What Type Of Gamer Are You?

Thanks to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (via Recordonline.com) for their article trying to characterize gamers into visual stereotypes. It starts: "It used to be that if you played video games more than casually you were labeled a nerd... Nerds, as an easily identified social group, don't exist anymore.", and goes on to describe "clans of specialist gamers" such as 'Survival horror junkie' ("Think goth kid from the '80s meets skate punk... the color for this season is black, black, and more black") or 'RPG obsessive' ("Little has changed with the outward appearance of role-playing game fans since the golden age of 'Dungeons and Dragons'") Is this simply lazy/offensive pigeonholing, or can you spot certain gamers on sight alone?

Comments

hmm

[bobbozzo]

Is this simply lazy/offensive pigeonholing...

Imho, yes.

I've played "shooters" (CS, GTA:VC (which I do NOT consider a shooter), Quake2, Doom(s), Hitman, 1942...), platforms (Prince of Persia 1 & 2, ...), "arcade sims" (NFS, Comanche, Apache, Falcon 2, Aces over the Pacific, Red Baron, subs, ...), some RPGs, ...

I don't wear camo, cargo pants, or t-shirts, and my reflexes suck (I rarely do especially well at CS, but I still love it).

I haven't (yet) played paintball, although I do shoot & hunt occasionally. Never even seen a Jane's book, although I have heard about them due to the Jane's flight sims.

Sniper was one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Thank god I didn't pay for it. I loved Starship Troopers though.

I don't know what a "Survival Horror" is (I've never seen any of the Resident Evil games, etc., but DoomIII looks like it will be fun, if that counts.

Basically, the author couldn't think of anything to write, so he wrote this? And he totally left out sims (no, not The Sims, although he left them out too, along with RTS's).

Re:Is this a joke?

[jargonCCNA]

Basically, they're normal people who spend time and money on military FPSes rather than stamp collecting or model trains.

I wouldn't call that "dyed-in-the-wool" behaviour. That's just having a hobby. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool hacker -- I've been using computers for, literally, time out of mind (goofing around on VIC-20s is among my earliest memories. Possibly my first.) and it's all I can see myself doing. I'm skinny, lanky guy with elongated fingers and a mildly shitty back. I'm surprised my vision and wrists are as healthy as they are (I have 20/20 vision in my right eye and slightly better in my left; and only after playing guitar for about three days, three hours a day after barely playing at all have I developed any wrist problems). Looking at me, you can sort of tell I use computers -- a lot. That's what the author's talking about -- the gamers that have been interested in the game's subject matter for as long as they can remember.

this kind of crap really isnt valid any more

[Milkhorse]

consoles destroyed the nerd strangelhold on gaming. 15 years ago when you HAD to have a PC to play the GOOD GOOD high tech games, being a nerd was a prerequisite to being a serious gamer, because you had to invest a lot of money in a computer that most people had no need for AND you had to havet the expertise to run it. Once consoles caught up with PCs in terms of gaming power(which wasnt too long ago), all of that ended. Now ANYONE can pretty much play any game they can wrap their brains around. I work for a "large multimedia rental chain" and I can tell you the people coming in to rent games are NOT nerds.

Re:Part missing from the article

[DarkZero]

I agree with your sentiments. This article is a tongue in cheek social criticism of gamer culture. If previous posters had bothered to read it, (which they don't seem to have, or not very well) they would have noticed this at once, as the entire article has a cheecky and jocular tone to it. One wonders if the person who posted this story also ran to the Humane Society after seeing Bonsai Kitten. (Yes, I have a cat)

The thing is, it's not even a tongue in cheek social criticism. He took vague assumptions that could apply to any medium and applied them to video games. RPG players are geeks, people who play military games are nutjobs in camouflage, people who like anything regarding horror are goths... someone who knows nothing about video games could've written this.

A better tongue in cheek social criticism would have an anime fangirl who's played Final Fantasy X eighteen consecutive times, a bunch of pale, deluded gamers sitting in an arcade dutifully playing 2D fighters as if they were brand new games, and a vast army of Korean kids screaming, "ZERG RUSH KEKEKEKEKEKE!". But he didn't write that. He wrote a vague piece of crap that just as easily could've been "What type of movie-goer are you?" or "What type of reader are you?". Sports fans are obsessed with sports and wear nothing but jerseys, horror fans are goths... someone could've wrote this thirty years ago. But it still wouldn't have been funny.

Re:Part missing from the article

[PurpleFloyd]

If it's social satire, where's the element of truth? Good satire needs to have a kernel of truth "stretched" to the extreme; think of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, being force-fed by a machine while he works on an assembly line. While factory owners never actually attempted to make their workers work and eat similtaneously, Chaplin still made a point: that factory owners were willing to sacrifice workers' basic decency for higher rates of production and more profit.

I don't see a corresponding "basic point" here. Is the author trying to tell us that games can take over our lives? Maybe, but that doesn't seem to be a major social problem in today's society; for every one gamer who allows games to take over his or her life, there are many who treat gaming as a fun and relaxing hobby. While some people do treat this as a problem, the identification of this writer as the P-I's videogames columnist seems to rule that possiblity out. Still, the article seems to be written by a person who is somewhat afraid of computers, but wants to write something on the "gaming culture." There's no point that it tries to make; the only humor is weak and solely derived from hyperbole. Social satire should be funny and have a point; this posesses neither of those characteristics.

As for the analogy with Bonsai Kitten, there's very little similarity. BK is a troll, designed to shock people into an emotional response. I see no evidence of this being similar; if it were going for shock value, it would probably describe gamers as somewhat similar to this. If this is a troll, it's a fairly weak one: it doesn't appeal to any emotions, but rather simply makes you want to point out the author's errors and move on.

While one does get the sense that the author is trying to be funny and perhaps a bit controversial, there's no content that makes me laugh or think. Instead, I get the same feeling you might get from a comedian whose jokes aren't getting a response. I think, "what a moron!" and move on; not the response that either a humorist or troll would look for. It doesn't matter whether you rate the article on humor value, shock value, or informative content: it fails on all three counts.