Identifying As A Gamer, Erratum

• Gaming
• Opinion
• Responses

I’m not entirely sure what happened, but somehow WordPress posted two different versions of my last post. The RSS feed and the front page shows one version, but the post page itself shows a newer version. I think maybe ScribeFire did something to it. Anyway, I added a paragraph to my answer for question 20 at the last minute and this is what it was supposed to say:

20. Do you identify as a gamer?

Only while playing games and around other gamers. I generally don’t talk about games with “normals” because they think at best it’s weird and at worst it’s self-destructive.

I guess this question is aimed at uncovering my thoughts on the whole “real” gamer controversy. I can understand the need to believe that how one spends their time is important, and I can understand the competitive urge to be better than one’s peers, but I think I’ve outgrown all of that when it comes to video games. The only people that I think deserve to be put into a niche of their own are those kids who fly around the world playing in e-sports LAN tournaments and such.

To further elaborate, I didn't mean to suggest e-sports tournament players are "real" gamers. I just meant that they are different in the same way that I would classify professional tennis players as different from people who play tennis with their friends on a weekend. The goals are entirely different. One is trying to make a living, and the other is just trying to relax and have fun. Sometimes those things overlap, but in my negligible experience with online gaming tournaments, there's nothing relaxing about playing solely to win.