In a recent interview with renowned anti-videogame lawyer Jack Thompson, he said to me “There is no such thing as gamer culture; there are just people who play games.”  Now, as a gamer myself, and a studier of psychology and sociology, I would disagree and I am sure many other people would do the same.  He does however make a good point.  Gamer culture is very different from other cultures and subculture out there.  It dosen’t really have a public face, or voice, or even a prevalent stereotype that we can be angry about beyond the standard view of “geek.”  In fact, in all outward appearances, gamer culture really does look like a random collection of people playing games to waste away the unproductive hours of the day.

On the contrary, however, we all know it’s much more than that.  Go to any tournament and you see gamer cliques trading strategies, talking about frames per second, or damage rates, or any thing prevalent to the game being played.  You see people ranging in appearance from the lost novice not even sure where to sign up, to the hardcore fans with the label shirts and the expensive gear, to the co-players, and finally the crazy people who do strange stuff like, wear a bathrobe belt like a headband and bring computer printouts to help with between game strategy adjustments (I assure you I am not one of those people *insincere shifty eyes*).

But who ARE these people?  What is the word on the street?  How does the industry view them and what impact do they have on game development and marketing?  More importantly, how do others view these people?  Well, these questions are some of the most complicated to answer, and without years of research we will never get one that is completely concrete, but through asking a few professors, researchers, industry representatives, gamers, and of course random people on the street, you can get a feeling of an answer that is at least a little.  So let’s break this down to the microcosms and units of gamer culture and examine them closely under the microscope...