Gamers Behaving Badly

"Sup F*****ts", the cry that ricocheted around the room.
I looked up from the unfolding engagement between my stalwart Astra Militarum Infantry company and my opponent's Mechanicum war-host.
The man, barely old enough to claim the title, stood at his table with a half-unpacked army mostly in front of him. He looked like any other gamer in the room, bearded and dressed like any other game bro that I'm sure that you, dear reader, have seen a dozens of times before. In short, not so different from any one 40k player that you care to find at any Games Workshop of FLGS. One of the members of my own gaming circle had the misfortune of being paired against him in the next round, and by all accounts he didn't have a great time of it.

It was an easy thing to ignore at the time, certain thresholds of behavior in these circles are par for the course in Wargaming circles and for the sake of getting by without making waves, you generally ignore it unless it becomes a problem. Looking back now, such behavior neatly correlates to just about every article on the subject of why these circles are generally unpleasant to be in for anyone that doesn't fit the gamer bro archetype.

This is why I generally avoid started to avoid the tourney circuit after spending a couple of years playing Flames of War at CANCON and a couple of small 40k ones. One of the cited advantages of tournament games is that it forces you out of your comfort zone and clique to play against people that you don't normally play against. The very same thing, by my experience can sometimes be the worst thing about tournament play. Every game that is not against someone you know and trust is like playing Russian Roulette, except instead of getting a bullet, you get a toxic arsehole as an opponent, often paired with an aggressively friendship ending list. The ensuing game is neither fun, nor helps you grow as a player. When standing at the other side of the table, getting shellacked by such a hideous combination, it makes one starts to wonder why you would pay money to give up your weekend to endure this kind of abject humiliation.

This is how communities die. The worst ten to twenty percent of the group gradually sap the morale of the rest to the point where the value proposition of choosing to spend time to play these games with them becomes clearly not worth it. Attendance trickles down to nothing, and the scene evaporates. Often the game itself is part of the problem, take a listen to any competitive 40k podcast over the last two years and you get a window into exactly how degenerate strategies in a rules set can fuel to toxicity of a community.

At this point in my hobby I generally shy away from large communities, and stick with my smaller clique of people that I trust. Generally I get better games in and the game winning net lists are generally not used due to the unwritten rule that going down that path makes things not fun for everyone involved.

Nobody should be forced into an environment and play space where they feel like they are going through the motions of playing a game, have the odds stacked against them. Then to add insult to injury, endure crappy treatment from their opponent. Ultimately it drives them out of the hobby making it bad for those that remain, as the pool of decent opponents shrinks and the shit-lords reign supreme.

Ultimately this creates a hostile and over-competitive wasteland of a scene, where only the worst of the worst roam. They to eventually leave as they slowly come to realization that the only people left are those just like them, and ultimately, they don't want that world any more than the rest of us.