Per Smithsonian.
Sorry, I really don’t consider Candy Crush and sudoku as ‘gaming’. When you can fly an armageddon in null sec without dying, call me.:dubious:
If those are games and women play them, that logically makes those women gamers even if they play games you or I don’t.
This has been true since at least 2005, possibly earlier.
Well, a generation of war gamers were shocked to hear that roleplayers considered themselves gamers, and my generation of roleplayers were appalled to hear that people who only played video games considered themselves gamers. Now, people who play phone games are being labeled ‘gamers’? We really must put our collective feet down and insist that collectable card games are the divinding line, and even that I have complaints about.
I saw an article recently in which Ron Delancey, former Brand Manger for Wizards of the Coast defined hobby gaming as those games on which at least one person spends more time outside the game than actually playing. People playing QuizUp are having fun, sure, but they’re not gamers.
At this massive gaming store we have nearby, I often see young girls playing, well, principally collectible card games, but also not rarely Pathfinder or the new Star Wars. I’d like to see solid data on that, not a bunch of phone games.
Meanwhile, when it comes to griefers, adolescent boys still outnumber women & non-adolescent men by a ratio of 15:1.
Personally, I define gamer as anyone who self identifies as gamer. If gaming means enough to you to call yourself a gamer, you’re in. This definition probably does exclude most farmvillers, because the farmvillers probably don’t consider it that big a part of their personality.
Trying to exclude certain games by genre is silly. Sudoku, and heck, even crossword puzzles, probably do more for your brain than most JRPGs and other grindfests. Yes, games like tapped out and FarmVille barely count as games, but this very forum has an 800 page thread on Cookie Clicker. And again JRPGS and some MMORPGs don’t ask too much more from you than FarmVille, and they are accepted as gamer games.
Splitting it by platform is even worse than by genre. A lot of phone games are FarmVille/Mafia Wars/etc, but a lot of them aren’t. If i didn’t convince you to not write off people playing bad games as not gamers, you still can’t write off phone gamers because there a lot of good phone games.
Of course your definition of gamer changes drastically depending on why you care. If I were trying to sell a console, my definition of gamer would be very different than if I were just trying to determine who should be called a gamer socially.
Why do they have to be computer/console games? I would say that anyone who spends a significant part of their time playing games is a gamer. People who don’t have a computer and just play board games or tabletop games are still gamers, if they choose to embrace that label.
Although I AM just a woman. 
But who is going to make the sandwiches??
Female, born in 1961. My dad started taking me to ‘help’ him play sand box games when I needed to stand on a box to see the top of the table. [He favored Napolean, so I got to push around little gunners, cannons and guys in horseback that should have had targets painted on their chests] In the early 1970s we went to Gencon, and I found a guy who wanted people to have a try at a book and dice based game. I played that until we moved to Connecticut in 1990 and my husband and I couldn’t find enough people to get a good game group going with. I didn’t do much of anything other than Magic the Addiction until I got an Amiga and got stuck in bed for 3 months post-op and I got wicked good on Eye of the Beholder to where I was the answer line for my friends trying to play through it. When Everquest came out in 1999, I started playing that [and was a GM for SOE] until I beta-tested WoW with some of the people in my guild, and when WoW went live, we shifted over to playing that. Played that for 3 years, then shifted to EVE Online and I have alternated EO with LOTRO and now am playing GW2. Filling in the chinks from about 2000, I have also worked with assorted developers closed beta testing something like 60 or so assorted games.
Biyatch, please. Go play candy crush and leave me alone.
[URL=“http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/extension/”]
Nobody is trying to steal your nerd cred. As has been pointed out already, the segment of the electronic gaming market that offends you mostly doesn’t even identify as gamers.
A case: I was watching a show counting down a recent poll of the top 100 games in Australia as voted by viewers. I asked my wife what her top 5 games were and she listed titles like Borderlands 2. I asked about Words With Friends, which I know she plays a lot more than anything she mentioned. She reckoned that was more of a pastime or something.
That attitude was reflected in the top 100, incidentally. I don’t recall a single social media or mobile-only title.
Funny thing is, when I think of women gamers I think of my mother, who liked playing shoot 'em up games like Doom.
But does she play Half-Life? Or Call of Duty? Or Halo?
There seems to be a different class of gamers who get hooked on one game or one series, who for some reason or another, play that and nothing else. They are gamers but not like me, who will try most any type of game and play a lot of variety. I’ve noticed as I gotten older that even if I’ve never played a game before, that I can intuitively know how to play a game because I have some experience in it. My mom, who plays Candy Crush, cannot for the life of her transfer that gaming skill to something like Tetris, or one of those hidden picture games.
Well, them’s some pretty solid credentials. You realize now we’ll just have to move the goalposts that much further. So now practically nobody counts as a gamer anymore. Thanks.
Yeah, I think perhaps its just the article that misunderstands that the term ‘gamer’ is part of a culture with its own statuses and taboos. In the world of non-gamers, throwing the term around does not amount to stepping in the dog’s business.
No, I simply do not consider something like candy crush or dungeon keeper mobile to really be gaming - gaming means interacting with others in a shared game [MMORPG online, console grouping to do something like HALO, sitting around rolling dice and moving figures on a sand table.] Simply squidging purple gems to clear a screen to get a high score that may or may not be compared to some stranger signed into facebook is not gaming. If you are simultaneously squidging gems with a bunch of people all signed into the same game at the same time in a squidge-off, then it is a game.
[URL=“http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/extension/”]
That would also exclude ALL single player games. Blowing away scary dudes in Bioshock is just as interactive as moving purple rocks around by yourself in Bejeweled. You’re welcome to use that definition but I don’t think many people would agree with it.
I don’t really care if Candy Crush/Words with Friends/Agriculturetown players are lumped in with “gamers” or not but the more inclusive the term gets, the more worthless it gets. Which wouldn’t be a problem except that people insist on bringing it up into much more narrow contexts as though it has meaning (“Space Dragons III should be more woman friendly because 61% of gamers are women!”)
That’s not to argue against Space Dragons III being more anyone-friendly just that the reason given is faulty when you’re talking about how an Xbox game should look based on the habits of iPhone and Facebook game players.
It does appear that people are taking this ‘women are the majority of gamers’ out of context. Salon did an article about the problem of sexism in video games, wringing some irony out of this claim about a new female majority, but the games they’re taking the industry to task about are not the kind of which women are now the majority of players:
Yeah, I’ve been seeing that a lot over the past year (while the video game sexism debate rages).
When the Candy Crush, et al thing is pointed out people tend to get defensive about it and say that it doesn’t matter but of course it does. Manly Games Industries isn’t interested in trying to convince a Facebook game player to buy a PlayStation 4, they want to take the current PlayStation 4 demographic that buys AAA games at release and sell them video games. If that demographic is mainly males then that’s who they’ll aim for.
Again, this is just about the poor use of the statistic in the debate, not about the rightness or wrongness of the debate itself.
No one is a true "gamer’ until they’ve reached #1 A List status on Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. I have 51.8 million followers. How hardcore are you?
Seriously I spend a good 20-30 minutes over the course of an evening to complete an 8 hour event to gain another 1/2 million followers. The game is pretty lame and I only started playing to see what the hype was about. I play it during commercials to pass the time like I would a crossword puzzle.
But I agree with the others who said anyone who enjoys playing games in their spare time to be a gamer.
I’d define “gamer” as someone who spends a significant portion of their leisure time deliberately playing games as a activity.
It’s the deliberation that is key; just playing Candy Crush while you wait in your Dr.'s office doesn’t make you a gamer, but playing it intentionally instead of watching TV in the evenings does.
I’d argue the opposite: the earmark of a gamer is someone who plays a game to interact with or experience the game. Thus, somebody who plays a mobile game to try to get to the next level or beat their high score is more of a gamer, IMO, than someone who plays the same game simply to pass the time. Someone who occasionally plays board games solitaire because they enjoy the experience of the game itself is more likely to be a gamer than someone who plays every week, but only because his or her partner is addicted or because it’s popular with his or her clique.
In other news, Salon looks like crap these days.