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I've always been a gamer. I started young, eight or nine years old, and continue to this day. Sure the games have gotten better, way better in graphics quality and performance and certainly in blood volume splattered all over the upholstery, but in general the principles remain the same: solve the problem at hand and have fun doing it. Granted, those problems now hold large aperture weaponry and tend to jump around a lot, but they're problems nonetheless.
It's become terribly fashionable these days -- at least among boomer media personalities it seems -- to want to "understand" us gamers, and (for the first time) not only when some fruitbar snaps and takes out half his class after playing Doom either. So in typical boomer fashion, they slap on some catchy marketing labels and run around the country doing radio interviews, especially if your name is John Beck or Mitchell Wade and you just wrote a book called "Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever."
I caught one such interview recently with one of the authors (John Beck) on the nationally syndicated show On Point with Tom Ashbrook (here's a link to the show if you're interested). Beck was pitching hard the idea that gamers make "good corporate citizens" because they've been trained to "take risks," analyze problems, and understand parameters, you know whatever boomers like Beck and Wade can use to their advantage in the workplace. The increasingly baffled Tom brings up games like Doom 3, Half Life 2, and GTA: Vice City (and San Andreas) and questions what they teach about the business world, and ultimately the show seems to conclude that although some video games seem to have some positive effect, even if it doesn't at least it's better than having your kids watch television. Man oh man. Noobs.
I have to say, I had a hard time suppressing images of Tom and Beck crawling through the Indonesian jungle in Joint Ops, knee deep in water with heavy fire erupting all around them, and squeezing off a nice couple of head shots from atop a nearby hill with my Dragunov. No, not because I'm an increasingly dangerous psychotic hallucinating that Satan or Anton LaVey is talking to me, although that might be fun, but because I'm sick and sleepy of baby boomer marketing nimrods and their lazy analysis of my generation. Ever since Rosemary's Baby they've been scared out of their BVDs, well, get over it people. Why the hell don't you spend all this time and energy fixing the significant crap you've messed up in society, government, culture, and your own personal families, and spend less time trying to figure out why I play Doom 3 and how you can sell me shit as a result. Go on now, shoo. That's right, Hedonism 3 is just a phone call away. Go on now. There's a good generation. Buh bye.
This interview was a painful hour listening to two boomers scratching their bald spots over the connection between simulated violence and corporate culture. Well, I don't need to explain that to any Xers out there, but for you folks looking to destroy social security in order to save it, let me say this: gaming is fun. We like to have fun. It's not about simulated violence, although that is pretty cool, it's about proficiency, coming up with creative ways to out-maneuver others to gain an advantage, it's about competition, skill, and some pride because you've mastered something hard to do. Whether or not that's going to make us more or less "successful in business" is pretty much the dopey analysis we've come to rely on from you boomers. I don't know about you, but I'm guessing an MBA from Harvard will help a whole lot more. Drawing some vast generalization about superior business skills from playing video games is like saying anyone who writes good Christmas cards is destined to become Steven King. It's not going to happen. Too many other factors to account for, but, of course, you'll realize that AFTER you've purchased their book. We've had to become "risk takers" because we've got fewer opportunities that you had 20 years ago and want to get ahead, not because we like wasting alien demons with shotguns or nuking noobs to grab a powernode. You loot social security, freeze adjusted wages to mid-1970s levels, and screw up our school systems, and then wax philosophic about whether or not playing Vice City will make us better CEOs? Are you kidding me? Oh go inject some more botulism into your eyebrows and leave us alone already. Go away. Still, despite the flimsy "proof" here, I found a lot of positive commentary from gamers on this book around the web. This, I imagine, is just what the author's intended: put out a generally positive theory that flatters a marketing segment you wish to court (there aren't many negatives about the "gamer generation," besides a bit of narcissism which is hardly distinguishing in America) and they'll tend to believe what you want regardless of any bothersome logic flaws. And buy your book. But at least it's not blaming Columbine on Doom again.
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