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Play Matt: Are Competitive Men a Board Gaming Blight?
- Virabhadra
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FWIW, there really aren't any bitter, socially awkward older male gamers. Their depression, failures at connection, and lack of skills interacting make them recluses and early suicides in many cases. Volunteer at the local VFW or Veterans home if you want to see what I mean. These older men work just to stay alive, gaming isn't on their radar.
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- Virabhadra
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Or just move this over to RSP on BGG and be done with it.Anjou Valentine wrote: Just kidding... nuke it now.
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- JonathanVolk
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What I take issue with, and not bitterly or even emotionally, is the now well-beaten dead horse that men, mainly young, white and nerdy, possess this mythical quality of toxicity which amazingly is not detectable in women gamers or men who have submitted their will to the holy altar of gender studies and improving Earth by taming bad men.
The horse ain't dead from where I'm standing, sheriff. I think Rebecca Solnit's essay "The Longest War" should be required reading for all adults in the #metoo era. Hey, I often have my own students read it when we're thinking about myths surrounding gender and sexual violence. The statistics bear this conversation out: the majority of violent crimes (and crucially the most extreme violent crimes) are committed by men. And we already understand this in broad, essentializing myths that most of us can reach for with greater ease than our own butts to scratch: men are aggro, women are passo. Dudes shred, women wed. Blah blah blah.
I also find Michael Kimmel's work valuable, like "Bros Before Hos" , where he explores how ideas of masculinity and femininity are shaped. For some reason, men tend to listen more carefully when other men talk about constructing masculinity.
I think Masculine Fragility could be a handy concept for us to have in our discursive toolbelts--that is, the various strategies men have developed (consciously and unconsciously) to shut down critical, nuanced conversations about masculinity and gender. After all, at the end of the day, if you feel me bro, we're all just "people"; similar strategies are used to shut down and derail conversations about race, which Robin DiAngelo explores in her book White Fragility.
I know we risk making totalizing statements in a thread like this, and of course you can point out examples of toxic aggression among female, LGBQT, and POC gamers, sure, absolutely, but in a hobby that is so obviously male-dominated on both the creator/designer and audience/player sides, why does it hurt so much to even entertain the question?
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This was really and truly an accident. We are having a server issue which is making a mess of things. Sorry
ETA: The post has been restored.
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- Jackwraith
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cdennett wrote: Or just move this over to RSP on BGG and be done with it.
Except that that's what we don't want to do because Matt was asking a valid question and simply because it involves issues of race and gender doesn't mean that it's off limits or shouldn't be asked. That was the whole point of what we wanted to do when we started talking about revising the site: being able to have CIVIL discussions with each other about deeper topics that involve games and gaming, in general; severe emphasis (again) on the civil part of that. I'm not going to name names. Many of you have already been discreetly called out by one of the moderators. Dial back some of the testosterone here, guys. All you're doing is, unfortunately, proving Matt's point.
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The original article which Matt is responding to more or less says that men and their competitive nature is a blight on board gaming.
This article then questions that conclusion. Are Competitive Men a Board Gaming Blight?
Matt then concludes that NO, it is NOT competitiveness in games or competitive men that is the problem. The blight is actually the arrogant selfishness as displayed by a small sub-group of gamers (the angry nerds/vagina man types), and that "Competition merely gives it a thin veneer of justification" for their behavior. And finally requests "Let's not confuse the two"
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- Matt Thrower
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Vysetron wrote: This wasn't written in any tradition of speech other than "well this'll get clicks".
So, let's set the record straight on this: no, it wasn't.
I went in hard on purpose, yes. But that was because I knew I was going to be taking some quibbles with someone else's piece that I largely agreed with. So I went in hard to make sure that everyone understood I see toxic masculinity as a serious problem and that I'm not disagreeing with the substance of what Angelus wrote. I was just a bit alarmed about the idea that competition itself was inherently problematic and it seemed to prompt some interesting thoughts, so I wrote them down.
That said, I can see how it looks a whole lot like clickbait, and clickbait gets people's backs up. I should have seen that coming and worked harder on it: my bad. The trouble is that, sadly, there's only a very thin line between clickbait and firmly stating a position on a topic likely to cause controversy. But I'm the author and that's my problem, not anyone else's.
So please let me not have two people I respect starting a fight over whether or not it's clickbait: you're both right.
Vysetron wrote: The problem is that the content of the article is paper thin. It makes some weak statements on the issue then tries to backpedal for a milquetoast conclusion.
I'm happy to accept that it might be a weak argument, but, I don't think I either backpedaled or made a milquetoast conclusion. Watching out for other folks at the table is not easy, especially when you're deep in the game groove and yet it's exactly what we need to try and combat the kind of crap I didn't backpedal on.
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Edit: Matt responded directly before I posted this up. I think what he says in the above post is perfectly reasonable. I'll look forward to future work.
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- Matt Thrower
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southernman wrote: It is so simple - if you join someone else's game and don't like the level of competition you put up with it or leave, if someone joins your game and doesn't like your level or competition then you tell them to put up with it or leave.
DWTripp wrote: Your point about poker and levels of competition is well taken and I think spot on. There are people I don't enjoy sitting at a game table with and so I don't sit at a table with them.
The trouble with this kind of thinking, which looks a like just plain ol' common sense, is that it puts the onus on the incoming person to take responsibility for working out whether the environment suits them or not. And the trouble with that is that it's often not obvious that the environment is going to be problematic until it's too late.
If you join in a game with a group of relative strangers, you might not realise that they're old friends who love to taunt each other with bigoted language they'd never dream of using in public. How could you? But if you're sensitive to whatever bigotry they like to sling around, you're going to find that a traumatic experience, to say the least. You can walk away at that point, but you can't walk away from whatever hurt's been inflicted.
I'm not suggesting no-one can ever say anything for fear of upsetting anyone. There's a balance here, of course. But right now we're in a situation where some men feel free to sling around gendered or racist insults at clubs and conventions and you can't argue thait's okay. And to make a balance work, we need to be more observant, thoughtful and accommodating which is all I'm really suggesting we do. This should not be controversial.
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Would we say that the behavior described was normal competitiveness or selfishness (or just plain meanness and poor sportsmanship).
It also illustrates what Matt said, "It's often not obvious that the environment is going to be problematic until it's too late."
A Board Game Meet Up That Made Me Cry
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- Jackwraith
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And to make a balance work, we need to be more observant, thoughtful and accommodating which is all I'm really suggesting we do. This should not be controversial.
Exactly. And DWT's comment veers pretty closely to the old "If the cake shop won't serve you, go to another cake shop!" fallacy, as the same rejoinders apply. What if that's the only game store in town and, obviously, the one where everyone goes to play? You walking away from the table because someone is being a bigot or overtly aggressive basically means you've agreed that you can't play. You've let the people that are, potentially or definitively, ethically in the wrong determine whether you can do something that you enjoy. Even beyond the moral aspect to it, most of us need more players, not fewer. Making sure that more people can participate and enjoy doing so is a win-win.
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Man, that thing in the reddit post about staring at the person when they ask you not to fuck with your game pieces and literally saying f-you is "we are stopping the game right now and I am not speaking to you again" territory to me.
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