I Hate the Word Gamer

I hate the word "Gamer", it's easily one of the most annoying things that I ever hear when browsing websites about games.  But I never used to hate this word, my hatred is kind of recent and it's party because of what the industry has become over the many years.

Back in my day, a "gamer" was just another way of saying an enthusiast.  It was a term used to describe a person who was pretty good at games and was knowledgeable about them to boot and that's all it meant.  As long as you took some kind of pride in this thing that you called a hobby, enjoyed it, learned about it and got good, you were a gamer.

But that has all changed now and hearing the word "gamer" makes me imagine the post pathetic pieces of shit that make it embarrassing to play games.

You know the kind of people I mean, like the ones pictured above.  They don't necessarily have to be fat and unshaven, they can look like perfectly normal people, it's the attitude that pisses me off.  These are the kind of people who play usually one or two titles, usually Call of Duty or League of Legends mainly, and constantly go on about "gamer cred" or the importance of fucking achievement points or whatever stupid bullshit.

The kind of person that you know people like Geoff Keighley (The Doritopope) are pandering too when you see that kind of thing.  The kind of people that lap up all this overpriced DLC and accept bad business practices because "you aren't a gamer if you don't", right?  The kind of person you can imagine sitting in a big fat couch with an Xbox headset on screaming at his team mates about how shit they are in any given FPS game du jour.

So yeah, fuck the word gamer.  Just because you play Call of Duty and farm easy games for achievement points doesn't make you one.  Imagine if just because I could throw a piece of chicken into the oven and let it bake for 40 minutes, that qualifies me to be a chef.  That would be ridiculous and so are these people.