Because I surround myself entirely with excellent folk I sometimes forget that gaming is a pastime primarily enjoyed by affluent young males.

Actually, that’s not really true. Most of my Live friends list are affluent young males. The websites I frequent are largely made and populated by affluent young males. I’M a (fairly) affluent young(ish) male (yeah, I’ve checked). I don’t forget that that demographic dominates gaming at all.

What I forget is that gaming is a hobby largely enjoyed by fucking idiots.

Because I hang about with a better class of gamer I generally burble along decently isolated from the hoards of braying, spoiled, clueless berks carting around a sense of entitlement to rival Violet Elizabeth Bott’s.

Which is why it’s always a shock when something bursts my bubble, then beats me around the head and body with a big sockful of “Oh Yeah, Most People Are Complete Wankers, Aren’t They?” Venturing out into the murky jungle of public online gaming is usually good for this, as is trying to read the comments appended to Eurogamer articles by the hoi polloi.

Here’s a f’rinstance. A developer complains that too many black characters in games are “urban” stereotypes, reinforcing casual racism. Pretty undeniable, I’d have thought. Games still largely filter themselves through the perceived expectations of young white males and so generally treat race in about as enlightened a fashion as they treat women. Yes, of course there are exceptions but they remain just that.

Some selected highlights from the comments section attached to that article, then.

“Tell me this is a joke.”

“Anyone who playes on Xbox Live and hears the Americans knows that this is a reality, not just a stereotype. Anyone offended by it is a complete moron.”

“He’s entitled to his opinion I guess. I can just imagine what his whining sounds like. Bet he sounds really pissy. One of those people you meet and immediately want to punch the crap out of. No?”

“He should go make a game with a main black character who doesn’t “talk black” instead of bitching about it, Mr Victim Complex, stereotyping is good, most of the time it ends up being true anyway otherwise why would we do it on instinct?”

“Well he has to be a tit if he takes Gears of war seriously. Idiot. I quite liked the Cole Train character in Gears, he made me laugh.”

“I quite liked The Black And White Minstrel Show, it made me laugh.”

“Shut the fuck up you whining prick”

“What would a non-stereotypical black person look like?”

Words fail me.

“i dont notice the color of the games characters, and surely thats the point

and white stereotypes are just as prevelant - the white mass murder, the italian mob boss, the irish boozer, the uk thug/upper class twit, the yank dummy, COD 4 for example was PACKED with stereotypes. why is it acceptable for there to be white stereotypes, but not black ones?”

Well, that settles it then. If a middle-class white guy doesn’t notice any casual racism in games then there can’t be any, can there? And I honestly can’t believe I didn’t notice that every white videogame character was a mass-murderer.

This obsessive hand-wringing need to be politically correct about every little thing is possibly the most tedious facet of modern life.

And yet, I haven’t met a single person who wasn’t bigoted about something. It usually just surfaces somewhere else. Get over it.

This from one of the site’s actual writers. For the love of mothering FUCK.

It’s not nice to realise that world is run largely for your benefit, that as a well-off middle-class man you’ve been born into a position of astonishing privilege through no special merit of your own. That most of mainstream media is designed with your point of view in mind, so that 90% of female characters are fantasy objects and 90% of black characters are capering bloody stereotypes. That’s a really tough thing to come to terms with, largely because we’ve come to accept it as completely normal, as the natural way of things.

Minorites and women have legitimate grievences with the way they’re treated by society and portrayed in the media. It’s annoying to feel you’re being berated for something you, personally, had nothing whatsoever to do with. It’s difficult and, yes, occasionally tedious to consciously avoid bigotry so deeply ingrained in us it’s become part of our language, to consciously try and avoid perpetuating casual racism, sexism or homophobia.

But, y’know? Call me a bastion of bleeding-heart white liberal guilt, but to consider yourself anything even starting to approach a decent human being, I think it’s an effort you’ve got to fucking make.