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Video: A new documentary series by one-time Kotaku contributor Latoya Peterson asks women who call themselves “gamers” why they do so. Girl Gamers explores the way that female gamers and game-makers deal with how to describe themselves and the perceptions of others.
English is an evolving language, beyond that Game and Gamer have been in use in the current sense for over 30 years, not to mention history of it being used as a verb and pronoun as early as the 1500’s to refer to someone who gambles. I think it’s time to let it go.
No one here is saying that being a Gamer limits yourself to the one label. I’d consider myself a gamer but I’m also a musician and a car nerd. We label ourselves to feel part of something, not to exclude it from all else.
The problem for me is that labels almost always leads to snobbery. Fair enough if everyone else doesn’t think that a label tends to eschew other groupings; that’s probably just a personal quirk; but labels like film buff, gamer etc. tend to create an unclear distinction as to what that entails and people get weirdly protective of their label if someone else claims to be a (for example) gamer and this new person doesn’t meet the first’s criteria; which in my experience almost always leads to self-righteous snobbery at best and outright hostility at worst.
For me labels are just as much for declaring participation as they are for ‘othering’ those outside of the group, not something I personally think people do deliberately, but something of a natural tribalistic response to the self-created ‘other’. That’s kinda veering into media theory talk there so I won’t go further, but this sort of thing is the stuff I’m studying at uni at the moment, so it’s kinda fun to go drawing links between basic anthropology and media critique. Fair point on the language thing, it’s just one of those words that grates in my mind when I hear it, much like versing incorrect usage of your/you’re or even yore (actually seen that last one, it was horrifying).
Also in regards to the rest of it, I don’t see what the problem is. Or why labelling yourself with one thing means you’re restricting yourself to just that one. I am a gamer, games interest me and I like to play them, collect them and find out as much as I can about them. That doesn’t mean I can’t also identify as a musician, or a programmer, or a costume maker. I’ll go see a movie occasionally, but I wouldn’t say I have any particular interest in them as a whole. Similarly I don’t have that much interest in music or books, so probably wouldn’t have a lot in common to talk with someone who was heavily into any of those things and not games.
People always seem to get so fired up about this label thing like it’s some way of pigeon-holing people into strictly defined definitions… but all it is is a method of describing things. And there’s nothing wrong with describing things in general terms. You might organise a box full of assorted items by colours, put all the red ones together, then the yellows, the blues… but that doesn’t mean everything in each section won’t also come in varying shades that can describe them in further detail if necessary for the situation.
Please don’t be white women with coloured hair and piercings. Please don’t be white women with coloured hair and piercings. Please don’t be white women with coloured hair and piercings.
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