The Drunken Lizard Pub

Ladies, gentlemen, others:

What, in your opinion, qualifies as a gamer? Who is a gamer? What games must you play to be regarded as such?

I'm asking because this popped up on my tumblr from a genuinely aggrieved female gamer as an example of a post on a gaming site she subscribes to:

Girl gamers, just because you have played Call of Duty, Halo, Resident Evil, Minecraft, Portal, Left 4 Dead, Legend of Zelda, World of Warcraft, and/or whatever casual game, does not make you a gamer.

I have no pretensions to being a gamer. I played Halo with my nephew back in the day, obviously I'm playing Eschalon and I play an awful lot of casual games from sites like Big Fish. But who or what is a gamer, if it's not someone who has played the games named above?

I realise the guy could just be a troll, but all the same I'm curious.

The guy is just a troll whose testosterone is threatened by the idea that estrogen is just as capable of gaming.

If you enjoy playing games as a hobby, regardless of the kind of game it is, you are a gamer.

I think of it like this- there are all kinds of car enthusiasts: motor heads that like the old muscle cars, street rodders, exotic car aficionados, jap import modders, clubs devoted to luxury cars, electric cars, kit cars, etc. There are people who love auto racing and people who love cars that just sit in museums. I could go on an on, but cars are the one thing they all share.

Games are the one thing we all share. Doesn't matter if your passion is Plants vs Zombies, Call of Duty, Train Simulator, Eschalon, or Skyrim. We are all gamers.

Yeah, my only qualifications for a gamer are:

Video Games: I wouldn't necessarily consider someone who plays 'Monopoly' or 'Life' all day to be a gamer. Now, if they also happen to play computer games, or video games in general, they might be a gamer, but it's not because of the board games they play.

Consistency: Someone who has played Eschalon (Or any other game) once in their life, and will probably never play it again, is not a gamer. I would say, that to be considered a gamer on this front, one must play games on a regular basis.

Maybe not Monoploy, but before tabletop D&D and video games, the gamers were wargamers spending hours setting up armies, fleets, or aircraft models to reenact battles.

Randomizer wrote:Maybe not Monoploy, but before tabletop D&D and video games, the gamers were wargamers spending hours setting up armies, fleets, or aircraft models to reenact battles.

Oooh, you just reminded me. Did anybody else play the old Star Fleet Battles game? Federation versus Klingon versus Romulan in any mix and match you wanted. Great fun.

I have not played that, but it sounds awesome! I'm glad to know I'm not the only Trekie here though!

The game was around back in the 80s. I think when Next Generation started, Paramount may have had the game killed off for copyright infringement. Not sure.

I played some variations of it back in the 1980s, but not since then. Besides I forgot my password.

Its alot like the are you a biker or a rider question.

You are what you think you are.

If you play fb games and love them, your a gamer of some sort.

If you only play rpgs, your a gamer of some sort.

If you play all of them, your a gamer of some sort.

I have played pretty much every aspect of some kind of games, so therefore, i consider myself a gamer.

If you told me your a gamer and you just played chess, id agree with you.

Yeah, a gamer's just someone who is passionate about games. Your age, gender, and such doesn't enter into it. Nor does it matter if you are a casual or hardcore, if you prefer console, phone or PC; or if you play tabletop or videogames or whatever!

And I agree, whoever wrote that post is a troll. And an idiot.

To me, a gamer is someone who is actually adept at gaming... which excludes me, I guess, 'cause I'm really careless, even though I play a lot of games. ...Well, when I have the free time.

...Though I guess others would classify me as a gamer just 'cause I love computer games. (And am currently co-developing one... against my better judgment.) Not that I have an enormous library, or anything. I mean, it's pathetically dwarfed in comparison to my book library or my music library... even my film library is larger, and that one's not very big, even though I love films more than I like games.

Kreador Freeaxe wrote:The game was around back in the 80s. I think when Next Generation started, Paramount may have had the game killed off for copyright infringement. Not sure.

Not so much.

SFB never infringed copyright, because they got a license to make their games from Paramount.

However, their license only included the original series and the animated series, not TNG or DS9 or Voyager - so they couldn't include "new" elements like Cardassians, Ferengi, Borg, etc (or, obviously, new style ships). That was fine, because SFB had already and added new races (such as the Lyrans and Hydrans) and made existing minor races more important (such as the Tholians, Gorn, Orion, and Andromedans, each featured in one episode apiece, and the Kzinti which featured in one animated series episode written by Larry Niven, who probably later regretted allowing his IP into the Trek universe) and extrapolated into the future of Trek (with the Andromedan invasion and X-series technical improvements) in ways that were incompatible with the "real future" provided by TNG.

The license continued, however, and they republished everything in the later 90s with a brand new version fixing many of the rules issues in the first two versions. There was even a video game series based on the SFB universe rather than off the "real" Trek universe called "Starfleet Command". Even today, the creators have SFB have adapted to the internet age by making their products print-on-demand rather than boxed up in game stores.

Older versions were known for being more like "Star Fleet Rules Lawyering" than Star Fleet Battles, but those days are long gone. The later rules revisions are much tighter and have fewer bugs. Game play is long and complicated, but rewarding in my opinion.

The strengths of the game are attention to detail, heavily cross-referenced rules and such a huge variety of options that you can play for years and never explore everything. The weaknesses are tooooo many rules, the designers being obsessed with the naval metaphors which sometimes fly in the face of science fiction, and their super-strict license observance getting far too much in the way of fan contributions. As both a strength and a weakness, I'd mention that the tournament rules are a very, very restricted subset of the full rules - which is good because you can get a grip on tournaments and decide if they are fair, but also makes you wonder what the rest of the game is "for" - I mean not everyone plays to practice for tournament, but that just makes it harder to find fellow players because you also have to take into account whether they're the kind that play by tournament rules exclusively for practice or don't care.

Good to know. Thanks, Silverkitty. I hadn't played it or heard of people playing it since, probably, 1989, so it's good to know that it's still around. I did play with one guy back in the day who was a real rules lawyer. Played once, never joined him for another game. That may well have been when I stopped playing it all together. Soon after I moved across country and didn't have the same friends around to play with, so I spent more time playing golf.

Kreador Freeaxe wrote: Soon after I moved across country and didn't have the same friends around to play with, so I spent more time playing golf.

That's a good way to increase your frustration level.