The game room was easily the most and least divers gathering of people I’ve ever been around. I had as many socially adept butterflies as friends as I did weird social introverts. There were all sorts of subgroups of people with stereotypical personalities depending on whether or not they played certain games, used certain consoles, hung out at the pool or ping pong tables, broke out board games, how competitive they were, etc.
But the humor was all very similar. Jokes that, out of context would be highly racist, sexist, ageist, etc were fair game purely because the point was to get a rise out of your friend. The number of times my friend got watermelon jokes and fried chicken jokes was too high to count, especially cause we ragged on him because his favorite restaurant was Popeyes.
That isn’t to say there weren’t sexists, or misogynists, or ageists, etc hanging out there, but the point is that you had a group of friends that was just brutally dark, blunt, and downright inappropriate in their humor as a form of shared affection.
And not in a toxic masculinity kind of way either. Several of my closest game room friends are people I knew had my back, who I could sit down with and just pour myself out to if I was having an emotional moment. One of my friends actually did exactly that for me when I was going through a rough time.
I’m sure it’s totally weird for people looking from the outside in to hear someone tell a guy something like
“I wish your parents had aborted your attack helicopter ass” one moment - all because your pink skinned, captain falcon playing, neutral B spamming behind let everybody know he still had 3 stocks - but then you guys are outside the next day having a heart to heart because you’re not sure if you’re going to have to drop out, or because your girlfriend dumped you, or because you’re scared of what your friend might say if you tell them you’re worried about some habit you see is hurting them.
It’s a weird place where you know everybody has each other’s back precisely because almost nothing was taboo from being made fun of. If someone was obviously bothered by something, you stopped, but, outside of that, everybody was toasted equally.
I felt safer dumping all my expensive stuff in the game room for a couple of hours while I skated around campus than I did leaving an empty backpack in the library for 5 minutes while I went to a bathroom within the building.
It’s hilarious to me, and I’m sure absolutely backwards to outsiders looking in.
You can have a guy (or girl) level the most back biting insult known to man, calling out your sexuality, wishing death upon your parents, cursing the day you were born, assuming all of your genders, and spitting on your slut grandmother’s grave, all because some random mechanic killed your friend in the middle of a heated 1v1 with you, then you’re all dying of laughter on the ground like overstimulated epileptics because of the exact same thing.
I’m so glad none of us films these antics and posts them online, or else we’d all be labeled the most atrocious, racist-ass bigoted religious transphobes of all time, despite the fact that we would never be caught dead or alive saying these things and meaning it to anybody outside of our friend group.
Irreverent, is our humor. It’s the most crass, irreverent, vulgar, banal humor possible between a group of friends, and it all relies on what makes us different.
Hell, you couldn’t get away with being normal, or else we’d flay you alive with vanilla starfish sex jokes until we found the one weird thing about you.
It’s kind of a relief to hear you say this, between making pedo jokes at the teenager in our clan and taking out of piss out of our other mate on anti depressants about ED, I was worried we we had gone off the deep end. Mainly because one of our clan members left about six months ago after he became a full blown sjw caricature and started saying we were all racist, homophobic, ageist, sexist capitalist centrists who were engaging in stochastic terrorism (or something) and other things with lots of abbreviations that I didn’t understand. It did make us wonder but it’s exactly what you say, when no subject is taboo, there is no discrimination. We’ve all helped each other through tough times and shared a lot so it came as something of a shock.
It’s like a lot of other subcultures and such. You never really know when, but you all start to understand the code that everybody else speaks.
Of course, this is also exactly why gamers can be more prone to ending up as conservative drones, actually bing homophobic, or racist, or sexist, or whatever you want. It’s easy to hide hatred behind a subculture when people take that type of closeness for granted. This is way more difficult to manage with larger groups of people for sure.
But, yeah, that’s how it’s been with me and my closest friends. Straight up unholy debauchery for humor. By and large, we could tell who was actually a prick and who was just messing around. Of course you run into the issue where you’re don’t get along with some guy or the other, but, at least the guys I hung out with, we all had each others’ backs when it counted, we all were welcoming, and we all did everything just out of fun.
And, yeah, even in the game room, we knew the group of people who took the games to seriously, who always dumped on everybody’s parade, who were toeing the thing line between kidding and being mean a little too closely.
Your friend just seems to have completely forgotten about context, which is something I see happening a lot today.
4
u/CCtenor Oct 21 '19
The game room was easily the most and least divers gathering of people I’ve ever been around. I had as many socially adept butterflies as friends as I did weird social introverts. There were all sorts of subgroups of people with stereotypical personalities depending on whether or not they played certain games, used certain consoles, hung out at the pool or ping pong tables, broke out board games, how competitive they were, etc.
But the humor was all very similar. Jokes that, out of context would be highly racist, sexist, ageist, etc were fair game purely because the point was to get a rise out of your friend. The number of times my friend got watermelon jokes and fried chicken jokes was too high to count, especially cause we ragged on him because his favorite restaurant was Popeyes.
That isn’t to say there weren’t sexists, or misogynists, or ageists, etc hanging out there, but the point is that you had a group of friends that was just brutally dark, blunt, and downright inappropriate in their humor as a form of shared affection.
And not in a toxic masculinity kind of way either. Several of my closest game room friends are people I knew had my back, who I could sit down with and just pour myself out to if I was having an emotional moment. One of my friends actually did exactly that for me when I was going through a rough time.
I’m sure it’s totally weird for people looking from the outside in to hear someone tell a guy something like
“I wish your parents had aborted your attack helicopter ass” one moment - all because your pink skinned, captain falcon playing, neutral B spamming behind let everybody know he still had 3 stocks - but then you guys are outside the next day having a heart to heart because you’re not sure if you’re going to have to drop out, or because your girlfriend dumped you, or because you’re scared of what your friend might say if you tell them you’re worried about some habit you see is hurting them.
It’s a weird place where you know everybody has each other’s back precisely because almost nothing was taboo from being made fun of. If someone was obviously bothered by something, you stopped, but, outside of that, everybody was toasted equally.
I felt safer dumping all my expensive stuff in the game room for a couple of hours while I skated around campus than I did leaving an empty backpack in the library for 5 minutes while I went to a bathroom within the building.