Gamer Culture, is it Leveling Up or Devolving?

[DarksideEric]

First question I'm going to throw out to you guys:

When did you start online gaming? Doesn't matter if it was on PC, console or even mobile, just would like to know when you started to be exposed to online gaming because I think (at least for me), the earlier you started gaming online the more open you are about things changing in the community. And perhaps a bit more knowledgeable on how to treat trends and such in said community.

I myself started gaming online in 1998 with the PC FPS Starsiege TRIBES (one of the best FPS games I've ever played), so I've been around the whole gaming + anonymity thing since it started.

So let me lay out a few topics to be discussed in here, if I might, and I'd like to see some of your thoughts first before I input my own into the conversation (though I will admit on many things in the gaming culture I'm somewhat "liberal").

- The continued separation of girl gamers and gamers (as "gamer" is still often meant to mean male).

- The continued separation of "casual" and "hardcore" and if people even still know what the differences between these two are.

- While multiplayer gaming has expanded thanks to the internet, are the social connections gaming used to have (such as playing next to someone in an arcade) being dropped out? Are gamers not getting the same social skills or is it actually increasing?

- Will gaming ever be taken seriously by not only the media, but gamers themselves? Many, many times I still see gamers degrade things like MLG where gaming is actually being turned into a profession.

So, is it Leveling Up or Devolving?

 

[M]

I started getting into the whole online gaming thing around 2004 when I found out I could play strategy games with other people over a thing called "the Internet" and continued on from there. The first real social Internet gaming experience for me was when a cousin of mine took me to an Internet gaming cafe and we played Battlefield Vietnam for almost 8 hours on end, I still love that game and will occasionally play a round or two against AI just because.

You've got a bunch of topics there (maybe just a bit too much for one single thread) so ill try to come up with an amazing analogy on the spot that kinda covers all of them

Think of gaming culture as a circle, one side of an argument is on one edge of the circle and the other side is on the opposite edge. What edges are they on? You can't tell, it's a circle, but as the gaming community grows larger it places a weight on top of this circle, squishing it down and turning it from a completely balanced circle into a stretched oval where the two viewpoints' edges are increasingly easily seen. As the circle gets squished the edges get further and further apart and as such the viewpoints get more and more extreme. The middleground stays perfectly balanced and sane, but it's always gradually decreasing in ratio to the irrational thinking strong viewed edges. Sometimes an edge's argument is right, and sometimes it's wrong, but because the edges are so far apart now they'll never compromise or admit their wrongness.

(Don't judge me if that doesn't make sense it's 2:30AM here and I'm very sleepy ;_

Point is: gaming culture's going forwards and backwards at the same time, the progressive sections such as the embracers of casual and girl gamers are growing but so is the amount of idiots out there who often scare the newly embraced groups away.