We're All Gamers Now

In yesterday's review, I originally contrasted "the feminine sensibilities of casual gamers" with the "aesthetic of real gamers," until I was chastised by Emily Short, of one our reviewers, and modified the latter to "core gamers." But this got me thinking, and I want to explore that a bit more -- partially, to be sure, to justify myself as someone who is not fundamentally a chauvinist schmuck, but I think more importantly, to explore, and perhaps seek to erase, the distinction between "gamers" and "game players."

When I were a lad, these long years ago, toiling up the steep Bronx hills in snow and sleet toward my dismal high school, the only people who called themselves "gamers" were, like me and at most a hundred thousand others, players of geeky board wargames with hexes and thousands of words of rules and little die-cut cardboard counters covered with numbers. We were the first flower of what has now become a subculture that includes virtually every adolescent male, a substantial number of adolescent females, and a portion of every demographic group under 40, those exposed to games of various kinds in their youth, and who continue to consider themselves "gamers" -- it's part of who we are.

To be a "gamer" is to mean that you consider your love of games, and your propensity to play them, at least one component of your identify. Few gamers are gamers alone, of course; most of us are atheists or Methodists, liberals or libertarians, New Yorkers or Kansans, gay or straight, polyamorists or family men. But just as some people identify as "readers," and some as "film buffs," we consider ourselves "gamers."

Yet the play of games extends far beyond the community of gamers: we are all, or almost all, gamers now, in some sense. Some of us play games like Bejewelled or Diner Dash, and never make a connection between our occasional light entertainment and the medium that produces things like Grand Theft Auto IV, and indeed may continue to hold the conventional attitude to such games (violent! bad! kids should be outside playing!) without experiencing a moment of intellectual discontinuity when we fire up Bejewelled for another bit of match-3 relaxation. Some of us play Hearts, or Spades or Klondike solitaire on the Windows Games menu, without any understanding that the modern medium of games derives from such folk games by direct, linear evolution. Some of us do the crossword daily, or while idle moments away with Sudoku, or enjoy logic puzzles but would be puzzled by the idea that we might find the same enjoyment in Portal or Eets.

And that's a crying shame--on both sides of the equation.

It's a shame that so many people who enjoy some kind of game are unwilling to consider exposure to games beyond the narrow range of those they enjoy, because we live in what will no doubt, in the future, be considered the era of the greatest innovation, experiment, and exploration in games, the era in which games came into their own as sublime products of the human soul, a form of art capable of standing proudly even with those forms acknowledged by the ancient Greeks. But of course, the same can be said of every other artform; there are fans of romance, or noir, or space opera, who want nothing more than to sink into the comforting embrace of another work with the characteristics of others they have loved, without any desire to explore the larger realms of literature. Nonetheless, by seeking out the familiar, they are blinding themselves to experiences that could expand their horizons.

On the other side, it's a shame that for so many gamers, "games" equally mean what they are familiar with. Line extentions sell, people spend years and even decades obsessed with the likes of Counter-Strike and WoW without lifting their heads to see the wider horizon, and the conventional industry continue to narrow its focus down to a handful of genres and styles of play. Gamers, too, would benefit by noticing the enormous variety of games, and our proud, multi-century history of innovation and expansion, and perhaps by noticing the paucity of expression that currently plagues the conventional industry.

"We are all gamers now" is perhaps exaggeration; doubtless, somewhere there is someone who has never handled a deck of cards, or tossed dice, or held a controller, or paid any attention to Window's games folder -- yet those who have must be a small, and decreasing, portion of the population. But it is undoubtedly true that many people who play games -- indeed, many people for whom games of one kind or another are a vital and important part of their leisure-time activities -- do not consider themselves "gamers" and never will.

Not everyone who watches movies considers themselves a cineaste, and not everyone who picks up a novel from time to time considers themselves a reader -- there's no shame in that. And yet -- what would the world be like if the millions who play casual games enthusiatically considered themselves "gamers," and the millions of FPS and RTS and MMO enthusiasts acknowledged Chess and Bejewelled and Hearts and Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons and Monopoly as equally legitimate?

Let us break down the artificial barriers that separate us. We are all gamers now. And we are all participants in an artistically exhilarating venture, a culturally important enterprise -- the creation of a new medium, a new form of art, based not on humanity's story-telling impulse, but instead on our instinct to play.