By Steph Ferns
These days, there are professional gamers, those who earn money through playing games. There are also different ways to play games, through a plethora of consoles, the computer, even your smart phone. With so many ways to play games, and so many people playing them, it can be hard to define what makes one a true gamer.
Now this used to be an easy answer. Back in 1958 the very first video game came out: Tennis for Two. Basically, it was good old Pong before Pong was a thing. If you’d played this, you could call yourself a gamer.
Though this probably wasn’t a good idea, as up to this point in history, the term “gamer” had been used to describe gamblers in England since 1422.
These days there are way too many video games to list; too many producers, publishers, content creators, etc. There’s merchandise, comics that began in the late 1930s being adapted into games, games being made into comics, TV shows made from games. The content is endless.
And with that we come to titles.
Gamer girl is a term that has been used for many years. Gaming has been seen as a “man’s hobby”, and many believe that “gamer girls” aren’t true gamers as they like to play games that are far less challenging than the ones men play.
Say there’s a little eight-year-old girl who gets a second-hand Nintendo Switch, with the new Princess Peach Showtime game. That sounds like an easy game, and on a surface level it is. If you want to do the bare minimum to finish, it’s a relatively easy game.
Many games are like that, where the challenge lies in the completion, or in playing on a higher difficulty. This game has no difficulty settings, however.
So, she goes the extra mile, she completes it.
Let me tell you now that I have seen professional, money-earning gamers finish the main story of this game, only to baulk at the completion requirements and switch off the console.
Again, this is a Princess Peach game. You know, the helpless woman Mario saves.
So, is the little girl a casual gamer girl, or a gamer?
There are many professional gamer girls out there who make money from simply playing games on YouTube or Twitch. They have their own brand, fans and merch.
We’re gonna take a step away from gaming and look at basketball here, bear with me. Say person A plays basketball casually, as a hobby, but is incredibly good. They’re a basketballer, right? But person B is a member of an international basketball team, they earn millions of dollars a year from playing. Is person A still considered a basketballer when compared to person B?
It’s the same for gaming. Not only are there people who stream and record themselves playing video games, which they earn money from, but there are people who play E-Sports. Electronic sports. The professionals of professionals, who earn prizemoney and trophies for playing video games.
Then there’s the infamous “console wars”.
Over the years, Nintendo has brought out many different consoles, from the SNES to the Switch. Then there’s Microsoft and Sony. Good old Xbox and PlayStation. There are die-hard fans that swear up and down that one is superior to the other in every way. Personally, I don’t care, but these people are ride or die with their favourite console. Reference how good one is compared to the other and you’ll quickly start another battle in the never-ending conflict.
Standing among the console war participants are what is known as the “PC master race”, people who exclusively play on their computer. And why not? A top-of-the-line gaming PC has incredible graphics, is FPS (frames per second) boosted, and has more RAM. Hence the master race part of the title.
Then there’s Nintendo, who for some reason stands off to the side in this battle of tech giants and does its own thing.
Lastly, we have mobile phones.
Yes, smart phones.
The gaming community seems to mostly look down on people who solely play games on their smart devices, seeing them as inferior.
But smart phones are now so powerful that they can play games that consoles play. Genshin Impact and the new Wuthering Waves are both mobile games, but they are also now some of the many mobile games available on consoles.
Then there’s games like Minecraft and Stardew Valley, originally console games that are now playable on mobile, thereby melding the two worlds together, making it more and more difficult to see where the phones end and the consoles begin.
We’ve pretty much covered the basics here, gender, professionalism, consoles/platforms, along with a touch of history. With all this information, we can only come to one conclusion.
The definition of a gamer is whatever you want it to be.
Featured image: The Xbox One and WiiU belong to my brother. The rest are all mine. Photo: Steph Ferns
