Game for Gamers

In a high profile piece for New Statesman last month, Simon Parkin writes "If you love games, you should refuse to be called a gamer."  Dennis Scimena follows up Parkin's thoughts in Salon with "Why I can't call myself a gamer anymore."  It's natural to soapbox against discrimination that affects oneself; it takes principles to adhere to the same standard when discrimination goes against someone else.   Both Parkin and Scimena deserve kudos for taking a stand against prejudice. Yet it's possible to admire people while disagreeing with them.

What Simon Parkin wants to do is erase the notion of a "gaming community."

The term is a miserable legacy of the medium’s niche past, where video games were viewed as the sole preserve of white, western indoors-y teenagers. The cliché has proven indelible. ‘Gamers’ (a term that further segregates ‘players’, while adding unwelcome ghost notes that call to mind the gambling industry) are routinely represented in media as socially inept boys with poor hygiene and a proclivity for impotent rage...

Parkin's examples are cogent, as Scimena summarizes.

Parkin feels that the idea of the “gaming community,” and its endemic misogyny, transphobia and rape culture, all need to die, and by extension, anyone who has adopted an identity as a “gamer” needs to give it up.

It would be pointless to deny that their objections lack basis.  Just yesterday the following arrived in my in-game inbox.  This doesn't happen every day, or even particularly often.  It was written a few hours after midnight on January 1 in North America, and although I have no idea which time zone this was sent from it isn't difficult to imagine him groaning with a hangover a few hours afterward--and also reeling with well deserved embarrassment.

I don't know the fellow who sent it.  We aren't even acquaintances.  Didn't answer, of course.  And yeah, passed this to the appropriate staff at the gaming company.  They're professionals with good judgment.  The question here is not whether this bothers me personally (it doesn't much) but whether it's a one-off.  If this dude goes around writing to random women like that it's a problem because of course that message is completely inappropriate.

So here's the question: do we cede the term gamer to the sort of guy who does this?  In particular do we cede that ground to not just to the dude who does it once when deep in his cups on the Holiday of Drinking Binges but to the guy who makes it a habit?  Is this a more authentic expression of gaming enthusiasm than anyone else's?  Or is it a steaming mound of horse manure?

I vote horse manure.  And I'm not handing that person ownership of the word gamer.  I'm a gamer.  Frankly, most guys in the gaming community aren't that doofus.  Not even once in a blue moon.  Yes, we get transgressive behavior.  Transgressive behavior happens everywhere on the Internet.  Sometimes it's trolling, sometimes it's poor impulse control, sometimes it's just the belief that the Intenet is a space without social consequences.  Occasionally it's real bigotry; that exists too.  But I'm not about to retreat from being a gamer over that.  And the good news is that about 98% of men, Simon Parkin and Dennis Scimena included, don't take to behavior like that either.