The DeanBeat: Outsiders, insiders, and manufactured outrage

I felt a bit like a lab rat this week as I found that my career in game journalism — and my terribly unskilled gameplay in Cuphead and the reaction to it — were the stuff of academic discourse.

I gave a speech about game journalism at a game design class at Stanford University, and I participated in an online panel discussion at the University of California at Santa Barbara about the implications of my Cuphead controversy (where I played the game so poorly people thought I couldn’t possibly be a real gamer). And these sessions made me think about outsiders, insiders, nativists, tribes, manufactured outrage — and the politics of gaming. Getting hazed by lots of gamers left me reeling in that Cuphead episode. Their anger at my self-deprecating play left me perplexed. I was also surprised to see the gamer outrage over loot crates in Electronic Arts’ Star Wars: Battlefront II game. Having just felt so much gamer rage, I wondered what fuels these heated reactions.