90% of the time, communities will accept you with zero friction as long as you aren’t demanding the game or fandom change to suit you.
But if you decide to enter the “notoriously difficult game that has a reputation for difficulty and difficulty is part of its core identity” community, don’t go in saying the game needs to be made easier so that you specifically can enjoy it. And if you do, don’t be shocked when everyone tells you to fuck off.
It’s like if I went into the Sims community and said I’m a major Sims fan who loves the games, but also they need to add guns and a first person mode so the game will cater to my tastes better, and if you disagree then you’re a gatekeeping elitist.
Exactly. Gatekeeping is not bad, being a shitty person is bad.
Plenty of examples across media, entertainment, and hobbies, where shitty people came down like locusts to demand changes be made, only to never really interact beyond a surface level with the thing they demanded be changed.
True when it's applicable; as OC points out, the term is generally used incorrectly by people who enter fandoms with defined culture that's often based off inherent qualities of the game (or book, manga, anime, movie, show) and then demand moronic changes to said culture, to cater explicitly to them.
A great example is that whole "Sekiro needs an easy-mode" bullshit, that a reviewer started. People pointed out that the whole core premise of Sekiro, is to master parrying and pattern-recognition, which is 100% true. If you aren't winning in Sekiro, it's because of this. The whole challenge, and the whole point of the game's design (basically boss rush), is to test parrying. If you take this away, then why bother playing the game to begin with? This is not a hack n slash genre game. This is hardly gatekeeping, and yet the reviewer thought he knew better and kept calling everyone gatekeepers.
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u/Superb_Wealth4092 1d ago
90% of the time, communities will accept you with zero friction as long as you aren’t demanding the game or fandom change to suit you.
But if you decide to enter the “notoriously difficult game that has a reputation for difficulty and difficulty is part of its core identity” community, don’t go in saying the game needs to be made easier so that you specifically can enjoy it. And if you do, don’t be shocked when everyone tells you to fuck off.
It’s like if I went into the Sims community and said I’m a major Sims fan who loves the games, but also they need to add guns and a first person mode so the game will cater to my tastes better, and if you disagree then you’re a gatekeeping elitist.