I dont recognize this but sure, study says... But im going to go with my own experience. :)
this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2026
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Here's my personal anecdote that supports this.
I live in Pennsylvania, which is considered a swing state, but it did vote for Trump both of the times he won. Pretty humiliating.
AGDQ this year was in Pittsburgh so I got to attend a couple days. It is by far the most inclusive crowd I've been in locally, where people can just let their true colors out without constant fear. I think it's the only crowd where I've heard "trans rights" exclaimed and met with cheers. And it's truly inclusive in both directions. I'm a big old bearded straight cis white guy and nothing made me feel out of place either.
Between gaming communities and FOSS/linux communities, I think it's we nerds who are so inclusive!
Unless that game is csgo
Source: I play csgo
Don't for get dota 2!
Source: I play valve games.
makes sense,maybe the less inclusive/racism thing comes from your view not the video games you play.
From my quick read through of their methods it seems like they didn't account very well for the types of games, platforms and demographics. The decade in question saw a massive explosion of gaming as a hobby into the mainstream and, importantly, a strong growth of women in the gaming population.
So as a whole you have games becoming more mainstream to younger ("woke") audiences and more accessible while the inclusive-biased demographics also blew up. It's not at all shocking that you'd find more inclusivity there.
A much more interesting study would be separating the gamers from the Gamers. Show me how people playing Splatoon and Animal Crossing compare to the neckbeards living in LoL and HoI4...
A much more interesting study would be separating the gamers from the Gamers.
That would require you to define a Real Gamer, which would be divisive by design.
It's an exercise in nutpicking.
It's hard to give an exact definition, but someone playing candy crush on their phone is meaningfully different than a LoL player. Not in elitism or whatever, but for example one is a game any person might play for a bit while bored, and one is a demanding competitive immersive game. I would say a good separation is the cozy / not competitive games with competitive games, since the competitive ones are the places most people think of Gamers not being accepting.
Normally I would agree... But there is a seriously real difference between someone who plays csgo dota and hoi4 vs someone who plays animal crossing splatoon and peak.
Its fundamentally two entirely different demographics which no over lap. Both are gamers but only one set are "gamers".
Anyone who's been around long enough knows how fast the gap between the groups are.
Yeah I have no idea why you lumped first person shooter players, moba players, and 4x players in the same category. Talk about fundamentally different demographics.
Edit: by the way, I love the Endless series (Legends, Space 2) and love Animal Crossing. I also have 5000 hours in Tarkov. Peak is also fun.
there is a seriously real difference between someone who plays csgo dota and hoi4 vs someone who plays animal crossing splatoon and peak.
About ten years of age range, for the most part.
Its fundamentally two entirely different demographics which no over lap
Yeah, famously, people never get older
Which of these groups do you expect to be older, I honestly cannot tell. I swear, not bait.
Personally, I'd expect the nintendo group of these two to be the older one.
Which of these groups do you expect to be older
In my experience, you start out playing Splatoon as a kid and then you discover CSGO when you get to HS/College and then you get a job, get married, have kids, and its back to playing Splatoon.
I can almost guarantee that 4x players are the oldest, yes this is a vibes based assumption.
This is obviously just my experience but the younger generation is not inclusive at all, kind of the opposite. At least around the north east US where I have lived.
I work in a kitchen. I often have food runners, hosts and dishwashers who are under 18. They're extremely uncool sometimes.
Yeah.
Kids are jerks. They’re naive. I certainly was; I think that’s always been a thing, though I can’t comment on how much worse or better it’s gotten.
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In almost 50 years of playing D&D I've found that gamers tend to be more accepting of just about anybody than the general public is. I think it's partly because the gamer population itself gets more than its share of being spurned by that public.
let me point you all in the right direction: people in general are more inclusive than the general public is led to believe
Metal heads and punks are also really inclusive despite society viewing them otherwise.
and despite a tiny but vocal minority of them being bigoted assholes (for metalheads at least, don't know enough about punks)
The Skinhead movement was originally Nazi punks. As The Dead Kennedys said, they can fuck off.
every group of humans has a subset of bigoted assholes. dont hold it against them unless they are tolerated by the majority.
Punks are always having to run off Nazis who want to come to their shows.
Might be just my anecdotal experience but that seems to be the case for basically any group of people. Edit: typos
Maybe it depends on the subgenre of metal. Every time I discover a new black metal band, I have to research if they are Nazis or not.
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All the people who complain about games being woke don't play any games.
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Yeah, they are thinking of 2000s xbox live chat. It's been a while since then.
This study isn't saying that xbox live users today are better than xbox live users 20 years ago. They may actually be worse. All they say is that xbox live users today hold more inclusive beliefs than the general public today. The community could still be more toxic than the general public, despite those beliefs. And the general public could have become worse over the last 20 years.
I think games these days don't select for anything in particular. It's a giant space that caters to every taste. That gamers are more inclusive than the general public could have any of a million reasons, but I think it's easier to look at non-gamers than try to find any commonalities among all gamers
Also the trash tends to stink the most.
Not really, I'm thinking of literal unapologetic nazis on Steam, gamergate chuds on Twitter, incels on Reddit, mykittens on Discord and so on and so forth. Competitive games suffer from bigotry the most, but there's still plenty of casual "you aren't a real gamer if all you play is Sims/Stardew/Animal Crossing" aimed primarily at women, too. And of course it's currently the wave of nick fuentes type stains that freak out over anything even remotely "woke" that keeps the shitshow going, the GoW situation literally just took place.
However I do think that all of the above is strongly amplified by the outrage content farms, so I can believe when "The authors suggest that hostility might be driven by a vocal minority of players rather than the general gaming population. It is also possible that certain specific online communities reinforce exclusionary behavior, even if the average gamer holds progressive views."
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I play a lot of multiplayer games and I find that gaming constantly teaches me that no matter what, it always comes down to the quality of the community.
Every other aspect of design is a comparatively merely a detail.
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Just don’t hang out with Madden or COD players and you’re probably fine :D
Direct link to the study: https://www.psycnet.org/doi/10.1037/ppm0000672
Unfortunately, its paywalled, but I'd be curious about the methodology and population.
Well it was posted about by psypost which is dogshit and constantly spams headlines like this based off studies with n=25 chinese teenagers, online survey
But then psypost writes a 50 paragraph "blog" post about it like its gospel and never mentions these insane limitations, and almost everybody happily accepts these posts because the headline meets se confirmation bias if theirs, or an expected one at least, then sprints to the comments to blather on and on about it, never even reading the original crappy study
Its all really unscientific but masquerades as scientific fact
I despise psypost and think it should be banned
We cant even verify the methodology or sample size of this one but look at all the commenters in this thread who have seemingly accepted it as valid science
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