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Gamers can be hot-blooded about their hobby. They have a deep passion that can lead to some really amazing experiences like midnight launches, all-night marathons, and friendships that only exist because of a game. Of course, the complications of hot-blooded passion often pave a path directly to irrational behavior and a tendency to be overly defensive. If a gamer wants to be defined by his passion, there isn’t anything perverse about that. However, the perception of gaming is tarnished when gamers defend it from every misconception and ill-informed pundit. Robert Ashley made an interesting analogy on the latest episode of his A Life Well Wasted podcast: We all have a four burner stove that represents the passions in our lives. One burner represents family, another represents friends, then a career, and another leisure time. Well, you can’t have all four burners turned on high at the same time. You have to choose. We’ve done the best we can by creating a civilization to give everyone as much time for each burner, but it isn’t enough. People still find it odd that there is a huge group that wants to label one of the burners “video games” and turn it up to high. There is nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but screaming at every critic who looks at us funny is not helping and is probably hurting.
When you have your “video games” burner turned on high, you have to be prepared for the narrow-mindedness of people who can’t understand why gaming is important to you. You can be defensive, but it is more important to be rational and empathetic. There are people obsessed with music, movies, books, and then there are people obsessed with comics, origami, and collecting toenail clippings. I have nothing against people who collect comics, but this industry is defined by fanboys and companies that serve them. The whole art form has suffered because of it. Which side do you want video games to land on? Grand Theft Auto could be considered as important as music, but it isn’t going to get there simply because developers are making a great game. It is going to take a push by the people who are obsessed with the products those developers create, but still possess a moderate temperament.
A recent news story broke out about a 40-something-year-old American woman traveling to Canada to meet a 16-year-old boy with whom she had been playing World of Warcraft. A call-in show covered the story. The first caller was a gamer who said that he didn’t think it was fair to mention the name of the game, because it wasn’t the game’s fault that this happened. Many of us probably feel the same way. However, if we are going to be more concerned about protecting the reputation of a video game than about fighting international sexual tourism, people are going to continue to look at gamers as an unbalanced people with twisted priorities.
What this boils down to is something very simple. I call it “Being Barry Sanders.” His philosophy is to act like you belong. Barry Sanders treated scoring a touchdown as if it were no big deal to him, because he had been in the end-zone before, and he would be there again. That is how we need to treat our passion. Video games will take their place next to music, movies, and books simply because we know that is where video games belong.