Naldan said:
veloper said:
Hey okay, I can't speak for the German Zuckers, as I haven't even heard of that word before this thread appeared.
But let's assume the german word for gamer is worthless nowadays, just like you say, then it shouldn't be a big deal to anyone for some other German to come along and re-appropriate the word. How many words can one need to indicate roughly the same group as the word "persons" afteral?
Some suggestions:
Core gamer (that one is already used by the industry), hardcore gamer, gaming enthusiast.
All have the word "game(r)" hidden somewhere.
That's not what meant, unless you mean to say that in German, it's a common to thing to, say, refer to a random person carrying a smartphone somewhere, as a Spieler or a Zucker, in which case I totally believe you! I so suck at speaking German.
Now, if you'd really wanted to preserve the term gamer for someone who is really enthusiastic about games, then you could call those who play games casually only differently. Like player. But from a descriptive point of view, and from a linguistic point of view as well, at least from my pov (
DDD ), it wouldn't make much sense to call them "Players". Also, as I said, probably your opinion will be overrun by the shared opinions of others, who most likely call everybody a gamer.
The majority has become casual. They are pretty new, since the Wii or mobile games. That in turn means that the former audience got a lot of new members with different point of views.
No actually, your first suggestion is a good one. The word player is fine (in English that is; maybe not in German).
A casual if anything, is not defined by strong gaming habits, so he or she is the player while playing a game and just something else when not playing.
The language is always dictated by those who use it, of course. But that means that it needs to have an agreement. Now, you could go to your friends and tell them, for example "Yo, Jimmy, your mother plays Pou like a pro, but she isn't a gamer." for whatever reason you'd say that, and all your friends might agree and everything is fine. I could do the same thing in my inner circle. We have agreed on what a gamer is and isn't. But, as I said, it has shifted _hard_.
But has it really changed though?
Do you suppose that, for example, there was anyone who may have read the headline "Gamers are Dead", and thought: yeah, this is going to be an article about the end of casual gamers, or even an end of anyone-who's-ever-played-a-(video)game-ever kind of apocalypse?
Now "Zuckers are Tot," might be confusing, but I wouldn't know.
And frankly, the media did and still does a super bad job to help the community to create and evolve. All they do is to whine, rage and criticize. The latter isn't even bad, but if you have a huge audience, you have a huge potential. And most of them use it very, very negatively. That means in a destructive way, also by relying on the 3 former mentioned activities.
Instead, they could use their huge potentials to simply discuss problems and not taking a side right off the bat. They could use their journalistic connections, and even their education in something that is heavily intervowen with language and communities, to suggest alternatives. They could help the community evolve. They could be constructive instead of destructive. But they aren't, won't and don't even consider this. Well, I won't dive deeper into this.
Yeah we don't need the media for this. I once heard you Germans have official committees deciding on language, but we'll just have to say whatever we want to in this place.
So, what this community needs is a forum of truly diverse individuals. And none of those who want to inject other topics into this forum. YES, THEY CAN DO THIS, but in this forum, it has for this moment in time no place. It's just about the neutral discussion about the identity gamer, the term gamer, and the direction they would *suggest*. Again, ~just an example~, sexism in gaming, games, developement. Fine, talk about it, but at another time. It has its place, but this should be about where to go, not how shit it supposedly is.
For clarification: I mean an open forum, not a forum of the Escapist. Like a gathering of experts and moderators, who meet over a week or weekend to discuss a specific topic. I'm sorry to say this, bt since the media fails to do this, we would need other gathering points. And I don't even mean the Escapist. Frankly, I could even see the Escapist being a part of that forum.
I don't think we need anything like that at all. We're doing fine already.
If some posters want to say gamer, when they actually mean to say person (who played some game atleast once), then let there be confusion. This is fine by me.
Nobody's ever mistaken my use of "gamer" to mean anything other than someone who's an enthusiast of the hobby, so I'm good.
