"Gamers"

pasquinelli

MDS-02 don’t be afraid, it’s a good post.

to me, the word gamer is a demographic created by marketers to sell crap. when video games first came into existence, they weren’t for any particular age group or gender, they were a novelty, like film was at first. but what has supressed videogames from flowering, the way film did, and becoming something having something, somewhere, for everyone is the decision to aim video games at boys of a certain age range, manipulating their sense of identity, and making more whales out of them than you would have otherwise, while consolidating the market into fewer, larger players.

to me, there is only gamer as in mtn dew gamer fuel. the only other way i can think to use it is to express contempt, so i have no use for it at all.

yeso

pasquinelli gamer is a demographic created by marketers to sell crap

I think this is right and agree. It’s another invention to trap people into a market-identity, just like “marvel fan” or “star wars fan” has become. The gamer thing was just an earlier and less refined example of this kind of effort. A more contemporary analogue could be streaming services like amazon and netflix spending huge $$$ to corral “cinema” into their domain of control via “prestige” films like nomadland or the irishman, or buying up traditional studio catalogues and burying them behind disney plus

I understand if some people feel like the term can be reclaimed or redefined in some way because of some positive connections or experiences they’ve had under the gamer product rubric, but of course the term and concept just need to be destroyed as thoroughly as possible. I wonder if gamergate ultimately served to marginalize the gamer concept. Mainstream “gamer” media like ign, kotaku, giant bomb have seemed (after a painfully long learning process) to get the picture after gamergate threw all that in sharper relief

Also everything is better if videogames are understood as part of media/art/culture and are in conversation with real human being culture stuff. I may have mentioned this elsewhere on the forum, and don’t mean to be a big old snob but I get a bit frustrated when even the brighter and more well-intentioned youtube videogame essayists re-invent the wheel re a lit theory concept or line of argument. Just read a couple of books and watch some non nerd movies good grief. But again that could be another consequence of everyone being forced into the gamer baby side of the swimming pool

goonbag

I usually make the distinction by saying “capital-G Gamers” when I am talking about the stereotypical toxic game-likers. The OP highlights why my gut has been telling me the distinction is important - because the stereotype is slowly dying out, thank goodness. I put this down to gamergate splitting off a lot of the most toxic elements into overtly right wing grouplets and separating their voices a bit from mainstream gaming discourse.

Nemoide

I think it’s like a lot of labels: some folks get hung-up on it and bad things happen as a result.

I really like video games, but to me “gamer” at least a little bit gives me gamergate flashbacks. I’m okay with using it in a more narrow context though: like, I’m comfortable saying I’m a rhythm-gamer and a retro-gamer. But just plain “gamer” has connotations I don’t especially like.
Similarly, I watch a lot of movies and my undergrad degree is in cinema, but I’ll never call myself a “movie buff” because that has connotations I’m not wild about. In my brain, a movie buff is the kind of person who watches a lot of movies but has really pedestrian taste and doesn’t want to look deeply into the media they consume. Like the kind of person who will insist loudly that the 1984 Ghostbusters is the greatest movie of all time but doesn’t have much reasoning beyond “it’s funny.” There’s a part of me that would like to call myself a cineaste but then nobody would know what I even mean by that, so I just say I’m someone who has seen a lot of movies.

I feel like “people who play video games” works better than “gamer” for the most part anyway, though I admit it’s a mouthful.

treefroggy

I was self conscious of being called the term gamer from an early age, always hated it. Had a guy from Saudi Arabia in my van this week, and when I said I hate gamer culture he essentially asked me the time old question of “what the hell is wrong with video games”, and we 💯unanimously agreed it was the appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Gaagaagiins

MDS-02 What does the label “gamer” bring to mind when you hear/read someone us it to describe a person?

What does the group term “gamers” bring to mind, and how does it make you feel?

I think my answer to these two questions overlaps quite a bit, so, I will say that I mostly have extremely negative associations, at least, as far as there being a difference between saying Gamer or Gamers, as opposed to when someone is just describing someone who plays games.

As bizarre as it sounds to say now, Gamergate was a defining moment in a swelling of public identification of a certain age demographic of modern netbound English speakers (if not other global communities, I’m sure there are others, but that’s what I know about for sure) with far right ideology. I don’t think it was (or is) fashionable to be openly far right, but I think it’s hard to deny that there were (and are) a relatively dedicated subculture of very loud people who identified with two main things, playing videogames, and openly espousing fascist ideology. Even more frustrating, from my perspective, scant little was done (or is being done) to really actually deal with this issue in a proactive manner. It’s like we have sent the canaries into the mine shafts, none of which returned, and upon asking for help, the only support we seem to get is more canaries. Well, that’s liberalism for you.

So, for better or worse, yes, I think that’s more what a Gamer is, than anything, for better or worse (let’s be real, mostly worse).

I think it also kind of speaks to a starvation for some sort of community or shared cultural experience or sense of belonging and history. Culturally, socially, mayhaps even spiritually if that has any meaning to you, a lot of the English speaking world is in a state one could say is totally emaciated. It’s certainly not shocking that no small amount of people would try and construct an identity around a commodity based hobby, especially one as stimulating and exciting (as well as manipulative and exploitative from a commodity perspective) as videogames. On one hand I can sympathize with wanting something you’re so bereft of, but on the other, I dunno. It’s weird and I’ve never identified with it even as much as I have loved playing videogames and talking about videogames for going on 30 years now.

When and how do you use the word gamer/gamers to describe others? Do you describe yourself as a gamer, or do you use a different term?

Mostly when positively dripping with irony.

I think it’s funny to call people gamers when they most certainly are not gamers, even if I don’t actually do that, I just make jokes about it. As in:

Me, barging into the packed courthouse, as the news cameras swivel toward me: Where the gamers at

I like to tell my partner that they’re a gamer simply because they have played a videogame before. For no reason. It doesn’t even bother them like in a teasing way. I just think it’s funny. You got to amuse yourself, in life. I call my dogs gamers. I very often say that my one dog is a gamer girl.

But also, with friends who I know play games or who I have played games with, we will call each other “gamer.”

At first it was mostly ironically, sorta like, ha ha he he, we’re saying “gamer” but we’re not like those other gamers. Then it sort of became like a proxy for “friend,” just like, what the fuck is up gamer?

Eventually at some point I got kind of tired of the whole self deprecating nihilistic ironic detachment on the internet, and so eventually, I started to sort of subvert the meaning of what a gamer was, at least just as I was letting my cool brain leak out all of the fun thoughts I have out on to the internet, so, at least around me and my friends.

So I would say things like, I dunno,

(I have some fear about posting this and coming across poorly, but it somehow felt important.)

Don’t worry, we’re true gamers here, we support and uplift each other, that’s what real gamers do

This is more for my own personal amusement, even if I mean it totally sincerely. But, you know.

LeFish

I think anyone with a modicum of interest in videogame subculture since widespread availability of the internet would associate the term with its toxic elements. The only time I ever see it being used are as a pejorative for people that base their entire identity on videogames or in response to someone gatekeeping the term, and frankly in my opinion they’re welcome to it.

treefroggy

Sometimes, for the most pragmatic examples, yes, I’ll admit to being a gamer, I.E., someone who does play video games as a facet of my lifestyle and a hobby. Like someone who balls is a baller.

xhekros

This is a complex term. I believe that the term gamer and the term film buff aren’t quite simlar to compare, although nowadays they have some similarities to it. Film buff culture started because of Cahiers and the french film critics spreading the word to label a certain kind of user who watched the reality that surrounded people as kind of being a movie or filmable. Gamer, as @pasquinelli said though, started as marketing and then gamergaters used that term to label themselves as the “true gamers”. I believe the difference between communities, though, can be analyzed more profoundly by the term preservation and how both communities have worked through it. I’ve seen not that much development here in the gaming community up until recently from part of the public outside of IC and some marginal spheres in the sense that I don’t see that much broad-minded perspective in the film buff sphere as compared to gaming, and maybe it’s because of that, although I’ve seen part of the public rising up in that regard.

christoffing

The term is bad but rich in connotations, so it’s very funny to use. Can’t remember the last time I heard anyone use it in earnest, though.

robinhoodie

The world has lost all meaning. There are “people who play video games,” and “game-huggers.” For all the time, energy, and money I pour into video games they’re hardly what I would define myself by. I dunno, I’ve lived enough and done enough to know what I like in earnest. My personality doesn’t come from liking games, but liking games suits my personality. If I had to defend my lifestyle to someone (which I feel no need to do at this point in my life) that is how I would explain it. I am a person who plays video games.

treefroggy

robinhoodie in this world, those who hunt the “game-huggers” are called “gamerunners”

Gaagaagiins

I think all of us gamers can agree though that we should like share and subscribe to this thread so we can increase engagement

yeso

lol

Gaagaagiins

PMs yeso * hey I see that you didn’t like or share my post about engagement? Are you mad at me?

baftaboo

My mental image of the “gamer” is still a young dude, a little overweight, playing deathmatches and drinking soda and wearing a big ol smile. Basically John Romero in the 90s. Surely that’s an anachronism? The anti-gamer, the person who resents the gamer-shoe and anyone it fits, is a much more solid category in my brain. The anti-gamer takes games real seriously and wants to help other people take games as seriously as films or literature. The guy from Errant Signal is my mental prototype. So I guess I imagine that in the "gamer"sphere games are more closely aligned with junk food or comic books than with art. Gamers are the ones for whom games are (scrumptious?) trash. In that sense I feel like I personally have more kinship with the gamer than with the antigamer.

I would never use the word in real life, though, because I cringe to hear anyone say “to game” when they mean “to play a game.”

captain

At this point I’m just repeating others’ opinions but it comes down to two things:

1) the people who sell us things use the word, and invented the word, which as has been said means it’s bad news
2) I guess there are terms like “cinephile” and so on, but “gamer” both sounds more childish and is used in part by more childish people (not exclusively, of course), which means I don’t like it

petition to rename the literature thread “true readers only”

yeso

speaking of the gamer archetype image what on earth is going on with the angry video game nerd’s 12 epaulette shirts? It doesn’t make sense for a vg nerd. But I saw a recent not in character vid and he was wearing the same thing but tan. I don’t get it.

MDS-02

Part of what drove me to make this post was a statement of “gamers suck” somewhere on the forum. I was curious what group people mapped that word onto. Sort of similar to the statement in the latest podcast of “gamers are the worst people in the world,” but it felt to me that in the former case, there was a sense of IC being the positive ‘anti-gamer’ as described by baftaboo, whereas in the example in the podcast it seemed to mean to include any person interacting with games (getting their psychology ‘poisoned’ a bit by interacting with skinner boxes). I realized that both things didn’t sit well with me.

It then made me curious about how people thought of it, and how it may be utilized in some form of in/out group definition among the community. Not sure there is any way to map the truth of that interpretation, and these are individual examples, so there may be nothing there. I can say I didn’t feel great about either statement, because group labeling/ putting down is just not something I feel cool with, even when being hyperbolic or including oneself in the group.

As an aside, I was speaking with a group of not-into-games friends and asked them how they felt about the word gamer. I had forgotten how little of the world has the mental line drawn between gamergate and other events, and it was interesting to me how much less negative baggage they seemed to hold for the word. Suppose that could be true for anyone who doesn’t have a particular label applied to them as well.

Gaagaagiins

MDS-02 I’m not sure how much of the podcast you have listened to, but I think you may have taken Azurelore’s statements out of context, through no fault of your own.

Alex’s question of “What is wrong with videogames?” is part of a longterm recurring discussion initiated on Episode 146 - What Is Wrong With Videogames And Nine Other Questions (August 16, 2020). In that episode, Alex asked the titular question, well, once, and then nine subsequent times. The discussion didn’t start there but eventually the discussion did land on social and cultural problems with videogames and gamers and “Gamers,” in the “toxic element of videogames as a cultural sphere as a whole” sense. As well, when Alex finds it appropriate, he re-asks the question, and has a few times before, including in the anniversary episode. Again, the question was not meant to specifically steer the discussion towards social and cultural issues within games, it organically went there. I think a lot of us were feeling it at that time, with all of the social unrest of those times (which hasn’t gone away, of course). I distinctly remember listening to that episode and thinking that it was timely, to say the least.

So, when Alex asked that question and Azurelore gave the answer that they did, I would say with some confidence that that was not meant to speak about videogames or people who play videogames in a general sense at all. There is a sort of implied “What the hell is wrong with [the aspects of] videogames [that have made it develop such pronounced anti-social, right wing, bigoted elemenst]” in the question within the context of the ongoing discussion on the podcast. Perhaps, even, also with an implied “and what can we do about it?”

What Azurelore I believe was getting at overall, and I don’t mean to speak for them so they can correct me without reservation if they read this (they don’t read the forum regularly I don’t think), is that the toxicity of some subcultural elements of gaming did not just spring up out of nowhere and that there is something inherent to games that may have contributed to it happening the way that it did with Gamergate and with current associations of gaming with borderline sociopathic white men who embody a sort of equivocation of being a gamer with violence against women, being racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, and so on and so on. And, that there is no small measure of social power and influence that games are attempting to tap into and have tapped into for a long time (hence the reference to games having origins in gambling). Games do have psychological influence and they have, for a long time, attempted to tap into psychological feelings of validation, complacency, and feelings of power and autonomy. And I think that that is or at least could be a contributing factor to the sort of social/cultural problem that the overall gaming community has been facing for some time. That’s how I understand what they were saying, at any rate.

I don’t want you to think I’m just trying to tell you how to feel, rather, trying to reassure you that I don’t think how you interpreted the discussion was the intention behind the discussion, and there was implication about what the question was about that you may not have been aware of.