The Best Things are Hard to Get
One of my recent obsessions has been folks who seem unwilling or uninterested in finding their place and their thing. Growing up when the internet was a budding platform for all manner of weirdo to finally escape their little hells of reality, finally giving folks a way to find heir compatriots across geographical and societal barriers, I've always felt a strong affinity with anyone who has their thing and loves to talk to you about it. Those things are as specific and varied as the people who love them, but every person I know born in the mid '90s has one. Cars, painting, ska, cycling, fanfiction, and (in my own bubble) games all have communities built up of enthusiasts who leapt at the opportunity to use the ever-more-interconnected technology of the twentieth to connect with like-minded people. Replacing the clunky and asynchronous mailing lists of yore, dedicated forums and blogs were as far ranging in their subjects as one could imagine. Over time, social media like Twitter, Tumblr, Myspace and the like created their own subcultures with distinct dialects, as folks found their people and coalesced into their own microcommunities among a sea of others.
However, in recent times the tide seems to have shifted and the invisible currents of cultural change have been itching me. Increasingly, I've been met with young folks with little time or patience to find (let alone make) their own little home online. In a post-COVID world where many community spaces have shuttered and a generation of young people spent some of their most formative years shackled by global pandemic, much of the momentum feels stymied. It's easier than ever to connect with others, and yet I've found that the ease of connection has failed to translate to lasting community spaces. Discord has made it easier than its ever been to find people interested in the things you love, and yet as these communities grow, the diehards run for cover under fire of petty squabbles among uncaring new members. While sites like Tumblr continue to exist, their microcultures have become so insular that new users are frequently run off by pure force of cultureshock. On the other hand, Twitter and Discord have become so accessible that they're no longer viable platforms to create new community homes. At least, not without actively resisting their accessible nature.
In ruminating on how these things — the casual fan with no interest in community, in tandem with the purportedly ease of creating and finding social spaces — have come about, I've been struck by how ubiquitous this issue is. Not only are the old platforms of enthusiast community building dead or dying, but many enthusiast hobbies have struggled to maintain the energy they once had. As old stigma dies and more people play video games or pick up Magic the Gathering or D&D, I'm also shocked at quite how resistant communities are to engaging in different modes of play. Steam and even GOG have made playing games on a PC easier than ever, and yet so many of the people who are happy to download and play a niche indie game are unwilling to download an emulator to play games they've been recommended by their peers. Magic is more popular than ever and yet for so many, Commander is not only the only way they have ever played Magic, but it's also the only format they see as worth their time.
I'm absolutely convinced that the ease of access has directly impacted the culture of enthusiasts. As the internet has become the primary means of communication, it has also become increasingly corporate. When social platforms aren't projects run by impassioned hobbyists, but are instead designed to be a streamlined host for ads and data collection, there's an enormous force towards making social platforms and services as frictionless as possible. This runs directly counter to the experience of enthusiasts in generations passed. Where once it was a point of pride to be part of a niche, a community stigmatized by the bores of the real world coming together in a flagrant rejection of the status quo, it's now a triviality.
"Vintage cassette collecting? Yeah, I follow 120 people on Twitter that have collections bigger than you've ever seen."
"Huh? Why would I join a private Discord to find games when I can just press the Ranked button and find a match in 10 second?"
The more I think about this, the more convinced I am of a simple cultural maxim: convenience is the death of care. Not that these folks, introduced to new thing by the endlessly scrolling feeds of the current decade, don't care (verb) about anything, but rather that there is a fundamental lack of care (noun) as the willingness to put oneself into a thing. Care is the fundamental impetus for all of the joyous things that people do. Care is why folks are willing to travel to see friends and family. Care is why folks are willing to spend their precious free time in an evermore time-short world learning skills that they'll only ever practice for their own sake. Care is what makes people do good things, and it requires more care to do good things in the face of the many trials that impinge upon our ability to organize, find others, and get shit done. Care comes from many places, but it is always a powerful force for good, for empathy, and for the development of new and novel ideas and projects. I fear that as young people are born into a world where finding new things and people is so trivial, the spaces that once nurtured the weirdos and geeks will falter and become fragile.
Uncaring Majority
Recently a friend shared a Slate article describing a shift in the preferences of young romance readers from third person omniscient narration to first person as the preferred mode. These young readers are looking for self insert stories that fulfill their fantasies and explicitly want it in a form that is easiest to digest as self insert. They forego the romance of reading each character mentally undressing the other at a dinner party, in favor of simplified prose written to be as easy for their brain to insert itself into as possible. Author Luke Winkie quotes K. Iwancio, whose work has been the object of both first-person fans' glee and ire, who tells Winkie that she changed the perspective of her novels due to readers telling her point-blank that they simply won't read anything third person.
Pattheflip, who's put immense time and passion into cultivating the modern Xrd scene and who worked as a producer on 2XKO, recently shared thoughts on the unfortunate necessity of ranked queues in games. Pat succinctly describes the convenient addiction of ranked: "Players choose Ranked because it’s the quickest path to Competitive Excitement, and once they’re getting the Competitive Excitement, the addiction to Conflip Number Go Up and Down will keep them in there until they’re too tired to keep going." This is to say, as players sit down to play, ranked offers a type of friction that is highly convenient while also having a highly volatile carrot to chase that never quite comes into reach. As many (including Pat) have pointed out, this experience can be miserable and even anti-social, but it's also the new normal.
Vince of Pleasant Kenobi recently published a YouTube video about how Magic's Commander format being the most common introduction to the game has led to new players often failing to understand their own tastes. Magic is a game that can be played in many ways, and Commander simply doesn't satisfy the desires of Magic's playerbase by itself. However, since Commander is so ubiquitous (to the point that, as Vince points out, "playing Magic" is often synonymous with "playing Commander"), new players who are competitively minded often inadvertently silo themselves into a less competitively-oriented format, and become the most obnoxious players at their local game stores. Playing Commander is just so much easier than playing Standard or Modern (or god help you if you're a Pioneer fan). On the other end of the spectrum, players who are more casually oriented may really enjoy Commander, but fail to develop the skills to get the most out of the format because the casual boardgame-esque experience enables them to ignore key strategy elements of Magic that exist across formats. Sure, they're having fun, but they might have more fun (and cultivate a deeper appreciation for Magic), if they understood why their deck with 28 lands keeps bricking.
The more I look for this sort of narrative, the easier it is to find twenty, fourty, a hundred examples. I'm hardly the first person to notice the linkages between 'doing the most convenient thing' and 'being a bit miserable about it'. But the more I consider this trend the more I begin to notice it myself in the wild in sudden ways. In media-centric hobbies, often the conversation I often see online looks something like this:
A: "Where can I get this Niche Thing?"
B: "It's on Niche Site, you can find a guide on how to set it up if you're struggling."
A: "It should be on Big Service."
OR
A: "I really enjoy Convenient Thing."
B: "Cool! There's this Niche Thing that's similar, do you want to join us?"
A: "Why would I do that when I can do Convenient Thing?"
This applies to emulating old video games, downloading artsy movies, finding fan subs for anime, you name it. And on some level, I get it. Services like Steam, Netflix, or Amazon are unbelievably convenient. There has never been a time in history where you can access so much information so readily, and access so much media with a few clicks.
For folks who read a lot of romance, communities like BookTok, sites like Goodreads, and services like Kindle Unlimited make it easier than ever to find more to read, and online shopping makes it trivial to purchase their favourites. It is not surprising, then, that young folks who have grown up with these services have very specific acquired tastes and that they're fulfilling using large corporate services. The bit that gets sticky however, is the much more extreme experience K. Iwacio relays: these readers preferences manifest as a frank refusal of anything else.
In the pre-internet world of fiction, zines and mailing lists gave folks with very specific niche preferences the means to find their fix. In the early internet, fanfiction and writing communities developed incredibly detailed tagging systems designed to help folks who only read slash with a short dom (or only read romance with a first person perspective) find works that fit their needs, but these hubs weren't something you'd come across without hunting. If you wanted romance with a dark brooding male character whose femme partner infantilizes, you might struggle to find good material at the local book store, but you might find it in batman/catwoman slash if you dig deep enough. If you're looking for work that creates a safe space for you to recontextualize or compartmentalize and help heal passed trauma of an abusive relationship, well that might struggle to get picked up by a publisher, but it probably exists in some online blog, and that blog might inspire you to write yourself.
However, as folks increasingly rely on large services and popular storefronts, niches that used to be provided by fanfiction, doujin, or zine cultures are now increasingly being read by folks who aren't accustomed to finding writing beyond the curated shelves of a bookstore, or on subscription services. For authors like those Winkie interviewed, this means they're now carrying the burdens of what used to be hosted in an underbelly of strange and arcane hobby writing, and that's put them in the strange position of being pulled in different directions by fairly small niche constituencies. This then compounds with the rapidity with which niches are exposed to new potential fans via platforms like TikTok and Instagram, and you get a recipe for a peculiar readerbase that is both shifting and strongly opinionated. In ye olden days of zines and fanfiction sites, the strong opinions resulted in all manner of inter- and intra-fandom fighting. BookTokers making stinky face at third person novels isn't so different.
Similarly, in the days before ranked queues and rollback, fighting game players sought each other out in arcades or locals by necessity, and in the pre-COVID days Magic players often just played whatever the local game stores were running. The onus was on you to find your fix and show up. However, with time and the advent of social media, many folks are exposed to these games through a nebulous network of algorithmic suggestions. Where flamewars between hobbyists used to happen in their own dedicated hubs, they're now happening in the same spaces your aunt uses to get the news and your little cousin uses to look at videos of fluffy dogs. It's easier than ever to be exposed to niche hobby discourse, and it's more convenient than ever to tell someone you disagree with to eat shit. In turn, it's become harder to tell if the person telling you you're full of it is a fellow hobbyist or a misinformed seventeen-year-old who saw your post cause their friend posted it in their groupchat with three cry-laughing emojis.
No hobby is indifferent to this, I've found. In the video game hobby, emulator developers are increasingly unwilling to support highly convenient platforms like Android after being inundated with upset users accustomed to software that asks nothing of them. Like in the case of the first-person zealots, these users are not new, but have massively increased in quantity as the ease of finding an emulator on an app store (or by proxy of a streamer) has greatly increased. They have expectations that emulation devs aren't accustomed to and unlike the romance authors, who have a financial incentive to keep up with a changing audience, emulation is largely FOSS and so the common response has been to remove emulators from app stores or stop supporting mobile versions entirely in order to reduce access to laypeople. More young people than ever are aware that these options are out there, but as that knowledge has become more accessible, the difficulty that was previously a badge of honor for enthusiasts is now seen as contemptible. "Why would I go out of my way to configure some janky software," they ask, "I'll just wait until it's on Switch." You've been able to play Pokemon Leaf Green on the go since 2004, but it's only now that they're available on Nintendo's subscription service that many are willing to try playing.
I fear much of the (frankly exhausting) discourse around 'optimization' in games comes from a similar place as the eye-rolls about third person narration. A lack of technical know-how, an unwillingness to troubleshoot, and no experience-hardened acceptance that not every game will run well on every computer all seem apparent in the popular discourse of games like Monster Hunter Wilds — which had issues, and has been improved, but also has been maligned in ways that only ignorance can explain. As gaming hardware has largely unified behind a smaller number of graphics APIs that are supported by all relevant hardware, and affordable PC hardware more powerful than the most recent consoles was standard for the entirety of the 2010s, we have a new generation of PC gamers who aren't used to needing to upgrade in order to play a new title. In parallel, technological innovations like raytracing have become standard (and having all sorts of benefits for development!) and compute-heavy engine tech like Unreal's Nanite are increasingly common. We're seeing meaningful changes to how games work and what sort of hardware they scale with (or don't scale with) for the first time in many young gamers memory. For ten to fifteen years now, new PC gamers could expect their midrange graphics card to cost about 300$, and be able to play (even if at lower framerates) every game that would release for the next eight-or-so years; but as graphics paradigms have shifted, and generation-over-generation performance in an increasingly costly and increasingly stagnant consumer GPU market has waned, this was no longer true. It became both expensive and inconvenient to be a PC gamer in a way that these folks might have never been aware of, and that new friction wasn't something they were prepared to solve with ini file tweaks, mods, or their wallet.
The drop in friction to access film or music, and the recent increase in friction to access high fidelity games, has made a meaningful impact on consumers degree of care. The Marvel fan who got hooked on Marvel movies because they're great to have on in the background while scrolling Instagram is not going to care the way the Marvel fan who went to each movie in the theaters, and then rented them at Blockbuster for a rewatch, does. Why would they? After all, it's trivially easy to turn on the TV, click the Disney+ button, and click the first recommended movie on the front page. Why would a video game player be willing to excuse stuttering (or god forbid, seek out other people to play with outside of the game) when there are tens of thousands of other games they could buy instead? And sure, those games have their issues too, but everyone's wishlist has 500 more games to try. These players don't have formative memories of finding out how to run the then-Japan-only Heart Gold on no$gba, and every other game they've played has been trivial to buy and set up. Why go out of their way to try Leaf Green on mgba?
A Community of Our Own
As these hobbies become more and more streamlined, and there's less need to ask around and make friends in order to find your fix, what follows is an apathy towards community. Anyone who's spent time in them knows hobby spaces can be rife with infighting and incestuous cliques, but the microcultures they give rise to are an artifact of the intense love those that maintain these spaces feel, and a lack of enthusiastic support for these communities can turn their annoying artifices into antisocial behavior that drives people away. Sure, it's obnoxious when what's-her-face goes on another tirade about how someone doesn't understand good prose, and we've all had what's-his-face muted on socials for the better part of a decade, but those are the exceptions that prove the rule. Going to an event and hanging out with like-minded people or chatting shit with the homies in the group chat while you're on the clock is a joyous experience that forms the backbone of any hobby community. The flipside being that when community spaces are attracting more people who would feel nothing at the prospect of being kicked out, it becomes very difficult to drop your guard and be your authentic self.
I've felt this particularly strongly of late myself. I was a spectator and fan of fighting games for the better part of the last fifteen years, but I wasn't much of a player. I lived in a student ghetto in Florida with bad wifi and little cash on hand and while, looking back, I wish I'd looked for the local scene, I was content to play DOTA and watch events on the other monitor. Since COVID, I've put a concerted effort into learning fighting games for the first time, and that has led to a strong will to find community. There's sometimes online bickering about what constitutes the Fighting Game Community (FGC) and let me tell you from experience: if all you do is sit around and watch, you're not in it. This isn't an attempt to gatekeep and keep the so-called casuals out, but rather it's a truth of what communities are on a fundamental level. The community is not matches on stream, the community isn't a ranked ladder. The community is a network of spaces created by passionate people for other people, and it's one that is rich with care. If you aren't in those spaces, haven't sought them out or been ushered in, you simply haven't found the FGC. The FGC is its own whack-ass knitting circle, and if you're not pulling up a chair and shooting the shit, you're missing out.
I've been very lucky that the Xrd community is so dense with folks who understand this, and ensure others learn it. Going to events, introducing myself to folks I've spoke to online and having them not only recognize my tag but immediately start chatting like we've met a hundred times before is a gift that only a culture of authentic passion and joy offers. Folks opening their homes or hotel suites to peers as if it's the most natural thing creates a fulfilling warmth that burns away so much cynicism and darkness. Yet if anything, as I find my place within the Xrd community, I feel more alienated from the wider FGC than ever.
Grinding ranked puts me in a bad mood without fail. An endless carousel of new opponents, none of whom have any interest in getting to know me or making friends, each with their own strategy that works just long enough to win a single set, it's an exhausting format and one that I find incredibly difficult to learn in. Once upon a time I found the desire to achieve a shiny new emblem or personal peak ELO was sufficient to keep me interested, but as I age and struggle to find lasting connections in the post-COVID world, it is fatiguing. Similarly, while there are plenty of wonderful folks in the wider FGC — and I've been gifted the opportunity to meet so many of them — the open venues of Twitter, large Discord servers, and Twitch seem to vomit out thousands of people who would sooner dredge up the worst of the community than celebrate the best of it. They pop up faster than I can block them, and I just don't have the will to keep mental tabs on which of the five hundred active posters in the big Discord are there to get to know people or improve instead of because they're bored and shitposting.
This is the role of care. Not for each other (that naturally follows), but for the hobby itself. If you've spent thousands of hours cultivating a skill, overcoming the hurdles that are inherent to any difficult task, and have come out on the other end with a deep appreciation for it, odds are you want to share it with others. You want those others to feel the glee you felt when it clicked, and you feel the uncontrollable urge to gush about how cool it is to anyone who will listen. Fighting games are fucking hard, and they present often frank and abrupt problems to solve, backed by a threat of a real sense of hopelessness if you can't solve them. If you're being mixed by I-No, and can't figure out how to contest her, you're either dodging the matchup or you're unlikely to be playing the game much at all until you learn. That sort of enjoyment 'cliff' creates an intense pride and ownership of our games and skills. The friends who helped me climb those cliffs are folks I have immense respect, admiration, and appreciation for. The opponents who used to be unbeatable who I now have the honor of beating up myself are folks struggling the same way I did, and I want them to overcome it. What else could form such rich and empathetic community than a shared experience of overcoming such a difficult task? Why would anyone bother if they don't deeply care?
The Friction is the Point
The friction that makes Xrd (or painting, playing guitar, hiking, take your pick) so difficult, and so prone to creating a deep-seated sense of care and passion, is opposite to convenience. The more convenient a skill is to practice, the less one has to struggle to become skilled, the less it evokes a sense of care. A skilled cyclist with a passion for bicycles cultivated over decades could tell you all about how different wheels, frames, seats, road conditions, and countless other infinitesimal intricacies impact their experience. Someone who rents an e-bike, cranks the motor and guns it down the sidewalk — to the horror of every walking pedestrian they pass — simply won't be able to do that. Nor would they feel any desire to join the local cycling club. Someone who hires a gardener to tend to their yard isn't going to be motivated to earn a Master Gardener certification, and they're not going to have much fun talking about which native wildflowers grow best in their local acidic soil. This is intuitive. It's also been brought to an absolute extreme in a very public way with the advent of generative AI. It's no surprise that those who have cultivated their skills would be so horrified by the tech, which has created a whole generation of wanna-be artists and writers that fundamentally lack the care that motivates those they're shamelessly aping.
Anything worth putting time in to comes with its difficulties, however minor. Consumerist hobbies like stationery, audio, watches, jewelry all carry a huge amount of monetary friction. They all also carry a lot of friction in terms of expertise. Understanding which of Diamine's inks will give you the desired color and gradient on your Tomoe River notebook with a Japanese extra fine nib is a significantly higher hurdle than purchasing the products, and it's that sort of familiarity that forms the basis of the hobby — though being wealthy certainly helps.
Sometimes it isn't about having worked with a large swath of materials, or having an encyclopedic knowledge of a topic, but rather being aware of the thing at all. In the days before powerful search engines, simply knowing about the cool prog rock zine, or being on the K/S fanfic mailing list was itself frictional. When I was an undergrad watching EVO from home, it simply didn't occur to me that there would be a rich fighting game scene next door to me — something that now seems unbelievable given the ubiquity of Tampa Never Sleeps. Being the hipster who knows about the thing before anyone else does require a genuine level of expertise that inspires care. Just try not to be a jackass about it.
Sometimes the friction is more obvious. Sinking threes in basketball, going on week-long hiking excursions, etching sharp lines in a woodblock, any athlete, artist, musician, or outdoorsperson is extremely familiar with how difficult it can be to do these things at all and how much their body changed as they practiced more and more. It can also, therefore, be incredibly frustrating for folks who have spent this time and energy developing their bodies and skills to have others reduce their effort to"talent" or have others who don't practice write off their own ability to succeed in the skill. Any hobby space will collectively roll their eyes at those who haven't put in the work acting as though the work is some natural gift.
Analogues exist as well in hobbies that require no physical exertion at all. When consuming media, trying to understand the deeper significance of a poem, or taking a step back from the action to ask yourself how you would improve a scene that fell flat are their own friction. Being willing to be wrong and publicly state your interpretation of a difficult passage of philosophical prose is another. Hell, for some works just the work itself is frictional. Schindler's List is a difficult watch. Phenomenology of Spirit has broken many an upcoming philosopher. Grappling with difficult media and being willing to risk the contempt of peers by arguing for your interpretations has been the backbone of media fandoms for years. Whether it's jazz upending classical paradigms or shippers teasing out new interpretations of the narrative so that their beloved boys have sex, there is genuine work being done to overcome genuine barriers. Jumping those hurdles inspires care the same way as something more physically rigorous. It's no surprise, then, that fandoms, book clubs, and music festivals are so ubiquitous.
I could go on. There's all manner of ways in which hobbies introduce friction, and that friction is the impetus for care that forms the basis for the development of community spaces where passionate people who share that sense of care congregate. These spaces are sometimes incidentally created, sometimes deliberately, but in both cases they are developed and cultivated by passionate practitioners who have a deep understanding and respect for their hobbies and their compatriots who have also done the work. Many of the hobby spaces that have come and gone are places that were founded as a means of overcoming friction by crowdsourcing. Forums to ask questions and get answers, repositories for self published writing and fanfiction, listservs for people to help organize and advertise events have all largely been supplanted by microblogging platforms and Discord, and as the friction of finding these spaces have gone down, the number of folks who are only interested in extracting value and not contributing rises. It's natural when reading a forum to answer questions others once answered for you, but when most folks seeing a tweet are apathetic observers with no stake, you're more likely to see shitposts and quote retweets clowning on folks asking questions than answers.
A Culture of Contempt
Of course, in the case of books and games alike, there are infinite contributing factors to cultural shifts. Pat's article is titled "Why ranked sucks and we can't get rid of it", and similarly, streaming services will continue to be the prevailing way people consume music and video. These conveniences are here to stay both due to economic and consumer pressures, but these cultural trends occur in tandem with other cultural shifts and the behavior they cultivate will be born out over decades to come. The move away from blogs and written word in favor of short form video and images as the primary mode of sharing ideas about media is an enormous cultural change brought on by new technological paradigms, and it's going to change a whole hell of a lot more than which romance novels are popular. In the face of a uncertain and troubling future, it may seem petty to put the onus on budding hobbyists to rise above the conveniences of their age; unfortunately, this trend has social consequences as well.
It was the experience of talking with people a decade my junior and being utterly bewildered by an unwillingness to take a step beyond their comfort even for things and people they claim to love that led me to this whole obsession to begin with. There's a solipsism to the act of only allowing yourself to experience those things which are most convenient: things that are easy to buy, easy to understand, easy to think about. Things you don't need anyone else to get your fix. As discussed above, tackling a difficult task is often a social experience — it leads people to making guides, seeking help from others, asking questions and appreciating and respecting the know-how of those who answer — and not having that friction makes it very easy to avoid making those connections, intentionally or otherwise. If instead of being introduced to your fellow hobbyists by their Ocarina of Time romhack's development diary, a forum thread chronicling a DIY project, or finding the Tumblr of your favourite horny Naruto fanfic author, you're introduced to your cohort by their stupid fucking tweets, well it's easy to see your fellow hobbyists as pointless drones.
This convenience-bred solipsism has created a demographic of hobbyist that has a very utilitarian view of community. Their preferred genres give them joy that is injected directly into their veins by services and content feeds that make it as easy as possible to get another hit. The people, and media, who ask more are not well received. Complicating their favourite media by asking not what they like but why is not only seen as strange, but as hostile. Digging into the things they like in a way that introduces friction isn't seen as a sign of deep passion that might be the basis for comradery, but rather an uncomfortable intrusion upon their independent experience, doubly so if your ideas don't align with theirs. They're not there to have a discussion with you, they're looking for their fix. Get out of the way. Worse, while saying you don't like something they like evokes all the in-fighting of the hobby drama of yesteryear, it does so without the social investments. They're not going up to bat for their ship of choice because you flamed their friend's fic, or telling people to boycott your software cause you made a hostile fork of their homie's tool. Instead, its reduced to a facile distraction while they're bored. It's easier than ever to find new hobbies, sure, but it's also easier than ever to make a hobby of telling people the way they spend their time is fucking stupid.
"Let people enjoy things" has become emblematic of a negative trend in media literacy linked to this unwillingness to dig deeper. It makes perfect sense that folks who are primarily introduced to media in a constant stream of effectively-unlimited media wouldn't develop the skillset to dig deep in to any given piece. Indeed, it seems this has led to a phenomenon of young hobbyists preferring quantity to quality of media. They'll collect film on their Letterboxds, casually deriding seminal films as iterative and aging poorly. Liking the right things, or disliking the right things, has become a replacement for the care-laden passion of yesteryear's hobbyists. This isn't particularly new (lord knows folks of an older vintage will happily brag about liking Rocky Horror Picture Show or Rush), but where there used to be impassioned debate about the right reasons to like things (complicating assumptions of gender in SciFi novels, interrogating the writing of women in film, deconstructing a classical phrasing and turning it into a metal riff), increasingly these lower level debates seem to have been replaced by a desire to amass media you like as if they're trading cards. It's certainly easier to garner street cred in your community by saying you like hundreds of books than to learn the skillset and expose yourself to the vulnerability of trying to formulate a new and novel explanation for why your one favourite is so good.
I fear it's this desire for a simplistic direct-to-consumer pipeline of media consumption, and this distaste for deeper dives, that leads to anti-social behavior like telling an author you feel personally offended by them writing in third person. In my own life, it often takes the shape of folks who meet attempts to have nuanced discussion about industry or subgenre with a frank refusal. Highguard failed because the game is bad, service games are bad, and the devs are incompetent, of course! Sure, Tencent pulled funding — but that requires the additional intellectual labor of imagining the inner workings of a large organization that we don't have any direct insight in to and therefore isn't worth considering. It's dehumanizing to me, as someone trying to engage with another person and being treated as an inconvenience, but it's also dehumanizing to the writers and developers who create the objects of these folks ire.
You can make as strong a case that the casual derision is due to the 'dunk culture' of Twitter and TikTok as it is about the dehumanizing force of convenience. I'd probably agree with you. But of late, especially off the back of the release and subsequent firings of 2XKO and half of its development team, I've been desperate to understand the cruelty some have so casually put onto my screens. How is it that these people who demonstrate so loudly a profound unwillingness to see their fellows with compassion occupy the hobby communities I spend my time in? As we continue to see maximally convenient services that sell all your data to the highest bidder as the premier economic model of the western world, and young people grow up with them and expect the degree of convenience they offer, we'll continue to deal with people who aren't interested in overcoming the minor inconveniences that promote community and community solutions to corporate problems. I fear for all the economic and legal ramifications of these models becoming so ubiquitous, but more immediately I fear for the spaces that I've enjoyed as hubs of community and open discussion. Climbing fences to get to the clubhouse makes the clubhouse feel special, like its something you earned. Disagreeing with friends is fun, and gives you a reason to question yourself and practice argumentative and conversational skills. In spaces where this friction still exists, people aren't less insufferable necessarily, but they do understand the value of the things they invest themselves into with a much greater salience, and they understand that the folks they share even anonymous spaces with are people like them. Just ask any Xrd discord what they think of their characters worst match up, or ask the Arch forums how to configure your fstab. You'll get a whole bunch of hot takes, but you'll also get a genuine insight born out of years of experience, and a genuine desire to discuss and help.
As local governments continue to give up community spaces to the highest bidder, online social platforms are increasingly monetized, and our time is monopolized by apps developed to sell our data to arms manufacturers, I fear for this generation of young person whose free time is spent in isolation. It is easier than ever to strike up a conversation with a stranger, or find folks who share our loves, yet as the convenience of socializing becomes easier, and hobby spaces become easier to find, some budding enthusiasts seem more inclined to treat passionate folks with contempt than appreciation. I'm heartened to see a countervailing force as the same generation looks to embrace physical media, and young folks are certainly more accepting of people of color and queer folks, but there needs to be a concerted effort to squash antisocial behavior and foster appreciation for the spaces we create and enjoy. We're all guilty of an occasional shitpost or dunk, but try to balance them with a willingness to be vulnerable and show others how wonderful the things you love are. Start a blog, join a forum, volunteer to run a bracket. Whether other folks notice your work explicitly, the satisfaction of doing things is its own reward, and if you stick with it, you'll reap the rewards of a community of people who appreciate you as much as you appreciate them.