Why I Don’t Consider Myself a Gamer
The term “gamer” can mean all sorts of things. Generally the term just means someone who plays a lot of video games, but there are also plenty of gamer stereotypes out there, dependent on many different things, such as consoles, handheld games, mobile games, and so on. However, I’ve never really considered myself a gamer. I’m just a person who plays video games occasionally. Am I really a gamer though? Or am I something else?
I’m not very good at video games
Seriously. As someone who has been playing video games for years, I’m shit at most of them. Parkour and platforming in particular are spectacularly bad. I’ll nail a hard jump, then accidentally run off the next ledge or miss a really easy following jump. Most of the time, I overthink things, rather than just going for it like my team mates do. Even in games that I’m somewhat okay at, jumping and parkour are still troublesome. Playing Warframe has spoiled me, with its hypermobility and lack of punishment for falling into pits.
I mostly blame my reaction times when it comes to being shit at games. It takes forever for me to realize I’m being shot at, then it takes me forever to swing the camera round and shoot back at whatever is attacking me. It’s especially bad when I have enemies behind me as well as in front of me. I tend to just panic and try to melee everything to death. Even if I don’t have melee available.
That being said, I do think my aim as improved a bit. Rather than not being able to hit the broad side of a barn, I can at least hit said barn with a handful of pellets from a shotgun.
I don’t even play that many games
My catalogue of completed games is tiny. Sure, I have over 4000 hours in Warframe, but that is a super rarity. The only other game that competes is Team Fortress 2, with 1700 hours. But the majority of games I’ve played, I have barely an hour in some of them. I find it really hard to get really stuck into a new game. Maybe I just have a short attention span, but I haven’t been able to stick with a new game for ages. Just look what happened to me with Agents of Mayhem.
It’s particularly bad because I never got around to playing any of the classics. Heck, it was only recently that I played my first proper Pokemon game that wasn’t Pokemon GO. I always say to myself that I’ll get around to playing all these games eventually, but I never actually manage to. I still haven’t played a Super Mario game or a Sonic game or anything like that. Even with thousands of games, including emulated ones, right at my fingertips, I still haven’t tried anything, old or new.
I’m a blogger not a gamer
The one thing I can call myself though is a blogger. After all, I do a lot of blogging. Over 2000 articles of blogging. And still going. I do so much writing that it can take up a large part of my day. At least, compared to other things.
That being said, blogging isn’t the only thing I do. I do play video games, even if I suck at them. I guess I’m just a video game blogger or something. Either way though, I’m definitely not a gamer by any normal means.
I do consider myself a gamer, which is a designation that I’m proud to refer to myself as. But I can see why some (even those who play video games, whether a lot or a little) wouldn’t want to be referred to as a “gamer”. There is some baggage that comes along with the title. But, in my opinion, calling myself a gamer is ultimately a positive thing.
I think it might be more of a gender thing as well. The term “gamer girl” in particular is a bit iffy.
The way I think of it, a gamer is just someone who plays video games, just like a dancer is someone who dances. Even if you don’t play every week, you could say something like “I’m a blogger, and occasionally a gamer”. I haven’t been to any boy scout activities for 2 years, yet I still consider myself a boy scout. Also, I too have always disliked the term “gamer girl” because there’s no need to put on more words on “gamer” unless necessary, and if it is then they’re just looking for attention.
I personally avoid the term “gamer” like the plague. It just brings up all the wrong connotations either stereotypically (people who hide indoors and play games all day to the point they’ve made it part of their identity), historically (“gamer movements” have championed some truly bafflingly awful takes, especially whenever they get big enough to reach mainstream media coverage), or professionally (if one interacted with gaming in any deeper degree, like game development or game journalism or game modding, they’d call themselves one of those instead of just a ‘gamer’, which suggests a pretty surface-level consumer-oriented degree of interaction with the genre.) It just seems like a laundry list of negatives to call oneself a ‘gamer’ with absolutely no positives to counter-act the various associated stigmas, deserved and not.