{"id":140,"date":"2005-05-25T23:48:00","date_gmt":"2005-05-26T03:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=140"},"modified":"2006-08-19T20:24:59","modified_gmt":"2006-08-20T00:24:59","slug":"gamer-shame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2005\/05\/25\/gamer-shame\/","title":{"rendered":"Gamer Shame"},"content":{"rendered":"

Womengamers.com recently posted an article by Fizgig<\/a> (pseudonym, of course) about being afraid to reveal to your hobby to you colleagues and friends. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Why don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t I tell people at the university where I work that I play videogames?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Fizgig wrote. A university teacher, she would hide her hobby. (At last week\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s E3, ESA chief Doug Lowenstein brought this article to the attention of the industry at large in his State of the Industry Address.)\n<\/p>\n

Fizgig focuses on the shame of women gamers, but there is still a prevailing fear among adults that games are not a serious hobby and a waste of time. She makes a connection between the objectification of women in the industry and the corresponding resistance of women to share their interest in gaming.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

But, as she notes, her own fianc\u00c3\u00a9 was reluctant to reveal his interest in gaming. Gamer shame is an equal opportunity disorder.\n<\/p>\n

I have been \u00e2\u20ac\u0153out\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as a gamer<\/a> for a while now. And Fizgig is on the way there. She doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t go into people\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s reactions to her hobby, but I can guess. Most people are genuinely interested.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

At the high school where I finished interning, about half of my department gamed in one fashion or another. There was one teacher who was a serious flight sim nut. Another was your standard console gamer. A third confessed to playing a lot of Rome<\/i>: Total War<\/i>. One female teacher took the trouble to explain that she had no games on her computer because she wasted too much time on then.\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

And the age range of this group is from early 20s to mid 40s.\n<\/p>\n

My other non-gaming friends find my hobby (and the fact that I occasionally get paid to write about it) interesting, but in general just another hobby. They put it on the same level as watching movies or reading mystery novels. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a harmless distraction of no real importance. I am not a freak \u00e2\u20ac\u201c though their lack of gaming knowledge does limit the types of conversations we can have about the subject.\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

In short, I think that the fear of ostracism, mockery or pity is pretty overblown. There will always be those snobs who think gaming is pointless, but these are the same people who don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t watch TV and talk about it endlessly. Games have been part of the background of my generation for as long as I can remember, so it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not like you are unveiling that you are a LARPer.\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Games may not be mainstream yet, but they aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t in the shadows. Gamers shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be either.\n<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Womengamers.com recently posted an article by Fizgig (pseudonym, of course) about being afraid to reveal to your hobby to you colleagues and friends. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Why don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t I tell people at the university where I work that I play videogames?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Fizgig wrote. A university teacher, she would hide her hobby. (At last week\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s E3, ESA chief Doug […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-2g","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}