -- brings to mind the prohibition of the term "gay" in gamertags at Xbox Live: Richard Gaywood banned from Xbox Live.
posted by ericb at 11:37 AM on May 29

'Tis ye olde English methoyd of scrybing "gaymover," perchance?
posted by yeti at 11:38 AM on May 29

Nice try yeti–OR SHOULD I SAY "STEVE"??!!11!?!?!/1!1/1&&2~!!>?
posted by Mister_A at 11:44 AM on May 29

I still use "gay" to mean "happy." Or, more properly, "happy to get good same-sex loving."
posted by Astro Zombie at 11:49 AM on May 29 [1 favorite]

I've had people get mad at me for using the word "queer" to mean... well... y'know queer. Like the normal definition of queer. TSK.
posted by CitrusFreak12 at 11:51 AM on May 29

Like the normal definition of queer.

The problem with our wonderful melting pot is that there IS no "normal" definition of queer. The whole idea of there being a normal [as opposed to traditional perhaps] meaning of a word is a little, er, normative? Not trying to point any fingers at you CF12, I just read that sentence and realized I had absolutely no idea what you meant.
posted by jessamyn at 11:56 AM on May 29 [1 favorite]

Mister_A, let me present the facts.

I am told your full name is Mr. Aloysius Snuffleupagus, aka Mister_A, aka Mr. Snuffleupagus, aka Snuffy, aka The Snuff.

Then is it is or is it aint true that you fathered a child, -A CHILD!- whom is named Stephanopoulos, aka Steven, aka THE STEVE? Answer me that.
posted by yeti at 12:00 PM on May 29

Queer thing is, that I gayly browse MeFi entries periodically and it's almost impossible to not notice someone all screwed up into the ceiling about something or another. Sometimes things just are innocuous and nonsensical.

Maybe it meant Gameover?
posted by valentinepig at 12:09 PM on May 29

Speaking from experience as someone who has played a whole truckload of video games, what it actually likely meant was "Game Over, except that this is the twelfth fucking time I've died on this level and I'm going a little batshit, and so just for the heck of it: instead of saying GAAAME OOOVERRR I'm going to say GAAAYYY MOOOOOVER and maybe giggle a little bit at the absurdity of the idea that a video game would celebrate the death fo my character by going off on a non-sequitur about homosexual furniture handlers".

Which is all well and good as something to mutter when you're playing Resident Evil, or even as a recurring chorus with your best friend as you sit together on the couch and drink beer and fail repeatedly at getting Jill Valentine past those zombie fuckers in the basement hallway of the east wing of the mansion.

Deciding to tag it onto a post for no good reason? Probably not quite the same thing.
posted by cortex at 12:16 PM on May 29

instead of saying GAAAME OOOVERRR I'm going to say GAAAYYY MOOOOOVER

I always just say GAME OVER YEEAAAAAH.
posted by burnmp3s at 12:28 PM on May 29

Dude, or the snake? Remember the snake? There was some trick to that which, once I figured it out, infuriated me even more.
posted by Mister_A at 12:30 PM on May 29

Oh that fucking snake. Grr.
posted by cortex at 12:31 PM on May 29

Is it possible that this is just a huge misunderstanding? Like that time I referred to that gay Fucking fag, and I was talking about a really happy cigarette from Austria?

No, probably not.
posted by quin at 12:34 PM on May 29

*plans elaborate, improbably innocuous deployment of "light in his loafers"*
posted by everichon at 12:37 PM on May 29

This thread is gay.
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 12:45 PM on May 29 [1 favorite]

Jill Valentine past those zombie fuckers in the basement hallway of the east wing of the mansion.

There's a Republican in the West Wing, you to go talk to him first.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:45 PM on May 29

This thread is gay.

Quit reclaiming things!
posted by cortex at 12:49 PM on May 29

It took me forever to see that word as "game over." I totally saw the pink moving truck too. I am moron hear me roar.
posted by CunningLinguist at 12:56 PM on May 29 [1 favorite]

And gaiety ensues?
posted by 1f2frfbf at 1:01 PM on May 29

I don't see what your problem these people is!
posted by Pollomacho at 1:06 PM on May 29 [1 favorite]

[turning around]

Josh, is that you?
posted by valentinepig at 1:16 PM on May 29

there's some point in gamer culture where gay and fag became the go-to insults between gamers online, and I cannot for the life of me pinpoint where that is. Obviously, it has to have occurred after the invention of online gaming. did people playing MUDs and MOOs speak to each other like that? I'm not sure. I remember being infantile and griefing in roleplaying aol chat rooms, but never homophobic. I feel confident that it didn't start with friends playing 1v1 doom games with each other over 9600 baud modems because, let's be honest, most people couldn't tie up their parents' phone line long enough for a 9600 baud modem to send out the sequence of letters g-a-y.

I remember the first time I'd heard about the ability to play strangers in an online game without needing to know anyone's phone number was when the utility Kali came out to support Duke Nukem 3d multiplayer, and things sort of exploded when the doomed Ten Network arrived as well. If no one ever called me a fag on either of those, I'll happily eat my hat.

I suppose it's rather like the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. I think it arrived concomitantly with the arrival of the ability to play strangers online competitively. This implies, to my mind, that it has to stem from some deeper rooted problem among gamers.

So here I'll make a rather long logical leap: I think it's an issue of transference. I believe we're dealing with a tred which has as its origin high school abuse. Early gamers, indeed the overwhelming majority of gamers until rather recently, were mostly non-athletic and unpopular adolescent males, and thus were the targets of frequent and at times ritualistic abuse during their regular lives. Their masculinity and sexual orientation having been constantly challenged every day of their lives, I find it easy to believe that most gamers had a sore spot for the subject. More importantly, I find it easy to believe that most gamers knew that the other gamers they would play against online lived lives much like theirs. Their online competitions became an opportunity to transfer those feelings of abuse and inadequacy onto someone else who they could confidently rely on having the same sensitivities they do. So most gamers knew that calling someone a fag would infuriate their opponent because it so regularly infuriated them.

We are not only all molded from the same clay, but are in all likelihood molded into the same shape by those who abuse us in our youth. I think it's safe to say that virtually none of the gamers you would have met as recently as 5 (at most 10) years ago would have perpetuated a hate crime against a gay man or woman, or would even have intentionally offended one in real life. Stick them in a group of strangers with the relative safety of anonymity, however, and the opportunity to assign one's grief to someone else for a moment proves too tempting to resist for some.

Of course, gaming having achieved unprecedented mainstream success combined with a long history of sports games having brought a once uninterested athletic demographic into the gaming lifestyle, it has become virtually impossible to assign any sort of broad generalized character to the modern idea of a gamer. While it's true that even at its earliest stages it was possible to find all types of individuals engaging in gameplay, nowadays diversity is the rule among gamers, rather than the exception.

And yet... sexual orientation and masculinity are still the prime targets for in-game antagonism. I work for a massive competitive video gaming league, so I see the world's best professional competitive gamers play their games all year long with each other, and even the girls at tournaments will call other gamers gay and yell "Rape!" when they're severely beating their opponents. Are they all just obeying the social rules of a culture that pre-exists their involvement in any serious numbers? Maybe.

Maybe gamers, much like everybody else in the world, are just a bunch of assholes.

Maybe it's just that games, being still on the cusp of achieving "grown up" status among the general population, are populated by people still in the process of learning what it means to care about the lives of people outside themselves.

Like I said, I don't know.

This has been another installment of "Overlong Shallow Thoughts with shmegegge." Thanks for listening. Tune in next week when our topic is "Refrigerator Magnets: Kitschy Cool or Kitschy Fuck You?"
posted by shmegegge at 1:19 PM on May 29 [10 favorites]

Josh, is that you?

And don't you start in about the evils of video games, bucko. I don't come to your house and tell you not to meditate.
posted by cortex at 1:21 PM on May 29

This thread is gay.

And moving. I shed a tear at your comment.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:25 PM on May 29

shmegegge, the reason that "gay" and "fag" are the go-to insults in gaming is the same reason that they were the go-to insults on the playground in 6th grade. Even though many gamers are well beyond the 6th grade in age, there's a fair proportion of them (like many non-gamers) who are still there in terms of psychosocial and intellectual development. Thanks for the interesting comment.
posted by Mister_A at 1:55 PM on May 29

WOW! Good timing. I can feel your breath on my neck.
posted by valentinepig at 1:56 PM on May 29

You know, it's probably been years since we've had a "don't refer to MeFites by their real name, unless their username is their real name or an obvious derivation of it" discussion, so I'll gently bring up the issue here.
posted by yhbc at 1:58 PM on May 29

I know what you mean, Beloved Commish. It weirds me out too.
posted by quin at 2:03 PM on May 29

cortex is the only daytime mod whose username and real name have nothing to do with each other, but yeah, what yhbc said.
posted by jessamyn at 2:04 PM on May 29

Thank god no one has brought up "ghey" yet.
posted by desjardins at 2:07 PM on May 29

Yeah, and valentinepig is one of the only mefites I work in the same building as. Hey, vp, cut it out or we're going to freak the norms.
posted by cortex at 2:08 PM on May 29

So noted. But for the record, it was him who pointed it out that I was talking to him. And it's an intertextual reference.

He's been right there for days now...it'd be creepy if he wasn't the one who turned me on to these sites. And no we're neither gay nor homophobes. But if I were, I'd probably hit that.
posted by valentinepig at 2:20 PM on May 29

*facepalm*
posted by cortex at 2:22 PM on May 29

Oh, and I did not know that was taboo. FWIWSTSNKOTBWNHVM
posted by valentinepig at 2:22 PM on May 29

I like "geigh", if we are stating our preference for alternative spellings of the word "gay".
posted by everichon at 2:24 PM on May 29

Dear AskMe,
How do I locate a game over? I tried the other kind, and they broke my shit. I’m in the Seattle area.
Anon.
posted by found missing at 2:25 PM on May 29

I'd probably hit that.

awesome. and about cortex too.
posted by jessamyn at 2:26 PM on May 29

I'd probably hit that.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
posted by burnmp3s at 2:29 PM on May 29

This "sharing a building" business has a whiff of cabal about it, I dareseigh.
posted by everichon at 2:30 PM on May 29

I love the whiff of cabal in the morning. It smells like... intertextuality.
posted by Armitage Shanks at 2:39 PM on May 29

I'm curious to know who the others are? I'm surprised he hasn't slammed the door shut on this thread.

But, alas, no, no cabal. I tried to cabal with him once and it just petered out, only to be done by a larger organization with more resources. Although it was a good idea, clearly.
posted by valentinepig at 2:41 PM on May 29

I think I calculated the odds at 3.6% that any given month on metafilter will be free of the cooter clock resetting phrase. However, I probably got the calculation wrong, not to mention jessamyn could just use a sockpuppet to post the phrase.
posted by BrotherCaine at 2:42 PM on May 29 [1 favorite]

What kind of socks would a Vermont puppet wear?
posted by desjardins at 2:50 PM on May 29

the reason that "gay" and "fag" are the go-to insults in gaming is the same reason that they were the go-to insults on the playground in 6th grade.

Seriously. The gamers who were playing MUDs and Doom Deathmatch were almost all 18 years old or over. Gamers in general were an older and more demographically diverse group back then. Remember when games like Kings Quest were the best selling games on the planet? The people playing those were people who were using PCs back then, generally nerdy but often older than 25 and sometimes even (gasp!) female.

For whatever reason, by the time Duke Nukem came out the average PC gamer population shifted heavily toward being around 12 years old and male. Basically any place online that has a high proportion of 12 year old males ends up being like that. Although I can't entirely explain the low quality of most YouTube comments, I suspect that much of it has to do with the fact that YouTube is more popular with 12-17 year old kids than any other age group.

I don't know what happened to all of the older, intelligent, (or female) gamers. It was sad to see genres that appealed to those kinds of gamers, like the Adventure game genre, die a slow death due to lack of commercial success. I think a lot of them just stopped playing games due to the fact that every game that comes out now needs to appeal to kids to be successful.
posted by burnmp3s at 2:52 PM on May 29

Wool, fer sure.
posted by timeistight at 3:07 PM on May 29

Since the tag has been removed, can we close this thread now?
posted by fixedgear at 3:09 PM on May 29

Must! Bite! Tongue! *TWICE*
posted by valentinepig at 3:10 PM on May 29

burnmp3s: "For whatever reason, by the time Duke Nukem came out the average PC gamer population shifted heavily toward being around 12 years old and male."

For whatever reason? Wasn't online gaming coming into its own around the fifth generation of game consoles? I think all video gaming had shifted heavily toward 12 years old and younger.
posted by team lowkey at 3:18 PM on May 29

It was sad to see genres that appealed to those kinds of gamers, like the Adventure game genre, die a slow death due to lack of commercial success.

As an avid adventure gamer, I agree with oldmanmurray (as I often do) that adventure games committed suicide. Also, Tim Schafer disappeared from the planet between Grim Fandango and Psychonauts.
posted by shmegegge at 3:32 PM on May 29 [1 favorite]

I saw that tag and thought to myself, ' I'm sure someone will call the OP out on that bullshit, but i have to go to work...'

Pretty lame overall, and yeah, a total flashback to high school (and at my high school you didn't even have to be a nerd or anti-social, it was just the perjorative du jour.)

And as a data point, I was a 12 year old playing King's Quest and Duke Nukem.
posted by schyler523 at 4:58 PM on May 29

shmegegge - Very funny link. God I hate that guessing-game-disguised-as-a-puzzle shit.
posted by Artw at 5:01 PM on May 29

For whatever reason? Wasn't online gaming coming into its own around the fifth generation of game consoles? I think all video gaming had shifted heavily toward 12 years old and younger.

Well, yeah 12 year-olds were always a big part of the console gaming population, but back in 1993 when Doom came out and modem multiplayer first started, most of the 12 year-olds were playing Super Mario World on their Super Nintendos rather than pwning people in Doom. Between 1993 and 1996, there was a big shift in PC gamer demographics that brought it from how things had been since the '80s (older and more diverse) to the current state (younger and mostly male).

As an avid adventure gamer, I agree with oldmanmurray (as I often do) that adventure games committed suicide. Also, Tim Schafer disappeared from the planet between Grim Fandango and Psychonauts.

I don't think you can blame all of it on the game developers though. The logic in Myst is at least as complicated and nonsensical as the Gabriel Knight 3 example on oldmanmurray, but it sold millions of copies when it came out in 1991. When Grim Fandango, one of the best ever adventure games, was released in 1998 it had trouble breaking 100k in sales.
posted by burnmp3s at 5:09 PM on May 29

I would vaguely agree that people using PCs to play games in 1991 were old and kind of fuddy duddy, as PCs basically sucked in 1991 and were something your dad might have used for work, sort of like how ridiculous mac ads make them out to be now. Hell, even macs had better games back then, and we all know how much mac gaming sucks (largely because, as far as i can tell, it has not actually changed since 1991)

Plenty of 16yr old Amiga gamers though. Yay Amiga. And they would totally call you gey in a scrolling message demo thing tacked on front of their warez.
posted by Artw at 5:21 PM on May 29 [1 favorite]

I'd probably hit that.

I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO!!
posted by waraw at 7:53 PM on May 29

vodka and Arizona kiwi strawberry, why do you ask
posted by waraw at 8:07 PM on May 29

No one is gay for Moleman. No one.
posted by blue_beetle at 8:40 PM on May 29

My openly gay coworker used "That's so gay" as a perjorative the other day.

My immediate reaction was to chasten her. Thankfully, I realized how absurd that would be before I opened my mouth.
posted by five fresh fish at 11:01 PM on May 29 [1 favorite]

whats a melting pot anyway ?
posted by sgt.serenity at 8:05 AM on May 30

TWENTY BUCKS SAME AS IN TOWN
posted by cortex at 8:12 AM on May 30

The logic in Myst is at least as complicated and nonsensical as the Gabriel Knight 3 example on oldmanmurray, but it sold millions of copies when it came out in 1991.

Here I'd disagree. Myst's logic makes perfect sense, when you try to understand your surroundings as a functional world that was disrupted. That was the problem, was that people weren't used to having to think of their environment as a completely functional world where the puzzles weren't meant by design to be puzzles. Myst was very hard because you had to think differently than you had to for other games. The clock tower wasn't a puzzle, it was just a broken clock with a fancy drawbridge and you had to figure out how its gears worked and set them properly. The problem is that the purposes of the devices, especially in the various sequels to Myst, were at times hopelessly obfuscated so the logic of what you were trying to accomplish was lost on the player. I seriously doubt that anyone naturally figured out the final puzzle in Riven, even though the logic behind it makes perfect sense ONCE YOU READ THE SOLUTION.
posted by shmegegge at 2:11 PM on May 30

I’m kind of looking forwards to valve doing some physics engine based puzzles other than “put things on the seesaw”.
posted by Artw at 2:17 PM on May 30 [1 favorite]

(or "take things off the basket connected to the pully which is really just another seesaw". Or "float things up under the aquatic seesaw".)
posted by Artw at 2:26 PM on May 30

fwiw, artw, the guy who wrote that article I linked you now works for valve, because of his now-famous crate review system, whereby he lambasted first person shooters for precisely that kind of nonsense.

once he worked there, the designers of half-life 2, as a way to throw themselves on the mercy of the court so-to-speak, made the first puzzle in the game a stacking crates puzzle.
posted by shmegegge at 2:28 PM on May 30

Isn't there a throwing-trash-into-a-trashcan-so-not-to-get-hit-by-a-fascist-thug puzzle first? I thought that was a opretty good establishment that you were in an evil authoritarian state...
posted by Artw at 2:42 PM on May 30

Yeah, I don't think the box puzzle came till later. Perhaps right after you first get the gravity gun? But it was conspicuous to me as well, as a big fan of the time-to-crate metric.
posted by cortex at 2:48 PM on May 30

I think it might be after Barney pulls you out of the line, before the helicopter chase...

You don't get the gravity gun for ages.
posted by Artw at 2:53 PM on May 30

it is after barney pulls you out of line. it's the very first thing you do as a free man (GET IT?!!!) in the game. the can in the garbage thing doesn't really count as a puzzle.
posted by shmegegge at 3:16 PM on May 30

So for crate test purposes all teh introductory atmosphere building stuff doesn't count? Bang goes Half Lifes score...

(though I think you see a robot moving a crate from the train pretty early on)
posted by Artw at 3:19 PM on May 30