What I Hate About Gamers

I am a proud gamer. We are far past the days where playing video games was a niche.  We are about at the point where it is common entertainment as TV or movies. Gamers now come in all shapes, size, backgrounds, and genders, and stereotyping a gamer is not as easy as it once was.

Despite the new mainstream appeal, there is still what I call a “gamer culture” that is reserved for the hardcore players, enthusiasts, whatever you want to call individuals who live and breathes video games. I write for a video game website and have attended or seen E3 for God knows how many years. Video games are definitely my passion and it’s always fun to whip up a conversation with a fellow knowledgeable gamer, but there’s certain things I can’t stand about our culture linked to it.

Whether it’s online or face-to-face, thanks to “fanboyism” I rarely (if ever) can have a decent discussion about games. Maybe I am the weird one and like this only because as journalists we’re called out otherwise, but I can never talk about the industry from an analytic standpoint without the person I’m talking to picking sides if they’re really into games. The bigger the gamer they are, the more likely they are to defend their console of choice when greeted with any incoming negativity. I can’t think of any other purchase that makes people feel they need to constantly justify it.

It could be that or a lot of it may be carry over from the days we had to defend the hobby from detractors. It’s very possible that we are still on edge; gamers hear what they perceive as criticism of their purchase and rush to its defense. We should be past that by now. Criticism and competition in the market make the product better, especially in tech. If fans can speak analytically about sports, which requires you to pick favorites, there’s no reasons gamers shouldn’t be able to do the same with gaming industry. For the most part, we cannot.

Fighting games are always good fun, but I don’t really play them anymore because my gamer friends have turned them into a profession. The new one comes out, they rush out to get it, and they devote many hard hours to memorizing every combo and possible weakness in the system. Everything becomes really serious, people get really furious, and all of a sudden no one’s having quite as much fun as before. The same intense mentality applies to FPSes for a subset of gamers.

There’s nothing wrong with being good at a game. Before the rise of online multiplayer, every gamer had to go through being the best one they knew. At the time you (hopefully) didn’t balls out rage on everyone who dared challenge you. Being competitive is perfectly fine and encouraged until it turns tasteless (constantly raging about everything over your headset) and so technical it’s restrictive (only pistols. No items/Final Destination/Fox). When you play every game with this angry fury like you’re being sponsored by Monster Energy Drink, you suck the fun out of it for everyone.

Chill.

At the risk of alienating my readership, I’ve gotta say I cringe at every ironic game shirt that’s ever existed. When the shirt is supposed to be funny and it’s not to someone who gets the reference, you have a problem. My awesome Parappa the Rapper shirt prevents me from badmouthing all gaming apparel, but the non-official ones that try and fail miserably at humor embarrass me and I’m not even the one rocking them.

Worse than gamer shirts though, is “gamer food.” Someone thought it was a good idea to market the idea of a caved-in nerd who lives on Doritos, caffeine, and the energy from LCD backlight. Best part of the story is that we actually buy into that. Bawls energy drink, Madden branded Doritos, Halo branded Mountain Dew Game Fuel (Ok, that last one tasted good. But that’s not the point.)

This stuff annoys me, but I am a gamer geek myself. No matter how much facepalming may occur, it’s all out of love for the gaming community. The real lames are the people who would throw around terms like geek or nerd as if they were derogatory still, if those people even exist anymore in our modern country of nerds. I’ll still crack on you if you wear a shirt from Jinx though, sorry.