Yeah this is playing into the notion that gamers are misunderstood and oppressed. I like Game Theory, but it's so annoying that he's feeding this petty bullcrap narrative. Maybe some people should just stop letting their videogame hobby consume their lives so they don't have to get so defensive?
I've been playing games since the 1970's. My first 'video game' was an Atari Pong system my dad got from a coworker; it was broken and we fixed it and played Pong until the 2600 came out. I wish to all hell that I still had that Pong console as it would probably be worth something now. My first game of D&D was over the 4th of July weekend in 1982, just in time for the Stanic Panic to kick in. I say these things so that the people reading can understand where I am coming from. Games and gaming and gamers have always been shit on. My parents burnt my D&D stuff, literally burnt it in a fire pit in 1984 because they were told I was worshiping the devil and that D&D was a system training me to be able to kill without remorse. Video games were rotting the minds of the youth of America. Then, the early 1990's happened. Us weird kids who played games and loved technology started making million of dollars and started buying advertising on traditional media. For a few years, encouraging your kids to play video games was seen as a gateway to a career in computers. I was no longer a kid by this time of course but I was working building computers, playing games and yet there were still people who thought it odd that a "grown man" would be playing computer games and Dungeons and Dragons. Yet my brother, a guy who would paint himself in a full body color scheme and scream for a sports team for four straight hours was considered normal and acceptable. My post leads up to this statement and my rebuttal. How is the video game 'hobby' any different than any other hobby? Why doesn't the media act this way to all obsessive hobbies? People who decorate their whole homes in sports team trinkets? Normal. Slap a few dozen team decals on your car that you bought because it is your team's color? Normal. Spend $10,000 on cameras for a photography hobby? Normal. Buy broken down motorcycles and fix them up to the point where you are riding a new bike every 6-8 months? Normal. Play video games? LOL manchild basement dwelling neckbeard loser. (Yet the LAN events that I co-run have to change layouts to accommodate all the families that come.) This in your room makes you normal This in your room makes you, something else? This attitude is apart of the whole social consciousness of our culture. Video games make people violent! (Yet the crime rate in the Us, Canada, Europe and Japan has plunged 80% since Doom came out). Video games make people aggressive! Aggressive does not mean violent, yet the two are always linked in these stories. Video games are rotting the brains of the youth of the nation! Actually.... the opposite may be true. Doctors are now being encouraged to play fast twitch games that use controllers as doctors who play games are faster surgeons, make fewer mistakes and have better hand-eye fine motor control Note this is from 2007. The traditional media is dying. Nobody seems to disagree with that. Fewer people read newspapers to the point that there is a legitimate concern that newspapers may not survive the decade. Newspapers do not get the internet at all, even now twenty years later, and seen to not understand how the internet works. Fewer and fewer people are watching traditional TV. Cord cutting is starting to be a thing that is impacting the bottom line of television and cable. Teenage boys are not even turning on the television anymore as they have moved onto other media for their news and entertainment. Hell, my circle of friends does not watch TV, go to movies in a theater or even watch sports. And now this dying traditional media is attacking Netflix as if Netflix is the cause and not the symptom; see the Chicago Netflix tax for one of the more nutty examples. So here comes the moral panics to try to stay relevant. This is nothing new, the first one was in 1938 Videos like this make me happy as they are bringing awareness to how people who play video games and live and work on the internet are being treated by so-called 'normal' people. Gamers and gaming are the same old whipping boy they have always been; the man wielding the flail has been swapped out is all.Maybe some people should just stop letting their videogame hobby consume their lives so they don't have to get so defensive?
As someone who has been playing video games since childhood and occasionally talks about them in public, I really don't know what you're on about. It seems like every time white men get criticized in any domain they behave as if criticism was invented purely as a weapon against them. No. It wasn't. Video games are criticized far less than film and tv. You just don't seem to notice it (which is fucking amazing, because it's everywhere.) Yes, gamers get made fun of. Like everyone else. People make fun of the kardashians ruthlessly. They make fun of movie stars. They make fun of pop stars. (Do you really think gamers get made fun of more than Bieber? You're insane if you do.) They make fun of politicians. You haven't been singled out, and you aren't a victim. I wish there were more to say, but there isn't. XoXo, Another person that plays video games.
Against my better judgement, I am going to reply to this because your reply makes my point for me. I am addressing this reply not to you specifically but to the audience who may not understand why this is important to me. You don't know me. You don't know what I look like, my life experience, or anything about me. I say the same about you. One of the beauties of the internet is that what you look like means nothing; on the internet in a forum like this we are all text. But I am going to tell you a story so you know where I am coming from here. One of the things that I do to make the world suck less is working with a childhood cancer center. I got hooked up with them through Child's Play more than a decade ago after the whole Jack Thompson thing. We started with Play Station 2's, then got a few XBOX's when they came out and then went out and got games that we thought the kids would like. We were going to shell out for some Wii's but as most of these kids have IVs and Chemo ports, the hospital did not want them using something that was so active and had them swinging arms etc around. A few years ago we raised some cash, built some PCs and put a bunch of free games on them so that the kids could play games while they were hospitalized for treatment. When Minecraft came out, we bought Minecraft for each machine, now about ten or so, and holly balls those kids love Minecraft. The age of these kids is from nine to about 14-15 and we knew Minecraft was going to be big but I never exepected it to be this huge. And I'll tell you, watching these kids be happy for the hour or two that they got to play on the in-hospital server with the other kids was amazing. These kids also love watching twitch and Minecraft people online. They build castles and all sorts of crazy and amazing things and I get the satisfaction of making some people happy if for a few hours. One of the things I found out when I came out here, that still makes me mad, is that when I tell people I do volunteer work with kids with cancer, people get funny. Some christian sects see cancer as a punishment for sin, and when I was looking for work way back, my work in a cancer ward was seen as a negative. Since I believe that we have a duty to help those in need, I had to tack my volunteer work in another 501(c) so that I can say "Volunteers with sick kids" and get the tax write-offs. Which brings me to the point of this reply. People suck. The one thing I have asked the staff to do to help these kids is to not allow commercial television. Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network are fine but they also show the news and things like Letterman and other Late Nite people; I think this is mainly for the staff, not for the kids. But adults forget something; kids are more aware of what is going on than people realize. The kids get to stay up late (some of them are on a six hour schedule where they have treatments every few hours). These kids saw that show. Then they spread that around to the others. Now you have a bunch of kids who are in the hospital, love Minecraft and are being told by the man on the TV that they are idiots, morons, and whatever else he was saying to make fun of gamers. This rant is not directed exactly at you, but I am going to ask you specifically. What would you tell a group of 10-13 year old cancer patients who want to know if they are bad people for playing games? How do you comfort a group of kids who are being mocked for enjoying the one thing in their immediate lives that is not being sick? Gaming has not been a "white male" hobby since the PS2 and XBox made gaming mainstream more than a decade ago. Everquest, WoW, Ultima Online brought more women and girls into hardcore gaming roughly a decade ago. Yet this stereotype exists whenever people either try to grab a part of my $100 Billion a year global hobby or see it as a threat. Online, in a game, nobody really gives a shit about anything but your skill. A poor kid in the bad side of town and a rich kid in a private school can and do play games together but that does not fit the narrative and is ignored. Like all people who are famous for being famous, I am more upset over the media's role in creating these empty celebrities than anything else. The Karashians themselves? I am in FUCKING AWE of them. They are going to make more in interest today for being a functional net zero to society than I am going to make all year working a 3000 hour a year job. They manipulated the media to keep them in the news, they got paid and people still eat this crap up. I don't hate them, but the people who help make them famous I hold in low regard and I will not feel ashamed for saying that. But to bring this back to gaming, have you seen the Kardashian mobile game? They raked in almost a BILLION freaking dollars. That is GTA level cash. Have you ever looked at the game? Its evil. I'm not saying that to be out there either. The game makes the player into a woman who is nothing more than a coat rack, and you as a player are judged and advance in the game solely on how much money you spend to look good. The goal of the game is to make you into a vapid celebrity. It is everything that you don't want to teach women and girls, that they exist to shop, buy things and look pretty and nothing else. You think I'm kidding? Another review And yea, bad games making money makes me upset just like bad movies making money makes a film nerd friend of mine angry. I don't care what people say about me personally. I've been there done that and wear the scars proudly. I've lived long enough to see my hobby grow bigger than Hollywood, television, music and theater, COMBINED. You can't shame me, mock me, or make me feel bad/weird/troll-lol-lol/whatever about being a gamer. We have been here before with comics in the 40's and 50's. We've seen this with Rock and Roll in the 60's. We saw this with D&D in the 80's. I'm worried about the people now entering gaming and how they are being treated because I do not want them to go through what I did.It seems like every time white men get criticized in any domain they behave as if criticism was invented purely as a weapon against them.
People make fun of the kardashians ruthlessly.
You haven't been singled out, and you aren't a victim.
I'll agree that traditional media is dumb, old-fashioned, and maybe just plain old. I think you can put the blame on generational differences for why your parents and people like Jimmy Kimmel don't understand gamers. You grew up with games, they didn't. Heck you were an early adopter so you probably had a worse time. Gaming was being unfairly put down in the 70s and 80s so I get why you would be defensive, but nowadays that kind of mentality doesn't work anymore. Gamer mobs that attack personalities who "offend" them are annoying. It's toxic, dangerous, and doesn't help their cause at all. I dislike the idea that gaming is the media's whipping boy because it's feeding these weird, tantrum-y, dare I say "manchildish" reactions every time a person so much as tweets that watching Let's Plays are dumb. Sure I get it, there's all these bad misconceptions about gamers being violent and neckbeards and that should definitely go away, but maybe people should just give them time to disappear. Gaming is an increasingly mainstream pastime. You can rest assured, the kids of 2015 growing up with Steam and iPads and 3DS XLs are not going to experience the same adversity you did.