A Shift in the Image of “The Gamer”

It is during this lazy Sunday afternoon that I am finally able to articulate a concern that has been boggling my mind for a while (fancy way of saying “ranting about stuff”) – and that is the notion of what a “gamer” is. When the medium of videogames was young “gamers” consisted mostly of MIT programmers and, when they eventually became commercial, the hip young crowd at a bar playing a “game” where two ambiguously shaped squares paddled a smaller ambiguously shaped square back and forth. Back then, before the early 1980s, “videogames” were nothing more than a curiosity to spend a few minutes with an odd form of entertainment.