{TwäT} Clan for life!

I do the same with sites I respect. This site has now been added to my regular haunts. Huge respect to the author of this 🙂

very good points! Never thought of it like that before but yeah in real life if you said something controversial then it would be to a big group of people that you would see mostly agree, and you would visibly be able to see that the hecklers are a minority. But on the internet you don’t see any of the people supporting you you only see the hecklers! We tend to forget that most people are normal still because its the trolls that are most vocal. But in all reality most people viewing the post or whatever it is would probably agree or at least be nice decent human beings and discuss it rather than being annoying trolls. Its just we only SEE the trolls! Well you said it a lot better than I did lol but yeah that did make me think.

awesome, cheers 🙂

The thing that I’ll say is that the anonymity of the internet makes the vocal minority both more vocal and less minor. Saying something controversial on the internet is similar to having a protest march where you just standing in front of a group of hecklers. The entire march isn’t plagued by these malcontents but your prolonged interaction with them can leave you feeling jaded by the whole experience.

If that analogy was a little too out there, how about this one? Call of Duty multiplayer. It’s the home of racist 14 year-olds, right? Well, it’s also the home of my friends and their respective circle of friends. If I can maintain my ability to stay insulated within in this ever-increasing bubble, I can limit the chances of encountering a poor multiplayer experience.

One thing to think about, gaming is one of the few pastimes where Adults openly play with children as equals. This empowers children to thinking they’re adults…

PREACH! Well said man! You weren’t rambling, I wanted to hear more!

You’re right about getting our act together and this is something I want to actively start doing from now on. We can’t be a respected medium if there are a bunch of us who say the dumbest shit possible. We can be better than that as gamers.

Thanks!

We haven’t recorded that podcast yet. We record it live tonight at 10:30pm EST. I’ll link to it in this article. I’ll also post it on Twitter so you should follow me there if you aren’t already. @Romudeth

started listening to the podcasts, good stuff! Didn’t know about them before, you got a new fan!

It means that I turned off adblock.

I was born in Luton, England. My dad left to go live in Fort Lauderdale, Florida when I was just a baby. My mum didn’t want to leave my grandparents behind so we stayed here. Throughout my whole life I never had much contact with my dad, he’d call like once a year if we were lucky. Fast forward to 2007/2008, I joined up with the other co-founders of TK to create this special place you see today. We qualified to go to E3 in 2009….I decided I would go as it was a life dream. Suddenly out of nowhere my Dad gets back in contact with me, and I tell him all about E3. We decide we’ll finally meet up. So after E3 2009 I flew over to Ft Lauderdale to met and stay with him. If it wasn’t for E3 I probably would have never had the motivation to do that.

We aren’t helping this stereotype either; “gamers” come across as arrogant, foul-mouthed, know-it-all’s and very rarely have anything positive to say when hidden behind an internet connection. I’ll go to youtube now, search Call Of Duty, click on the first video and post the first comment I
see;

“Hmmm lets see, Cod Advanced Warfare, a game about more future shit with barely any of the campaign weapons and abilities appearing in the multiplayer where we’ll have to put up with 5 year old quick scopers, corner campers, head glitchers, and mic spammers. Or Battlefield
Hardline, where I can play as a cop fighting hellbent batshit insane criminals in HUGE maps, with all campaign features appearing on multiplayer, a more mature community, destructible environments, amazing graphics, and overall less bullshit. I think Ill take Cod instead, because you know, all the cool cats play it!”

Lovely. I’m so proud to be associated with people like that. But maybe Call of Duty is an extreme case. What if I do the same for “Mario Bros”;

“The 3ds sucks ass”

How can we expect others to respect us if we don’t respect our own people/industry? Like you, gaming has probably saved my life. I grew up being a horrible and violent kid, living in one of the worst areas of London (no, we’re not all tea and crumpets). Most of my friends sold and took drugs to help them escape from reality but for me, my drugs were videogames. My sole reason for wanting to do something with my life was so I could afford to buy videogames and I actually vowed to never go to jail because I couldn’t fathom the thought of missing an E3. Sorry to ramble but to summarize, being a gamer can be a wonderful thing, we just need to clean up our act and further educate “outsiders” on what being a gamer actually means.

I hope whitelisted is a good thing lol

Thanks! 😀

“If it wasn’t for E3, I would never have met my Dad (long story).”
Do tell…

Agreed. While our own personal gamer groups are inclusive, there are some that are excluding others. This isn’t right and is in contrast to the spirit of being a gamer. We’re all united by our love of this. Some gamers and some journalists seem to have forgotten this.

Great article. This part particularly nearly brought a tear to my eye:

“Like I said before, gamers include all kinds of different people. The
gamers I know fall into every imaginable race, social class, religious
ideology and sexual orientation that you can imagine. So many different
kinds of people who don’t care about what makes us different because
we’re united by our love of games and the culture. I myself am
handicapped and use a wheelchair to get around but none of my fellow
gamers care about that. It’s irrelevant to them since I’m a gamer just
like them. This is easily one of the most inclusive groups I’ve ever
been a part of.”

Because goddamn right, we’re all gamers. I don’t know when we started becoming so exclusive, but we used to be the group where everyone could be themselves–or, alternatively, whatever the hell they wanted to be, be it a heroic mage, a badass dwarf warrior, a messianic psychic, or a cyborg soldier.

That was beautiful, man. Stories like yours are great examples of why video games are so important. Why being a gamer is something to be proud of. How would your life have turned out WITHOUT games to teach you lessons that your father (unfortunately) couldn’t?

Thanks for sharing that.

We have more great stuff coming your way. We’ll go into full detail about this entire situation on the premiere episode of the podcast I host called “Throwdown.” I hope you look forward to that.

Thanks again. 🙂

Thanks a lot man. That’s definitely what I was going for with this. These guys have forgotten what purpose they serve. I haven’t. I wrote this for us.