Nordstrom, did you ever consider that perhaps it's because we have a negative image of ourselves? I can tell you that I have my girlfriend, who is perhaps the hottest woman in the universe, in the same room as I am right now. This is not normal, as we're usually 1300 miles apart, and yet, we're talking on AIM because she's playing WoW (Which I will not ever play) on her desktop. There are a million and one things I could and should be doing with her. Yet here we are, a pair of gamers.
It's a part of what we all are, I think. Part of the reason for gaming is the power of being able to say, "Heh. That Pope thinks he's any good. Let's see what a Danish garrison of over 3000 Spearmen does in the Papal States", your cleartime through Metroid, or the levels of your pokemon team (or whatever floats your boat gamewise). In part, because of the way we make ourselves so strong in the game that our weakness in the "real world" is typified. Movies like the Matrix inspire us, because if life's a video game, and we're good at video games, why in heck's name aren't we amazing at life? There is no inherent value of any kind in games (I use value as in a part of a "value system", not that games themselves are valueless - just a note so I don't get flamed). Anything that indicates otherwise is bunk. What we make of games is what we as gamers make of them. They started in arcades, and slowly the scale shrank as the market and industry grew. It's not that we or the games are inherently one thing or another. It's that we come from many walks of life and the most typified in the 18-30 range is the antisocial gamer, to whose image we all feel a need to conform.
Maybe therein lies the problem, the fact that this image, like so many before it, has been remarketed back to us in a very weird and slightly uncomfortable reflective process, where I know that the only reason I'm neglected in the marketing is because I avoid it. Anything with a big marketing campaign, anything that says it's "the best X", I avoid. Anything that gets popular, like WoW, I don't play. I don't do the "latest game". Hell, I still play Zork once in a while. But that makes me less of a "gamer" than someone with two 52" flatscreens on a quad-core water-cooled linux rig. Why? I play games for 5-6 hours a day. If anything, he's just tossing money out, to me.
We're not a bunch of losers, but we are a bunch of people who are unsure of ourselves. And that, I think, is what causes us to be so interesting, and yet at the very same time it's what makes us so hard on ourselves and each other. In short, it's a very central part of who we are. And I thank those of you who had the courage to put your names and your stories up, because these articles more than most, especially "Not a Gamer Anymore", resounded with me.
