The Gamer
Who is the gamer? or what makes him such? Can a person be defined as a gamer?
In china a few years ago, I read online, a group of boys got together, hunted down, and killed another boy because, online, in a game, he’d found and killed one of these boys, who, unfortunately had found a very rare ‘object.’ and his death, had meant they’d lost it.
The really scary thing was that this wasn’t an isolated event, and the story was actually about measures that the Chinese gov. was taking to prevent this sort of crime, by making the net more anonymous.
I’m not sure if these people can be called gamers, because the rest of the article also dealt with people who were, clinically, addicted to the internet.
The idea of the gamer used be of this social misfit, someone who can’t quite be cool, or even accepted in the real world, and so he escapes to this alternate one, where is the top cat. Typically, these would be seen as wimps, sissies, geeks, or any similar social stereotype that was a misfit.
Later when society started moving towards being more and more electronic, and spending hours staring at a screen became part of job descriptions, and not really that weird, gaming came to be a little more accepted. It was a legitimate pass time.
But obsessive gamers were still not quite regarded as socially normal.
Now gaming is coming to be recognized as a professional sport, and you have to wonder what kind of sportsmen these are… they definitely don’t fit the macho image that sportsman have.
Nor do they spend the time they’re not staring at screens blinking at the ‘bright light’ around them. They may not be hunks running on testosterone but they’re definitely not diminutive either, and if you want competitive spirit, they’ll give the Australian cricketers a run for their money.
Which once more leaves me asking, where exactly do gamers fit in? More on this later.
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