Have any "anti gamer" or "video game ignorant" stories?

[Scrib]

Eh, different kinds of people like different kinds of stuff. And hate different kinds of stuff. Just think about how many people think supporting a sports team - soccer/football/baseball/whatever - to be a complete waste of time and think that the people who do it are moronic toglodytes wasting their time with getting drunk in the stadium or in front of the TV. Hating sports seems to be esspeically widespread among nerds.

Yet, many people I know both game AND support sports teams. I think the crux of the matter here is that what society considers acceptable is >balanced< people, not people obsessed with one thing and one thing only*, unless your obsession leads you to great heights in your chosen field.

*I find Earth001's characterization of gaming vs "reading" and "watching movies" as some sort of dichotomy to be a curious notion. I suppose though one can make do with simply avoiding spending time on reading and movies so to have more time to game, but I still maintain it is rare to find a gamer that does not also watch movies and read...

Also this notion that one must avoid "quiting" games or the "anti-gamers" "win". You either have spare time to devote to your hobby or you do not. Just assess what you are sacrificing to pursue gaming and how much time you have to game. If you find that after you've accounted for sleep, school, work, exercise and socializing (which may even involve games anyway!) you have no times for games, well welcome to the real world? And if you do have time for games after covering the basics, who cares what other people think about what you do in your spare time?

Oh, I agree. I find it quite silly to dislike somebody because of the form of his/her entertainment. I´m just saying that people who will dislike other people because of their gaming habbits don´t appear to be increadibly more common than people who dislike people for other forms of entertainment like sports.
But that´s just personal experience. I have no statistics.

Maybe this is also completely different in other countries where there´s a more emphasis on "popular" and "unpopular" people.

Maybe. On the other hand, just going off history, social acceptance and the like I would personally find it much easier to believe that the people who hate sports are people like gamers creating a backlash against a perceived double standard than I would the opposite case.

As for society caring for balanced people: I think you give people too much credit. They may think that what they want is balanced people but I think it's more than likely that their silly misconceptions run away with them.

Take the stories in this thread: anyone who negatively judges someone they don't intimately know for gaming is not making any sort of rational comment on their "balance" or pro-social behavior any more than I would be if I came on here and slammed the "fattynerds" and comic books fans. They are letting stereotypes do the thinking for them.I mean, the person playing games or trying to figure out how hard 1938 America would fuck medieval Europe is not necessarily spending an amount of time on this that would ruin them as social people, it's just that the activity itself is not respected.

Now, granted, if someone spent 6 hours on a football forum or at the pub discussing the game and barely did anything else they'd be slammed, but we never outright assume that they're shit when they tell us that they're football fans. We never assume that they're unbalanced.

You can argue that this doesn't happen that often of course, I don't have numbers. But judging someone badly the minute they mention an activity that is not inherently unbalancing suggests something other than a rational concern for the social life of said person.

A whole lot of people enjoy watching Star Wars and Star Trek. Comparatively few of them will ever bother going any further than that - it should not be surprising that the "mainstream" finds it odd to go to the point of spending hours on a website composing essays on the topic.

Just like a ton of people play video games on the can and have no interest in going further? What is the point of contention here?

[TheFeniX]

Now, granted, if someone spent 6 hours on a football forum or at the pub discussing the game and barely did anything else they'd be slammed, but we never outright assume that they're shit when they tell us that they're football fans. We never assume that they're unbalanced.

You sir, have never dealt with Fantasy Football in the Lone Star State. Bring up a video game that isn't CoD or Madden and watch sparks fly. But stand or sit around all night drinking and talking about how well your draft picks are doing this football season and it's A-ok. The wives might complain a bit, but not like if you played WoW every other night for a few hours.

I took a lot of shit playing video games (PnP RPGs and Magic also) over the years. There's no specific story, up until we got our first apartment. Party central, but we used to rig up 3 Xboxs to TVs and play Halo a lot. The original frat-boy drinking video game. A few months in, an old friend from High School stopped by from A&M. Him and his frat brothers did the same thing with Halo. This was a guy who wouldn't touch a video game to save his life in HS because "I'd rather get laid."

So, he comes in and decides he's going to "run train" on all of us because he's a "big gamer" now. So, he proceeds to get his shit stomped badly in a 8 man deathmatch. I'm of course #1 because I was that good at that hilariously broken game. So Dave decided it was bullshit and he want's 1vs1 to show me how he really "rolls." I proceed to crush him 35 to 3 until he gives up and says "gaming's for losers anyways." Honestly, I don't see how he lasted through 35 deaths. I expected him to quit after the first running riot.

I had a couple of friends like that in High School as I was on the outskirts of the popular circle. They could never understand why I would curb-stomp them in pretty much any game, no matter the genre, because they weren't gamers so games obviously didn't take much skill to master.

That's where a lot of the derision comes from against "casuals." No one really minds people who just play games to play games. We get annoyed when they think because they played some Halo or CoD, they are on anywhere near the same level as a guy who has been playing for over a decade in the genre. It really doesn't matter the game, unless you had to understand something besides gaming mechanics, I am probably going to beat you on a level playing field. But to an asshole who doesn't really game, every kill means they're awesome and you suck. And every death is bullshit or you cheated.

And that's kind of person is who games are being made for these days. So yea... it gets kind of annoying.

[TheFeniX]

I lied. I do remember one particular story that's relevant. Due to circumstances I won't go into, my senior year in High School I got stuck into a second "study hall." It's where they just stick a bunch of students into a classroom and have a teacher watch them for an hour. Anyways, there were 4 computers in the room and the teacher didn't care what we did as long as it didn't interrupt her coffee or newspaper reading.

The PCs normally wouldn't be usable because the mouse balls were removed and the CD-ROMs manually unplugged. So, I setup "mouse-keys" on them by using IE to bypass the Control Panel restrictions and opened one up to reconnect the CD-ROM, copied my Grand Theft Auto 1 disc to it, and shared the folder to copy it to the other PCs.

So, we had 4 man GTA LAN going for a few months. We were very quiet about it, but one girl had some HUUUGE fucking issue with 4 guys playing GTA. I would find out later she was one of the popular girls in the Junior class. But who gives a fuck, I got video games to play. She would go on and on about boys (and girls) and who was acceptable and who she would date or not date. Real cliche movie shit.

One day, she starts in on some bullshit about how it's sad we spend "all day" playing video games rather than socializing... during study hall. She then asks me directly, why I'm wasting my time on them as I should know better. I never did figure out what she meant by that.

So, I turn around and ask: "Do I know you? Have we met? What would you like to talk about? Maybe we could go on and on about the 30 some-odd boys we have a crush on or who aren't worth dating because of whatever reason. I mean, I don't swing that way, but I could give it a shot so you don't feel left out."

"Or how about, I sit over here and play my kiddie games and mind my own business and you go back to bad mouthing people you claim are your friends and we'll both go on somehow living."

The sad part is, after that she was fucking nice as nails to me because she asked around about me and found out that, whereas I wasn't extremely popular, I had friends all around school and (for some reason I could never comprehend) people generally liked me. Probably because I refrained from being a judgmental asshole.... on most days.

[Scrib]

That's where a lot of the derision comes from against "casuals." No one really minds people who just play games to play games. We get annoyed when they think because they played some Halo or CoD, they are on anywhere near the same level as a guy who has been playing for over a decade in the genre. It really doesn't matter the game, unless you had to understand something besides gaming mechanics, I am probably going to beat you on a level playing field. But to an asshole who doesn't really game, every kill means they're awesome and you suck. And every death is bullshit or you cheated.

And that's kind of person is who games are being made for these days. So yea... it gets kind of annoying.

I always thought that most of it was exactly the last sentence: the perceived dilution of the economic power of the hardcore gamer because the casual fan simply doesn't give a fuck about whatever agenda they have. Of course, gamers themselves can be pretty bad about this, I remember the times when they'd boycott a game only to end up playing it. So they essentially end up like the film (or comic book)fans that bitch about reboots- even more irrelevant and this time by their own hand.

Really, if you want to be pissed about something, that's it.

[Borgholio]

Probably because I refrained from being a judgmental asshole.... on most days.

And yet you frequent a forum where many of us are actually judgmental assholes.