Intermission.
Even though I was playing lots of games, I still didn’t call myself a “gamer” because I had associated that term with the games I wasn’t playing — instead of all the ones I was playing. This was largely because I’d bought into the myth that to be a “real gamer,” you had to be playing testosterone-infused blockbuster franchises like Grand Theft Auto, God of War or Call of Duty.
I couldn’t agree more with her, I ran a very popular cheat code websites for years, PS2cheats.com (No longer under my control) for 7 years. The website made me enough income that I never had to hold down another job during my long duration of college… and yet, I distanced myself from gaming and the term “gamer” during that time, back in the early 2000s. Gamer culture embarrassed me to the degree that I wouldn’t even mention my popular website in person in causal conversation despite having serious “gamer” credentials. I did not want to be associated with videogames, and nearly stopped playing them. Even today, I don’t talk about videogames with many people outside of a select few people . I avoid gaming as a topic for this blog despite owing my current job as a front end web developer directly to gaming . PS2cheats is where wrote my JS script, my first CSS line, and switched to writing HTML by hand.
Wayback machine of Version 4 of PS2cheats.com,
When my Xbox 360 experienced the Red Ring of Death, I didn’t bother to replace it. I spent 3 years without a game console besides my iPhone and my Mac. The games I played were iOS games like Zen Bound, Plants vs Zombies, Triazzle, Spider and games ported to the Mac such as Portal 1 & 2, Borderlands (with friends) and indie games like World of Goo, Crayon Physics, and Thomas Was Alone.
For my birthday my brother bought me a PS3, and I rediscovered gaming That Game Company’s Flower and Journey games and Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us reminded me that there still could be a mass market for games willing to break the boundaries and narrow confines that appeal to a certain demographic. I still enjoy games but I couldn’t give a royal damn about being a gamer. I even celebrate the death “gamer” as it means that gaming is no longer an activity owned by testosterone-driven white male gamer. I live in an age where mom plays more videogames on her iPad than I do.
The worst part is, I suspect a good portion of the #gamergate community are 80s children such as myself. I grew up, and its time my games did too. Hats off to Anita Sarkeesian, keep fighting the good fight.
Now back to our regular program of web development, Apple tidbits and digital audio…