Unfettered Blather

Welcome, welcome to the 4th installment of Blog Banter, the monthly blogging extravaganza headed by bs angel! Blog Banter involves our cozy community of enthusiastic gaming bloggers, a common topic, and a week to post articles pertaining to said topic. The results are quite entertaining and can range from deep insight to ROFLMAO. Any questions about Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

When non-gamers talk about gamers they seem to focus on two major stereotypes.

The first is that they see gamers as being high-school or college boys, adolescent boys in other words, with short attention spans, foul-mouths, and sexist attitudes. They’re assumed to be dateless perverts whose social interaction is largely about who they “pwned” recently while playing Halo 3. These people do exist and they are as annoying and socially irredeemable as they sound.

The second stereotype assumes that a gamer is a little older but is really just a variation on the above. They hold some unimportant dead-end job and still live with their parents where they spend most of their time playing games and collect ridiculously proportioned statuettes of their favorite women from videogames and comic books. They may or may not have an action figure and/or comic book collection. Essentially they are a darker and creepier version of the first stereotype. Again, they do exist but are not anywhere near the norm that some people believe. In fact, these people are largely eschewed by the gaming community in general. Not that you can tell since those that do exist tend to congregate on the Internet and are quite a loud and prolific bunch having nothing better to do with their time. To say they are over-represented is possibly one of the greatest understatements I could make this year.

Demographics I find oddly absent are as follows -

Children, I suppose, are not really seen as “gamers”. Video games are still largely seen as toys and so when a child is playing a game it seems natural. When an adult plays a game they are seen as immature. I’m guessing this is why parents buy games called Condemned, Grand Theft Auto, or Manhunt because despite their titles they must be for children since they’re games. Right?

Women are largely absent from any kind of stereotype because it is still assumed there are so few of them. Odd because while that may have been true when I first started gaming, which was over 20 years ago, every year I see more and more women become visible in gaming. In their defense, I see many women reluctant to make themselves visible because it only takes a few socially retarded gamers to go nuts over being around “a girl” and I understand why many women prefer to keep to very specific social groups. Furthermore, just as it takes only that one jerk to drive women away from a gaming group or community, it only takes that one women who wants to play off her gender to make social interaction that much more difficult for other women. Also, the one stereotype of women gamers is that they just play RPG’s, as if to say that the only way they can enjoy gaming is if they play the videogame equivalent of soap operas.

Having said all that, where do I fit into the equation? I understand why people stereotype, I just don’t understand how people can hold to them so tightly, especially when there is so much information that says your stereotype may not be true. Let’s take a look at me in a nutshell. I am a 34 year old software professional who has been married for 14 years and has two children. I have friends that I did not meet on-line and I think the extended state of my marriage attests to my ability to actually relate to the female gender. You could claim that I am the exception to the rule, but there are actually many people out there like myself.

PC gamers have always been a very small part of the population, and as such are often invisible. Console games, easier to use and often more accessible, were more attractive to the younger crowd and have sold better than PC games for as long as I remember. The reality is that a lot of PC gamers were older than the more visible console gamers but represented such a minority that they haven’t had much impact on the stereotype as a whole. As consoles have become more mainstream and some PC gamers, myself included, have begun to move over more to consoles I think the demographics have diversified to a point where the old stereotypes have been diluted sufficiently to become a minority in their own right. Societal perceptions are always behind the times, so I believe the stereotypes persist simply because individuals have not seen enough first-hand anecdotal evidence to believe that there are many people like myself who are gamers.

The other problem remains over-representation. The loudest and most prolific of commenters, community members, and game participants tends to be the two stereotypes I detailed earlier. Many gamers just game. They don’t necessarily participate in forums, run blogs, or run around from game to game talking smack and acting like jerkwads. For example, my brother-in-law mostly sticks to the PC and 360 has a regular group of people he games with. Aside from Halo 3, he rarely ventures beyond his usual circle of friends and associates. He is in upper management, married for 14 years (to my sister, the poor guy) and has three kids. Again, not anything like the stereotype. He is what I call an “avid casual gamer” in that while he plays I don’t see videogames as his “primary” hobby. Nonetheless, more and more gamers are starting to look like him.

Games have not been “just for kids” for decades now and gamers who are not children are also not necessarily immature adolescent smacktalking monkeys. The harm of these stereotypes comes from the constant outrage over videogames culminating in the usual media money shot “We must legislate for the children!” That’s my hobby you’re attacking and the industry hasn’t been focused on children for a long time now. In a time when we keep talking about how stereotypes are such bad things, I’m surprised at how often I continue to see stereotypes of gamers when so many of us don’t fit the standard. Not even a little.

Check out these other Blog Banter articles! The Average Gamer, Silvercublogger, shinybento, Unfettered Blather, Boom Stick Brigade, Gamer Unit, Zath!, Man Bytes Blog, Game Couch, Video Game Sandwich, Delayed Responsibility, thoughts and rants, Hawty McBloggy

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