I thought it was pretentious too until you mentioned the t-shirts.
…Bob Chipman and AronRa? The problem is that once I start naming people where it’s not pretentious, nobody has a fucking clue what I’m talking about.
“Gamers are dead” is not an attack on gamer identity. “_______ is dead” is an editorial trope that’s been in fashion since Nietzsche declared God is dead in 1882. Pretty much every movement, genre, identity or style gets declared dead at some point.
I want to write something florid about how it prompts us to take a moment to examine the identities we take on, but really that’s giving it too much weight. It’s a high-school journalism headline that’s as common and predictable as it gets.
If y’all really can’t handle that (and I suspect you can and we are now fighting just to be fighting) I don’t know what to say. You’ve become as irrelevant as Trekkies or fanboys- an interesting phenomenon but not really connected to the rest of the world and utterly unimportant except to maybe sociologists wanting to study a community.
Media gets critiqued. Media that people take seriously gets critiqued more. Grown ups are able to handle someone not liking something they like. Grow up, or marginalized yourself. Those are the options.
As long as gamers are spending hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars on the industry this won’t be the case.
This is exactly the sort of defensive response that supports Leigh Anderson’s argument that gamers are over.
Someone secure in his or status doesn’t need to make the “I am still relevant” argument.
And it ignores the larger point that the growth in the industry is on non-traditional sectors.
Just like how Hollywood now makes its movies for the overseas market instead of the traditional domestic market.
A very small number of movies are made by the big industry players for movie buffs. The industry cares more about the segment whose identity is not tied up in the medium because there’s more money there. That’s the change that’s coming to video games and that’s what “gamers are over” means.
I’ve said multiple times that I don’t consider myself a gamer. Therefore, I’m very secure in my status as “not a gamer”. I suppose if you want to ignore this because it makes it easier to paint me with your own brush, go for it.
That said, anyone who thinks that the industry is going to ignore billions of dollars because “Well, you’re just irrelevant and unimportant like Trekkies” is having a major Pollyanna moment. That’s not called being “defensive”, that’s called being “realistic”.
Independent cinema buffs don’t spend billions on watching small indie movies and buying movie watching equipment.
In a world where Grand Theft Auto V and Call of Duty: Ghosts have sold more than 50 million copies combined, the ideas that “traditional games” is going away is absurd. And as we hashed out above, what is the difference between a “traditional game” and a “post-gamer” game?
Growth is occurring in all parts of the game industry. It’s only the massive, exponential growth that is occurring solely with cell phone games. Regular console games and PC titles are still growing, it’s just a much smaller jump.
Huh? What’s an interesting phenomenon? Video games? People who play video games? The word “gamer”? Since when are Trekkies or fanboys irrelevant? What does that even mean?
I don’t really understand what these two statements are going on about and I don’t think gamergate has made the cultural penetration you think it has.
Look, I can’t keep track of what people claim as their personal identities and it’s not even relevant. I’m responding to arguments. Just read any reference to “you” as a generic you instead of as a personal commentary.
I don’t even know where this comes from. A few social/cultural/pop culture critics have tried to make a few points, among them:
-
There are some very common elements in certain types of video games that raise troubling questions about depiction of women.
-
Women gamers and game developers often face a hostile social environment when they try to play games with people or participate in gaming forums.
-
Women game developers often face a hostile culture in the gaming industry.
-
Gaming has reached it is reaching a level of popularity among the general public that justifies encouragement and acceptance—as opposed to hostility—to a much broader and diverse world of game consumers, game critics, and game developers.
-
Sooner or later, the industry is going to wake up go trends that show that there is a much broader potential market to go after.
These comments have been answered with a remarkable degree of hostility and abuse.
Follow up responses to that abuse is where the “gamers are over” analysis comes in. It’s an attempt to understand the phenomenal shit-fit tantrum that a segment of gamer culture is throwing—what are its origins and, ultimately, does it matter?
Leigh Anderson’s answer is “ultimately, it doesn’t matter,” because in her view the economics of the gaming industry are changing to the extent that this one group of people throwing a shit-fit are not in the long term significant enough for the industry to care about their shit-fit.
No one is actually saying that some genre of games that these people like I s about to go away. So long as they buy games, the industry will make games that they buy. And neither Leigh Anderson nor Anita Sarkeesian has said anything along the lines of “the industry should stop making the kinds of games that these people like to play.”
The question is about the culture of hostility and tribalism and claiming of privilege as an identity group outside of the basic economic activity of making of and buying of games and the way it actually does actively alienate both game players and game makers and game reviewers who are women or approach games from a different.
When they say “gamers are over” they’re saying not that they are dead as a consumer group but as an in-group social group, the hegemony they seek to exercise about what is a real game and who is a real gamer and who should be allowed to comment on games or participate in game forums is going to come to an end.
The problem is that “gamer” is too easy of a shorthand for “someone who plays games” for it to be ever “over.” The phrase will always exist. Just as people use moviegoer for movies and reader for someone who likes books.
What’s going away is the arguments over who is a “real gamer.” If GamerGate does nothing else, it’ll push this ugly question into the abyss once and for all.
I don’t think that hegemony ever existed outside of the internet and even inside it was limited to certain spheres such as /v/. Vivian James means nothing to most of the gamers I interact with in real life.
It’s not a “problem.” It’s just a turn of phrase.
But that social group is directly tied to the economic side. They hang out in the gaming forums, they hang out in tech forums, they’re the people to buy $600 graphic cards when they come on the market and collector’s edition boxes of Dragon Age with cloth map of the game world and poseable Morrigan figurine. They have the potential to exercise considerable influence on the content of games and potentially gaming media.
I don’t really care if it’s true, but I’m incredibly skeptical that “Gamers are over”. Really, I haven’t seen any real evidence that “gamers are over” besides a bunch of articles on Gawker Media sites self-congratulatorily saying that it’s true.
Exactly. “GamerGate” is unknown to most gamers. Instead, what most of them are hearing is that a bunch of psychotics leveled death threats against multiple developers and a critic.
Then what are you babbling about? “Gamer” isn’t going away as a descriptor and its definitely not going away as a social group.
Actually, while he is responsible for its presence in popular language, the BFI himself claims that Hazlett coined the term.
TMYK!
It is astonishing yo me that you can read all this and still think this is literally about the word “gamer.”
Both the above paragraphs might be entirely true, but since this whole thing is not about the definition or use or really anything else about the word “gamer,” it’s entirely irrelevant.
It’s like someone saying “I’d like to address the George Bush problem” and a bunch of people jumping up and down saying “Hey, my name is George Bush and I resent being labeled as a problem.”
Just to clarify, my point isn’t that gamers are or aren’t over-- I don’t really care, and it’s a dumb discussion anyway.
My point is that gamers (or whatever) need to learn to accept people making basic social commentary about games, just like they do about every single other medium out there, without throwing a hissy fit or pretending to misunderstand what’s being talked about.
That’s fair. I think Sarkeesian’s videos are pretty poor and her arguments worthy of criticism but she has every right to make them.
I’m finding it rather astonishing you can type all this. If as you say, it’s not about the word gamer, why are you continuing to use it? If the problem is assholes who play games then say that. If you’re trying to address an asshole problem by referring to said group as gamers, you’re going to get pushback from people who don’t understand that you’ve added a new non-intuitive descriptor in your mind to the word gamer.