I swear i see this behavior that's supposedly an early childhood behavior in children 2-5 all the time online. People in team games who seem unable, incapable, not just of cooperating as a team but als unable to recognize cooperation as helpful or desirable.
Currently it's my going theory as to why some people breeze through helldivers while others suffer great frustration with the game; team players with mediocre skills and basic game knowledge will succeed, while a group of four individuals who do not cooperate, even if each of htem has better shooting skills, movement, or response times, will fail.
And what's fascinating is the people who seem unable to see and understand that. I've played large scale multiplayer games where the devs radically changed the core game experience because a player faction that leveraged team play and cooperation completely dominated other factions despite having, on average, less skilled players. Teamwork and communication were overwhelming force multipliers that the other factions could not overcome to degree that it was driving players away from the game.
My current jones is figuring out what drives a small but extremely vicious group of angry players in helldivers 2 and i think that ultimately, when analyzed from sufficient difference, the problem is a sub-set of players who cannot play cooperatively, do not realize they cannot play cooperatively, and so they feel bullied and persecuted when they fail in a game that requires teamwork and cooperation. For these players, unaware of their inability to cooperate, these failures can only be explained by malicious design choices by the devs. Since they do not or cannot understand that the game requires them to work with others to succeed the only explanation they can come up with is that the devs are attacking them. When a weapon is bugged in a way that allows an individual to bulldoze the game alone this group flocks to it and believes that they must use the weapon bc, from their perspective, that broken weapon is the only possible way to succeed.
They simply do not, maybe can not, understand that other players can and do succeed. They do not seem to see teamwork and do not understand on a conceptual level what teamwork is or what it accomplishes. They can only view the game from the perspective of themselves as an isolated individual.
And, so, when the devs fix a bug in a weapon that caused it to wildly overperform, these players believe they have been attacked for no reason. They were enjoying the game, then the devs maliciously broke their toy, now they cannot enjoy the devs. The only explanation they can conjure is that the devs are persecuting them out of malice.
For months I've been completely fascinated by the disparity by what players in online forums say about the game and what i understand about the game's mechanics and what I observe in the game. Online people will say, with rigid and inflexible certainty, that it is impossible to complete the game without a specific "meta" loadout. They seem completely convinced of this. And the plain fact is that many players are able to breeze through the most challenging content with little difficulty. And the gap seems unbridgable. No amount of evidence will shift some people. Many of them very vocally reject any attempt at education.
It's a personal concern to me because I do quite well at the game and play at the highest difficulty. Seeing a vocal minority of players demand that the game be made dramatically less complex and less challenging concerns me because if such changes are made I will not be able to enjoy the game. And the devs seem to be taking this minority very seriously and are describing changes they want to make to the game that will fundamentally change it.
And it won't work. It's a contradiction. It's a four player, team oriented game. If it's simplified to the point where individuals can succeed alone it will not be satisfying to team players. If it's made to satisfy team players it will not be suitable for loners. The small dev team cannot bridge this gap by creating essentially two separate games to appease each group. And it seems like they're going to try.
It's very unfortunate. Part of how i figured this out was a long, somewhat heated discussion with a pair of software engineers about why some people had so much trouble with the game. They put forth various changes to the mechanics of the game, none of which seemed to me to be relevant or to address the problem. They, in turn, were short with me and began speaking like i was a child who couldn't understanf simple concepts. And eventually a third party pointed out why we couldn't agree.
They're software engineers. To them the problem must lie in the software and the solution is to fiddle with it. I'm an anthropologist. I identified the problem as lying in the cultural beliefs and expectations of some players. The changes they were positing would all fail, not because of anything to do with their solutions, but becuase *the player population would never engage with the solutions". That was the gap. They didn't understand that no matter how they fiddled with things, they were trying to appease a group of people who are completely disinterested in learning or change, and who will not deviate from their behavior the engage with changes in game systems, in-game attempts at education, or tweaks to the parameters of weapons and enemies. They thought i was an idiot who rejected all their proposals because i couldn't understand the basics of games design, where I identified the problem as lying not within the game but within a subsection of the culture playing the game.
If that conversation sounds extremely frustrating; that's what being an anthropologist is like all the time. We study culture, and for most people culture is just as invisible and inexplicable as quantum mechanics. It just doesn't exist for most people and as such it's excruciating trying to communicate about culture. Stem people especially believe that they're rational individuals who exist completely by themselves and are quite hard to reach. Culture is soft and squishy, so it must not be real or important. Telling them that this is a cultural belief they hold does nothing to help the matter.
What about the far less common phenomena of the player who will only play support/heals? This player will sacrifice themselves to protect the team even in situations where it probably wasn't necessary. I'm not an anything-ologist so I'm always so fascinated when someone talks about stuff like this.
When you say techbros often don't think they're affected by culture because of culture; are you saying that it's techbro culture to pretend culture is fake?
From my memories of gaming back in the day there's long been an issue of gamers not wanting to play support classes. I remember healers and clerics being considered feminine roles, and that a lot of people, mostly young men, wanted to be some kind of dps character that was viewed as more masculine. I also recall a general perception that healers were subordinate to damage classes and that the healers were somehow not really playing the game. Like they were "just" supporting the other characters, not really playing and doing the fun jobs.
Those perceptions were mostly bullshit. In many games strong support players determined wether a team won or loss and mmorpg groups simply could not function without a healer, and you could survive a crappy dps but you couldn't survive with a bad healer
The issue persisted in some shooter games. Most people wanted to shoot people instead of healing. There were mechanical problems, too - often the game mechanics of supports were very limited. A healer or a mechanic would just look at a paladin or a vehicle and hold down the "heal" button. Then the other players would run off to do much more mechanically complex gameplay.
There's definitely a great difference in attitudes. Combat players can focus on glory, and it doesn't necessarily matter if the team wins or loses. Supports, on the other hand, are acting as force multipliers. They can give the team enormous boosts but at some point the rest of the team has to do their job. A dps or front line player doesn't necessarily need to care about the team while a support's entire game is tied to the team.
I had weird stats when I played planetside bc I spent most of my game time sitting in the back of an apc with the map opened talking to my squads on team speak. I had a lot of play time but a lower level and rank compared to equivalent players. I played an engineer mostly so i could protect spawn points, which meant i spent less time shooting and was often focusing on healing a spawn point even if it meant my character would get killed. Anything to keep the spawn point up so my team could keep sending in reinforcements for even one second.
I'd say the other extreme from your team focused supports would be "snipers". Of all the play styles i view it as the most aggressively anti-socialm sniper style players, at least in the olden days before a lot of anti-sniper mechanics were developed, would sit far out on the edges of the map. Normal players often could not meaningfully damage them while they could kill others in a single hit. Sniper style players, i don't view them as players, i view them as some kind of social parasite. They don't participate in the game, instead they disrupt the game for everyone else. They sit at a range where they can kill others, interupting the game, but they themselves can't be killed. They mostly don't contribute to objectives or team fights. "Sniper" in this sense also encompasses players who focus on aircraft, or in some games on ground vehicles. To this kind of player all the other players in the game are targets or hinderances. Their gameplay consists largely of interupting the play of others who have no meanignful way to defend themselves. They generally aren't in communication with their team and aren't cooperating. I used to take great join in deep flanking to hunt snipers. I can't shoot for beans but back in the old days snipers were often very fixated on their shooting and wouldn't notice someone walking up from behind to blast them. To me that highlights the disconnect - they're so focused on their disruptive style of play that many of them didn't seem to consider that anyone but other snipers could effect their game. They weren't really playing with others, they were standing outside the basketball court throwing rocks at people.
And you do get combat focused leaders. People who use their skills at communication, problem solving, and leadership to support their team from outside of the games mechanical systems. Even very simple leadership like telling the team to go to the A capture point or the B capture point could greatly contribute to a team's success. In games like Planetside or EVE leader roles could happen without the players even being in the game program. They might just be in the communications program, reading maps, crunching numbers, directing their subordinates, and passing information to other commanders.
And those players varied, too, in how social they were. My group had a system of "fun check" where if the team was bogged down in a fight that was going nowhere team leaders were expected to call "fun check" on the mic and if a certain ratio of players expressed that they weren't enjoying themselves we'd retreat and regroup, or move to another area, or do something goofy like getting a bunch of spaceships and crashing them all in to the enemy base. The goal was to remember that this was supposed to be a fun, social experience and prevent people from reaching a point where they became frustrated or upset.
And then on the other side you had leaders like the old "50 dkp minus!" Meme guy who could be very harsh and seemed less interested in their team mates as players of a game intended to be fun.
There's definitely a negative, harmful kind of social player. Let's call them try-hards or sweats. Plkayers who are very aware of the team but consider the team an impediment to their own glory. These players do interact socially but tend to do so in a negative manner where they berate others for perceived mistakes or bark orders at others without concern for whether anyone is having fun. This kind of player seems to view the social component entirely as a tool for them to achieve their desired glory and is generally indifferent to the actions of others unless he perceives them as failing him or getting in his way. Emphasis on "he", folks with that social style seem to be highly gendered.
Gender does play a huge role in this, come tot hink of it. At least in the past their was pressure for women to take "passive" feminized support roles and to avoid leadership positions. Plenty of people defied this of course. We made it a point to put every new player in command of a squad on their first day to aggressively break the idea that you had to be "good" or popular to lead. We'd give these new squad leaders support and answer their questions, but they were encouraged to make decisions. It was important to get women to take leadership roles in this ad-hoc way to break down gendered stereotypes and maintain that culture where women were allowed, expected, and supported as leaders. It certaintly wasn't perfect. We tried, and some were more committed to it than others.
I've observed many women are uncertain about their skills and competence and often apologize, i assume to try to diffuse potential critical comments or frustration from men co-players. It's honestly heartbreaking. A few months back I had a woman who felt she had to apologize repeatedly to the team. She was playing the game at the very highest level of difficulty, in a supporot role, and was absolutely pulling her weight and contributing to the team's victory. Not only had she nothing to apologize for, but she was performing in probably the top 95% of all players despite having limited time in the game. She was excelling beyond others but still felt she needed to protect herself by pre-emptively apologizing to man peers.
I find it so frustrating that women have to take these actions to protect themselves from gendered social violence, despite having every right to be there and expect fair and compassionate treatement. My group has always worked from a bedrock of understanding that active, enthusiastic cooperation is far more important than individual skill, but most groups aren't like that and we aren't perfect about it. Gender, disability, income and poverty, race, all are very frought in gaming. I've met a number of women who won't use voice comms under any circumstances because their voice would out them as trans and they'd face immediate abuse. Revealing yourself to be a woman in any manner can lead to immediate genedered social violence. People with disabilities may perform at different levels compared to abled people. That's doubly a problem where game stats are concerned. A person's k:d doesn't reflect their contribution either to a groups victory in game or the groups social cohesion and social benefit to it's members. The numbers on the screen only show what someone's shooting skills are relative to others, and an ableist society can be quick to level social violence against a disabled player.
I'm rambling at this point.
Regarding tech bros - tech culture does seem to hegemonically enforce a belief that humans are individuals that exist in themselves rather than humans as nodes within a complex social network. In their culture the person exists alone and relying on formal or informal systems of support shows both weakness as well as foolishness for believing such things are real. Tech culture as a whole seems to disdain a broad education, especially in the humanities, which in turn leads tech bros in their ignorance to think that ideas important to them are either something they came up on by themselves or they ascribe themselves to tech figures they idolize. The culture seems very competitive and cutthroart; loyalty and compassion anre disincentivized by the ruthless business practices of tech corps. There seems to be a widespread belief that formal education and knowledge in the arts and humanities is useless and irrelevant at best, or entirely false woo woo nonsense at worst. The notion of culture, of an all-encompassing and inescapable mesh of practices, norms, and beliefs that define the parameters of who we are as people and as societies, seems very much anethema to their conception of themselves as self made men and their slavish adherence to great man theory. Again, generalization, a very broad br
Where do tank characters fit into this in your experiance?
The closest I've seen most STEMbros come to acknowledging forces beyond the individual is Conway's Law.
I enjoy playing this role but usually because it's actually the lynchpin of the team and has the highest level of skill and responsibility (in the actually challenging content not the storyquest content). DPS on the other hand is usually for people that chew rocks and doesn't ever have to think about anything other than attacking a thing and dodging circles.
Support in a raid is the hardest role to play with the most important decisions.
It's long been bizarre to me how the support role can be feminized and devalued while also being, as you say, the lynchpin that keeps the whole machine running and separates victory from defeat. Many groups hold their healers up as the heroes who make it all work, while some dismiss support as a sort of women's domestic labor. Gennnnnnnnnnnnnnnder!
The tank role is also very important but having played both I'm quite sure that healer is more stressful. The tank only has one enemy in the raid whereas everything in the raid (friendlies and monsters) is the enemy. There's always that 1 player who does not move out of easily avoidable damage too.