Before I started writing here at the Odyssey, I spent four years writing for a gaming website called Hey Poor Player, writing reviews and news pieces and even hosting a podcast. In doing so, as will probably surprise nobody, I spent the last few years playing more video games and paying more attention to the industry than I had ever done before. I've critiqued, discussed, and occasionally argued enough by now that, having stepped back from that world just by a couple footprints, I feel like I've learned quite a bit about the way gamers absorb the stuff they love.
If you were to collect a hundred people in a room and ask them why their favorite movies are their favorite movies, the chances are in your favor that the array of answers you would recieve would vary like crazy. Some people might be in it for the acting, others for the stories, and others still for the cinematography. You would also hear about a lot of movies that can be evaluated on all of those grounds, but probably also learn about some created for more specific, singular purposes. You might hear some people talk about "art house" films as a completely different world from the rest of cinema. I can't blame them; when an art form exists for that long, different sub-forms tend to crop up.
This happens in video games, too, and I've come to feel that it does so in three basic ways. When it comes down to the brass tacks of the thing, there are essentially three camps (or combinations of two) into which any ardent gamer falls: the immersionist, the art appreciator, and the sportsman.
The immersionist is the category into which a lot of extremely dedicated people tend to fall; if you actively and vocally identify yourself as a "gamer," the odds are in your favor that you might call this category home. For some, games are more than just a hobby, but become a form of escape. Whether this escape is because of a bad home or work life, or just a desire to feel like something other than yourself, these are what define the category of the immersionist. A lot of the time huge, open-world experiences like the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series tend to be made with this kind of player in mind.
The art appreciator is in it for the creative genius of the thing. A couple years ago, a game came out called Gone Home that caused a bit of a stir among gaming communities, and kicked up a discussion of what qualifies something as "a real game." The reason behind this was that Gone Home was very light on gameplay, really only requiring players to explore a 3D-rendered house and interact with the story-related elements within as you learn about a character's story within its walls. Gone Home was not a ag,me for the sake of gameplay or immersion so much as it was one made for the sake of pure storytelling and atmosphere. It's a game made more to be seen as a peice of art more than something with technical controls to master, or a never-ending world to explore. Since that game, the whole idea has become something of a genre all its own.
The sportsman carries a passion for the art of competition in games. As long as there have been video games, even as far back as Pong, there's been a sense of competition. And for some, that competition is everything. Sports games, fighting games, online shooters; all types of games most loved by people who would be classified as the sportsman. The rise of MOBAs (Massive Online Battle Arenas) such as DOTA and League of Legends have gotten popular enough to even warrant their own spots on ESPN. If you're a sportsman-type gamer, you do in fact care that much!
None of these categories mean that anyone has to categorize themselves as one particular kind of player. For example, I would categorize myself in some ways as a sportsman, and in others as an art appreciator. WHat's interesting, though, is how easy it seems to be for people from all of these groups to criticize games of all types, regardless of what group may have been their intended audience. Of course something looking for high scores to bear or a giant world to make their own won'tr get as much out of a small story-based art piece, and that's okay; it should be, at least. There's types and genres in every kind of entertainment and media we have, from games to books to movies to plays.
