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[DeepEnigma]

The funny thing is, all the juvenile things that you listed in the OP that could be used to look down on gamers, are the very same shit that happens by grown adults in the music industry, Hollywood, Sports industry, and even politics with politicians and mainstream news talking points they have on there with the people on their panels.

Video game development and culture back in the late 70s early 80s was always an adult centric shared experience. Arcades were mainly upper teens and adults.

Then Nintendo came along and marketed the NES as a toy for children, and revived the market after the gaming recession with that stigma that stuck ever since.

But I do think it's more mainstream than ever and it hits all demographics now, especially the Fortnite craze with celebrities and athletes dropping shout outs.

 

[petran79]

You have some good points but in my experience most people find entire act of playing games childish not the social media around it. It basically same way most people find animation "childish".

Yet they'll watch the animated weather forecasts, sport analysis and documentaries without issues

 

[V1LÆM]

Yep, too many people are immature. Doesn't help you get some people who get so offended over the stupidest things. I can't really blame people for thinking what they do of gamers! Myself I just enjoy playing games and that's it. Not really interested in much else.

Oh and BTW sorry if I have offended anyone by calling them a "gamer". Wait, nevermind, I forgot I ain't on ResetEra.

 

[Bankai]

After playing more story-driven games such as Firewatch, SOMA, Oxenfree, What remains of Edith Finch and the likes, "they" might think differently

 

[ruvikx]

This is just my opinion. It’s how I feel and I hope to start a discussion on this. I don’t expect everyone to either agree or disagree.

So there are 3 main issues I would like to point out as to why I view this topic the way I do.

• The Gaming Media isn’t professional or on par compared to their counterparts in entertainment, politics, sports.
• Companies treat their Fanbase/Audience/Consumers like children. Unlike how Companies in other forms of entertainment treat their consumers.
• Actions of fanbases and interacting with their fellow fans and industry.

Before reading further, understand I am not a professional writer. I have the ability to create threads on NeoGAF and have a keyboard. Keep your expectations in check. This is not a debate for me. Just a conversation… exchanging viewpoints and thoughts.

These examples are not exclusive to gaming. The mainstream media is an abomination in 2019, i.e. partisan propaganda, gaslighting, lying, manipulating public opinion to suit the agenda of special interest groups (whether political or financial). It's a shitshow. Companies also treat consumers like children everywhere, i.e. you need merely watch a commercial on TV to witness the absolute lowest common denominator exploitative nature of advertising & selling xyz products.

As for the "fanbase"... car discussions (one small little example) between "fans" of various companies & models also degenerate into childish dick measuring contests. The list of counter-examples to all 3 of your own examples posted here in other facets of life beyond the gaming industry is basically far, far to long to post.

 

[Noboru Wataya]

I find it embarrassing in certain scenarios to disclose my hobby to people, most people in work know me as the “tech savvy” guy, but none of them know much about my gaming habits, or my money spending on gaming for that matter. It’s not that they wouldn’t understand, or want to ask questions, but personally I feel it’s childish. Mostly for the reasons in the op.

All non gaming adults know now is the Fortnite when it comes to gaming. The big cartoon online game all the kids love, I could be seen as a big weird old pedo that plays games with children instead of doing grown up hobbies like cycling clubs or being an alcoholic.

Now I know 99% of my colleagues wouldn’t give one shit if they knew really, but i am kinda ashamed of the hobby I hold and don’t feel like disclosing or trying to justify that I spend £10k a year on video gaming, the nuances in the medium, the nostalgia (which is tied to being a kid), the skill required and so forth. I’ll just tell em I play a bit of cod some times and you get the odd guy who plays fifa who can relate lol.

 

[ROMhack]

Sure OP is right as a generalisation but I'm sure that's not the case with all gamers.

Like, I'll never understand this forum's outright fixation with the gaming press (the main point really). People seem totally convinced that having an interest in games means having to consume news about it every day. I totally disagree with that. To me having a real interest would be consuming books about games or maybe divulging in old school blogs, or even newer ones like Hardcore Gaming 101. People here always talk about Kotaku and Polygon like you can't live your life ignoring them (which I can say I do personally).

As such I wonder if OP's points actually come down to the immaturity of 'consumers' not gamers. The latter is somebody who plays games; the former somebody who spends too much time on the internet, probably at the expense of playing games.

Sounds mean, I know.

 

[Saruhashi]

I find it embarrassing in certain scenarios to disclose my hobby to people, most people in work know me as the “tech savvy” guy, but none of them know much about my gaming habits, or my money spending on gaming for that matter. It’s not that they wouldn’t understand, or want to ask questions, but personally I feel it’s childish. Mostly for the reasons in the op.

All non gaming adults know now is the Fortnite when it comes to gaming. The big cartoon online game all the kids love, I could be seen as a big weird old pedo that plays games with children instead of doing grown up hobbies like cycling clubs or being an alcoholic.

Now I know 99% of my colleagues wouldn’t give one shit if they knew really, but i am kinda ashamed of the hobby I hold and don’t feel like disclosing or trying to justify that I spend £10k a year on video gaming, the nuances in the medium, the nostalgia (which is tied to being a kid), the skill required and so forth. I’ll just tell em I play a bit of cod some times and you get the odd guy who plays fifa who can relate lol.

I was thinking something similar.

I think the problem isn't in the hobby itself but rather is in the fact that most people outside, and many inside, don't REALLY understand video games.

The impression I have taken away many times from talking to people is that there are a ton of folk who just see "Video Games" as a monolith. So if one person sees games as "for kids" then they just believe that all games are like that. Very few folks seem to understand that there are as many types of games as there are genres of music or movies etc.

Like if you tell someone you watched movies at the weekend they are not going to assume you watched children's movies or musicals or a western. The different types of movies are on a really broad spectrum and people generally understand that. They aren't going to think "movies... hm... isn't that mostly pornography".

You can pretty much blame the media for this. If some guy's wife interrupts him while he's watching The Revenant and he slaps her then nobody is about to blame that on "Movies". If the same thing happens when the guy is playing RDR2 or Fortnite? Oh, boy, those gamers are at it again!

Basically, the casual or non game-playing pubic is subjected to reporting on games that gives a very particular take on all things gaming. It's all about addiction and how the gamers can do X or Y or Z abhorrent things in the game. There's never a disclaimer that someone playing Fortnite or GTAV all weekend is having a very different time compared to someone playing Gris or Firewatch.

I was going to reply to the thread by pointing out that there is a massive segment of the gaming community that IS immature because millions of gamers are literally children and teens. Then there's a big segment who could kindly be described as not very well-adjusted socially. So you will have many immature gamers by default.

When I thought about that though I concluded that many mature and immature people watch movies or read books or listen to music that suits their tastes. Yet nobody tries to throw movies, books or music under the bus because a few people or even a few sub-communities act terribly.

For me it comes down to mainstream media coverage of gaming compared to other hobbies.

I think actually that gaming is seen as for kids because most mainstream coverage of gaming is not aimed at gamers and generally presents gaming as a bit of a "problematic" and juvenile hobby.

Gaming communities sometimes don't exactly help with this. You have many places on the internet that will share anonymous post and comments and tweets as "proof" that gamers are trash. Problem is that we never really get to find out who was really behind those tweets. I know for a fact that 11, 12, 13 year old me and my friends would have had a goddamn field day trolling modern gaming communities.

Then look at someone like Anita Sarkeesian. Many of her video game criticisms are definitely based on factual information. You can kill a stripper and dump her in a closet in the old Hitman, that's not the entirety of gaming though. What she does is the equivalent of saying "in the 2007 short film two girls, one cup acts of coprophagia are shown on screen once again demonstrating a need for the film industry to take responsibility for what is included in movies". It's factual but the true nature of the medium is hidden to keep things in context. Basically she was making videos about the negative aspects of video games but these were aimed at people who don't actually know very much about gaming.

People like that cherry pick specific aspects of the entire industry and package it up and sell that bullshit to people who don't know any better. As a result things like "Gamergate" define gaming when tens of millions of gamers won't even have a clue what Gamergate even is.

It's like the old thing you always see getting bandied around that "in Grand Theft Auto the player can hire a prostitute then kill her to get their money back". To an outsider that sounds truly awful. If you willfully trick that outsider into thinking that this is the main content of video games in general then of course they will have a negative impression. I mean do any of these people even comprehend what "hire a hooker, kill her and get your money back" actually looks like in-game?

Yet, when someone says "I'm taking the kids to watch a movie at the weekend" you aren't going to see any responses along the lines of "I heard that movies are full of murder and sex and violence".

Same if you say "I went for a meal and movie with the wife on Friday" nobody is going to come back with "my kid had a McDonalds Happy Meal and watched Finding Nemo on Friday, aren't meals and movies just for kids?"

Gaming seems to get a bad rap because there's a never ending line of people ready and willing to misrepresent the entire industry and it's related communities. That is coupled with a someone what ignorant public that blindly believes that misrepresentation.

Shit, I know folks who think gaming is not a respectable way to pass the time but they go home every night to watch reality TV and soap operas.

Yes, gaming is full of kids and immature adults and loudmouth eejits. Yes, there are games that are aimed at adults but with juvenile content. Yes there are games that adults enjoy that are aimed at children. That's true for all entertainment mediums though.

The problem is that gaming has been unfairly stigmatized in a way that movies or books etc have not.

 

[petran79]

Yesterday I was in Londons Winter Wonderland. Compare the pay to win attractions there, vs video games. Adults participated and had no qualm getting applaused or ridiculed by watching bystanders Those sort of games are accepted by the mainstream and were not cheap to participate either. Same for the various attractions, from G force spinning spheres to kids riding with their parents.

I won probably the best prize in the luckiest day of my life when it comes to games: a real life sized white tiger! I was treated like a star even inside the tube station.

Video games lost this mainstream support through various bad practices. Nintendo know what they are doing. It is exactly this audience that treats all those sophisticated games and their fans as something distant and out of touch.
Even traditional arcade games are no more. Visited Namco Funscape and it had only racing and shooting games and a giant pac man screen. No Tekken at all! Yet it had a Tomb Raider shooting game.

 

[Mr Nash]

I've basically dismissed people writing off playing games as childish to just be normie opinions not worth caring about. I honestly like being a little bit immature. There's a youthful exuberance to it that gives me energy. Now that I'm in my 40s, I recognize that it's not all bad feeling that way. Sure, there's people who are clearly having a midlife crisis if they take things too far. Avoid that. But life isn't all serious business by serious people from sun up to sun down. Enjoy video games, put the Lucky Star theme on your answering machine. Just use stuff like this as filters to avoid the overly judgmental, obnoxiously serious people of the world.

 

[Fbh]

Nice thread but personally I don't agree .
My biggest issue with your points is that the average person that sees gaming as immature/childish doesn't know or care about the latest Kotaku headlines or that Siege ranked is still in Beta or that the latest AAA game was announced with a teaser to a countdown to a teaser to a trailer.

Their biggest exposure to games is probably gaming TV ads which are generally like this:


On top of its depiction in mainstream media which at least in my experience is generally negative. When games get mentioned in my local mainstream news it's mostly about some gaming related fight ending in assault/death, or Fortnite disrupting classrooms or some sort of harassing or "cyber bullying" or something like that.

It also doesn't help that some of the more vocal members of the gaming community fall into the pathetic loser stereotype.

Ultimately though, IMO the view of gaming as childish mostly comes to prejudice and ignorance and in my experience is mostly limited to older people. Most people I know in their early 30's or under seems way more open and accepting of it as a hobby so as time goes on I think this is an "issue" that will resolve itself

 

[Alexios]

Gamers insult each other as juvenile for liking mario or for liking gore or for paying for dlc or cosmetics or for not doing so or whatever topic, constantly choosing sides and digging in trenches over the pettiest shit, rather than unite under the common hobby without being judgemental or even growing more open minded and seeing things from the others' point of view and expanding their horizons so. Even on this forum you see people thinking of themselves as the alpha males, real men, real fans, real gamers, even trying to push that narrative to the outside-gaming world as well by talking about how they might make more money or have a hotter wife or whatever else, than those they deem to be inferior subhumans that just don't know any better so they accept this or that or pretend to in hopes of getting laid or whatever, hah. The world's population needs to grow up, gamers and non gamers, you shouldn't have to be into a hobby yourself to consider it alright to believe the root cause solved if the majority takes up gaming.

 

[Guardian's Light]

The witcher 3 is a mediocre game

Bloodborne has shitty ps3 graphics

No one needs tons of that jrpg japanese shit on Nintendo consoles, and Switch like Xeno, the last something, shin megami tensei who probably not even developers' mothers wanna play, we want more N first party decent support for a start, and THEN all the rest

Kojima went from being my favourite developer to a complete idiot who repeats itself for the sake of it
I sincerely hope he's not behind the Abandoned stuff, believe me, because that would make me look at him in disgust for all of this scam, someone should tell him this shit was fun...like 10 years ago, he lost credibility after the Mogren thing

Online ruined gaming, many games drops in single player quality just to prioritize useless multiplayer, cough cough gta v

No one likes enormous and empty open world, it's not a challenge for who has the longer and bigger dick in the college's locker room

 

[TheGodfather07]

some people still think games are like how they were during the snes days. i've had people watch me playing and say " whoa, i didnt know games were like this these days. they are like movies"

so ultimately it comes down to ignorance. also theres nothing childish about snes games anyway. i can still play donkey kong country or any mario game and enjoy it just as much as any modern game. maybe its the colourful cartoony look that people associate with children.

 

[subsmoke]

I don't think gaming is seen as a children's hobby. It's pretty well known that a huge percentage of gamers are adults.