I have a request, planet Earth. I have graced you with my presence for 35 years and I think it's about time and only fair you do something for me in return. So here it is. I want everyone to stop using the word "gamer".
I know it's going to be tough. Language evolves, so it's going to be a hard word to let go of. It's been a great comfort in all the years that people who play videogames have spent battling for acceptance. To say one is a gamer is to belong to a group, and it's human nature to want to belong, to know that there are others carrying the pennant alongside you, even if it they have acne and smell faintly of stale milk.
It is frustrating that this image exists, but it's nothing anyone can help. It's a status quo thing and a mass media thing and those are always hard to shift. But people who completely aren't helping the case at all are the ones who take an almost revolutionary pride in their "gamer" status. "I am a gamer", they say, "hear me whine".
These are the people who hurl abuse at film critics who question the artistic potential of games and send strongly-worded to game developers - which ultimately only proves the point. Whatever happened to those guys, by the way ?? I guess after they got disbarred they slipped back down to the "strange man yelling from porch" level on The Sims 2 career track for culture vultures.
I'm not saying you have to be ashamed of playing video games, but I'm not saying you should be proud and shouting it from the rooftops either. It's not like being a blind chess grandmaster or a female boxer or an amputee table tennis champion. Being a player of games does not make one a minority or part of an elite club, as employing a label like "gamer" wordlessly implies.
The point I'm trying to reach is that playing games, as entertaining and fascinating and beneficial as it might be, is just something people do, not something they should be defined by. People don't call themselves moviegoers, or TV watchers, or book readers. That's the job of advertisers and Facebook spammers.
The glitzy lifestyle mags don't cover the games industry, because there aren't any identifiable Cheryl Cole-esque` personalities to shake a narrative stick at. Mario and Lara Croft are never going to go through marriage heartbreak and divorce together. The Tetris blocks don't get drunk and punch photographers. The most compelling character in any video game is you, the player.
The resulting lack of mainstream coverage means that, despite being about 10,000 times more successful than the British film and TV industries combined, the British videogames industry continually balances a pathological inferiority complex with a wounded sense of pride.
Quite why it still wants validation from these older, fading forms of media is a mystery. It's like a powerful young warrior disgruntled at being ignored by an elderly and irrelevant dying king despite half his leg having just been eaten by a dragon. But gradually things are changing. The biggest growth area in video games right now is the "casual gaming" market. For "casual", read "mainstream".
Effectively, this means games the average human being can relate to: anyone who's lived in a house can grasp what The Sims is, for instance; and anyone who's played tennis knows how to swing a Nintendo Wii remote. Grand Theft Auto IV might not look like a casual game, but it certainly appeals to a wide demographic, namely anyone who's ever fantasised about going berserk in a city centre armed to the teeth with a bazooka.
My mum has a Nintendo DS, and he solves crossword puzzles on it and does little digital paintings with it. My Dad was looking at a second-hand PS3 the other week, not for games, but as a Blu-Ray player. I occasionally still fire up my PS2 and my PSP Slim / Lite, and the very blog post you are readin right now, with your own eyeballs and brain, was written on a desktop PC that has been fired up for the first time in about three months.
This sums it up for me. Music, TV and games all have so much untapped brilliance for people of all kinds to get stuck into. All kinds of media have parts that are accessible and interesting to all kinds of people. It's like art too - "I don't like art." That just means you haven't found the kind of art that you like.
I suppose that makes it a bit like girlfreinds in that respect, then.