The Gaming CommunityAugust 18, 2010 by

I've been fiddling with this concept for a blog post in my head for some time now, and I think now is as good as ever to discuss your brothers and sisters in arms, or well, chainsaw guns, which they use to brutalize their other brothers and sisters. Gaming has a wide grasp over our world. You can spot Halo Reach commercials on NBC,  politicians have gotten to the point where they feel video games are a crazy, evil thing to be regulated, which is a plus in some way or another. Video Games are, in my opinion the most creative medium in human history. Because of this, the big names in our industry are often creative geniuses. And it also happens to often make anyone who wants to be at least moderately intertwined with the industry a sort of connoisseur on the subject. Outside of that group exists an outer ring that holds a plethora of people who simply care about gaming enough to get involved.

These different tiers make up the gaming community. Tycho Brahe (Jerry Holkins) of Penny Arcade once brought up the idea of how comfortable midnight releases or late night events related to gaming could be for gamers. You are surrounded by people who understand your love, people you can connect with, and they are far more capable of connecting with you than that random woman in the Walmart line. The gaming community is like a rehabilitation center, that has no intention of  correcting it's patients' habits, but is nonetheless filled with people of all kinds, connected to their consoles, or genres, or development teams because they very much enjoy the games they get from these sources. It is really no simpler than that.

One of the most interesting parts of the gaming community is that gamers come in all forms; you have the strategic people who like RPGs, and turn based strategies. You have the action-loving  gamers who love every FPS that releases with guys in big green suits, with yellow visors, or those cheap people who use Juggernaut on Search and Destroy. You have the moderates, who love both of those things, but are content with settling down with a good platformer every now and again. And the beauty of this is that they are all very similar despite being very different people. They both sit down in front of a screen and don't get up for hours, because they are not in that world anymore, they are inside a giant worm, whose hearts that have to cut off to stop if from sinking Jacinto, or they are on Char, fighting off the Queen of Blades so her overwhelming Zerg forces don't assimilate all life in the galaxy into their ever-consuming horde.

We gamers know that feeling, despite the differences of the games. Conventions like E3, and PAX show the comradeship we have for people we never met, yet have known our whole lives. When you see a picture of thousands of people in a dimly lit room holding up their luminescent Nintendo DSs, or when you see the video of a huge auditorium in South Korea filled to the brim with an audience only there to watch two people play Starcraft. It's that feeling that you can be in a group of strangers that have felt like friends since the day you picked up a controller. Its the beauty of it all that gets me every time.

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