We all have our degrees of commitment/achievement within the culture, but if we’re talking a binary identifier, it should be nearly impossible to argue someone’s not a “gamer” if they are actively gaming.

Thank you for dropping by! I appreciate all comments, long and short, and it is always a pleasure to hear from you!

It actually put a lot in perspective when I started playing SWTOR VERY casually. Anyone who sees my SWTOR characters would think “some n00b” and probably wouldn’t believe me if I told them I spent 3 years of my life writing about WoW.

I wonder if those who play the occasional round of Call of Duty or Battlefield don’t want to identify as gamer, and that, because of WoW’s reputation, they don’t really “get” that many people play WoW the same way they play their FPS games. Though, WoW, since it’s a fantasy game and a large one at that, does require a stronger disconnect from reality than a war shooter does, which can scare those who don’t like getting lost in their imagination.

I don’t play a lot of gamers either. Mostly because when I do play a game, I’m extremely thorough, plus I don’t get that much free time. But I still consider myself A Gamer, because when I’m not playing, I’m usually thinking about games, talking about games or reading about games. Others may say I’m not “true”, but I think I am.

I love what you say about self defense. That makes a lot of sense. I’m feeling that I’m going to have to write a follow up post on identity since I completely omitted that. I think being on the receive end of so much mocking, harassment and, in some cases, bullying has given us an attitude of “I had to walk 5 miles with no shoes in the snow to be a geek…and you, you just walk right in with your fancy designer runners and think you can take that title?”

Though the interesting thing is that the same kind of identity defensiveness happens within groups of people who haven’t suffered for their title. Hmm. I’m going to have to ponder this, hehe.

Actually, I mostly played Castle of Dr Brain. Played Island a little bit at a friends’ house but her computer kept crashing and I couldn’t figure out how to get the game on a disquette without causing the machine to steam.

… I think I kind of got sidetracked there.

Your mom is awesome ^_^ I was very impressed when I met her about how easily she could carry on a conversation on gaming. So different from my family!

Her attitude about Farmville is pretty interesting: Farmville is often shrugged off as “not a real game”, but it sounds like she approached with the attitude of a gamer. I wonder if what makes us Gamers has to do with how we play games, in addition to, you know, actually playing games.

I totally get what you’re saying about the love of camaraderie, challenge and playfulness. I think that in order to enjoy games, you have to be able to get into a certain mindstate, where you let go of reality and become submerged in the fictional story/conflict/puzzle in front of you. Most people can do it to a certain extent (movies and tv shows would flop otherwise), but I think that gaming (and possibly the science fiction/fantasy genre) requires a lot more of that disconnecting ability than your average movie does. Perhaps the regular exercise of disconnection creates a certain something in a person that makes it easy to bond with others who also disconnect a lot.

I’m getting into something I can’t word anymore, so I’m going to stop now and hope I wasn’t too confusing ^_^

I love what you say about “ah, these are my people?”. I hadn’t stopped to think about that, but on a personal level, that’s when I started identifying as
A Gamer: when I met other gamers and discovered I wasn’t the asocial loner I thought I was. It still blows my mind how quiet little me spends Blizzcon running from group to group, talking to everyone and not getting to bed until 6 am.

And there are a lot of sub-groups within us gamers. If I met up with a group of Halo or of hardcore pvp-type game players, my eyes would probably glaze over right away and they’d be all “GTFO n00b”.

Ok ok.. I’m done.. Anyway .. I really enjoyed your post. Very good delve into a topic that has been hotly contested in many a forum.