Post 5: Wherein I Remember It Isn't All About Politics OR Why I Hate Gamers But I Don't Hate You

Samuel here.

I'll record this some day etc.

Don't let the picture fool you! Writing a post about Magic: The Gathering is the last thing I want to do. Instead, I want to talk about gamer culture, and more specifically, what it is about gamers that makes us do things like post rude comments about games on Facebook photos.

This is a picture of a card that they are seeing for the first time, and it is being posted by a third party retailer to inform people that this card is coming out soon. It's important to note that this card is definitely going to be sold soon; thousands of copies of it have been printed already and are currently sitting in warehouses waiting to be shipped to stores. And yet, these people complain. The first commenter seems to be deeply invested in the general quality of cards, writing that it is their "disappointment of the set", as though they were really hoping that this specific card would be awesome. And not only did the second poster agree with them, but 9 people liked it. And the next two posters thought that we desperately needed to know how much they wished the art could have been used on a better card. As if just looking at this card is so revolting to them that they simply cannot appreciate the picture.

So why do we do this? Why do gamers have this compulsion to vomit their opinions at the world? I will let you in on a terrible secret: gamers are horrible, horrible people. Let me share with you an anecdote: there's a store in Ottawa that holds regular competitive Magic events, and I haven't regularly gone there in 3 years. Last month, I thought I would peek my head in and play for an evening. When you arrive at such an event, you are expected to sign up by the time it is scheduled to start, or else the event will commence without you. If you're late to sign up, it's generally accepted that you have to just suck it up and wait until the next week. When I went to this event, however, there was a kid, maybe ten years old, who had tried to sign up on time but the event software had failed to correctly process his transaction, and so he was not registered for the event (despite having already paid for it). As we sat down and got prepared to start the event, he brought it to the attention of the staff, who announced to everyone that we would have to wait for about five minutes for him to register the kid. And with a 10 year old kid talking to a staffer at the front of the store, literally 5 or 6 men, probably between the ages of 25 and 50, all became outraged that they would have to wait for 5 minutes. "If he didn't sign up on time, it's his fault. He has to learn a lesson". "Too bad". "He can play next week."

Even worse, this sort of thing is relatively common, especially online. I know tons of awesome gamers, many of them among my very best friends, but when you're playing games, the people you notice are the really obnoxious ones. I have spent much of my life doing really fun things with really terrible people. Here's what really frustrates me: gaming culture scares away players, and yet games are so much more fun when more people play them. Better strategies will be developed faster, more people will be more skilled at the game and so it's harder to rise to the top, and there's a higher chance you'll bump into someone in real life who plays the game and can talk with you about it. But bigotry and obnoxiousness are the best way to make our community steadily worse.

And yet, I play games. Games are fun. They make me think harder than just about anything else. And they have very tangible payoffs; often I win money, often just respect, but either way it is great to consistently win at something. And now that video gaming truly is an industry, with dozens of genres of games, being really good at a game is increasingly accessible to everybody. Are you bad at video games? No, you aren't. Seriously. I can believe that you're bad at first person shooters, I can believe that you're bad at racing games, but have you tried independent aerial combat puzzle solvers? Probably not.

So this is where you come in. Often when I play games, I am playing with misogynists, with racists, with sore winners and sore losers. I play with grown men who throw tantrums when asked to wait 5 minutes. I don't like that. I hate it. Games deserve better. So here is my plea to you: pick up a game. Whoever you are. Find a cheap one that you enjoy, maybe talk to a friend of yours who plays games, and just play it until you're done. It really is a universal joy. Everyone likes playing games. If enough people who don't hate women start playing the games I like, then I won't have to put up with bigots any longer. And if reasonable people start playing the games I like then maybe they will see that in limited, 2R for shock in a metagame that has a 1-damage and 3-damage red spell and a whole ton of really conditional removal isn't terrible when that shock also has a flashback. And isn't that a dream worth clinging to?

P.S. Ian Martin tied me up in his basement and improved this blog until I couldn't take it any more. Please visit http://communistgoblin.com/ or he will beat me. Which, depending on what you think of Julian Assange, may or may not be a good thing.

EDIT (March 28, 2012): I've played with this card a lot now, and, exactly as I suspected, this piece of versatile hyper-value removal is really, really good. Everyone who was whining about it is bad at magic.