Planet Nectarius

This weeks Aberrant Gamer looks at how gaming as a community can tend to be volatile and unforgiving, and downright mean. Perhaps moreso than society generally.

I’ve noticed a trend recently. Several events such as the Jade Raymond comic, and the Resident Evil 4 trailer have shown some up bizarre reactions. It’s not just the issues themselves, or the disturbing supportive (of the negative) responses to them to them are disturbing, it’s the severe backlash against anyone that speaks out about it.
People don’t want to confront anything, they just want to let issues slide into internet oblivion. They don’t want to be accountable to societies conventions. There’s this expectation to conform to the ‘generic’ gamer (ie. white middle class hetero male gamer with no sense of social responsibilty.)

These people are defending their territory, they see gaming as theirs. Similarly I believe many are the same people that hate the Wii, because it is an inclusive technology.

I don’t really believe there is such a thing as a single gamer community. Mostly because I refuse to be lumped in with the nutcases.

I’m actually starting to think that this is because gaming is at a watershed moment. Gaming is growing up.
Those that don’t want to grow up with it feel like they need to defend their position, try drag it back into their ownership. They attack anyone that advocates a social responsible gaming future.

This is why it’s not just ‘issues’ which have provoke attacks against people. Intelligent critical thinking of games also gets attacked, some gamers just don’t want to grow up.

I updated wordpress and the K2 theme. It’s pretty amazing how much K2 has evolved. The rolling archives were extremely buggy previously. Now when you click on ‘older’ you get a bar for rolling through the archives that sticks to the top when you scroll down the screen. All ajax.

Also I’ve finally noticed that wordpress has proper tag support now. So the archives have a tag cloud now. I tagged a few older posts, but there’s no way I could be bothered doing all of them.

I’d never bother with any of this just for the sake of this blog, but since it all comes free with the theme and wordpress, that’s pretty slick. Open source wins again I suppose. Now I just have to get around to upgrading Ubuntu to Gusty.

Wow xkcd is getting fabulously ridiculous. Stallman fights for freedom!

I finished my course today. Last exam is done. I bought the orange box to celebrate, now I can finally play Portal.
The lens was in the mailbox when I got home. Fortuitous!

I just proved the prime number theorem. Woo. Now I just need to remember how to do it in the exam.

It’s been great weather recently.