Gamers: Who Are We?

Open full size image

We players are tired of reality.

We abandon reality at opportune moments: a few minutes in line at the bank, several more in the middle of that boring job, a few hours late in the evening to relax, and many hours on a holiday with friends.

But some still wonder: who are we?

We are ordinary workers who, when we get home, put all our intelligence, talent, creativity, skills, critical thinking and social characteristics underutilized in our mundane jobs into another world.

We are those who can create and coordinate hundreds of people in raids on complex massive online games for many hours without rest, like Lord of the Rings Online and Lineage.

We are musicians in Rock Band and Guitar Hero passing mornings in training, testing the best scores of the hardest song with great players from all over the world, who like us, spent hundreds of dollars on plastic instruments to train insistently.

We are fans of World of Warcraft who managed to write more than 300,000 articles on the same, thus creating the world's largest wiki after Wikipedia itself, describing clear details about a world entirely imagined, sharing information and working over distance in teams of more than 2,000 people in coordination.

We are the ones who take the streets of Mario Kart, Harvest Moon and Draw Something , capturing us, whenever possible, in small puzzles, races, minigames, managements or simple disputes between friends, occupying almost all downtime of our lives.

We are travelers with smartphones in hand, backpacks and GPS trying to find Arg's secret and revealing the new inroads of Google, dominating more and more areas of the planet virtually.

We are videographers producing comedy series for the gaming world, teaching beginners and making walkthroughs for recording our best matches in videos and in our memory as genuine experiences.

We are young fighters from various troops around the world, which in our spare time fought over the top scores in Call of Duty, Battlefield and more medals for a good service report in Halo 3.

We Chinese spend so many "green coins" in multiple purchases on virtual games that the People's Bank of China intervened to prevent the devaluation of its official currency.

We are children and teenagers across the globe who prefer to be in front of large interactive screens to doing anything else.

And make no mistake, we are not completely rejecting reality. We have jobs, goals, dreams, homework and family, commitment, and life outside the digital, about which we care a lot. However, we learned that as we increasingly devote free time to our virtual world, it seems that more and more, something is lacking in the real world.

We search in the real world, but where where are these feelings of alertness and focus skills at all times? Where is the sense of power, purpose, change and sense of community? Where are the explosions of joy stimulating and creative games? Where is the excitement, the thrill of every success, every victorious team?

The real world just does not offer the carefully designed pleasures, the thrilling challenges, the sense of constant feedback and the importance of our actions to the world. Reality no longer motivates us so effectively, not being designed to maximize our potential and not designed to make us happy. Things are going well and are changing. Everyone can see it and change is inevitable.

A question that remains is: where does virtual reality begin and end?

Finally, I leave you with a video that I really appreciate and handles the theme well:

http://youtu.be/fSU0lTCMTZw

References:

Images - Scirra, weheartit and google images
A Realidade em Jogo by Jane McGonigal
English Translation by RandomExile