Are you a "Gamer"?

I’ll accept “consumer” because it’s frank and accurate

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brand engager

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sb snobbery

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It’s the best

I prefer to think of myself as a “cyber warrior” but thanks for asking

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a taxonomy of Gamers

so clearly we have the stereotype casual gamer – i.e., someone who primarily plays mobile games like candy crush, f2p MMOs, other things of a drop-in drop-out nature. even if they are quite hardcore about said games they cannot drop this characterization.
then we have hardcore gamer – an ill-defined category; generally taken to mean the person who goes out and buys the newest and shiniest AAA game on the market, whether single-player or multiplayer; no level of proficiency in competitive multiplayer is really required to reach this category. most esports competitors do NOT fall under this category as they devote themselves too thoroughly to one title. generally the domain of the 16-23 year old male. also called “core gamer” by industry types. call of duty aficionados = hardcore; dark souls = hardcore; metal gear solid v = hardcore; fallout 4 = hardcore; halo in its heyday, borderlands, etc.

this is all the mainstream seems to realize, although with the benefit of proximity to the matter, we can see many more subtle varieties–

the competitive gamer: one attracted to the struggle of getting good at a video game, and the competitive element of being better than other people. can be found in games as diverse as league of legends, counter-strike, hearthstone, poker, fighting games, chess, starcraft, etc. oftentimes this comes with a bit of a narrow focus.

the sim gamer: one who plays games on a spectrum from light simulation elements to simulations that strive for verisimilitude. attracted oftentimes by pure geekery of the historical, technical aspects of the simulation, or else or simply attracted by the complexity of the systems involved. gamers who tend towards the latter side of this spectrum may represent the hardcore simmer who looks down upon his more ‘‘casual’’ counterparts. this category also represents more fantastical sims that may not represent reality, such as Dwarf Fortress or even EVE Online.
e.g. in air combat, this spectrum can be represented by: War Thunder (arcadey with light sim elements such as selecting weaponry, modeling of flight physics); Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator (more sophistication of flight models, attempts at historical accuracy); to something like IL-2 Sturmovik or DCS A-10C (thorough attempts at accuracy of flight models, physics, history; complexity/nuance of controls; often restricts its scope to a single theater or aircraft to achieve verisimilitude in that one sphere).

artgamers / indiegamers / notgamers: those attracted to experimental games that exercise the craft of the medium; roughly analogous to experimental/art film buffs. example games include Thirty Flights of Loving, Space Funeral, Passage, Undertale, Gone Home. the idea is not that one defends all these games or even likes them (for example i think passage is quite crap), but more that their purpose is to attempt to push the boundaries of the medium.
sidenote: the fact that a list of games used to defend games as art must include a subheading for each entitled “How Its Still Fun As Hell” [sic]… well.

please add categories i’ve forgotten, i’ve mostly stuck to the ones the appeal of which i can best elucidate

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I am a Trashgamer. My favorite game is Deadly Premonition and my current goal is to get all the emblems in Sonic Adventure DX. I haven’t played a game the year it was released if it cost more than $20, and mostly not even then.

One of my fondest childhood memories RE: vidgams is playing through the entirety of Crystal Beans: From Dungeon Explorer on the SNES while jamming 3 lbs of Swedish Fish into my gullet over a week. It was terrible. I also enjoyed playing VS. Collection on netplay, specifically the minigame where 2-4 birds would jump on each other while fireballs rained down from the sky. It was like garbage Smash Bros.

My favorite Half-Life mod was Rocket Crowbar because I enjoyed running up to people with live grenades. I was pretty good at that game, if you consider killcount. Not so much otherwise.

Roll me down the hill into the dumpster, for that is where I live.

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I’m pretty reluctant to wear the “gamer” identity for basically all the reasons that have been mentioned.

Something somewhat disconcerting to me is how the word “gamer” has come to stand in for the word "player "in some things I’ve read–mostly, but not limited to, casual discourse on Facebook. As in, for example, “To make the player character jump, the gamer must press the A button.”

I’m pretty sure I even read it in the instructions of some indie game I downloaded a while back, but I could be wrong. Maintaining a distinction between “player” and “gamer” is vital; they can’t collapse into one another.

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For what it’s worth, I never shared this perception that identifying as a gamer is necessarily in exclusivity to everything else, and don’t quite fully understand where it comes from.

For the record I don’t identify as a gamer due to aforementioned bad apples ruining the term for everyone else.

‘Gamer’ reminds me way to much of ‘GamerGate’, so no, I’m not a gamer.

I just play way to many videogames to be called anything else though.

“Vidconsumer”

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Why would you want to label yourself in a lowest common denominator kind of way?

I am KING OF GAMES!

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No one does, that’s the thing.

the televid kid
the sultan of Sega
the Nintendo Commando
a real game boy

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Electronic Entertainment Enthusiast, or EEE

the acronym matches my shrill screams as i complain about panty censorship

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Art Critic

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The ‘GAMER’ mantle is I think also categorically dependent upon the person being a voracious consumer of their preferred media; you know, having a backlog of fifty-six purchases on Steam, or whatever (and somehow having enough time to get to those). And since my relationship with the medium has always been small-scale – identifying with a concentrated number of titles and sticking to those until they are slowly, mostly supplanted by other titles two or five or ten years later – it would be impossible for me to identify as such even if I wanted to.