The Mobile Gamer
I’ve been having some really interesting discussions both online and offline with people lately about what a true gamer is…and all these discussions leave me frustrated about the arbitrary standards the nerd culture seem to use for a term many of us self-identify with. The discussions started because someone questioned if I was really a gamer or not, because according to them there are just too many women who exclusively play mobile games and call themselves gamers, and this person had to make sure I wasn’t one of them. Let’s sidestep the incredibly frustrating point I was trying to make last week about how women are often held to a different standard than our male peers, and focus instead on the backlash against mobile gaming, or the notion that somehow a mobile gamer isn’t a true gamer.
I’m usually the one trying to not cause waves, so I want to understand where people are coming from on this issue and why they’re so aggressive in their opinion against mobile games. Why doesn’t a mobile game not qualify as a real game? I get that the complexity of Bejeweled Blitz isn’t that of unrolling a map and throwing dice for a game of D&D, but I don’t understand where (or why) we draw the line between people playing mobile games and having fun versus people playing a different kind of game and having fun.
When I was a kid, and my brother and I would call ourselves gamers, it meant we had a video-game console and played frequently at home. This distinction existed because my childhood was a time when having a personal PC to play games on wasn’t really an option, having a console wasn’t as popular as it is now, and having a personal computer that also makes phone calls in your pocket 24/7 wasn’t invented yet. These days, calling yourself a gamer doesn’t carry any such implications with it, because gaming isn’t something scarce or hard to come by!
If someone only plays Candy Crush and introduces themselves to others as a gamer, what is the point in breaking that person down and telling them that they aren’t? It’s been my experience that we are using the term gamer less as a way to identify ourselves, and more as a barrier to letting people into our fun. (Our fun, I should add, which only increases when there are more people playing or familiar with the topic for us to talk with!) Gamer is a general term that means something different to each person who uses it, but when some in the community come across someone who doesn’t fit their personal gamer profile, they get increasingly hostile, and even bully those people. What does it say about our nerd/gamer culture that we are so hostile to people who want to enter our group? Last week I made the comparison that nerd/gamer culture is like a treehouse club, where you have to pass some secret test before being taught the special handshake. We’re increasingly acting like there are mobile gamers in our treehouse, but we’re refusing to teach them the secret handshake.
To have someone who plays only mobile games identify themselves as a gamer doesn’t make the gamer who plays FPS, complex MMORPG’s, e-sports, or even tabletop RPG’s any less special. Having a group of people entering our hobby with a different perspective and different medium in which they play can even enrich our hobby. Look at what Hearthstone is doing for CCG’s and Warcraft! (Though, admittedly, this is not a mobile-only example.)
My personal call to action here is that the next time I talk to someone who tells me about their favorite mobile game when we’re discussing our favorite games, I’m going to try to relate to them and suggest something similar that I enjoyed in that genre. (You like Clash of Clans? Maybe you’d like The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot!) And with the increasing power of mobile platforms, who’s to say that those games won’t be just as complex as console games? Being designed to pick up and put down easily doesn’t make it any less of a game, or make the fun of the end users any less real. So let’s open our arms to those people who are having fun, and play some more games!
