GermanyLoL
Sep 9, 2018 · 6 min read

I can identify with going through middle and high school feeling ostracized for gaming too much, and now looking back in hindsight and realizing it wasn’t just the gaming that caused it.

To an extent, in reflecting on events 10–15 years ago, while we are wiser with age, we’re also further removed from the saliency of the context. Our judgment therefore isn’t likely perfect. Probably, it’s a mixture of wisdom with age and gut instinct shaping our reflection on those events.

With that in mind, my gut-instinct reflection of those events disagrees with it being based on masculinity. Masculinity was part of it, but I feel there were also other equally competitive factors. I think if it can be reduced to a single underlying cause, it would be the timeless divider of humanity since we took shelter in caves, the fundamental perception that someone who is “different” should be avoided.

I remember a kid in high school (call him Robbie), who was as skinny as sticks, with a peach fuzz mustache on a goofy buzz-cut head that wobbled over rail thin shoulders, and had the nicest, softest personality. Nothing masculine about him, yet he got along with everyone, including “popular” kids. Why?

Well, he obsessed over sports, but not in a macho way, more like a nerdy bookworm who had tons of stats in his head; he liked rap and hip hop, but again in a nerdy way (imagine a 5'9" skinny white kid in a basketball jersey comparing jay-z to biggie’s legacy); and he would play video games (console games), but he wasn’t afraid to talk about them with others around, whereas I was terrified to discuss my video game knowledge in front of peers (I was the closet nerd who gamed 8 hours in the evening without talking about it).

He would show up to parties on occassion. He was never bullied or teased and everyone genuinely liked being around him at school. He could sit with almost anyone at lunch.

I had some other friends, the band geeks, who were the polar opposite of masculine. Overweight, underweight, acne, not into sports, not aggressive or loud in social settings. They avoided other cliques in a sort of self-imposed exile as far as I could tell, a defiant “we reject you before you can reject us first.” But you know what? Boy did a small group of them love to get high and throw parties.

(If it’s not clear by now, they were in the larval stage of becoming hipsters in college).

In my last couple years of high school, I remember this segment of the band clique mingling with skaters and cool kids alike, all of them crashing the same parties together — mostly to drink and get high, I imagine.

Whether Robbie or a small corner of the band geeks, why were they exceptions? For anyone else, having unnatural traits like piddly thin arm and goofy head, or being a band geek was reason to be ostracized.

I believe it’s because for all their weirdness, the only thing it took to bridge the cultural gap was to have something significant in common. In Robbie’s case, his encyclopaedic knowledge of sports made him the go-to expert for kids involved in sports and wanting to talk about next weekend’s games, his rap fanboyism was hilarious to observe because this goofy kid would be debating it with someone else and they’d be going at it, and his nerdy video games made him approachable for gamers in every group (there was no dedicated gamer clique back then at my school).

In the band geeks’ case, they overcame isolation by engaging in an activity that was difficult for others to find (alcohol and pot was a prized commodity in high school), so others were forced to dip their toes in unknown waters and ford the gap of clique differences to hang with them and obtain these taboo treasures.

None of them were masculine. The opposite. Band kids with skinny jeans, played video games, watched anime, had dirty hairstyles. It didn’t matter. If you had something important in common, and had sufficient social skills to talk to in that context, people crossed the aisle, shared phone numbers, and became friends.

This reflection has led me to the conclusion: At the end of the day, humans attract each other based on common ground, then informally band together into a clique, and this clique proceeds to gaze warily across the divide at other cliques, often aggressively warding them back. Fearing differences is a natural human tendency that can only be undermined by identifying common ground.

This is reinforced by the fact that adults are much the same, only arguably more subtle about it (if only barely, when you think about it). We divide ourselves along political, ethnic, and gender boundaries. We rally around esports/sports teams, or universities, or even our country, and shout obscenities at “losers” of other teams/schools, “fat Americans” or “pussy Europeans.”

So even as adults, we naturally band together on some commonality, immediately draw a line in the dirt around us, then brace ourselves to bare fangs at anyone outside of that line.

For some people, the fang-bearing is even fun. They call the loosing of aggression at others “banter.” It’s also clear for some others, the banter is not fun but taken seriously. Their ensuing response is tainted with actual enmity. The recepients of the enmity are offended, respond in kind, and we have an informal conflict.

In a way, we have an instinct to seek conflict, an instinct that defaults to scapegoating those different from us as targets for that conflict.

I believe high school was simply children maturing into these human instincts and grappling with it by being much less subtle about it. Like a kid copying an adult but going overboard in their zealousness to prove themselves. (Twitch chat EU vs NA spam, maybe?)

It’s more intuitive to me to connect the high school behavior with adult behavior and establish a consistent pattern, to ground the phenomenon in the logic that something so pervasive could only stem from something as fundamental as human instinct, than it is for me to perceive it as an isolated phenomenon, confined to an age group that magically vanishes as we grow up, or a single variable like masculinity.

I don’t for example believe that if we were all masculine, the conflict would stop, whether in high school or adulthood — except in the sense that with enough muscles and aggression in your demeanor, you might cause others to fear you to the point they play nice, exploiting another base instinct to respect someone larger than you.

Even if we were all masculine, people’s instincts would just draw different lines to be able to afford a new reason to satiate their tendency for conflict. It’s not like the gamer demographic, hipsters, or sorority girl stereotypes existed 200 years ago. People invent new boundaries between each other with each generation, and for many these boundaries serve as a convenient excuse to look down or reject others.

That’s why the internet, or a game gaining mainstream traction like Fortnight, are so important. These force us to communicate across such boundaries to discover our common ground. When the sum of our commonalities is greater than the sum of our differences, we remove one of our primary reasons for conflict.

In the long arc of human history, the internet is as old as a new-born baby, mainstream for only maybe 20 years. This is probably why there remains such a stark divide between generations of yesterday and today. So progress will be slow, but it’s working. Gender and race issues have plagued us for decades, centuries, milennia even. That the fight for tolerance has so much traction now, even expanded over the last 20 years to include new groups, is a sign our divergent worlds are being redirected to walk a shared path.

    GermanyLoL

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    Esports + LoL