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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSalon ~ Why I can’t call myself a gamer anymore
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The Spike television network recently held the VGX video game awards, formerly known as the VGAs, a production that often plays to the lowest common denominators among the video game audience. Last year, for example, an actor in camouflage fatigues teabagged guests who appeared on the show virtually teabagging an opponents virtual corpse is a popular way that first-person shooter players embarrass their opponents in multiplayer matches.
This years offense was a transphobic comment made by co-host and comedian Joel McHale, assuring video game fans that the rumor that Wario, a popular character in Nintendo games, had undergone sex reassignment surgery was not true. Transphobia in the video game community has been a major issue this year, as marginalized groups among the video game audience refuse to be ignored anymore.
Microsoft offended women in late November by providing a customizable form letter, in the fashion of one of those notes you may have written to your mother as a child explaining why the gifting of a new toy would benefit the entire family. In this case, one of the ways to customize the letter was to address it to ones girlfriend, in the hopes of convincing her that, among other things, the ability to use exercise software or interact with television programs for women using the Xbox One made it a worthy holiday purchase.
To be fair, the interactive letter could also be tailored as from a woman to a man, but in any case it validated the idea that gamers are a group of people separated from everyone else. The letter was another reminder that gamer culture is locked into old patterns precisely at a time when video games seem poised to break out of their niche status and become just another mainstream form of media. A familiar drumbeat from the progressive wing of video game criticism and cultural observation is that gamer culture slows this process..
http://www.salon.com/2014/01/02/why_i_cant_call_myself_a_gamer_anymore/
CFLDem
(2,083 posts)I'd say gaming has been mainstream for some time.
I agree that the anonymity of it all tends to bring out the inner jerk in people.
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)FWIW, I've been an avid gamer since childhood (now winding it down a bit at 37)...I can still celebrate and enjoy my longtime passion while keeping 1000 miles away from the pubescent lowest-common-denominator "VGX culture" (The whole Spike TV-VGA thing came way after my time, anyway)... Yeah, that crude, quasi-masculine frat house/boys club/P.E. locker room culture in gaming is many years overdue for a housecleaning, but whether or not he calls himself a "gamer" will have no bearing on the issue whatsoever...
If anything, the author should be trying to *reclaim* the term "gamer" from the teens and bad kiddies who make everything about titties, guns, glitches, exploits, rape jokes, cheese and a pathological obsession with mercilessly crushing weak, defenseless players...
el_bryanto
(11,804 posts)Someone who plays games? Computer games? Tabletop RPGs? Tabletop Wargames?
Someone who participates in Gamer Culture?
A marketing term designed to categorize people so as to make it easier to sell to them?
All of the above.
If you continue to play games you are a gamer; if you continue to purchase games, you are a gamer? And if this person intends to continue writing about gaming, he will probably be required to attend and participate in gaming events. So I don't know exactly what his denial of the term actually means.
There have been a lot better exposes on the latent and open Misogyny and Homophobia in Gamer Culture. Extra Credits did a few episodes on these subjects, all pretty thoughtful and incisive, and there was another web series that I can't find right now that did a very good review of how women were portrayed in games.
Bryant