I think you're bringing way too much baggage and projection into your "interpretation" of Alexander's piece. If in doubt,
read what Moral Panic just wrote above.
Let's revisit the article, because I get the feeling that, in their desperation to defend or attack this rhetoric, people (myself included) have forgotten what it says.
Its young men queuing with plush mushroom hats and backpacks and jutting promo poster rolls. Queuing passionately for hours, at events around the world, to see the things that marketers want them to see. To find out whether they should buy things or not. They dont know how to dress or behave. Television cameras pan across these listless queues, and often catch the expressions of people who dont quite know why they themselves are standing there.
Games culture is a petri dish of people who know so little about how human social interaction and professional life works that they can concoct online wars about social justice or game journalism ethics, straight-faced, and cause genuine human consequences. Because of video games.
Now, I'll admit first that this isn't as offensive as I suggested. I'm as prone to forgetfulness and excitability as anyone else. But there's no subtext here. She is talking about you and she's talking about me.
Also, the article has been edited, which muddies things. Her army line has been removed. I can't say what else has. (Was thinking of another article, should assume this one hasn't been edited)
You understand that this critique is being made by a gamer, right? That the entire first section of the article is feeling despair at how people perceive the subculture that she is a part of? People using this kind of hyperbole to describe groups they are part of is extraordinarily common. Someone from the outside telling a player on a team sport that his team sucks because no one is working hard enough is an asshole; someone from the inside saying that is probably a coach. It's still not ideal (and I criticized Leigh's article about this upthread a ways) but it's a very different thing for someone to complain about their own group than about a foreign one.
The framing being used by people who are really mad about this article all seem to have this undertone that gamers are being shamed by "the women," thereby implicitly confirming the idea that some people really can't imagine "woman" and "gamer" applying to the same person. People make generalizations like this about "gamers" in GAF threads all the time, but since the people doing so are frequently expected to be men and they aren't talking about issues of social justice, nobody gets too worked up about it.
I haven't been on a sports team for many years, but none of the pep talks that I can remember ended with the coach declaring we were all scumbags and that he wanted nothing to do with us. Or that he had an army to use against us.
Alexander makes it immediately clear that she is not speaking as a gamer. The very first sentence of the article is
I often say Im a video game culture writer, but lately I dont know exactly what that means.
I am a journalist. I am separate.
And again, we ignore the fact that there were other words pre-loaded with her supposed intended meaning she could have used. The article is poor, but it is not poorly written. I personally don't get the impression that there were linguistic oversights in the text.
As far as the "criticism from women" issue, beyond my personal anecdotes that go against that, there are just too many people involved to even begin to package this up so neatly. I'd like to specifically address this total defense of troublesome things the gaming press has said to exacerbate this issue. I tried to broadscope the thing earlier in the thread and it was totally ignored, probably rightfully, but I think it is more effective to focus on one issue at a time.
But... we see this all the time, and it's totally acceptable. We see it even with categories or terms that people in general need to be way more careful with than "gamer".
I guess the really easy example is Chris Rock's "Niggas vs Black People" bit. He stopped doing it because racists misappropriated it, not because he was being criticized for racism. But in general it's really, really common to hear people who identify as a member of some racial group speak in generalities about that group or problems with the group as a whole; they don't get criticized for this to nearly the extent that outsiders do because it's really obvious that they're in a position to be aware that #notallX.
This is even less problematic when we're not talking about the sorts of characteristics that in the US we consider suspect classifications. People generalize about political affiliation constantly. This is often seen as stupid, when they get it badly wrong, but rarely is it taken to be very offensive, and certainly not when people are speaking about their own affiliation.
Nobody bats an eye when hobbyists speak in this sort of way about people in their own hobby community.
I took the opportunity to watch this Chris Rock bit as I was not familiar with it. As we're going for easy targets and all, the title itself illustrates that Rock is making a linguistic distinction between "black people" and "niggaz." If Leigh wrote the joke, it would have been called "black people vs. black people." I dare say he would have cut that joke a lot sooner if it read "black people hate black people because they will break into your house and rob you."
I can't think of any other examples of open hostility towards a broad category of people that is meant to be about a smaller unnamed category. Especially not from someone who begins their speech by setting themselves outside of the category.
