Just Honest Game Reviews and News

Gaming and the gaming community have changed and in hand significantly over the last 10 years, and continue to change every day, the gaming industry is one of the fastest changing industries in the world and this is also true of the community that it has spawned, thousands of people every single day check their favourite gaming website, logon to their favourite gaming forum and chat to friends they don’t know in person but consider good friends, but where did this all start and why is the gaming community in the modern world so extensive and ever changing, to analyse the building blocks that have built up the gaming community, first you have to study the foundation that it was built on.

If you ask any gamer over 30 what was their experiences being a gamer when they were younger there is a high chance that the word taboo, or stigma will come up, this is because being a gamer or talking about a piece of gaming news in the school play grounds or at the park was considered unacceptable, gaming was a very niche subject therefor there wasn’t a large community. The gaming community 30 years ago would have been considered an underground phenomenon, gaming was not as elevated in popular culture as it is now, therefore there was a certain stigma attached to it. Almost to the extent that if you wanted to go home and play a videogame instead of going out to play football or go shopping you were in some way a lesser person, less masculine or less feminine, the sad moral upshot to this is that as the stigma grew and it became less “cool” to talk about games, the amount and severity of the bullying did too, anyone who put themselves in the proverbial gaming community was a target.

Another important area to explore is the actual term gaming community; this itself is a complex idea that has transformed over the last few decades, if you jump to present day a gaming community is a group of regular people who get together to discuss and partake in what may be either their hobby or career, inside the community there is a strong level of diversity, a roster of people from all around the world that are not judged by religion, sexual orientation, race, gender or any other act of discrimination.

Sadly this togetherness has only been achieved recently in the last couple of years, again going back to the 30 year old gamer, he would tell you that when he was younger gaming communities featured mainly males, this is at least partially the fault of the gaming media of the time, advertisements for games would be aimed at males and would feature some content now deemed sexist, the women would be largely over sexualised, and would be shown as weak or victims which lead them to be by default property of the “powerful, brave” men. Many famous videogames would make the user rescue the stranded female because she is weak and defenceless, a prominent example of this is the Mario series which is one of the biggest gaming franchises in the world, this game featured a female constantly getting rescued. The underlining tone of sexism in some of the early games caused some females to in sense boycott video games, and therefor would not be involved in the gaming communities of the time.

To begin to explore how the gaming community got to where it is today at a basic level you simply need to look at the word community, what actually is a community? A community is a social group of people who all are all joined together by one common interest. A common community that most people find themselves in is their neighbourhood community, in this example you are all linked by location, and the fact you’re so close to them means it’s easy for the community to build, but why shouldn’t this apply to a gaming community. You might be thinking that it is a total different subject area and the two can’t be the same but in theory it isn’t, the only difference is you’re not seeing the people in person but you’re still having relations with them, and in a lot of cases you are becoming good friends. In the gaming community that I involve myself in I have a lot of people I would call very good friends who I may have never met or only met a couple of times, and there is nothing wrong with this, don’t fall into the stereotype of thinking everyone online who you haven’t seen in person is crazy and out to get you, I have met many people in person that I first met online and we instantly got on like we had been friends for years and this is because we had.

Bullying although not as prominent in the gaming community as it used to be still exists in small pockets, I must explain that when I say bully I do not mean the stereotypical school sort of bully I mean real bullying, serious bullying that happens long after you leave school and can happen through life, be it bosses, friends or even family members. A bully may say that because you’ve got a lot of online friends that you don’t have friends in real life, this is completely not true, having friends in an online community is not opposing having friends in real life it is the same thing because they are real friends.

In this modern world the gaming community is a lot more prominent in the media and is now a friendly place where any social and cultural group is welcome, and will continue to grow for many years to come.

Another Friday as approached us which can only mean one thing, a brand new episode of the next level gamers podcast, in this weeks episode ..

This week: Alex is back from Maga! The latest gaming charts and news, amazingly composed jingles, Tom only drinks schweppes lemonade but why? How many “oooo’s” can we cram into the charts feature? Do we need new IP on the current generation of consoles? Jonny develops moving his microphone tourettes, Driver Francisco, is Sony making any money? What are the most underrated games of 2012? Tom doesn’t know how to track time, MORE Train Simulator 2012 and Wordy thinks hes now a train driver, Jonny thinks naming 5 good things about Sony will redeem the company, Wordy cant get a word in, The greatest game sidekicks! Tom has sexual feelings for aliens, purple vasers, NEW FEATURE: Which fact is bullshit? Gears of War 3, does Alex like soundtracks? Game of Thrones, Dirt Showdown, Someone does well at gamebusters but who is it? and can Jonny ACTUALLY shut a window?

To download to podcast for free follow this link http://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/next-lvl-gamers-podcast/id525183508

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