The Subculture of Gamers

The smashing of keys and the frantic clicking can be heard from the room. Digitalized voices blare out of speakers, in response to the the comments being shouted into the microphone. Two to three hours later, the same flurry of sound can still be clearly heard in the room over. If you have lived with a gamer, a scene like this is typical. But what exactly is the modern day "gamer"? How can a subculture be formed around the rising youth popularity in video game recreation, and how has such a general term come to mean specifically "video game players"?. The answer lies in how we prefer to socialize and bond over games rather than other means, we take games past being a leisure activity and into being a serious hobby, and finally, most of us have been playing videogames since childhood.

One of the most important things that defines modern gamers as a subculture is our willingness to bond over videogames rather than through normal means. Gamers at school bond together and form their own "gaming cliques". These cliques often operate like a normal clique, but instead of holding events such as parties and judging how well an individual "fits in" through that, gaming groups determine how well someones "fits in" through video games. For example, my friends and I who are gamers often get together and throw "parties". At these parties, we tote our laptops over along with all of our expensive gaming peripherals. After settling down with junk food, we sit down at the same table and play video games together until the sun comes up. We are creating friendships and bonding, while not through conventional social means, but through games. However, gaming groups are not always as inclusive as mine. At our school, there is a recent surge in popularity in the game "League of Legends". I had met a large group of friends through playing this game, first online. Even so, after playing online with all of them for many hours, it felt completely natural when I made the transition into hanging out with them in real life. However, one of the main feature of the game is that you play in teams of five against other teams of five. Due to this, it's very easy to find a set of four other people that you enjoy playing with the most and then playing with them exclusively. This inevitably forms small factions that hold some hostility toward each other. 

Eventually, elitist groups, who think that they're better than everyone else at school, start to form, and all of a sudden there were people who I didn't like in real life just because of competition online. Most players are inclined to have good sportsmanship, but during matches "BM" (bad manners), sometimes gets shown. There are gamers at our school who legitimately dislike other gamers at our school as a result of this. It's interesting to see how gamers can be influenced so heavily by games, especially when the nature of the game itself, like League of Legends, starts to affect the social dynamics of gamer. Even so, there are good points. For example, when I met the League of Legends gamers, I didn't know any of them at all, yet they were still friendly when we were playing. This is because they were judging me based on how good at the game I was, or to some degree, how fun I was to play with. This had nothing to do with how I was in real life. Later, when I went to parties with them, I found all of them generally friendly and genuinely good people. This is because a lot of gamers could care less about an individual's real life personality or appearance and judge them only based on their gaming ability. This is a key, defining factor of being a gamer. Because of the nature of the game market, gamer groups that form around a computer game like League of Legends likely do not have much overlap with gamers that are interested in a fighting game like Super Smash Brothers (SSB). However, I personally play both, although I play SSB "casually". At our school, the group that formed around SSB goes to a classroom every single lunch period to play matches against each other, calling themselves "The Gamer's Club". The Gamer's Club also holds a wide variety of card games, and people started coming from all around with their laptops or handheld devices to play against each other, enjoying the environment in the Gamer's Club.  The Gamer's Club is an artifact of the modern day gaming culture as it encompasses many aspects of the gamer's desire to socialize using video games.

It was a great place to meet other gamers with the same interests as yourself and bond over video games while you were at it. One of the questions that you may have asked yourself by now is: "how can video games be so important that they're controlling the social lives of gamers"? The answer is the second aspect of gamers: "we take video games way too seriously". In fact, we even created a term for people who play videogames but doesn't take it very seriously: "casual gamer". Most casual gamers do not identify themselves as gamers at all, and only play "casual" games. There is however, a large market for these casual games that many video game developers at targeting. Casual games are defined as requiring little skill, practice, or time commitment to be able to play and enjoy. A majority of these games are for mobile phones, such as "Angry Birds", "Mega Run", and "Cytus". These games are easy to pick up and play within seconds and become instantly fun and gratifying. However, even though some casual gamers spend a large amount of time on these games, due to the nature of them, they do not fall under the subculture of "gamer". Games that are targeted toward gamers often require adeptness in a variety of skills, such as reflex (Call of Duty, Battlefield), rhythm (osu!, DDR), strategy (Starcraft, Age of Empires), and teamwork (DotA, League of Legends). In order to become better at these games, gamers often practice these games for hours on end, pouring all of their free time into honing these skills. As the experience of a gamer grows, gamers often find themselves able to carry skills over from other games into games from a similar genre. This often leads to huge time commitments. There is another category of games, MMO (massive multiplayer online), where time commitment is the largest factor. A skilled player will still lose to someone who has been playing longer, due to a "leveling" and "power" system most of them employ. Because of this, MMO gamers are a subsect of the subculture that is often looked down upon by other gamers due to the nature of the game they play. Because of the amount of practice and interest a wide base of players can pour into a single game, sometimes games can transcend into what is known as an "E-sport" - a game with a professional scene. Tourneys are held for these games that are televised on online webstreams that many gamers tune into to watch and try to see how they can further hone their skills to become professionals. What is so attracting about E-Sports is that every single player is just some teenager or young adult who happens to love the game and decided they could make a living off tournament money. Indeed, it is reminiscent of the article "Jack of Smarts" by Justin Peters in Common Culture about poker players in every single way. Poker players see professionals "walk away with @2.5 million, and the near-worshipful admiration of millions of delusional amateurs like myself", not unlike myself when I watch South Korean Starcraft tournaments. The poker player subculture and the gamer subculture are both similar in that many people wish to break out into the professional scene. Ironically, the competitive drive is what fuels the deepest bonds between such a vast demographic of people as gamers.


The last aspect of being a gamer is simple: we all love playing video games too much for our own good. Most gamers of my generation have nostalgic memories of trying to play games like Pokemon on our Game Boys under the covers in bed, or going over to our friend's house to play Super Smash Brothers Melee on their Gamecube's. Sometimes we uncover our old, dusty Gamecube controller that doesn't work anymore, or an old game cartridge long broken, and we hesitate to throw it out. In the end we usually don't. These old treasures from our childhood are also artifacts of the modern gaming subculture. Even though the first few games that we have the most vivid memories of playing are different, all of us own an artifact that symbolizes our entrance into the gaming world. Almost all gamers have video games intertwined into their golden childhood days. In fact, many people in our generation do as well, but some simply "grow out" of it, decided they were "too cool" to be playing videogames, or continued playing the casual games. The rest find harder and more difficult games to play, and become gamers as they go into adolescence. However, it's a guarantee that most gamers still enjoy going back and revisiting games, especially their childhood artifacts. Even though newer games have come out, I'll never refuse a chance to go back and play Pokemon Gold, Starcraft:BW, or Super Smash Bros Melee. In fact, half the reason Nintendo is the most profitable and biggest gaming company is because it caters specifically toward creating amazing games that can be enjoyed by all ages. The majority of what gamers' consider "classics" - games that everyone should play because basically every gamer has played and loved it - are games that they typically played as a kid, such as Pokemon or Legend of Zelda, to name the biggest two, both by Nintendo. In fact, it's a long running joke line amongst my friends to say "if you didn't play Pokemon when you were younger, you had no childhood". It can almost be argued that the entirety of the gaming market is an artifact of the modern gaming subculture, as the demand from our generation is what formed the rise of titan companies like EA, Blizzard, or Valve. These games create an assured and definite bond between gamers, knowing that they at least have a small handful of common games that they love even if they currently play different games.

Gamers are mostly misunderstood for being antisocial and obsessed, but that isn't always the case. As shown to the contrary, gamers are primarily held together by socializing over videogames, taking video games to a higher competitive level, and sharing common childhood experiences with video games. It is a subculture that I identify with heavily and enjoy being part of. I'm proud to be a gamer.