I play video games, but I don’t consider myself a gamer. I suppose you could call me a de facto gamer, but I don’t feel a part of the gaming culture at all. I enjoy watching videos of people playing games, but I find the most popular mode of screaming and acting up as you play to be off-putting. I’ve watched a few of these YouTubers/Twitch streamers, but was immediately turned off. Not only was it difficult on my ears, the constant antics by the YouTuber/streamer hurt my eyes as well and detracted from the game actually being played. In addition, many of the top YouTubers/streamers are very bro-y, making dick jokes and slamming women every other minute. Let’s not even talk about Twitch chat, which is often a cesspool of grotesqueness. The best-known YouTuber is a man called PewDiePie who made his bones by yelling rape over and over in his videos. He has moved completely away from this, but the few minutes I’ve watched of his early videos is enough to make my black heart shrivel even further. I watched a few minutes of one of his newer videos, and he was mugging it up so much, I had to shut him off. When I was watching playthrough videos of the Bloodborne DLC, I had to expand my usual pool of YouTubers because they didn’t play it. Two of the guys I watched made rape jokes, and a third, in facing the only female boss of the DLC, kept snickering over how he was fisting her with his stake driver and how much she was loving it. I quit watching all three and haven’t gone back since.
Even the guys I like are, well, young white dudes. They’re more sensitive than the lot above, but by necessity, they’re limited in their points of view. I know if I’m watching their shows, I’m going to hear them talking about shit (literally), making dick jokes, and other dude topics that are of little interest to me. Even the ‘here we go, boys’ meme that has been circulating through Twitch streams is yet another reminder that I’m most emphatically not part of the crowd. It’s one reason I don’t watch any shows live or look at the chat; I prefer to watch the VOD with the chat window turned off. In addition, I could be many of these guys’ mother, which means I miss a lot due to the generation gap as well.