I have never considered myself a “gamer.” Despite my generation being the first one that really grew up with gaming consoles being mainstream, and the fact that between my parents’ houses we had several different systems over the years, it was never something I really got into. While my brother and sister fought over who got to be Player 1 and who was relegated to Player 2 (spoiler: my brother was the youngest and my sister punches left), I was busy reading or constructing ridiculously detailed architecture out of LEGO bricks. As we grew up and they progressed from SNES to Sega Genesis to the Sony Dreamcast, N64 and beyond, as my friends got various other consoles to experiment with and formed their own unique gaming identities, I always stayed on the peripherals of the gaming world. I was aware of the new systems as they came out, knew the advantages and disadvantages of the different systems specs, appreciated the advances to game art and playability as the technology advanced, understood the bitches and nerdgasms players had with each of these things, but with the exception of my well-known and admittedly unhealthy obsessions with the Sims, I wasn’t actively gaming, so I was not a gamer.
Or was I?
The common misperception of the gaming culture, espoused as it is by the ridiculously vocal minority (let’s call them ‘anti-gamers’), is that it’s a cast of socially awkward male misfits, usually late teens to early adults, who wear taped glasses, live in their parents’ basement, and drink nothing but Mountain Dew. They don’t have girlfriends, unless you count the waiku pillows. If they play shooter games, they’re violent and repressed. They have no life outside of gaming and trolling the internet. And of course, the real reason they’re upset about the Australian Target stores pulling GTA V from the shelves is because every single one of them wants to oppress women. Don’t let them fool you with that censorship nonsense. They’re geeks at best, miscreants at worst. Don’t let them near your children.
But what about that description actually exemplifies today’s gaming culture? For example, on the Rivalcast staff alone we have engineers, teachers, therapists, sales managers, customer service reps, and school administrators. A lot of us are writers. Many are military veterans. Some are parents. Most have connections to charities and special projects whose main purpose is to make the world a little bit better than how we found it.
Does that make us an anomaly? Hardly. Various groups small and large have committed to making a difference by harnessing the network of game enthusiasts, from the scholarships offered by the Cincinnatti-based gaming blog group HiddenTriforce.com to the more than $29,000,000 raised for childrens’ hospitals by the Penny Arcade team’s charity Child’s Play.
Miscreants, indeed. And let’s not even get into the fact that the greatest WoW Warlock I’ve ever seen happens to be (insert Highlander’s plot twist sounder here)… a chick!
Merriam-Webster defines gamer as “a person who plays games, and especially video or computer games.” It gives the first recorded use of the word as showing up around 1630.
Let me reiterate that.
Gamers have been around since 1630. That’s 384 years as of this writing. Well before the advent of the video consoles.
Gamers are people who play games.
So when I’m bugging Edge for the umpti-seventh time to join me in a round of online Monopoly, are we being gamers? If he ever rose to my challenge, then yes. Same for the 10-year-old discovering D&D for the first time. Or the college kids spending Thursday nights in the joy of battling a favorite nemesis in Buzztime Trivia at their local bar. Or the 50-something empty-nester getting sucked into Farmville as a way of connecting with their now-grown children. Gaming, video or otherwise, has evolved from the pastime of kids and tech nerds of our childhoods into a way to connect and build community with like-interested people around the world. Never before in the history of human civilization have we had the opportunity to create that sort of camaraderie on such a scale.
At the end of the day, we are all gamers.
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