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.

Who Cares About VGX?

Here we go again folks!  It's getting to the end of the year, so it's now time once again for everyone to start putting their game of the year lists together!

If anyone doesn't know what VGX is it's some video game award thing hosted by Spike TV and it involves talking about games for a bit, and then announcing a load of awards given to whoever made the best of whatever category they are pushing.  The show is produced by Geoff Keighley, the man known to the masses as "Dorito Pope", so you know it's probably a load of bollocks.

Now when I woke up this morning it was already underway but having a quick look at my twitter turned me right off the whole thing.  The first thing I saw was that Nintendo announced a new Donkey Kong game, which I thought was cool but apparently the rest of the internet was just complaining about it.  The day has come when people are cursing a new DKC game....and that's a sad day.

So aside from the Dorito Pope the whole thing was hosted by Joel Mchale, who I'm not familiar with but he's not much of a game fan by the looks of things.  From what I saw and heard about the goings on, he spent most of his time looking like he didn't want to be there but he did manage to ask a couple of really awkward questions to certain people, which gave me a little chuckle.

Now I have a bit of a problem with these kinds of award shows because the winners are always really really predictable.  The game of the year winner at VGX was, surprise surprise, Grand Theft Auto 5.  Not that I'm saying that there's anything wrong with GTA5, I've not played it yet, it's probably a good game at the very least however the game of the year really can only go to like 1 of maybe 3 games off the top of my head.  Most of the big review sites will probably give their game of the year award to either The Last of Us, Bioshock Infinite or Grand Theft Auto 5. 

In fact, I'll make a bet with people right now, for every major gaming site that gives it's GOTY to something different, I'll give £5 to charity, so make sure you email me and make me aware because I'm not going to go hunting for it.

Not that those 3 are bad games, they are all passable titles, well put together with lots of polish and all that jazz but the fact that every gaming site will give their awards to one of these three is a little boring and sort of smells a bit of that whole "paid review" thing that gets talked about sometimes.  I just wish that they would be more open about what their game of the year could be, so that when I watch I don't just fast forward through nominees because I know exactly what they are going to pick.

I heard though that fucking Gone Home of all goddamn things won indie game of the year.  THIS I don't fucking agree with, because it's barely even qualifies as a game.  If you want to tell me that Gone Home was better that Rouge Legacy, Don't Starve, Gunpoint, Antichamber and many others (that's just going off my sidebar) then take your shitty opinion and fuck off out of my face, I reject your awful taste in video games.  I'm not sure if it actually did though, so if I'm wrong I'll be happy to discover that.

I didn't ignore the VGX completely but what I did see seemed low budget, badly made bullshit.  The reveal about DKC was cool and I didn't see the others but the awards were so predictable I ended up closing the tab and playing fucking Gynoug on the Mega Drive.  Do people actually give a flying fuck about these award shows? They know which handful of games is probably going to win so why bother?

Although if the VGX did one thing right it bored me enough to make me get up from my computer and work through my PS3 backlog for a few hours.