Closing Down The Facebook Page

Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing.

Right now Identity Gaming has a number of social media accounts tied to it.  Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, and as one guy doing this by myself that's a lot to manage.  So, I've made the decision to close down the Identity Gaming Facebook page.

There are two reasons for this decision

1) The quality of the page itself is garbage.  I've put basically no effort into the Facebook side of this website, I just sort of opened it at the start because I felt that I had to for some reason.  So if I'm not using it, there isn't really any point of it existing.

2) Facebook is cancer.  I follow a number of gaming groups on Facebook to browse through while I'm bored in the bathroom or on a train but almost every single Facebook gaming group is an absolute shit show filled with the absolute worst people.  Have you ever seen someone post a speedrun on a Facebook and then looked at the comments section?  The absolute biggest sacks of shit seem to frequent these pages and on the off chance that IG does grow bigger and get a bigger following, I do not want your average Facebook ruining my day.

For friends of mine who may be reading this, this does not mean I'm closing my personal account, I'm still going to pester you all with my links whenever I put out something new.  It also doesn't mean that Identity Gaming is in any danger of closing down either.  I'm just chopping off the worst part of it

Gaming and Social Media

The fact that gaming and social media have sort of come together in recent years is such a strange phenomena to me.  Back in my younger years if I shared gaming related things on my Facebook wall then I would be ridiculed for being a loser but now I have game systems that let me, at the push of a button, upload screenshots, videos or even put out links to my Stream direct to Facebook and other platforms.

Allow me to share a little story about my first experiences putting gaming content on social media platforms.  A long while ago I used to play a lot of Monster Hunter Freedom Unite on my PSP, it was a grand old time.  Just when I was starting out, I managed to grind enough of a certain creature in order to get my first full, self crafted armor set so I was pretty excited.  I thought I'd share this excitement with some of my so called "friends" on Facebook so I snapped a picture, uploaded it and put a caption on it like "woo! first proper armor!".  The comments that I got back were things like "holy shit you're such a loser" or my personal favorite "there's casual, hardcore and sad.  Guess which one you are".  THEN fast forward to 2016 where I can smash a button and upload a screenshot from Bloodborne where I just killed a boss or something and suddenly the comments are things like "well done that game is hard" or "omg I wanna play that game so bad".

This is just one example of that happening but it happened many times more and with other titles.  If you were to go through my old photo albums and look at the screen shots for Left4Dead, Guild Wars or Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine then you'll see a lot of abuse but viewing similar content on newer titles or even posts for this blog clearly shows that gaming content has become a lot more "acceptable" on social media.

Gaming platforms have always had their social elements to them with things like Steam offering ways to share pictures or content with other players but with that it's always self contained within it's own community of gamers.  Facebook is where a lot of the filthy non-players reside, the kind of people who don't understand games and think they are either for kids or for lonely, fat basement dwellers with nothing better to do with their lives so the fact that people now are willing to more openly share their gaming experiences is a bit of a shock, but a good kind of shock.

This improving of the relationship of social media and video games is something we all frowned upon back during the launch of the next gen systems.  You had people on stages at press conferences harping on and on and on about social media this and Twitter that and we just turned up our noses and said "where are the games?".  However we now live in an age where there's a large number of people working within gaming media who are trying to smear and shame it.  Lot's of articles about gamers and games being sexist or violent.  It's stuff that happened before but now it's coming from within.  Except what these social media features allow us to do is show the people directly, the people who don't know any better and would buy into this shit otherwise, that this just isn't the case.  We have been given the tools to fight back against the clickbait, sensationalist bullshit that would seek to damage gaming for a fast profit rather than help us evolve the medium.

Times have changed drastically and I'm actually rather thankful for it.

I have Instagram!

I've always said that Instagram is kind of shit and after using it for two days I still kind of think that.  That said, thanks to some influence from the wife, I now have an instagram.

I'll be using it to post 1 picture a day of something either Japan related or something game related so if you want to see that go and give me a follow.

I guess this has the advantage of giving me some more exposure so if I post something cool then be sure to share it or whatever because more viewers to IG means more potential charity donations and that's always a good thing,

My user name is Taurinensis512 so come and check me out and marvel at how many useless fucking hashtags I can apply to a single picture that no one gives a shit about.

Online Harrassment Is Largely Bollocks

Thanks to the ongoing Gamergate controversy that I've been quietly watching from a distance it seems like harassment and cyber bullying have become hot topics for the games industry.  Not a day goes by on my twitter when someone isn't talking about "harassment" but quite frankly, harassment and cyber bullying is LARGELY complete bullshit and I speak from experience.

First I'm going to say a little bit about what I would define as harassment or bullying.  Harassment or cyber bullying, to me, would be a situation where the online nastiness that one is experiencing overflows into your real life.  For example, doxxing is a great example of what I would define as ACTUAL harassment.  Putting someones info such as their address and phone numbers on the internet and then having large numbers of people make calls and mail all manners of horrible bullshit is disgusting behavior that could only really be defined as harassment or bullying.

Also things such as DDoSing websites and such I'd define as actual harassment because if you're a content creator that relies on your site to make money (and maybe even a living) then you're directly harming them in some kind of actual way that they can't prevent.

However, saying nasty things to people on social media or in video games is NOT harassment and it's not bullying.  Even if there are large numbers of people doing it, I disagree with the idea that you are being harassed by randoms on the internet.  Almost every website, every social media outlet, every messenger service and every app has a block feature and an account removal feature.  If people are saying stuff you don't like then block them and if it becomes too much, shut down your shit, it's that simple.  Surprisingly, even in 2015, I'm pretty sure you'll be OK if you don't have to log into Facebook every day.

I'm sure there are people who are affected quite badly by people saying horrible things to you on the internet but I'm quite cynical of these people because, as I said before, I speak from a great deal of experience of being "harassed" and "bullied" across my life.  Allow me to tell you some stories.

In my high school days I was rather unpopular (nothing's changed lul) and I'd get bullied a bit at school.  As a young child I discovered MSN Messenger and on there I would talk to the few friends I did have and have a grand old time.  Occasionally, the bullies from my school life would appear to say nasty shit to me but I didn't mind it so much online because that was the one place where I didn't have to take their shit.  Without responding or even really reading what they said to me, I'd block them in a heartbeat and get back to living my happy life.  At home, on the internet, I didn't have to take that shit and so I chose not to.  Now we have a lot more avenues for communication like twitter, LINE, Facebook, Snapchat and all that shit, but I guarantee that they all have block features so you can avoid having to hear shit that upsets you from randoms on the internet looking for a reaction.

I'm aware that some people who are "cyber bullied" may then come off Facebook and face that shit in real life but when it gets that far, to me, it stops being cyber bullying and falls into the realm of just straight up normal bullying, right?

Now what about online harassment?  Things like emails and stuff that I hear people talking about so often?  Well that's bollocks too.  A long while ago my wife bought my Hatsune Miku Project Diva F2nd.  Since I'm a website that talks about games, I announced how pleased I was with the gift I had received with a little picture of the box on Twitter.  Not long after I made that tweet, I received an email telling me, in short, that I'm a horrible person and my wife is a traitor to women who should kill herself.

Pretty horrible thing to have to read right?  Well yeah, but it was sent by someone I didn't know and quite frankly, I don't give a shit about what anons on the internet think about me or my wife.  The criticism leveled against the two us wasn't constructive and the tone of his or her email was nasty so I just deleted it.  I received one more after that with similar words about me and no mention of my wife and did the same thing.

If it was continued assaults, there are features in my email thing to block addresses and filter shit as spam or whatever, so I could have just used those but I've not received one since and I refuse to let stupid shit like that get to me.

As for gaming there's been a sad change in what qualifies as harassment.  Back when I was younger, playing games online was an almost guaranteed way to hear something nasty.  Comments like "you're shit" and "fat nerd tryhard" as well as much wittier stuff was commonplace, it was just the rough and tumble nature of playing competitive online games and still is.  They don't know anything about me and they say stuff just to get a rise and 90% of the time it doesn't come from a place of malice so there's no need to get upset.

The problem is that nowadays, the definition of harassment has become silly and maybe that's another reason as to why I'm so cynical about it all.  Harassment on twitter can now be defined as disagreeing with someone or re-tweeting something that they don't like.  People like to use the word harassment to deflect legitimate criticism.  For example, if someone says something and you respond with like "well, you didn't really do enough fact checking, here are some sources of stuff that says you might be barking up the wrong tree.."  the person will just use the H word and large numbers of people will come to defend despite the idiocy behind the first statement.  I've also seen people use the word harassment to talk about calling someone shit at a game in an in game chat, which is just ridiculous. 

All this said, there are large numbers of people and large groups dedicated to stomping out or supporting victims of harassment and cyber bullying, so I'm more than willing to admit that maybe I just don't understand the whole issue.  If there's anyone with experiences they'd like to share or ideas they would like to put forward to try and tell me that maybe it's not all complete bollocks, I'm open to the idea that maybe I'm wrong on this.