5 Reasons It's Still Not Cool to Admit You're a Gamer

[Roman Totale]

http://www.cracked.com/article_18571_5- ... gamer.html

Number 1 makes a very good point.

[Dog Pants]

All the points are valid, although number 1 seems to be more a rant about how little he thinks of PC gamers. All of them are also down to incorrect preconceptions about who gamers are, and he even does it himself.

I don't shy away from admitting I'm a gamer though. I've a wife and daughter, so I think it's pretty safe to say I've encountered women. I'm in my 30s, so I think it's equally safe to assume I'm not a geeky teenage boy. Anyone doubting the social skills of gamers can make up their own mind about me. So by admitting - in fact not admitting, because that insinuates guilt - by acknowledging I'm a gamer I hope I move the perception of gamers one notch towards the reality of it.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

#1 does make a very good point, but as with all things, it's the vocal minority and the misguided kids causing the problem.

I can't imagine many/any average age gamers pirating the indie bundle, It's just not worth the effort, if you have a bank account/credit card, you'll pay your penny and get the games. Of course, if you have more money, you'll pay it, Indie bundle for me is worth about $10, as I'll buy it, forget I have it and not touch the games until I remember I own the bundle a few months later.

Also I don't know about anyone else, but I generally don't pirate games these days, especially not indie games.

Last thing I downloaded and played was MW2 single player, if it was good, I'd've bought it, I've pirated a lot of games in the past, then bought them when I could afford it.

Probably some level of entitlement feeling there, but devs get paid, I don't starve, I don't personally see an issue.

[Thompy]

It's a good point that PC gamers don't support the developers as much as they should but I don't think entitlement is the issue, it's simply because the means exists.

In general don't pirate games, but I have done, sure. Not because I feel I deserve the game for free, that'd be crazy, but just because 1) it's easy 2) seems like everyone does it anyway 3) it's anonymous 4) no consequences.

Main reason I have in the past is because of lack of money. Obviously I couldn't use that excuse to steal things from a shop, and I never would, but because of the above points it just doesn't cause a big of a morality issue as it should.

I guess if I did have one problem with game prices it's that the amount you pay gets you wildly different amount of play time. Most RPGs have a good play time to cost ratio, FPSs (barring MP) don't.

Additional: I just realised it's probably a very long time since I bought a game full price, I'll wait for them to come down first. I guess I just don't think they're worth as much to me now as they were 10 years ago. Am I getting bored with gaming or are games just a pile of tat these days?

[Dog Pants]

Am I getting bored with gaming or are games just a pile of tat these days?

This comes up quite often and I think most of us feel it. I don't think it's quite that games are worse - go back and play some of your old favourites if you want to wreck fond memories - but that expectations are higher. We always expect a new game to be an improvement on something, especially from a PC point of view, but I think each time our expectations get a little higher. It's not all our fault - many modern games have huge PR drives behind them which try to convince you that the game is the most awesome thing since Space Invaders. Also, while we have high expectations the console markets are tempered to a younger audience with lower expectations, and so the baseline is brought down.

[Joose]

This comes up quite often and I think most of us feel it.

I dont

Seems to me just like it always has been: Games mostly fall somewhere between the "fairly shit" and "reasonably OK" spectrum, with the occasional "Fucking Awesome" outlier. I think that's pretty much the way it has always been.

Its not just that you tend to view games of old through rose tinted mind-glasses, but its that you are comparing recent games with games from your whole past. I know this will vary from person to person here, but I think of "recently" as "the last year or two", when it comes to games. However, ive been playing games since I was about 10.

Thats 20 years of games.

Seeing as good games stick in your head much more than mediocre ones, that would mean comparing the games released in the last year to all the games released in the 19 years before that. Add in the Rose-o-vision and its hardly surprising that people look on the past as the glory years. Its not.

For more concrete examples, Mass Effect 2 came out in the last year or so, and I consider it one of the best games I have ever played. Other games I enjoyed immensely that also came out in this sort of time period were Minecraft, Assassins Creed: Brotherhood (ok, not out for the PC yet, but its still excellent), Civ V, Bacon 2, Just Cause 2, Borderlands, Batman: Arkham Asylum, SupCom 2....

[Baliame]

#1 makes a good point but sort of defeats itself by using MW2 as an example.

[FatherJack]

#5. We Can't Shake the "Lonely, Anti-Social Virgin" Stereotype

I like to think that something like the existence of 5punk is enough to disprove this. Not just demonstrably by our ever-increasing contribution to the planet's population, but how most of us have made real, actual friends here.

Since it's a game site, that rather removes any stigma about us being gamers, but we've also worked hard at removing any other stigmata about our other hobbies and encouraged discussion about them. What's left is people, interacting socially, who happen to have an interest in games.

#4. The Industry Thinks We're All 17-Year-Old Douchebags

They do, (although I'd put it more in the 11-14 year-old age group where you've discovered masturbation as a hobby, but before you decide drinking on the streets and smashing up cars is more fun) and every preview video I see which highlights kill streaks, blood splattering or an awkward sex scene makes me cringe internally at the image they project to outsiders.

While not immune, it seems European developers seem to think their audience is a little more grown up, and use this kind of thing less, ironically (like the DMA GTAs) or as some sort of statement (The Witcher).

Looking through the PSN stores in the respective territories is quite eye-opening. While the UK one has stuff subdivided by console, types we'd recognise (action, rpg, etc) and so on the Japanese version has at least three different categories for those creepy games where you select from a series of conversation options in order to elicit a response from a cartoon cutie. Browsing through the US wallpapers reveals an entire category dedicated to "babes" - it even has its own icon. Given this is all stuff you pay for, it's clear what the makers think of their audience, but also depressingly suggests that it's working.

#3. Video Game Storytelling is Still at the Level of B Movies

Perhaps, although it's not entirely a problem, or one of their own making. Games which try to have a grown-up, engaging story are often either roundly mocked or actually aren't very much fun to play.

I like a bit of mindless B-movie action to unwind and anyone who considers them a shameful guilty pleasure you can't admit to probably needs to get over themselves. Still some of them are embarrassingly bad, in the same way as point #4, in a really shit cliché-without-irony MW2 way, or in an I-don't-actually-care-about-any-of these-fucks FFXIII way.

Games where it's possible for you make the story, even if that story isn't the one it was supposed to be, which as 5punkers we seem adept at finding, can be much more satisfying than films, because you're the star and the other characters in the game react to you and your actions accordingly. Nobody played Oblivion, or Thief or Hitman the same way and we all have our own memories of our own particular story.

#2. We're Still Obsessed by Shiny Gadgets

(The point was about the bitching over technologies used in a game, like less-than-full resolution on XBox titles)

The floating apple vid showed we're not all like this, and can have a laugh at the minority that are. As PC gamers, though we do tend to scoff at the supposedly crappy console versions, even though they are rarely in any way inferior enough to sensibly damage anyone's enjoyment. Many of us like to play older titles, though - often ones that we know to be horrifically broken - it isn't all about new advances and graphical excellence and we accept that every new game can't be a new Half-Life, even if that does make us less excited than if it was.

#1. We Have Some Serious Entitlement Issues

I no longer want everything for free, perhaps as I've aged I get the sense of satisfaction from buying and owning a game that I used to get from ripping a CD-load of titles and never playing half of them. I've even gone back and re-bought games I wasn't sure I had legitimately and even some I was to save me looking for the CD.

Game piracy seemed different in the old days. £10 for a game on my C64 was maximum two games a year for birthday and Christmas and they were often atrocious. Inflation calculators tell me that's £20-25 in today's money which doesn't sound so bad, but it was a lot of money for a kid at the time. My reckoning is that the cost of entertainment has increased far ahead of inflation - which is largely a measure of how much everyday basics cost, most of which are price-fixed to make things look better than they really are.

Here's me with my last 1p after spending it all in the arcades on holiday:

No more games for another year for you, Goldilocks.

So we copied games a lot, as you could rent them from most video shops. My Dad was fully complicit, first letting me use his tape decks, then building a circuit board to connect and provide power to two 1530 Datassettes. Games magazines openly advertised piracy devices which would "freeze" memory contents and stream it off to tape/disk. We did it with music cassettes and taped stuff off the radio, since clearly that was why tape decks were invented. It was widespread, almost universal - nobody seemed to think there was anything wrong with it.

That was when the personal computer games market pretty much crashed. Studios closed, there were no major releases anymore, only 1.99 specials from Mastertronic. To my shame, I wasn't above copying those, either.

Later came the cartridge years, which mostly meant you had to pay up, rent, or just not have stuff, but with the birth of the internet and games moving back to optical media came the massive backlash, where people who knew where to look could get you anything for free. It was kind of an addicting thing, not just games but music and movies too, even before most of them were released, and in increasingly higher quality.

Now, there's DRM and online registering - it seems like some producers treat all their customers as potential pirates. I don't generally mind it until it goes wrong, but it's still a bit offensive as a paying customer.

The other tack is the "think of the poor developers" option. Trying to make gamers feel a link between them and the makers of the game, offering greatly reduced prices or "pay what you want" deals. The author seems to think that the Humble Indie Bundle deal demonstrates failure, given the average price paid was a mere 10% of the normal one and a good number of people refused to pay at all. What's not clear is whether they actually achieved ten times as many sales as they would have ordinarily, thus negating the price reduction - the people who stole it clearly wouldn't have ever paid anything for it anyway, even 1p was too much for them (although I think it was actually a $1 minimum).

I admit I've been moaning about new games costing a lot recently, particularly those over £30, even though from the 90s through to a year or two ago I'd routinely pay £40 or more. It's because I have less money of course, but I'm not going to use that as an excuse to pirate them anymore, I'll just not have them, wait until they're cheaper (which seems to now happen quicker than it ever did) or play some of the many games I already have.

[Sol]

On the scale of awkward social interactions, I'm going to guess these sessions rank right up there with a men's room conversation with a stranger at the very next urinal, while the stranger is pooping in it.

Made me drop a lol.