Gamers are a group of folks who game. (I guess that works as a definition.) But since when do they have a responsibility? Since always.
Whatever it is a person does, whether it is as an individual or shared as a group, that person represents the larger entity. If a person is a tourist, he may feel he can “let loose,” but in reality, he is representing his homeland to the visiting area. In this same way, gamers who hold contempt for those who do not understand their hobby only make things worse for their cause.
Games have a tremendous potential for our society. The power of play and a honed learning are concepts for which our society has been crying out. The concept of gaming as a children’s pasttime is fading though persists.
Presenting games as having such strength and redeeming values is not hard to do. Just as an example, here’s Spore:
Check out this talk by Spore‘s creator Will Wright. He speaks so quickly that it is hard to pick out gems like this:
“We can take a lot of long term dynamics and compress them into very short term experiences. It’s so hard for people to think 50-100 years out, but when you can give them a toy and they can experience these long term dynamics in just a few minutes I think it gives an entirely different point of view where we are actually using the game to re-map our intuition.
“It is almost like in the same way a telescope or microscope re-calibrates your eyesight. I think computer simulations can re-calibrate your instinct across vast scales of both space and time. “
