The Concept

Players vs Gamers:

Welcome to the Ring
(or, The Concept)



For this project, I am going to adopt a set of terminology I encountered in a very well-written book given to me by a friend (I'll omit the name and description of the book in order to not detract from the importance of the idea it provided and hide an irrelevant bit of fanboyism on my part, both of which would dilute the impact). The idea of a split like this among a group I had always considered so close-knit struck a chord with me. It was like the Cyborg Ninja in the room: it might have been there all along, but until it cuts the enemy's hand off in the middle of a boss fight, you don't even notice.

A "Gamer" is a person who plays video games purely for the achievements, be they mental, or built into a system within the game/console/platform. The "I beat it" moment. The chance to check something off of their list. Bragging rights, and not much else.

A "Player" is a person who turns the game into an experience. A person who might be willing to sacrifice 10 frames per second for 4X anti-aliasing instead of 2X. The kind who will play a game again, just to experience the story, even if it doesn't change. They play for the immersion. The emotion. And even, the beauty.

A game to a Gamer is a statistic. A milestone at best.

For a player, it's an investment. An experience.

A player sees that one stray bullet that accidentally kills an NPC teammate as a loss to the team. A loss of capabilities. They may not go so far as to start thinking of how "Timmy the medic won't make it back out of City 17 to see his daughter again", but he sees more than the Gamer. A Gamer sees this as just another bullet that didn't hit the enemy.

<SPOILERS FOR THE GAME CALL OF DUTY 4: MODERN WARFARE FOLLOW>

Take, for instance, the missions "Shock and Awe" and "The Aftermath" from the original Modern Warfare.

Shock and Awe starts out as your typical "I'm a badass superhuman soldier" mission. You man an Mk 19 grenade launcher and shoot at several baddies from the comfort of your aircraft. After extracting a team of Marines and several other firefights, you watch your Close Air Support gunship get shot down just as you hear of a probable nuclear threat in the area. So you run in, shooting through more bad guys and work your way to the crash site. Then you, as the main character, personally carry the injured pilot back to your chopper and start your way out of the city. During the flight out, a nuclear weapon goes off in the city, knocking you and all the other helicopters out of the air. You can then stumble out of the helicopter in the aftermath and fallout of the nuke, past the corpses of your team and the pilot you just risked your life to rescue as buildings crumble around you and you slowly die. During the loading screen a large list of casualties sustained from the attack are listed, among them is the name of the character you were playing.

This level and it's imagery is pure art. And as much hatred as I have for the Call of Duty franchise, this scene is still one of the greatest examples of games becoming a true art form. The sound of the radio announcing a large number of casualties and locations of treatment facilities as you stumble out of the chopper. The bodies of your teammates laying around you. A teddy bear on the ground and the faint sound of children playing if you manage to crawl your way to a nearby playground. It was a scene that has very few equals. And sadly, a great number of people's only reaction to it was something along the lines of "Huh...that sucks."

It's just plain depressing that something like that goes to waste on the Call of Duty crowd... But I'll save that for a later rant.

<END CALL OF DUTY 4: MODERN WARFARE SPOILERS>


But again, why this divide among such a normally united group of people? It started to happen when videogames started becoming popular with mass audiences. When they no longer carried the stigma of being for "nerds". Suddenly, everybody wanted to play them. And that large group of people, who didn't really appreciate games for what they are beyond a way to kill time, started to influence the games industry. And started to give us huge budget games, with very little in the way of advancement of the concept. We end up with a lot of very pretty games, that are all pretty much the same. But a game like Minecraft, which is not "pretty" in any sense of the word, can sell millions of copies and provide hundreds of hours of fun without even having a storyline or set goals.

Then you have the "casual" crowd. The ones who started the facebook game craze. These people have actually begun to steer the industry as well. And the fact that Uncharted 2 (a great game, by the way) has "Facebook Integration" and Angry Birds is now available for the PS3.....just plain sickens me. And one quick note, who really shares their videogame progess on facebook? Seriously? WHY!?

This is a declaration of war on the Gamer and their systematic effort to turn games into an endless stream of carbon copies. The people who really like videogames hate you. Us Players want you to leave our passion alone. Go back to doing whatever the hell you used to do. And take Madden, Call of Duty, Battlefield, and every single game made by Zynga with you...

We're tired of your shit. And this site is going to help us fight you all. Your move.

(Now, to give credit where credit is due, I would like to thank Benjamin Chandler for his section that explained "Gamers" and "Players" in the book "Final Fantasy and Philosophy" and a game's use as a Writerly Text, it opened my eyes to this horrible epidemic and was absolutely invaluable.)

--Vinciere