I am 20 and I have been gaming for most of my free time and since it is the year 2013 I have always thought we were passed the ignorance of when other people looked down on gaming. But apparently I was wrong and I have found out that a lot of people still hold a hatred of video games. I would like to know why do so many bad mouth video games so much?
See also:
“Why do people look down on Tattoos/Piercings so much?”
“Why do people look down on Heavy Metal so much?”
“Why do people look down on Disco so much?”
“Why do people look down on Dungeons and Dragons so much?”
“Why do people look down on Rock and Roll so much?”
“Why do people look down on dancing so much?”
"Why do people look down on bowling so much?
“Why do people look down on rollerskating so much?”
There’s always been this idea that the current generation’s entertainment is bad for them and/or substandard to the previous generation’s entertainment. It passes. Frankly, I don’t think the stigma against video games is nearly what it was ten or fifteen years ago, when politicians were seemingly desperate to prove that it would be the end of humanity.
TimeWinder’s got it, but you need to add this: A lot of fans or practitioners of those once-marginal activities tend to be pretty sensitive about “not being appreciated.” The biggest “you gotta be shittin’ me” complain group I can think of was skateboarders, who for a while seemed to spend more time whining about being hated on than actually boarding.
They were hated on for destroying public and private property and being hazards to life and limb. Didn’t take a degree in rocket surgery. But to listen to them was to come away with the impression that jackbooted thugs were hunting all their kind down.
There is also the ever present sense of being a non-comformist. For as much as video games have become “mainstream” they still really aren’t.
I can’t think of more than 2 other people in my family that play video games. At work, it’s nearly the same. And no one talks about it outside of our little click. And none of the guys would dare mention the fact to any of the girls in the office.
Video games are still shorthand for loser, or idiot, or uneducated youth in movies and TV. How many times have we seen a TV episode where someone is described as a loser, and then, to illustrate the point, they show the person playing video games?
The mainstream looks down at the non-mainstream. They are befuddled by it. Why are these people not like the rest of us? They ask themselves. There must be something wrong with THEM, is the typical answer they end up settling on.
They’re children’s toys
Mature adults don’t have time to play games
I do think that we’re reaching a time when too many adults are familiar with video games for people to be easily persuaded to scapegoat them. I saw film of Mike Huckabee accompanying Ted Nugent on Cat Scratch Fever – a song that was, as many of the Rock ‘n’ Roll songs that were so villified in the 50’s were suspected (sometimes correctly) of being – about pussy.
I was actually a bit surprised at the scapegoating of video games rearing its ugly head again after recent shootings, but it didn’t really catch fire.
Not sure if serious.
There are certainly people who feel this way, but I think the stigma is far less now. In the 80s, video games really were a kids only sort of thing. However, those of us who grew up with them are now adults and the video game industry is huge business, and a lot of that catered to adults. 20 years ago, you didn’t have video game launches grossing $1 billion on launch like you do now.
As an adult with two kids and a job, I don’t play games even close to what I used to, but I usually find 1-3 hours a week to play.
Function of your age. Every single peer of mine games in some way. Some are pc gamers, some are console, some are handheld but everyone has something they do whether it’s Halo, CoD, Minecraft, L4D, or Pokemon. There is no stigma in the 20s and under set to admit to playing video games.
I’m in my 30s and vanishingly few of my friends play “proper” computer games (ie not Angry Birds/Candy Crush/Farmville etc). None of my colleagues do either.
There’s no stigma with it, they’re just not interested/don’t have the time.
It’s not limited to video games. Board game and pen and paper RPG enthusiasts also meet with cool reactions when they mention their hobby. I think it’s because while plenty of people play games, they don’t elevate that particular pastime to the level of a hobby. They might spend a lot more time playing Angry Birds or Spider Solitaire, but their hobbies, for public consumption at least, are photography or running.
I know people who seem to love board games, so long as it’s Pictionary or Apples to Apples, but as soon as something as “heavy” as Munchkins or Settlers of Catan make an appearance they act like a child presented with an unfamiliar entree.
My dad once expressed surprise at how much time we could spend playing a game, I think it was Betrayal at the House on the Hill, which can run 90 minutes. I pointed out that even when it runs long, that particular game is shorter than a baseball or football game. I really wish he would’ve played with us. He was smart, good at cards, he might’ve had fun with BatHotH.
As for people actually hating videogames, well, I don’t really know many who do. One who says she does is this woman who claims she ditched a boyfriend because he bought an Xbox.
Yeah, and nobody I know likes country music or rap.
I think a large part of it is the active nature of games. When you play games you have to be paying some attention, think about your next move, often use some reflexes. In reality, it’s not very complex (I’ve certainly played Borderlands on almost complete autopilot), but to the casual observer we appear much more invested than somebody who watches The Walking Dead every night. I think games begin to look a lot like people who watch Inception 5 times with a notepad and pencil taking notes, or those who have impassioned arguments over the intricate character traits that separate the various Doctors from Doctor Who.
A lot of this is that we can have seemingly detailed discussions about minutiae, like which weapon or item or unit we like best and why. Again, in most real cases these aren’t really much more complex or informed than talking about why your least favorite character in a sitcom is a jerk (or your favorite Quaterback’s track record), but when you start throwing out math-sounding terms like “damage per second” or talk about simulated “bullet drop”, or “invincibility frames” or “how well this weapon scales with the strength stat” it sounds like something that requires far more analysis and investment than it really does.
Somebody can watch TV for 8 hours a day and claim they’re not really “doing anything”, but if you play a game for 8 hours a day, it looks a lot more like you’re invested in the game because of the active nature. Yeah, there is some research that games are more active on a cognitive level than TV, but in reality both people are generally just sitting back, slacking off, and enjoying themselves. But I can’t deny that the gamer looks like they’re more into it than the person watching the TV marathon.
One of my senior colleagues told me once that he thought video games were bad because they were isolating.
I pointed out that while this certainly can happen, (1) when my boyfriend and I were long-distance, playing video games was one of the few activities we could do together; (2) We made some real-world friends from playing video games; (3) Sometimes we get together with friends IRL so that we can all play the same game together in the same room; (4) Even with single-player games, we’ll discuss the plot and game mechanics with our friends in the same way that we’d discuss a novel we’d all read.
So, saying “video games are bad because they’re isolating” is like saying, “sports are bad because they cause injuries,” or “alcohol is bad because it causes hangovers.”
I never understood why video games are weird while fantasy football is perfectly acceptable. I know which one is weirder and trust me, it’s not video games.
I’m in my late thirties and I’ve been gaming since the Atari system came out. I think I got it when I was 8, or 10 - I can’t remember which. Since I’d been doing it since a child, I saw no reason to stop.
I started playing D&D in my 20s. If we’d had a kid, we’d have probably taught her to play D&D and even played with her, and also taught her video games. Since we don’t have one, we play with each other, and sometimes alone. Nothing is isolating if you don’t want to be.
Currently since I am in school I have very limited amounts of time to play…but that’s the beauty of games. if you only have 30 minutes free, you can play a game for 30 minutes and have fun. You don’t have to be an addict to enjoy.
But the stigma is still there. I remember being on a message board for one of my classes and a woman mentioned she liked to “play games sometimes, including Angry Birds.” So I asked her about what other kinds of games she played, and listed a couple, and she came back with, “Oh, I don’t play any video games! I’m just far too busy and have too much important stuff going on in my life.” Falling over herself to protest.
TBH, I never really understand why anyone judges anyone for their hobbies, even those fantasy football freaks. 
Spending your own money? Enjoying yourself? Still maintaining the rest of your life? Then go for it! Be it cosplaying, furrydom or what-have-you, enjoy it!
I can’t even fathom those of you who are saying you don’t know anyone who plays video games. Other than my grandparents and other people that age, I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t play at least some video games. And I don’t separate out games like Zuma’s Revenge, Angry Birds, Candy Crush, Plants vs Zombies, etc as “not really video games.” They are just as much a video game as anything is. The only reason people even try to categorize them as “not really video games” is because they have some stigma against games and don’t want to admit what they are doing.
Anyhow, gaming is a great hobby, and it can enrich your life as much as any healthy hobby can. Taken to an extreme, it is a bad thing, and people should be focused on leading a balanced healthy life. But almost all of my closest friendships that I have in my life have been because of meeting them through video games or video gaming groups. I grew up playing video games with my Dad and sister, and watching him play games when I was too young to play them very well. My Mom and I have competed for high scores on Bejeweled Blitz on facebook. My sister and I struggled to beat Jamestown on the highest difficulty with our friends for weeks and had a blast doing it.
Video games are pretty much a part of everyone’s lives now, even if the only games they play are the extremely casual light ones. It is often very easy to obsess over those games just as much as you could a more complicated one. I know people who never cared much about video games in general, but when Angry Birds came out suddenly they were hooked and weren’t happy with anything less than 3 stars on every level. How this is meaningfully different from me when I worked tirelessly to get all 120 stars in Mario 64 is a mystery to me.
I guess, in general, what I’m saying, is that there isn’t a lot of hate or looking down on video games and people who play them. Now, if you’re sinking 8 hours a day, several days a week, into video games, then yeah, you deserve to be looked down on. I’d say the same thing about a person who watches tv or any other non-productive task for that long.
It’s not so much that anyone looks down on playing games, it’s more about letting, or appearing to let, a leisure activity define you as a person. If you called yourself a puzzler, and spent all your free time doing jigsaw puzzles, people would probably have the same reaction.
Pshaw. Of course they do. “I play video games” is not remotely greeted with the same feelings as “I knit” or “I read” or “I make jewelry”. Video games is considered stupid and plebian and also teenager-y.
This. One of the really significant changes in videogames since the 80s has been the incorporation of actual stories, narratives beyond “get the frog across the road.” (Of course, text-based adventures, like Zork, were built out of complex narrative, as were the LucasArts games later, but they never had the popularity of arcade-style games). As computers got faster and (crucially) storage became cheaper, it became a lot easier to include video cut-scenes or in-game cut-scenes, or simply give videogame characters actual voices during gameplay. And once you do that, there’s a strong incentive to have all these characters saying interesting things. Boom! There’s pressure towards story-telling in mainstream games.
A quick note, for the OP: It’s also possible that what you perceive as a dim view of videogaming is simply a dim view of you spending most of your free time playing videogames. Nothing wrong with videogames, but there’s also a whole world out there, to say nothing of books, film, live music, and so on. Playing videogames is a worthy past-time, but you’re missing out on a lot if it’s your only past-time.
Which is what pisses me off now when games don’t have an easy pause option or an easy save option. I don’t care if it’s “harder” to have to go to specific save places, I need to be able to save at any time. I have a busy life. I can’t sit through stupidly long cut scenes and not be able to pause, and I need to be able to save at a moment’s notice.
Gaming companies should notice that their demographic is getting older as well as younger, and it’s us adults who have the discretionary income to buy their games.
Oh, but they are. I’ve especially seen it with scrapbookers, but also knitters. And there’s been all kinds of threads on this board about readers being told to “get their nose out of books”. Even sports fans are often thought of as juvenile by people who don’t like sports.
I’m 53, I play video games, and nobody gives me grief about it. But I don’t talk about it all the time, and I don’t give anyone the impression that that’s all I do.
That doesn’t mean it’s OK to put down people for their interests or hobbies, it’s not. But it doesn’t just happen to gamers, and it doesn’t happen to all gamers.