Popular Opinion of Skilled Gamers

I figure TNL would be pretty jaded enough to give some decent street-level opinion on this.

I've been feelin' the vibe for awhile, then that AVGN ZP debate followed by the guy's recent Smash review kinda summed it up enough to be worth asking.


Do you respect the gamer or look down on the gamer when he/she decidedly kicks your ass at something?

This is not to mean like losing to a guy who plays a single title 80 hours a week, is in a clan, and puts out replays. I'm saying people who may have taken time to read the manual or put 8 hours into a game during the first week of owning it, if those types of gamers are kicking your ass at something, do they really become "that guy?"



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If ya want the tl:dr version:
I remember my elementary school days of the late 80s when NES was starting out. I could tell you flat-out I was way more into gaming than I shoulda been, but I could also tell you just about every single person from friends to family really hated on me if I'd beat them hard on any game they chose. And even then, finding anybody to run multiplayer with on anything from a large group of friends even amongst themselves was a very rare occurance from then until the Goldeneye days. But even then, that was a fad along with a few other titles, then people graduated high school and nobody really did much of the gaming thing after that. Even me.

Now, the late 80s to mid 90s I observed public view of gaming as flat-out for dorks 'n nerds only. Then through PS1 and through into the first Halos, I saw that the general public and friends alike eased off the whole anti-gaming thing and more people I knew would even own a console and dabble in the shit. When I'd win at games I didn't even own, I'd get handed a beer, not social-status insults.

Nowadays about through the PS2 times up to this year after the Wii, I feel like another semi-cultural shift kinda went down behind the scenes. While the population of known gamers is the highest it has ever been, I've noticed the overall difficulty of many games has dropped a ton, the game journalists have degraded in skills according to their reports of what is hard* (usually with humor-based reviewers adding a stab at players who can throw-down in games they can't), and then you got the usual cloud of whining from many-a-forum-places matched with online-play griefers or other very, very sore losers on the online games. Yeah, I know when it's playin' online, that's expected. But the kicker is, even offline, if a group of people and I end up getting a game going in whatever from Wii Bowling to shit I don't own, If I win a few I'll start to hear the 23-year-old updates to whatever insults kids would throw on a 1988 playground. And I was like, "what the hell it's just a game." And this is all even when I'm playin' like an eighth of what I used to way back then..

*The recent examples I could throw from memory are the Zero Punctuation Smash Brawl review where Yahtzee degrades himself for putting 10 hours in a game before playing with friends, 1up's Omega Five review, and AVGN actually calling Super Mario 3 Hard. 'Could prolly find others but to hell with research..

So on the street level, in your eyes, are video games a legit medium for hosting occasional gatherings or for legit friendly competition? Or has the reputation of video games been brought back down to that of say playing darts at a bar or goin' bowling without the Big Lebowski references: "fun to do, but if you're noticeably really good, people ask what's wrong with you?"

Bonus Question: Do any of you know of any game reviewers that are known to actually be good at gaming? I've dumped more bills on misleading opinions than I'm happy with.

It just makes me want to play more until I can beat them. I totally lost interest in 3S until one of my roommates picked it up. I'm not particularly good, but for a long time I slapped him around until I noticed he was playing it a ton 1P. And then I started losing.

AND THUS BEGAN A HEATED RIVALRY or something I don't know it's not really fun to win all the time (on a non-professional non-money etc level I guess) and not have anybody challenge you, is it?

People who whine about people that try to be better at games are really annoying.

And then it gets 10x worse when they try to say some shit about how they "play for FUN, man", like being better at a game makes it fundamentally less enjoyable.

Some people consider it a negative that you can actually get better at games with practice and consistently beat people who've never played them. Coincidentally when they start complaining I actually stop having fun.

I tend to ask a lot of questions when I'm new at games and that kinda bugs people. Though when it came to (re?)learning the basics of Melee in the weeks before Brawl came out, I think they were just glad that I came around and gave it a shot.

option 3

We have spoiler tags, why did you do that stupid color changed text bullshit?

wait I thought the post ended at the line, that doesn't work in TNL Classic aka superior mode or is that the point :(

DJ may not be smart enough to figure out there's different skins.

hahaha, is it too late to play the newb card?


I didn't know the spoiler tag syntax and didn't see a convenient way to find it. The classic skin text color was in front of me, so yeah. Besides, you're not strikin' me as the guy willing to read an extra 6 paragraphs if ya simply cant be bothered to click, drag, and let go a mouse button.

Good times :)

Hell no I'm not reading that wall of text. But the bigger point is most of the people reading don't even know there's a bunch of shit there because of that.

Can cka just remove the option for color text from vbulletin?