Can I call myself a gamer?

The other day on Twitter, I saw an ad requesting contributing writers to a site called GirlGamer. My first instinct was, “Ooh, I should apply for that!” My second response was a bit more measured: I am starting a new day job on Monday, and I already have a freelance writing job that I just started, and I’m just over a month away from a musical theatre group performance, and my writing deadlines calendar is a bit full of contests and ideas I want to try, and now is probably not the best time to try to take on another commitment.

But there’s also the tiny little fact that I don’t really have any familiarity (yet) with GirlGamer and, even more than that, I don’t have the confidence to put myself in the gaming world.

I’ve never considered myself a gamer, really – not until the last couple of years, and even then I take the attitude of a “new” gamer. I don’t have much of a history of gaming, or exposure to gaming (until the last few years). My best friend growing up had a Nintendo of some generation, and I played Dr. Mario and, sometimes, Super Mario Brothers when we had sleepovers at her house, but my parents didn’t want me spending too much time staring at a screen and exercising only my thumbs. Or something like that. (Plus, we didn’t have a lot of money.)

We did have a computer, though, and my sister and I played some games on there, but never the ones that you think of as “gamer” games. We loved Oregon Trail, and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego (and eventually Where In Time is Carmen Sandiego) and SimCity 2000, which we’d learned at school. We played a lot of computer solitaire of various iterations. For a long time, when I thought about playing computer games, I thought about Solitaire and Minesweeper and, maybe, a Star Trek game that had come with a Windows pack.

In college, I didn’t play games. I was too busy studying and reading and being in choir and falling in love over AIM. If I did play games, it was, again, Solitaire and Minesweeper. Same again in my first career. I didn’t have a computer my first year, and then it was a laptop, and either way it was difficult for me to play games that weren’t pre-installed. My sister did get a Wii for Christmas, and I played some with her, but not any of the “hardcore” games that most people would think of when they think of gamers.

And I still don’t. I’ve been with my boyfriend – who is definitely a gamer, and did his dissertation on the role/history of music in video games – for two and a half years now, and he’s introduced me to so many things, from Rock Band to World of Warcraft (and, ultimately, Warcraft itself), from Final Fantasy to Half-Life. One of the first gifts he ever got me was a copy of Madden 10. (Which I now have a strong, strong desire to play, thank you football season....) But I know that I’m not yet up to speed on games. I have now at least heard of most of the major titles and companies, but I don’t play most games. I don’t have a burning desire to play most games. I think they sound really interesting, and sometimes fun, but most of them aren’t my kind of thing. (I do play WoW, though. A lot.) Some of it is the “life’s too short” thing – I know I can read a book or five in the time it’ll take me to get through most of the games, so why wouldn’t I do that instead? Some of it is the culture – the rampant, uninspected sexism, racism, and homophobia that permeates many (but not all) games and forums. But I also think that some of it may be fear.

See, my boyfriend’s been a gamer for years. Most of his friends – male and female – have been gamers for years. The blogs, comics, and magazines they read regularly are written by people who have been gamers for years. I feel like an interloper, an immigrant, who’s coming in all American and brash and loud and poking at the things that they have built their lives around, knocking things over because I’m not smart enough to know what’s good and what’s bad, what’s solid and what’s fragile.

Feeling like this is reinforced when I go into forums like reddit’s gaming thread, and realise that I don’t know 90% of the references. Or when I watch The Guild and see both Riley and Cyd’s faces fall when they realise that their definition of “gamer” is very, very different. I know that nobody does it on purpose, and I know that it’s a problem with any defined group of people. But when I see things like that, I don’t feel like I can call myself a gamer. I've played the "wrong" sorts of games, for one, and I don't have the right attitude, for another.

Sure, I play games. I really like board games (I’ve got a post coming soon about the board game resurgence in our society), I really like WoW and Civilization and Portal and L.A. Noire (once I learn to drive) and Typing of the Dead, I really like Eternal Sonata and Wii Sports/Sports Resort and Rock Band and Kinect Adventures and Madden. So I’m not not a gamer.

But when I have a free Saturday (like today), I don’t necessarily choose to game. When I have a free evening, I’ll probably spend it on WoW, but I am just as likely to spend it reading or cleaning or cooking. (Partially because of gender-based social conditioning, which is a fight we’ll have another time.) Games are not my automatic go-to.  And because of that, I don’t feel like I can really describe myself as a gamer, and why I didn’t even email about the opportunity at GirlGamer.