One of the best things about this generation of videogames is the sheer diversity of what's around. Tried and tested genres are evolving and mutating under the influence of next gen technology. Indie developers are making a comeback and bringing with them all kinds of delicious left field malarkey. Th?e Wii and DS are allowing the creation of whole new genres and attitudes towards playing games, and the entire industry is at the point of bursting out in all kinds of new directions like a bucket-load of fungus spores.

There are games for everyone to enjoy, and every kind of gamer can personalize their collection to suit their own tastes, lifestyle and approach to gaming. Of course, not everyone's going to like ev?erything, but given how wide the spectrum of gaming is nowadays, there's more than enough  potential for us all to be able to enjoy something in almost anyone else's library. 

There are still however, some game collections which no-one but the owner can enjoy, and with very, very good reason. Rea??d on to find out just what that reason is. 

#13 - The Tragically Unfortunate Gamer 

Behavior 

The workings of the universe are a mystery to us. After millenia of attempts to understand them through science, religion and plain old hard drug use, mankind is still bereft of a ma??nual and continues to find itself desperately jamming the buttons at random in order to crack the code (and this is one of those frustrating rare cases in whi??ch up, up, down, down left, right, left, right, B, A does not apply).

Some believe the universe to be sentient and have a plan into which we all fit and play our part. Others dismiss this, but still believe in a natural balance and flow to things which co-ordinates the patterns of our lives and c?ontrols the direction of our energies, so as to bring our metaphorical digits to their intended resting place within the great equation of existence. Some other people believe that we are in complete control of everything, while s??ome think us the swirling socks in the washing machine of universal chaos. And other people... Other people are Tom Cruise.

Whatever systems by which the universe may or may not work though, the tragically unfortunate gamer has only two options with which to explain existence. If we wander free throughout life as architects of our own destiny, then he is unnaturally unlucky and devoid of the perso?nal qualities required to help himself. If the universe has thought patterns, then it god damn hates him.

Every game he owns is awful. There is no kinder way to say it. A lot of the time the situation comes about simply through a lack of kno?wledge. He well may be blindly unaware of his predicament and continue to play happily, eagerly loading up each steaming poop stick of a title in much the same way that the uninformed cows of the world think that the trip to the abbatoir on Friday means that they're finally getting that sight-seeing holiday in France they've always wanted.

If he has any inkling of how much? crap he owns, the chances are he's heavily in denial and will defend the feet upon feet of steaming pustulant dog cock on his shelves with vaguely worded proclamations to the non-believers about having to take the time "to really get it". He'll be happy to do this, and given the fact that everything h?e owns contains an equally herpes-like level of fun he'll get away with it too. With nothing better to compare it with, he'll adjust his standards of fulfilment, downgrading his definition of entertainment just like a man who's lived in a ditch since birth will tell you that mud's a perfectly good substitute for furniture.

A lot of tragically unfortunate gamers have boundless enthusiasm for the activity. You'd have to, to have stayed at the banquet table after being served seven courses of rotting badger. Obviously thi?s is one of the most admirable of personality traits, but in the tragically unfortunate gamer it is often combined with an unhealthy dose of naivete and all mixed together with the dirty spoon of limited critical faculties. With a small dash of education and a pinch of direction, everything would have tasted much sweeter.

Often but not always on the fringes of gaming culture, the tragically unfortunate will be fully aware of the fun - as he sees it - of videogames, but won't have any of the contacts or information sources he needs to allow him to make a good purchasing decision. Like a lost kitten taken away from its mother too soon, he'll wander the games stores still half blind and unsteady on his paws, latching onto the first promising game he sees in order to simply grab hold of something. His decision-making tools in regards to what constitutes as promising are blunt and inefficient, and buying a good game?? is to him like trying to cut a diamond with a plastic picnic fork.

His problem is that he thinks all games must be good - Hey, if they were crap, they wouldn't sell, right? - and his methods of choosing which must be extra good are woefully misguided. Long-running franchise with 8724 entries? If it's been around for that long and been improved 8723 times in a row it must be good. It's got a movie license you say? Good lord, it must be fantastic! No-one would spend that much money before even starting production if th??ey didn't have a sure-fire quality hit on their hands, and there's no way a studio would allow their valu??able property to be sullied with a substandard piece of merchandise. It's being by published EA!? By the incandescent light of the very heavens! It will be solid gold! No company gets that big by peddling pap!

While it's unlikely that he often reads the gaming press, on the occasions that he does, he knows exactly where to go. It's the official magazines every time, because let's face it, if you're official, you've got to know what's going on. Just who do these independents think they are anyway? Ye gods, some of them even boast about their outcast status, as if being shunned from the embrace of the CEO were a good thing. They only give games bad ratings because they're jealous of the official magazines. It's obvious. Just look at how happy and full of sunlight those guys' scores are by comparison. And if after all that he's still unsure of which piece of disc-shaped orgasm in a box he's going to pick up, well, there's always the box art to help. Oh, and the graph??ics too. 

The weird thing is though, you'd assume that simply by the law of averages he'd ?have to have bought something good by accident at some point. But no. This guy's karma leads yo??u to believe he made a career out of bare-knuckle puppy fighting in a past life. And perhaps he did.

In the words of Niero, gaming at this guy's house is like pulling teeth. The horror will start slowly of course. You'll spot one or two bad games on his shelf and think nothing of it. After all, we all drop our credit card on a clunker occasionally through bad information or a blip in quality from a usually reliable developer (A pox on your house, Timesplitters: Future Perfect!). Your eyes will then skim along to the next game in the row. Also crap. Oh well, the reviews weren't all bad.

But then you'll look to the next, and the next, and the next, and you'll rapidly develop that trapped, sinking feeling you last had at the school dance when you realized that all the hot girls were taken and the big fat cross??-eyed chick was drunk and heading your way. But unlike ?back then, you won't be able to throw a chair at his head and run for your life. The games he plays may be less fun than sticking live cockroaches behind your eyeballs, but there's so much more out there that he doesn't know about. He loves gaming and there's so much he could get out of it, and you could help him... You could make his life so much better if you'll just persevere with him...

So you'll take the pad, you'll sit down, y??ou'll grit your teeth, and you'll enter a whole new world of pain in the interests of diplomacy. Don't worry. The c??rying will be over as soon as you're too numb to feel.

Games Played

You don't want to know.

How To Deal With Them

Always invite him to your house to game. Carefully select your playing list before he arrives, picking out games which are generically similar to the pap he plays but far, far better. Ease him into?? the good stuff and most importantly, lend him a few games so that he doesn't go back to his old ways when he gets home. Always avoid playing at his house until his collection improves, unless of course you have access to vast amounts of morphine.

Index

Chapter 1 - Back-Seat Gamers and Closet Gamers 

Chapter 2 - Chav Gamers  

Chapter 3 - Fluffy Gamers and PC Snobs  

Chapter 4 - Technical Gamers and Japanophiles

Chapter 5 - Aggressive Gamers and Ghosts

Chapter 6 - The One Game Gamer 

Chapter 7 - The Collecting Gamer

Chapter 8 - The Defeatist Gamer 

The post A Guide To Recognizing Your Gamers: Chapter 9 appeared first on Destructoid.

Videogames are great, right? We all know that. To the average player they bring fun, stimulation and cameraderie, demanding only the occasional sleepless night and mild case of carpal tunnel?? syndrome in payment for the big fat greasy dollops of joy they impart into the world.

However in this slightl?y delayed (Okay, two weeks delayed, you harpies.) eighth chapter of A Guide To ??Recognizing Your Gamers, I have chosen to discuss a curious little gamer-type I have come across a great many times over the years, who looks upon the pastime with all shades of reluctance and horror.

Rather than enjoying the fun like the rest of us do, he or she sees games as a double-edged sword upon which one side far sharper than the other. Instead of dashing home from school or work to get ?a few hours play in or s?pending Friday afternoon planning the weekend's social gaming calendar, their predisposition causes them to shy away from the games they know they should love, and makes the gaming experience one of naught but pain, suffering, and humiliation. 

Want to find out why? Hit the jump. 

#12 - The Defeatist Gamer 

Behavior

We are born ill-equipped for this world. It would be safe to say that at the beginning of life we are utterly us??eless. Our lack of hair, clothes, teeth, motor-skills, and anything in the slightest way resembling a professional level of bowel control makes us all noobs at the start, empty o?f inventory, low of EXP, and primed for an epic fail at the hands of life's Intangirs.

Fast forward seventy years, and on a superficial level everything is the same. No hair, no teeth, and a whole world of poop exploding out around us like a nova bomb. The crucial difference however, is that we have learned. We might look like crap an??d have clothing taste that a corpse would find dull, but underneath that same-as-before-but-wrinkli?er facade sits a life-time of experience, knowledge, and ability. Physically we have come full circle, but on the return trip we've brought a king's bounty of life's intangible treasures back with us.

Life is full of challenges and potential defeats, but to return to where we came from with the rewards we later hold, we have to strive, take risks, adapt, and improv??e. Even our losses are stepping stones, each, if used correctly, teach?ing us where we went wrong and allowing us victory the next time around.

As profound and affecting as the experience of the passa??ge of life is, on a smaller scale, gaming works in a very simil?ar way.

Cutting out the metaphor, we are all noobs when we start. There is no shame in that. After all, a lack of knowledge is a natural and repeated stage of every level of experience. There is a universe of difference between a lack of knowl?edge and a lack of ability or intelligence, and the scoffings and mockery?? we may suffer along the way come only from the unfortunate ones who have experienced much but failed to learn from any of it.

However long we play, through however many generations and however many games and systems, we will never be all-round masters of our chosen discipline. The noob stage will forever periodically reset itself within our gaming lives with each new chal??lenge, albeit in diminish?ing strength each time. It is the way of life, and as a sub-division of life, it is the way of videogames. We may be almost as successful as a chocolate teapot and twice as messy the first time we try something new, in fact we almost certainly will be, but each little victory along the path to mastery makes the adventure of learning so much sweeter. And that's the way it should be.

Some people just d?on't care though. When faced with the hallowed process of life experience and self-improvement, they look at the horizon past the forest of random battles, loot, and levelling, and immediately start searching their magic list for a warp spell. Having no respect for their place in life though, they are confused to find that they don't have the power they want at their disposal, and despite not even having started to look for life's Materia, they become frustrated and disgruntled and so decide to give up on the whole quest and go home. In the realm of videogames, these people almost always beco?me defeatist gamers.

For their ent?ire lives, they've have bad luck with the games they've bought. Every copy of every game they've picked up has had the same glitch. Whatever they buy, whichever format they run it on, their copy always includes a bug which writes off any chance of success from the s??tart. All of the power-ups and gameplay tactics available to their friends are omitted, the facility is provided for but a single life with no provision for restarts or continues, and the game not only crashes their machine after that one life is spent, but refuses to load in that machine ever again. Most of the time the disc even manages to glue itself to the inside of the box after being removed from the tray for the first time.

It's not that they haven't got the ??skills you understand. They're the sort of person who knows everything they need to know and has every ability they'll ever need. But they just keep getting these defective games... They really can't understand how their friends can be happily playing that crap after so many months, and even claiming success when it's clear right at the very beginning that progress is impossible.

Deluded fools. They must be lying to massage the??i??r own egos.

To watch the defeatist gamer play is to witness a tragic human drama played out in accelerated form. The entirety of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' Five Stages Of Grief will be occur in front of you, as the defeatist moves through denial ("No worries, I'm pro, I'll nail this. There's got to be at least one game in the world that isn't broken, right?"), anger ("I've got the crappy third-party controller again!"), bargaining ("I'll just put it on easy mode for a few minutes to get a proper feel for it"), depression ("Oh god, it's happening again.? This game just?? does not want me to win. What's the point?") and acceptance ("Oh well, what was I supposed to expect? Videogames just aren't fair. Stupid things").

It is truly a sad sight to behold. There is a whole world of fun to be had in gaming, but half of that fun comes from learning how to? have it. Every player in the room knows that with this attitude, even if the defeatist were by some fluke successful first time, they'd still be missing out on the fun of getting there. As graphics, animation and physics have improved and storage capacities have got bigger, games designers have even been able to make failure rewarding. Modern games are now comic master-classes of amusing injury and death which take the edge off defeat to the sound of a hearty chuckle, and with the right outlook a frustrating section of gameplay can become its ??own therapy as the player's poor, put upon avatar is hurled cacklingly through a string of punishments to rival classic Warner Bros. cartoons.

Not making progress in GTA? Hit a ramp at full speed and jump off your bike at the apex of your arc to see how many buildings you bounce off before you get amorous with the pavement. Leon having an off day? No worries. Just punish the guy's ineptitude by seeing what new ways the Ganados have thought up this week for creatively rearranging his anatomy. The defeatist gamer doesn't see this however. All they see is the leering visage of the "Continue?" screen, t??heir ears filled to brimming with the sarcastic venom dripping from its ??question.

If allowed to maintain its cruel stranglehold on the defeatist's perception of videogames, this outlook can have serious long-term effects on their gaming career, even cutting it short in extreme cases. Often the defeatist gamer will segue into a one-game gamer, perhaps finding that one title that for some reason brings with it instant success, and fooling themselves into believing that it is the one well-made game ??on the marke?t and thus the only one worth bothering with.

Others will come to pathologically fear gaming, especially amongst groups. They'll know on some level, beneath all of the levels of denial and excuses, that they love videogames, but they'll see it as a??n abusive marriage of which they're unable to break free. They keep trying their best but all they get back in return is pain and humiliation, so while they may periodically try to quietly iron out their relationship difficulties behind closed doors, the embarrassment of airing their domestic problems in public ??will always be just too much to bear.

And there will be others still who will see themselves as stronger than that and decide to put their foot down, but for all of their? aspirations, these defeatists are the saddest of all. Allowing their misguided pride to cloud what's really important, they'll refuse to admit their weaknesses and blame all of their problems on their partner, becoming increasingly cold towards gaming and eventually ending the whole relationship with a bitter divorce. They might feel like the victor for a while, but they'll always have the nagging doubt at the back of their mind of what could have been. Although they'll never admit it, they'll always have repressed feelings for the medium they turned their back on and experience th??at cold shiver of regret whenever they walk past a games store, but their pride will always prevent them from walking in and attempting a reconciliation. If only they'd been willing to put a little more work into the relationship, things could have been so different. Alas with these gamers, defeatism has been a self-fulfilling prophecy to the ultimate degree...

Games Played

Initially everything, but only once?. As defeatist status cements itself though, less and less new games w?ill be tempting as fear of the inevitable becomes crippling.

How To Deal With Them 

Be patient. Be very patient indeed. While helping a defeatist g?amer to overcome the??ir hang-ups can take as long as the wait for a Valve game and can try the patience of a monk on valium, when successful it is a very worthy thing to do. You might have to tape their hands to the controller and tie them to the chair in front of the TV in order to force them to face their fear. You might have to ration food off to them every time they press the Start button as part of some Pavlovian conditioning. You might have to fill your house with the sounds of whalesong and the smell of incense for several weeks to create a calming gaming atmosphere. But if you can pull the job off, you may well save someone from a future without gaming, and that has to be worth the effort, right? 

Index

Chapter 1 - Back-Seat Gamers and Closet Gamers 

Chapter 2 - Chav Gamers  

Chapter 3 - Fluffy Gamers and PC Snobs  

Chapter 4 - Technical Gamers and Japanophiles

Chapter 5 - Aggressive Gamers and Ghosts

Chapter 6 - The One Game Gamer 

Chapter 7 - The Collecting Gamer 

The post A Guide To Recognizing Your Gamers: Chapter 8 appeared first on Destructoid.

Roll up, roll up one and ?all, and come bear witness to the greatest cavalcade of videogaming curiosities known?? to modern man. We've got freaks, we've got geeks, we've got things the mere sight of which will make your eyes bleed, and they're all yours for the paltry price of a click.

Actually that's a ??lie, but we do ha??ve another gamer species described and analysed for your perusal, education and edification, as is customary around this time of the week. 

#11 - The Collecting Gamer 

Behavior

Human beings like having lots of material possesions around us. This is a fact. Evolving as a hunter-gatherer species with a pack mentality, we?'ve always liked to go out into the world and claim little pieces of it as our own in order to bring them back home to addorn the metaphorical cave. We like to stamp our mark on the planet by finding the things within it that appeal to us and making them ours, and we complete this assertion of identity by using these things, be they food, tools, materials, or merely trinkets, to provide for our pack, improve our living conditions and personalize our surroundings. When it isn't taken to the hedonistic extreme of greed, this process is a perfectly benevolent one, existing only to improve life for ourselves and our people and to make physical our psychological identities.

As videogames have become more complex and realistic, th?is instinct has spread from the physical world to the virtual realm, the desire to build and fashion our own personal environment finding a playground of i?nfinite possibilies within the many digital habitats we venture forth to explore. Thus, the collecting gamer has been born.

The collecting gamer's habits might have initially formed themselves in the real world, his inherent need to source, secure, and hoard whatever items he deems valuable sculpting a well-stocked household of domestic and economic treasures of every shape and size. His domain is the land of the perpetually disappearing carpet and ever-shrinking wardrobes, where every item that has worth or may have worth in the future is kept safe and secure. His few items of weekly trash always feel lone??ly rattling around in the largely empty bags outside of his house, while his living space feels progressively like the darkest depths of the Death Star??'s trash compactor.

He's okay with that though. What his home loses in terms of space to contain oxygen, it more than makes up for in terms of usefulness, provision for emergencies and plain old nice things to look at. Those shelves full of action figures and that forest's worth of comic books? Classic pieces of cultural history and all-important rubber stamps of the aformentioned environmental identity. That broken ??collection of hardware, largely comprising of almost half the parts of a 1974 vacuum cleaner? Invaluable, should he ever happen to find the other half of said vintage cleaning device in need of repair. (Seriously, it could happen, you never know.) After the nuclear apoloclypse, the cockroaches will indeed survive, but they'll be going round to his house to borrow batteries and car parts.

As a result of this, there's a very good chance his gaming collection is a 3D encyclopedia of full software libraries for obscure hardware, all of which he also owns, along with every available peripheral and years worth of the related magazines. There are no half measures in this man's life. If he's passionate about something, he makes sure he's as well provided for as humanly possible. He absolutely will not run out of games to play, and if he ever needs to remember exactly which treasure it is that he's playing, his reference library of previews, reviews, character profiles and cheats is but an afternoon's dig through the garage away. Needless to say, he'll be the roaches' first port of call when they fancy playing Secret Of Mana.

The pleasures of playing videogames are never-ending to him. Of course, there may well have been a time when he didn't apply his real-world behavio?r to his gaming, seeing it as pointless. After all, what good were those coins if they were only going to provide him with some abstract "points" on a TV screen? They gave him no real advantages in life. But then one fateful day he heard a second noise upon accidentally? brushing past one of those floating gold treasures, and took notice.

"1-up, you say? Whatever could that mean?"

But then he noticed his lives-count and suddenly all became clear. That non-existent currency had provided ?him with extended play-time, an actual, tangible bonus in his material life. His real-world habits had paid off in the virtual world, and suddenly his gaming style changed forever.

??Unhindered by the inconvenience of physical space, in videogames he is allowed to unleash his borderline obsessive-compulsive tendencies with gleeful relish. Coins or their substitutes are everywhere, and all potentially his. Extra weapons, ammo and health-packs too. Whatever genre he is playing, there is something to collect, and where other gamers may just find these pick-ups useful in a sticky spot, they are the fundamental part of the gameplay experience as far as he's concerned. He might have wiped out every bad guy on the level, beaten the boss and got the girl, but if he's left behind but a single armor bonus or left one hostage unrescued, that damsel's getting dropped to the floor and won't be picked back up again until he can come back with full arms and bulging pockets.

RPGs in particular are an almost heavenly joy to the man whose attic will soon to crush him and whose Katamari cellar-contents threatens to rise up and eat him on a daily basis. There is so much to find and so much to claim, and most of time the initial collection is only the beginning. Weapons, armor, items, spells, skills and vehicles, they're all there for the taking, and then they're all there for the upgrading. The collecting gamer has probably spent more time looking for materia and Chocobo grasses than he has ?looking for food to fi??ll his real-world fridge.

And the collections don't even have to be visible. While the constant increasing of his currency stash is like a never-ending, ever-improving hand-job, EXP is just as legitimate a collection, with each levelling-up being all the reward he needs go go out and fight for more. "Why?", he wonders, "Why oh why do they call it level-grinding when it's such a constant pleasure?" The only sadness he ever suffers from an R?PG is when he realizes his collections are limited by the inevitable maxing out of the in-game counters, but hell, that's what expansion packs are for. Downloadable content was invented f??or this man.

But all of the above collecting is spurred on only by his own desire for in-game self-improvement and completeness. Things are taken to a whole new level when a game provides a reward for his conciencious behavior. A better ending, a bonus weapon, or nirvana of all nirvanas, an unlockable level full of new things to collect is all the vindication he needs from the ?game to tell him that he is playing it ??the right way. After all, if he wasn't meant to be collecting, why are those things there? He takes them as a warm pat on the back from the developers, and merrily ploughs ahead to complete the righteous charge they have entrusted to him.

He never leaves a crate unbroken, a chest unopened, a body unsearched, or an box free from a head-butting. He is as thorough and as attentive as gamers come, and in his own way, as professional as the technical gamer. Truly, the collecting gamer is an inspiration to us all in the area of properly completing a game and getting our money's worth out of every title we purchase. Now if only there were a few more achievements left...

Games Played

Almost every game has value to him, as almost every game has something to collect. If there's a power-up, or an extra life or even a scrap of health to be had, he's there. He positively goes on vacation in RPGs and he's completed Chrono Trigger as many times as there are endings. Needless to say, finding all of the Crackdown orbs was one of the most fulfilling experiences he's had in years... What he does hate however, is the way FPS often don't let him pick up health and armor if his stats are already full. He's inflicted damage on himself more than a few times in order to collect them, and the one time a lack of enemies forced him to save without grabbing a couple, he cou??ldn't sleep all night.

How To Deal With Them

Leave him to it. He'll be perfectly happy doing what he does best. Communal gaming however, can be a problem. As with the aggressive gamer, be prepared for some very slow co-op as he clears every area before moving on, and never play a Mario game in multplayer with him. You'll have died and rotted away to nothing lon??g before your turn comes around.

And absolutely, pos?itively, under no circumstances ever say "Yes" if he wants to show you his Pokemans. Not if you have anything else you want to do with?? the rest of your life. 

Index

Chapter 1 - Back-Seat Gamers and Closet Gamers 

Chapter 2 - Chav Gamers  

Chapter 3 - Fluffy Gamers and PC Snobs  

Chapter 4 - Technical Gamers and Japanophiles

Chapter 5 - Aggressive Gamers and Ghosts

Chapter 6 - The One Game Gamer  

The post A Guide To Recognizing Your Gamers: Chapter 7 appeared first on Destructoid.

Once again, it's Thursday, meaning the time has come to roll out this week's chapt??er of the Guide. Follow me through the jump, where you'll find another g?amer archetype analyzed, scrutinized, dissected*, and moderately lampooned for your persual and delight.

This week's chapter is coming a little later in the day than originally planned due to malevolent ninja i??ntervention*?*, but being the hardy, manly sort that I am, I've fought through those difficulties for the good of you, our readers, meaning that gamer number 10 is but a click away. 

* Dissection will unfortunately be metaphorical only in lieu of the arrival of our surgeon's licenses. Don't worry though, we've fou??nd a web site which we've been assured can qualify us.

** The malevolent ninjas intervened by messing with my router. I didn't actually see them do it, but the whole job positively reeked of ninja. 

#10 - The One-Game Gamer

The modern gaming climate is an incredible phenomenon. The rapid advancement of technology over the last couple of generations has put the creative minds of our favourite industry in a position where they can now make almost anything a reality. Old genres can be overhauled with all-new HD graphics, and complex physics engines allow all manner of new possibilities for interactivity. Online technology facilitiates connections between vast numbers of gamers and their chosen game worlds in ways? which were mere fantasy a few years ago, and new innovations in control input are bringing about almost limitless scope in what a game can be and how the player can manipulate it. Gaming really is an endless buffet table of almost infinite flavor and texture now.

There are some gamers however,?? who don't seem to care abou?t any of that. 

The one-game gamer realizes how much is available, but just doesn't seem ?interested. He is aware of the vast spectrum of gaming available to him, but somehow, it just all feels peripheral to his needs. The ongoing march of development and cross-pollination really does seem to be a waste of time to him, as the games industry has clearly already produced the pinnacle of its past and future achievements, and he already owns it. 

There was a point, probably several years ago now, when he wandered the videogame landscape like a nomadi?c ronin, dabbling in the many varied experiences of gaming, but never really finding one which felt like home. Now however, he is fully aware of his place in the gaming environment at large, and having moved in his furniture, redecorated, filled the place with knick-knacks, and put his feet up in front of the TV with a cup of coffee, there's no way he's ever moving out. He knows which g??ame, and which game alone, is worth playing, and the disc-slot of his console has been glued shut once and for all, lest anyone ever try to make him change what it contains.

Since he found his game, everything else has been so much an irrelevent diversion. His game is not only the absolute height of its genre, but is so good that it transcends genre, providing everything anyone could ever want in a videogame experience in one title alone. Show him anything else, on any format, from any era, in any style, and while he might nonchelantly prod the buttons for a minute or two, the look of distrust on his face will say it ?all. He'll know from the start that it isn't going to be as good as his game, and a two minute fumb?le with the controller is all it will take to prove him right.

However, while you should never point it out to him, the chances are that his game isn't actually that good. It's probably thoroughly enjoyable in its own way of course. After all, none but the most misguided videogame elitist would spend every waking hour pouring his energies into something bad. But the defining moment of the whole medium? Maaaybe not. Something other than pure game quality alon?e is at play in the one-game gamer's attitude, although he'd never admit it to you himself.

Sometimes a strong community based around a game causes this devotion, and there's nothing wrong with that at all. A strong social element based around or within a game can make a good experience great if the right people are involved. As much as gaming is a technology-led medium, it is nothing without the human element, and a str??ong sense of camaraderie can quite easily overtake gameplay as the driving? force for participation. 

At other times, the game in question may be a security blanket, an early gaming love which introduced him to a genre, and which,?? shielded by a thick shell of nostalgia and a personal connection, has remained preserved in its perfection to his eyes, as flawless and fresh now as it was the first time he ever laid thumbs on it. New and more advanced variations may come and go, but none of them will ever have the same feel as the game which started his passion. Like sleeping in your own bed for the first time after coming home from a vacation, the old favourite might not be as technically impressive as other examples, but it just feels right.

There is one kind of one-game gamer however, who is as such for much less benevolent reasons. There is unfortunately a certain type who only plays one game because he can only play one game. He's mastered his chosen title, developed a formidable set of skills, become rather good indeed at seeing off the competition, and now absolutely refuses to go back. He's put months of his life into honing his now considerable abilities, sacrificing sleep, social events, and the health of his previously non-calloused thumb?s in order to become pro, and there's no way he's letting his now godlike image become fractured for the sake of playing a game he doesn't know.

If you're playing his chosen game with him, he'll be perfectly happy, quietly show-boating his talents, knowing that this is the one game that no-one in the room will beat him at. Suggest anything else however, and the icy look of scorn will freeze your controller solid before the words even come out of his mouth. Those words are guaranteed to be a set of hastily ad libbed reasons why the game you are suggesting is not only terrible, but makes you a terrible person for insulting him with the offer, and will never ??be played in his house. A few months later, when he's quietly bought a copy and put?? some practice in, you may well find he's changed his mind completely about the game's quality, but until then, you have no chance. 

Games Played

While a number of one-game gamers stick with older titles, claiming that "They just don't make them like this any more", most prefer more modern, well-known fare with a large community element. World Of Warcraft is frequently a game of choice, as is Halo. There are also franchise variations, such as the Final Fantasy loyal, and a great many will buy one Nintendo console every generation simply for Smash Bros. The show-boating one-game gamer will naturally always go for titles with a strong competitive e??lement, so beat-'em-ups and shoo?ters come up very often. 

How To Deal With Them

Learn to love their game as quickly as you can. It's the only way you'll ever enjoy any multip?layer with them. Other than that, never spring a new game on them unexpectedly. Venturing outside of their safety zone will be a massive, if not impossible step for them, so it's best to let them quietly take the initiative, lest the shock to the system cause irreparable damage.

Index

Chapter 1 - Back-Seat Gamers and Closet Gamers 

Chapter 2 - Chav Gamers  

Chapter 3 - Fluffy Gamers and PC Snobs  

Chapter 4 - Technical Gamers and Japanophiles

Chapter 5 - Aggressive Gamers and Ghosts 

The post A Guide To Recognizing Your Gamers: Chapter 6 appeared first on Destructoid.

So here we are again, at the beginning of the newest chapter of?? our gaming field guide. ?I'm sure you all know the drill by now. Each week we take two archetypes of the 21st century gaming world and analyse their traits, play habits and peculiarities, in order to arm you with the knowledge you may well need to survive an encounter in the wild.

It's a ??dangerous and unpredictable world out there, so follow me through to the other side of the ?jump, where this week we take a look at Technical Gamers and overzealous Caucasian Japanophiles.

#6 - The Technical Gamer 

Behavior

There are some sights in life that are very impressive. There are even some which leave such a powerful impression as to create a sense of temporary disbelief in the viewer. One's first ever sighting of an early summer sunset as it ignites the sky with peach and purple. The majestic vision of a buffalo herd comprising thousands upon thousands sweeping across the dry wilderness on its annual migration. The sight of one's own child being born. All of these have been described as "unbelievable", and will be countless times again. But none, I guarantee you none, can compare to the hallowed sight of the technical gamer in action.?&n?bsp;

It's not just that he's good. Mere practice and reflexes alone will not bring a player up to his standards. No, his advantage is one which sets him apart from the rest of us on a fundamental level. He doesn't merely see the on-screen action, then react and learn as is the norm. He sees through the surface of the game, and manipulates its very inner mechanics on a base level; enemies, texture?s and environments becoming the mere window dressings which garnish the bare engine he holds in his hands.

He is the fully awakened gaming Neo, seeing through the facade of the Matrix and into its basic building blocks, which he toys with like a child's plaything. Not allowing himself to be distracted by music, plot, or graphical effects, every rule by which the game operates is as clear to him as the sun, and knowing that the game cannot break those rules, he exploits them and dominates completely. Playing games as physics or mathematics projects, he quickly became bored of the split-second timing required by todays beat -'em-ups once he started pondering over which fraction of the split-second to strike at, and a Quake 3 rocket launcher has almost become a teleportation device in? his hands.

To him, those FPS guards are simply AI scripts with targets attached, and once he understands their limitations, it'll be "Boom! Optimum placing of firing-co-ordinates shot!" before his location's even been processed. In a game of Tekken, he isn't fighting an opponent. He's merely witnessing a series of input windows flashing before him, and reacting to each with the correctly chosen and timed response for reducing the computer's energy variable, while simultaneously minimizing the length of the response windows it has available. And Ikaruga? Simple geometry and rhythm. With the bullet?? pattern algorithms understood, he could play it ??blindfolded. 

So how did the technical gamer become this human computer, able to m??atch and beat the machines he goes up against on their own terms? ?As is the case with most extreme gamer-types, the possibilities are many.

Some have just played too often and become too good, transcending the peripheral trappings of videogames to evolve and become able to meet the computer's programming on an equal footing. Others, in a similar manner to some PC snobs, have always been technically and scientifically minded, and have simply decided to bring their outside expertise to the realm of gaming, perhaps deciding that blowing Street Fighter 2 wide open was a more fun idea than a traditional physics practical. In others, technical gaming may be a symptom of obsessive-compulsive control ?issues brought about by a fear of chaos; the power to understand and manipulate every variable i?n life bringing about a feeling of security. And others still, may well just be plain autistic. 

Games Played

The faster and more complex the better. The technical gamer lives for lightning processing and ever deeper physics engines to understand and exploit. Platformers are pointless frivolities to him. He did admittedly enjoy N for the five minutes it took him to complete the game, but most examples of the genre are far too lax in their rules to be stimulating. Punishingly hard Japanese shmups however, are his bread and butter, and if he controls both ships at once, one may even last him an afternoon. 

How To Deal With Them 

Respect their powers, be impressed by their feats of gaming prowess, but never play them at Virtua Fighter. The resulting shock to the ego has been? known to cause death before now.

#7 - The Japanophile 

Behavior 

Finding insufficient stimulation in his immediate surroundings, the western Japanophile spends his days gazing whistfully off into the?? east, looking for inspriration from his adopted spiritual motherland. Dissatisfied with what he sees as the restrictively conventional culture of the west, he yearns for a land where a spirited young otaku is free to gallavant across neon-drenched cities strapped into his own personal mech, while wide-eyed anime girls and cyberpunk street bike?rs look on in awe of his multicolored speed lines.

He wants to adventure out into the bright sunshine of an ancient and engigmatic countryside, seeking mystery and idiosyncratic yet friendly ghosts. He wants to discover legendary?? cursed swords in picturesque temples, and use them to liberate cute and amiable tribes of woodland creatures from tyranny, before jacking himself into a hallucinogenic cyberspace and zipping back to the city for a well-earned can of Pocari Sweat and a game of pachinko. He wants so badly the crazy, quirky, high-tech lifestyle he's seen in so much imported media, and his western Caucasia?n middle-class existence just can't provide it. If only he'd been born on the other side of the planet, things would have been so different. But fear not, life will be good once he gets over there and finds his long-lost true family of cybernetic ninjas.

To satiate himself until he eventual?ly makes the move "home", he surrounds himself with all of the Japanese pop culture he can get his hands on, wearing only imported Japanese clothes, listening only to J-Pop and J-Rock, and watching enough obscure anime to embarrass even the biggest Japanese geek. And naturally, this cultural cocooning has in??evitably led to gaming. 

Of course he knows that Japan is the true home of the videogame (just don't mention Nolan Bushnell). As such, he is a purist, and will only touch the Japanese version of a Japanese console (of which he has every one??), and even imports additional Japanese controllers so as not to dirty either his hands or his machine with the second rate materials palmed off on the western philistine??s. In terms of games, the weirder, and so as he sees it the more Japanese, the better. 

To the Japanophile, an incomprehensible title is only ever so because of the western inability to grasp Japanese culture, and so as a mental resident of Nippon he must plough through as many of these as possible, even if he hasn't got a clue what's going on. The only thing better than a weird and obscure game is a weird and obscure game licensed from something weird and obscure, giving him a cultural double-hit of eastern elitism. A game based on a little-known manga gives him two new media avenues to explore, and speak about with assumed authority around his DC Comic-reading friends. It doesn't matter whether he understands any of it, because he can guarantee they'll never even have seen it, and so his mere ownership of the property makes him more Japanese than them, and ?therefor the winner.

He laughed long and hard with pity and derision when the Xbox was announced. An American console? From Microsoft, of all western philistines? Didn??'t they know that videogames only come from Japan? Expecting anything else would be like trying to extract honey from the teat of a cow (Again, don't mention Atari). And how smug he was when the PS2 triumphed ...

His laughter broke across the land again a few years later, when the 360 was announced. Naturally, he couldn't believe they were trying to affront all natural laws of gaming for a second time, but thought ?it would be at least amusing to watch them?? fail again, with their pitiful array of "pretend" games.

But then Capcom signed up. And so did Sega. And Namco! But it was okay. They were clearly making an ironic statement and simply mocking Gates-san by releasing their games on his machine. And besides, the Wii was coming up and the PS3 couldn't fail ... But then something strange happened and Mistwalker released a game called Blue Dragon. Not only that, but it was part of that most Ja??panese of all genres, the RPG. And Akira Toriyama was involved, and the Japanese seemed to l?ove it, and, and...

But then it hit him. Far from being seduced by the west (Philistines!), his noble, adopted Japanese brethren had clevery commandeered the 360 for themselves, assimilating it into their own culture and making it worthwhile. They had saved the machine from the Americans and once again asserted their gaming authority over the rest of the world. So he bought one (a Japanese machine, of course), imported a copy of Blue Dragon, and merrily played through it in its original language. He didn't underst??and any of what was going on of course, but that didn't matter. He was keeping things pure.

Games Played

Anything with a twelve word title making little translated gramma??tical sense, ideally featuring cyborg raccoons on go-karts in ?space. And a flying whale. 

How To Deal With Them

While it may be tempting to engage him in light conversation regarding shared Japanese media interests, this plan is unwise, as the serious Japanophile's tastes will always be infinitely more in-depth and obscure than yours. Unless you are one yourself, being taken seriously in this area will be hard, so the best plan is often often simply to admit? your cultural inferiority. Unless of you course you have any Japanese relatives, in which case he will follow you around like a lost puppy for the rest of your days. 

The post A Guide To Recognizing Your Gamers – Chapter 4 appeared first on Destructoid.

Welcome once again to our continuing anthropological guide to the wa??ys of the modern gamer.

You may recall that last week, a full dissection of the common or garden British gaming chav took over the whole chapter. Things return? to normal this week, as I once ??again bring you a total of two very different and contrasting sub-species in an effort to promote greater understanding of their ways, and perhaps better prepare you for an encounter in the wild. 

So co??me my friends, and join me after the jump for more sociological study and good-natured moc??kery of our brethren. 

#4 - The Fluffy Gamer

Behavior

Not to be confused with the much maligned furry, the fluffy gamer has a similar pre-occupation with all of those "keeyoot ickle fwuffy animelz", but takes a more distanced and eclectic stance in their appreciations. Usually - but not always - female, t??he fluffy sees the entire world with an admirable child-like glee, fo??cussing only on the positive in the things and people she comes into contact with, and shying away from acknowledgement of the negative in anything. 

Whether they've had any direct gaming contact with a fluffy or not, most long-time internet users will in??stantly recognize her as the self-appointed peace-maker and speader of joy in any forum roster. A tornado of "hugz" and "luffs" precede her every post, and there's not a single flame war she doesn't feel fully equipped to satiate with her arsenal of kitten and bunny photos, along with timely reminders that "Evrywon here's so kyoot and luffly. No need for this silly fighting. I luffs you all!".

Both endearing as a honey-dipped puppy and screamingly naive in equal measure, the f??luffy likes the secu?rity of the happy and fantastical world she's built around herself, and so naturally, she was always going to find a home in video gaming.

While she may well have a full appreciation of a well-made game, the chances are that she got into the scene more as a branching path in her quest for the cute than through an initial interest in the medium. Perhaps a Disney license was her gateway game, or maybe she dis?covered the pastime through her inherent natural anime obsession. Whatever the reason, once she discovered the multitude of eccentric and off-kilter cartoon worlds which gaming harbors, she found herself provided with a more than ideal virtual dwelling place, and set up camp, never to return home. 

However, while the flora and fauna of gaming should theoretically be an on-screen nirvana for the fluffy, there are dark, devastating dangers lurking around ever corner.?? Of course, the plethora of cuddly, big-eyed wonders available frequently provides more high pitched giggles than that time The Chipmunks tried acid, but gaming nevertheless remains a do??uble-edged sword. 

Yoshi's Island is the perfect illustrative example. On the surface, said game provides nothing but sheer, unbridled cartoon platforming joy, accelerated to a tear-inducing level in the fluffy gamer by some brilliantly realized storybook ?graphics. However once she gets into the actual gameplay, the true horror in the game becomes apparent. You see, while the combination of the various Yoshis and a baby Mario is like cotton-wrapped crack, the various enemies of the game are incredibly cute too. And try as ?she might to avoid it, eventually she's going to have to kill one of them.

It's a moral nightmare that even the world's most humanitarian politician will never feel the pain of. Picture the scene. She's skipped happily through the crayon-shaded heaven of the island for a few minutes. Mario's happily gurgling, Yoshi's flicking that cute over-sized tongue around, and all is right with the world. But suddenly a Shy Guy appears. And she can't avoid him. She puts it off for as long as she can, making nigh-gymnastic use of the platforms available to make her way past him in a manner which leaves him safe to go about his day. She absolutely can't kill anything so cute. She won't.

But he gives her no choice, hitting Yoshi and sending Mario floating off, bawling pathetically and utterly, utterly helpless. Eyes filling with tears, she sacrifices every moral she's ever lived by and turns that cute and adorable tongue on the Shy Guy, ending his life with one gulp and leaping skyward to rescue the baby. When she opens her ey?es again, all is still, and the scene is comparable to the quiet horror following a bombing raid. As cute as he is, she'll never be able to look at Yoshi in the same way again, and their relationship, however well patched up, will always be fractured.

Sobbing, she turns away from the screen and returns to her bedroom full of stuffed Chocobos, Poke??mon and Koopas, seeking forgivness. She eventually finds solace with Mr. Mug?gleface, her cuddly Moogle. She's going to marry him some day, you know. 

Games Played

The list is endless, though cute games which don't put her through too much emotional pain are preferred. Harvest Moon, Chocobo Tales, all things Mario and Pokemon, Spyro, Rayman ... they're all good. And of course, she lives in Animal Crossing and now much prefers her friends' Miis to their flesh and blood originators. She probably hasn't pre-ordered Manhunt 2. 

Though don't ever mention Lemmings. She's ne??ver going to get over that n?ightmare.  

How To Deal With Them

It's all about the game choices here. If you're playing or talking with a fluffy gamer, you'll have to make your selections carefully, and as in many situations in life, finding some common ground is the key. Pick strong, well-designed titles that just happen to have cute window dressing, such as Pikmin or Loco Roco, and play them in a "charitable" way. Do that and you'll probably have a great ti??me. Suggest a headshot competition and you're going to lose a friend very quickly. 

#5 - The PC Snob  

Behavior

Having to deal with fanboys is an occupational hazard in our line of leisure. We've all met them, all suffered them, and hopefully all ignored them and walked away, slightly amused but no worse off. What we often don't rea??lize though, is that we have it lucky with most of them. The majority of fanboys only have obsessional love or hatred for one format, and so can be easily distracted by shifting the conversation to another machine or game series. There is one more rare format afficionado however, who cannot be escaped using such methods. He is the PC snob, and if you play with any kind of a joypad, you are his target. 

The origins of the PC snob are various, but his allegiance to "proper computers" is undenia??ble. He is no contrary fanboy, chopping and changing his predilections with each coming generation. Oh no, the coming and going of these insignificant console eras is to him as the passing of a day is to a god. He believes in one format, and one for?mat only, and nothing but the PC eternal will ever raise his interest. 

While the PC does indeed have many advantages, ve?rsatility and upgradabilty being particular strengths, most gamers will admit that consoles provide a m??uch easier experience on the whole. Unless you fall victim to the red ring o' death, console games are guaranteed to work on your machine, and while upgradability is nice, it can be expensive, and console hardware is by and large a one-off payment. Mention these bonuses to a PC snob however, and you can expect to be laughed at for a good long time.

You see the complications are what he seems to live for. Regardless of what events in his e??arly gaming life shaped his preferences, the one thing that seems common to every PC snob is a shared ideology of consoles being toys for babies, and that complicated technological issues are the only way to earn the right to play a game. 

It may be that his parents didn't want him wasting his time playing video games, and so sneaking a copy of Doom onto the PC they bought him to do his homework with was his only option for a long time, leading to a lifetime of repressed console jealousy. Or it's entirely possibly that he's always been a diehard techie at heart, and that gaming became just one of his uses for the machine he proudly built with his own two hands. He may even simply be an over-achiever, finding insufficient satisfaction in merely mastering a game, and thus feeling?? the need to make the actual process of gaming a challenge in itself. 

Whatever the?? reason, he proudly sits in his command centre, nearly buried under a years-old Gilliamesque array of obscure hardware parts and peripherals, smugly mocking the rest of the gaming fraternity as they bumble around with their juvenile and simplistic devi?ces.

Online gaming revolution? Don't make him laugh. His kind pioneered the use of the internet, and they had to do more complicated work than simply choosing a Gamertag.?? HD gaming? Ha! Let them run around buying their expensive televisions and their component cables. The PC elit?e have been playing in 1900 x 1080 on monitors for years! Oh, what's that? You can customize your dashboard? God bless you. It must be exciting now that you've finally got a front-end interface after years of simply sticking little bits of plastic into holes. Welcome to the modern world people!

Nothing consoles do will ever impress him. However many control inputs your pad has, if you're playing with less than 101 buttons, you are without doubt doing it very wrong. Any innovation the kiddie game boxes can come up with will be something he's seen before, and quite possibly designed and put together himself. While the Wiimote raised his eyebrow for a brief time, he feels nothing but sorrow that it will be wasted on console games, and immediately bought one purely so that he could hack it and bring it to the promised land of PC gaming. Though admittedly that daliance lasted only a brief time, as he ??knows nothing will ever compare to the sacred joy of a keyboard and mouse. And besides, using it started to make him feel dirty after a while.

No, create wha??tever you want for consoles, be it hardware or software. If you can merely plug it in and play with it, it's not worth the effort. Only when yo??u've spent three days without sleep, teasing the life into your custom designed baby in a Frankensteinian workshop full of screws, tools, water coolers, vents and fans, can you truly call yourself worthy of being a gamer. 

You ?console players ... You don't know you??'re born.  

Games Played

Anything complicated to play or requiring ble??eding edge har?dware specifications. Ideally both. If he has to upgrade any components to play it, all the better.

How To Deal With Them  

Again, common ground is the key. While you'll never get him to admit to liking? any console exclusives, cross-platform console and PC games are fine. You may even get him to share a few games of the console version with you. Of course, his excuse will be that he's only doing it to see how superier his rig's performance is, and you'll have to overlook his constant complaints about the controls, but if you keep quiet about the hardware and offer to play the PC version, he might well start quietly having fun despite himself. And at the end of the day, that's all that matters. Treat it as a cultural exchange and everyone wi??ll come out happy. 

The post A Guide To Recognizing Your Gamers – Chapter 3 appeared first on Destructoid.