5 Reasons It's Still Not Cool to Admit You're a Gamer
Let's get this out of the way right now: The only reason I don't have more game consoles hooked to my TV is because I'm out of ports on the back for cables to plug into, and I don't want to have to get off the sofa to switch over. I've been playing video games since the Carter administration. So do not compare me to Roger "I never play video games yet dismiss them as worthless" Ebert here. Just... don't. I would have taken my SNES as my date to senior prom if they had let me.
But the thing is, I grew up. Gaming didn't.
Why? Why is it that of all my many hobbies--reading, motocross, Gun Kata--only gaming lowers my sense of self worth? Maybe it's because...
#5.
We Can't Shake the "Lonely, Anti-Social Virgin" Stereotype
Oh, look. Somebody has launched a goddamned service where you pay women to play video games with you. Eight bucks for 10 minutes.
Creepily ogling girls should be free, like air. Or porn.
For that amount, she'll chat with you, or even let you look at her on webcam while you play games and awkwardly flirt. Afterward you get to rate the girl on her, "hotness, gaming skill, and flirtiness."
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. There isn't an industrial disinfectant on the market that could make a woman feel clean again after a day of doing this. So, here's what I can't wrap my mind around:
Everybody plays video games now, right? My mom plays them. Yet, there is still a "if you have touched a video game controller, you have never touched a boob" stigma attached. It's so universally believed that somebody put up a whole lot of capital to start a business cashing in on it. And damn, do us gamers ever play the part. Get us on chat or an Xbox Live headset with a female and suddenly we're drunk on puberty juices.
Here's something I bet you didn't know: Two thirds of online gamers are women, according to one study. If you're thinking that doesn't match your experience at all, it's because they either avoid male-dominated games or they go undercover--70 percent of them intentionally choose male avatars so they don't have to put up with our "TITS OR GTFO" bullshit. That's just sad.
"But wait!" you say, "Everybody takes shit in online games! It's not just women!" Oh, I know. Our inability as a community to demonstrate any kind of human social skills extends in all directions.
Somehow that doesn't make me feel better.
I spent years putting up with the "gamers are pale loners crouched in the dark among Mountain Dew bottles and pizza boxes" stereotype--one that persists right up to the main character in Zombieland. Now that's transitioned to "gamers are all 17-year-old douchebags." That's not an improvement.
Of course, one problem is...
#4.
The Industry Thinks We're All 17-Year-Old Douchebags
I'm no prude; I'm the guy who made my publisher use a font where all the T's look like uncircumcised dongs. But I'm also an adult, with a wife. A homeowner who works very hard to maintain something that looks like dignity to people who catch a glimpse of it from passing cars.
But it's hard for me to maintain my self-image as a mature, upstanding member of the community when I sit down to enjoy my favorite hobby and see stuff like this (WARNING: massively Not Safe for Work). That clip is from God of War 3, one of the best-reviewed titles of this generation. This "Rated 'M' for 'Mature'" title features a minigame where you, the God of War, come across Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and boning. You walk in on her in a giggling naked lesbian threesome:
She then casts aside her two female lovers to invite you to her bed. You crawl in and the camera pans away. We hear moans and ooh's and ah's as button prompts appear, walking you through the process of thrusting your gray and red erection in and out, bringing Aphrodite to orgasm. Meanwhile, the camera focuses on the two rejected topless females across the room, who are now watching and fondling each other's bodies while mewling admiring phrases like:
"Such power!"
"If it's this good watching, just imagine!"
"Is he going to...."
"By the gods!"
Eventually they get so aroused from the spectacle that they turn their lust on each other, and start having lesbian sex on the floor.
Again, "Mature" is the rating, and I've come to learn that "Mature" in video game land means "teenage male." So here we are again with the stereotype, the games themselves selling the kind of sex fantasy that appeals to specifically to males who have never actually had a relationship with a female.
When you're in your mid-teens, hormones thundering through your system, popping wheelies and doing donuts in your brain, you tend to think of women as giggling titty support systems who exist only to give you something to masturbate to. Then we actually get to know some real women and grow out of it.
Gaming has never grown out of it. I pop in Street Fighter IV and my very first match is against a grown woman in a Japanese schoolgirl fetish costume.
But hey, what about games where the female is the hero? You know, like Bayonetta, the woman who seductively sucks on a lollipop during cut-scenes, whose special moves require her to get naked.
This would be the game where the modeler boasts about how lovingly they crafted the character's ass.
Then you have Resident Evil 5, where you can control Sheva Alomar, a strong, heroic, capable African woman...
...and your reward for beating the game is you get to make her dress like this:
Again, I have no problem with putting sex or sexuality in entertainment. Sex is part of life, so it should naturally be part of our movies and TV shows and games. But these are the digital equivalent of inflatable sex dolls. It's embarrassing and insulting, not because I'm a staunch feminist, but because I don't like the assumption it's making about me (that I'm an emotionally stunted, sexually frustrated teenage male). It's like even award-winning video games have the sensibility of made-for-Cinemax B movies. Maybe that's because...
#3.
Video Game Storytelling is Still at the Level of B Movies
Have a glance at a list of the best-selling Xbox 360 games ever. I can tell you I've played and enjoyed each of the top five. But here's the storyline for each of them:
Faceless Space Soldier Guns Down Many, Many Aliens.
Faceless Earth Soldier Guns Down Many, Many Foreigners.
Different Space Soldier Guns Down Many, Many Aliens.
Different Space Soldier Guns Down Many, Many Aliens Again.
Eastern European Man Bent on Revenge Kills Everyone in New York.
Successfully completing those five games required me to kill, oh, about 10 million people. There was a death on screen about every five seconds. Movies structured this way--two minutes of plot and 20 minutes of slaughter--would be considered grindhouse cheese, direct-to-DVD stuff starring Steven Seagal that we'd never admit to enjoying when talking to anyone we cared about impressing. Guilty pleasures.
The original title of Hard to Kill was, in fact, Guilty Pleasure.
With very, very few exceptions, video game plots are stuck at this level. It's storytelling at its most primitive: good guy with a gun, thousands of bad guys, the happy ending comes when you make enough of the bad guys dead. Characters are crude, cartoonish archetypes--grizzled soldier, grizzled gangster, femme fatale, cool hit man, bumbling fat guy, robot.
Pimp, etc.
Now, within five minutes of this article's posting, somebody in the comments will mention Bioshock. I've played that one, too. And loved it. Still, 90 percent of what transpired on screen was me mowing down room after room of faceless bad guys. If you make a movie where 90 of the 100 minutes of runtime is people getting their faces blown off--even if you fill the other 10 minutes with speeches about objectivism--every critic will use the same word to describe it:
"Mindless."
Don't tell me it's unfair to compare games to movies, either. When even Mario games come with dialogue and cutscenes, it's crystal clear that gaming wants to be a storytelling medium. You can judge a culture by the stories it tells, and you can judge the maturity of video gaming and gamers the same way.
Cue suggestive lollipop
But damn, we're about to hit the 40-year mark on video games as a form of mass media. Forty years after movies were invented (the late 1930s), Hollywood was making The Wizard of Oz--a movie that people are still renting and buying 70 years later (they even re-released it back into theaters in 1998 and it made about $20 million--there were people still willing to leave the house and buy a ticket to see it).
Will people still be playing Bioshock 70 years from now? Hell, hardly anybody is playing it now. Sometimes I pop it in and it makes me feel really smart for five minutes, then I spend the next hour firing a flame thrower at a giant mutant with drill hands.
But that really has nothing to do with the game.
Forty years of evolution, and here we are. So why are games overwhelmingly mindless, when gamers aren't? Well...
Such a shame about the negative stigma that is associated with being a gamer. Most of us are really normal people, but it just takes a few douchebags to make a scene and suddenly every non-gamer groups us together.
ReplyObviously though, sometimes developers are to blame too, I have a mate who loves playing WoW, but constantly complains about how ridiculously revealing the female armors are. A non-gamer sees this and immideately thinks that all WoW players are highly hormonal virgins
Lol. The WoW Freakout was taken down by youtube for third-party infringement reasons.
ReplyHe makes a lot of good points, but I take issue with his comment on Bioshock, the reason that it's mostly gameplay is because it's a game. A movie is two hours, a game is anywhere from five to a hundred. We play games for interactive entertainment, strung together with a story, we watch movies to be given a story. Games can have amazing stories, and should, but a game's first priority should be gameplay.
ReplyWTF?! Did anyone see that Spore alien?! XD
ReplyNo, No one else saw the f*****g picture in the middle of the f*****g page, you must have super-fucking-vision. You fuck.
PC gamers complain about CoD only being 9vs9?!?!?!? WTF? so they get used to massive 100 player epics, while us on the regular platforms only get 9vs9, do we complain? no we are f*****g happy about it, that to me says PC gamers are a group of spoilt little brats who endlessly b***h when they dont get there own way.
Replyrant over.
That hurt me, and they say the truth hurts...
well when u talk about the lack of story telling in games all i have to say is Bethsda, creators of the Elder Scrolls series, prehaps the most detailed games ever, with books that fill out every part of the game world, and a system that means the killing everything in sight isnt the only option, and then theres Fallout 3 and New Vegas.
ReplyYour missing the point, the actual story of the game is like a b rated movie. Thumb me down if you honestly thought the main story of skyrim would have been considered a if it were a movie.
I have never played a videogame. There I said it.
ReplyYou seem to be forgetting the number 1 attraction of video games in #3... They're supposed to be interactive. I get that they should have a good story, but they can't be purely story. MGS would be a great example of a blend of story and game, but even that goes a bit overboard. You say that Bioshock is 90% shooting people and 10% story (which is pretty false, since the story progresses as you shoot people), but isn't that what a game should be? I mean, back when Mario was released, it was 99.9% jumping on mushroom's heads, and 0.1% story, and that pretty much launched an entire form of entertainment. Basically, what I'm getting at is that games should have a good story, but that doesn't mean the story should completely overshadow the actual game aspect. We play games mainly to have fun; good storytelling is just a byproduct of that.
ReplyThe only time I will pretend to not be a woman online (because it's just really annoying when you keep getting kicked from L4D2 lobbies after 5 seconds of awkward silence) is when I'm in the mood to listen to peoples' hilarious reactions to having a woman in their lobby that could kick all of their asses combined at Guitar Hero, Call of Duty, Left 4 Dead (2), and pretty much every online game there is except WoW because I do have a life, contrary to popular belief.
ReplyIt's not really sexist... It's just fear of the unknown. And a lot of male gamers online are still afraid to let anything that bares a vagina anywhere near their digital M-16s and flamethrowers.
Final Fantasy 7. Proof that not all video games have bad stories.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesThat's just one example. Do you have anything else to cite?
~@ Rayos~
Terranigma, Metroid: Fusion, Golden Sun, Jade Cocoon: Legend of the Tamamayu, The entire ZERO series of MegaMan...
... Oh, I'm sorry... was that just an asshole-reflex-induced RHETORICAL question? I could really go on, but let's not waste the precious seconds you thought you had because you were so damn sure Video Games have always sucked at telling a story.
Lol, metroid fusion? I enjoyed it, but not because of its paper-thin story.
I think it was somethingawful where I read (paraphrasing):
"They only think the games have good stories because they've never been exposed to real literature. If you read them a Keats poem they'd all have strokes."
Planescape: Torment, Baldurs Gate saga, Deus Ex 1 & Human Revoliutions (in which you only need to kill like 3 people). What about adventure games like Grim Fandango? Seems like you only started playing games a couple of years ago and only blockbuster titles aimed at console kiddies. Oh and about piracy, I'm gonna paraphrase Gabe from Valve: we've never cared about piracy, it has always been a low priority for us, because if you produce a good product and don't f**k with your clients, they will want to buy your games. Oh and Spore was a good example of this, the reason it was pirated so many times was because Ubisoft included some s****y DRM and made the game installable 3 times per purchase, which ticked off the community, hence turning Spore into the most pirated game of all time. If PC gamers are mostly pirates and consoles are where the big bucks are at, then how come a company like Blizzard is not only able to stay afloat, but also be one of the most successful companies in the market? FFS Blizzcon is arguably bigger and better than E3. Not to mention Valve. Notice how both companies produce games almost exclusively for the PC and only quality games, not buggy, low value money grabs with generic characters and stories, that console kiddies love so much.
ReplySimply "not killing people" is not a story. Puzzle games are no more inherently "storied" than shooters.
As for Blizzard, WOW. Monthly subscriptions are substantial.
Oh come on now. Some game's stories are idiotic, but if they're WAR GAMES (FPS, RTS, etc.), of course you're going to have to kill a bunch of enemies. It's practically the point of the games. And movies and games are both storytelling mediums, but like I mentioned above, FPS games serve basically two functions: they have you kill bad guys, and tell you a story (which may or may not be good). In a movie, the whole thing is a story. No gameplay, and a time limit.
ReplyI pretty much agreed with every point, but the author left some facts out to support his arguments at times. Mainly on the topic of piracy. Sure, 1.7M copies of Spore was pirated in the first 3 months, an impressive number, but 2M was sold in the first 3 weeks (Sept '08), and it was the #3 highest-selling PC game in Dec '08, 3 months after its release. This is similar to Capcom's Street Fighter 4--it was also pirated in high numbers but it was also one of the highest-selling PC games.
ReplyThe misconception with digital piracy is that it is comparable to physical piracy in terms of financial impact; it isn't. When you physically pirate something, YOU have the object of value now and the owner lost it. When you digitally pirate something you AND the owner both have the object of value. A Cracked user summed it up nicely
"Creating a copy isn't stealing.
To be stolen from, you have to lose something. If I steal your car, you don't have your car. If I copy your car, you still have your original car. But now I have a car as well. How is this theft?"
Ecologically, it can also be thought of as commensalism, a relationship between two organisms where one organism benefits and the other is not affected negatively or positively.
One might bring up the argument that "the company lost a potential sale". That could be true, but more often than not the pirate wouldn't have bought it in the first place! Where am I getting that information? Admittedly I can cite no scientific study and only cite my own (Joe Blow) observations on human psychology and behaviour. Some pirates would not be able to afford the game in the first place, and so while "ethically" they shouldn't play it in the first place because of this, the argument is that the company lost a potential sale, which they haven't. And yes, it is true that there are pirates who buy the game if they like it. I find it more difficult finding a pirate who won't pay for any games if they can afford to.
And to those saying Anti-Piracy measures only affect pirates... you lot have obviously been lucky in your purchases or did not do your research: Anti-Piracy measures have also affected legitimate consumers negatively. I didn't have a problem, but many users did when they were installing Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory because of StarForce. I also have a purchased copy of SSF4: AE on Steam and Capcom/Games for Windows Live won't allow me to load or save my progress when I play offline single-player... come on man. HDCP also causes problems.
"Sex is part of life, so it should naturally be part of our movies and TV shows and games."
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesI completely disagree with that. For one thing, I'm a girl, so I don't want to see other girls naked (and I don't really want to see guys naked either). Also, I don't think non-perverts like myself should have nudity forced upon them through media. There are barely any movies left that don't have some form of nudity and/or sex in them. If you want to see someone having sex, then watch porn, but don't force it on people like me through non-porn movies.
im sorry to say, but its a male dominated industry, your gonna have that no matter what. I think at this point its really apart of the expiereince, and anyone would be hard pressed to get rid of it.
You still watch TV O.o?!
That's odd. Virtually every woman I know likes to look at nude women
Assassins Creed does an amazing job with the storytelling -even if you're mostly running around killing people the majority of the time. My husband literally won't play the quests if I'm not home to watch, Iiterally will watch him play for hours because the story is just as good (if not better) than a lot of the movies these days. There's a history and reason for the characters actions and motivations and I find the story as compelling as the game playing. I'm a Zelda girl myself but Assissians Creed has definitely opened me up to playing other types of games.
ReplyI think he misses the point; it's true that games can be compared to movies, but if you changed them in the way stated, why make the game when you could just watch a movie?
ReplyAlso, the humble indie bundle made more than $1 million.
Compared to conventional games, the Humble Indie Bundle didn't make that much. And the piracy is costing them money.
WHAT how can someone mock alan wakes graphics? the game looks buetifal and has an amazing story, beaten only by L.A. Noire, plus great gameplay.
ReplyI realised this was made after the article but, L.A. Noire, basicly the god of all stories and paces out the shootouts and chases 2x better then A movies, so when a shootout comes it feels special and funnier.
ReplyWell, the thing is that gamers are shitheads. Nobody in their right mind would treat them like actual adults.
ReplyWhere do you gotta go to apply to play video games with nerds for money?
Reply