Who is a gamer???

Gaming has evolved so much over the past five years that defining who is a gamer has become more difficult. In fact I’m sure there are many gamers who don’t even know they are gamers. The industry has expanded so much and made its way into many aspects of our culture that is would be very hard to avoid gaming. Gaming is all around us and the sooner we realize that most of us are gamers in one way or another then we can find comfort in gaming.



Gaming has typically referred to those gamers we see on the PC and on the consoles. Those who play World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Crysis, Call of Duty, Halo, Final Fantasy and many others are what is normally seen as gaming, but today this has changed. With the prominence of the Iphone/Itouch/Ipad, Facebook, and flash games we can no longer look at gamers as simply those who sit in front of a computer or TV playing games for hours on end.

Facebook has started a small obsession with many on their social network with games like Farmville and Mafia Wars. People spend hours a day tending to their virtual farms (trust me I see this pop up on my Facebook feed all day long). Those people are gamers, they may not consider themselves gamers, but they are spending time each day to ensure they don’t lose….they are playing the game.

Apple and other portable devices have had a significant impact on gaming. Cell phones sell games and Apple’s App Store has a plethora of games, many of which are on their top ten for downloaded apps. I feel most user purchase them based on the love for the app store or as a time killer, but they are still playing a game. Angry Bird is perhaps the most addicting I have played. I still put 25 – 30 minutes a day into it in my effort to get three stars on every level. My wife who would never consider herself a gamer, she is too hip for that sort of thing, is just as obsessed with Angry Birds and even more so with Scrabble. I may end up sleeping on the couch, but she is a gamer.

The more time I spend browsing the interweb the more I see flash games showing up on a verity of websites. Most are meant to be funny, but almost always there is some sort of score attached to it. I have even seen a few sites that have weekly give always based on the high score for that week.  

One last idea with the phone apps…A new App is getting ready to be developed and release called Epic Win (may have been relesed already) in which they are going to turn your to do list, your everyday tasks into a game. Every time you complete a task it improves your character and progresses you in the game. So now gaming is trying to make everyone’s life a little more entertaining and in the end add more people to the classification of gamer.

The world is becoming more and more populated with gamers; most may not even realize that they are gamers, but their actions still influence the industry. We see more gaming apps added every day, we see the Facebook game expanded and more and more people are trying to cash in on that and become game developers. This is only going to progress the industry as it will have a wider pool of creativity to draw from. More gamers mean better products….now we just need to convince everyone they are gamers