The downside of exclusivity

Am I a "gamer"?

It is kind of weird that this is an actual question under debate. Not about me personally, but certainly about "people like me". I did a rough estimate of how much of my life I did spend playing games, and came up with a number of around 40,000 hours. Apart from sleeping, playing games is probably the activity which I did most in my life. These days in a typical week I do more working than playing games, but I started playing games much earlier in life, so my work hours haven't caught up to my play hours yet. I also spent over a decade writing nearly 5,000 blog posts about games. The "15 minutes of fame" in my life are certainly related to that activity. I play games pretty much every day. It would be weird to have a definition of gamer that excludes me.

But that definition that makes me not a gamer not only exists, but is widely used by people on two different sides of an argument.

It started with a certain group (I usually call the "core gamers" or "hardcore") expressing their belief that people who do not satisfy certain criteria are not gamers, or at least not "real" gamers. You don't play game X at the hardest difficulty? You're not a gamer! You don't like free-for-all PvP? You're not a gamer! Basically these people didn't like the fact that these days pretty much everybody plays games, and they wanted a definition of gamer that is far more exclusive, and limited to people with a specific attitude towards games.

Now your attitude towards games is not to 100% determined by your sex, age, or race. But there are strong correlations. There isn't much demographic overlap between the people playing Battlefield and the people playing Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. If you define "gamer" as "everybody who at least occasionally plays games", you get rather broad demographics. If you use the proposed very narrow, very exclusive definition of what a gamer is, the demographic is also a lot narrower: It is more male, younger, and whiter.

This is why I wasn't in the least bothered by the recent spate of articles that "gamers are over", "dead", or "extinct". They obviously weren't talking about me. Some even said so: "Note they’re not talking about everyone who plays games, or who self-identifies as a “gamer”, as being the worst. It’s being used in these cases as short-hand, a catch-all term for the type of reactionary holdouts that feel so threatened by gaming’s widening horizons. If you call yourself a “gamer” and are a cool person, keep on being a cool person.". And because I write, I also clearly understand the use of hyperbole. Gamers, even by the narrowest possible definition of the term, are neither dead nor in any danger of going extinct. The authors use those words as substitutes for "less relevant".

There is an obvious downside to defining yourself as belonging to a very exclusive club: By definition there aren't very many of you. And at some point the others will turn up with a sign saying "We are the 99%" and be right about it. And unlike the 1% of richest people against which the 99% of less rich people protested in the Occupy Wall Street movement, the 1% of most hardcore gamers wield a lot less influence. Okay, they wield more than 1% influence, because they hold key positions in the game industry. But in the end games are a consumer product subject to market forces, and the 1% are far from spending the most money on games. The 1% have fought an endless battle for example for game developers of MMORPGs to keep making mostly content exclusively for them, and they have lost that battle. The 1% have fought against Free2Play games, and they have lost that battle. The 1% have fought against casual games, and they have lost that battle. And today the 1% are fighting against political correctness in gaming culture, and they are losing that battle as well.

I am a gamer. I would even go as far as to say that I am a voice in gaming. But only if you define gamer as everybody who plays games. I am not part of some elite club of core gamers, nor do I want to be. Because that sort of "gamer" is if not dead then at the very least becoming increasingly irrelevant. They are just one small market segment whose wishes is being considered amongst the wishes of other market segments. If they cry out because they feel left behind by the gaming industry or by gaming journalism it is because they increasingly are. That is the downside of exclusivity, you can't be both exclusive and the majority. It is easy enough to have an exclusive club of people who collect pink garden gnomes, but you can't expect the rest of the world to give special consideration to that club. The more people you exclude from your definition of what you are, the more lonely you become.