10 Misconceptions About Gamers From Non-Gamers [Pt 2]

(logo beeps) - [Falcon] Obviously, we all love our video game. We all like spending our time a certain way, and we know a lot about ourselves, and a lot of the time, people outside of gaming don't really get it. Hi, folks, it's Falcon, and today on Gameranx, 10 Misconceptions About Gamers From Non-Gamers Part Two. Starting off at number 10, the idea that older gamers don't exist. Now, your old Avian friend right here talking to you right now, Falcon, I'm a little bit on the old side. I'm not a s

pring chicken, so to speak, not a spring falcon, either. And yet at the very same time, I am barely able to contain the hype that is gradually building over the thought of having "Portal" everywhere I go. So the average lifespan of a Falcon is 13 years, and I have, I've outlasted that by a couple of decades, but if that vintage is not quite enough for you, there are much, much older gamers who are frankly, just utterly fantastic. One that I think deserves special mention is Shirley the Skyrim Gr

andma, who is just this awesome YouTuber that spends a lot of time enjoying life by doing what she wants, which is playing "Skyrim." And really, that's kinda why older gamers do what they do. You know, when I was young, I was obviously very entranced with video games, but that was an era where video games were way less advanced than they are now. Same time, I definitely did not have a job and was at the mercy of my parents which games I was playing. That is no longer the case. In fact, non-gamer

s out there might want to take a page from us older gamers. Playing video games just keeps getting better. And at number nine, the idea that games don't have writing that is up to the standards set by, say, movies and TV shows. Now, I'm not going to say that this was never true, but it's a stereotype that has persisted well beyond its time as an actual norm. I'm not gonna say I don't remember a time where the average game was not well written, but in this era, people know that that isn't going t

o fly. And even just to be frank, in those eras, there were a lot of incredibly well-written games. Some of the point-and-click adventure games I remember from my childhood were just mind-blowing. Lucasarts and their various projects comes to mind. That lineage has yielded us things like "Disco Elysium," "Night in the Woods." But further than that, role-playing games have always had something to say, and they've only gotten better through the years. And that goes for Japanese RPGs, like the "Fin

al Fantasies," which have, I mean, I'm not gonna say they aren't bizarre, but very intricate, detailed, and interesting stories. But there's stuff like "Witcher III," which is frankly a tour de force as well. If anything, I am a little bit disappointed with where TV has gone. For a while there, we had the golden age of television. There was tons of incredible stuff going on, like "Breaking Bad, "Game of Thrones," et cetera, and the success of those things has kind of bred this era of things that

look like those things and try to act like those things, but aren't quite there. Video games certainly had that era, but it's kind of gotten past it. I mean, a huge video game just released that George R. R. Martin wrote the scenario for. We're past that. At number eight, there's a lot of people that think that gaming is still a niche hobby. Like, ah, they're just gamers down in their basements, playing the games. They're just nerds, people with very, very narrow interests that are specific. Th

at's not the case. Video gaming is $175 billion industry, and while I am not exactly going to measure its success entirely by that, I mean, companies have gotten pretty good at bilking money out of people. In order to do that, you gotta have people to bilk the money out of, though, and there's a lot of 'em. And that growth has been tremendous. Between 2006 and now, it's gone from literally an $8 billion industry to well over $175 billion. It is the second biggest entertainment industry behind te

levision. Gaming is huge. There's so many people involved. An active multiplayer game with a good lobby, you can drop into and play against people from anywhere on the planet. You could not do that, especially that easily, conveniently, and quickly if only a few people were playing. At number seven, and this one really sucks, when non-gamers think you can pause an online game. This goes from everything to the latest, biggest first-person shooter to "Teris 99," and I have dealt with it one way or

the other. I imagine it's probably bad for people who live with their parents especially, but even in my advanced age, there are people around me who ask me to do things while I'm playing, say, "Call of Duty: Warzone" and can't distinguish the difference between a single-player and a multiplayer game. Now, I suppose that using voice chat, I could ask everybody to stop playing the game for a few minutes while I load the dishwater or whatever, but I'm gonna suggest that not everybody is gonna put

a hold on what they're doing, not just 'cause it's a competitive game where everybody's into it and wants to play, but also because life is short. We have limited time. We're spending the time playing the game that, frankly, we have to take out of our schedule. That's another thing you'll notice, that the older you get, the more it becomes a problem. But paired with the fact that people do not understand that you cannot pause a multiplayer game, things can get really frustrating. At number six,

and this one is one that really hits home for me, not every gamer has an awesome setup with a huge TV and RGB lighting that responds to what's going on on the screen. I know that people love to post videos of that stuff, and those videos are cool to look at, but not all of us out there are willing to spend that kind of money on stuff that doesn't really affect the game, and a lot of the time, it's because we don't have the money. Now, I am pretty fortunate to be in a job where gaming is the wor

k. That's fantastic. That makes this hardly a problem for me anymore. I mean, I don't have an elaborate setup by any means, but I've got a nice TV and I've got some colored lighting. It doesn't respond necessarily to the game, but it's cool-looking. I didn't always have that. In fact, that is a pretty recent development, and I definitely do want to take the time to thank everybody who watches these videos and enjoys them because you are the reason. Anyway, gaming wouldn't be the sizeable industr

y that it is if it were exclusively for people who have tons and tons and tons of money. It's not that we can't all save up for something. Again, I have done that, thanks to you folks, but for me, the memory's still pretty fresh of playing games on a pretty small monitor that I'd got for really cheap that I had on a cardboard box for a pretty long time. Granted, that was years ago, back when I was brought on to Gameranx, but I'd say there's a lot more people playing games like that than have inv

ested like several months' rent into a gaming setup. At number five, a lot of people assume that gamers play every single game out there, and as I alluded to in the previous point, that's not always possible. A lot of people don't have time to play every single game, or they have a lot of time and they just really like one game. They wanna be like an absolute friggin' unit at that game, a beast, a savage, if you will, and they sink tons and tons of time into developing that particular game's wor

th of skills. A lot of people are incredible at that, too. And yeah, there are some people that play "Call of Duty," "Fortnite," "Battlefield," and every single thing that comes up. I'm not saying that you can't do that and become an expert at all of those things, but a lot of people just don't. A lot of people also have a primary game where they really work on being good at that and just sort of casually play the other games. For a while, that was "Valorant" for me. I was playing that probably

90% of the time I was gaming. That was also in the middle of a dry spell of some single-player games, if I remember right, as well. So I mean, I guess it really just depends. But obviously, different people play different stuff and different amounts of stuff. And at number four, the idea that people always choose to kill people in an open-world game or choose to the evil option in RPGs, that these games are murder simulators. But that's really not actually the case. If you look at the statistics

that companies put up, usually, people pick the good choice. Why? Because it's usually the thing that brings them to the good ending. I absolutely can attest to this, too. Generally, when I do my first playthrough, it's always whatever choice I think is gonna get me the best ending, and then I'll do kind of an experimental playthrough, where I'll often pick the bad choices, but then after I've done that, it's usually back to good choices. And yeah, I mean, people like to assume that all gamers

are these moral deviants, and we're really not. And at number three, this is one that I think a lot of people are really having trouble with. Did you know that most people who play video games don't throw their controller across the room when they lose? I know that it's really popular to kind of let the emotions flow in streamer circles, because it certainly makes for a spectacle, but most of us really aren't like that. It's kind of related to the idea that whenever a gamer plays a horror game,

they scream their head off, and that's just not true. I certainly have an elevated stress level when I'm playing a horror game, but I'm basically dead silent the whole way through. Same thing goes for this, though. It's just something that non-gamers seem to just think gamers do, and again, it's probably because a lot of streamers are popular and do that, and that's kind of their image of video gaming. But if you want me to be honest, I notice a lot of non-gamers tend to do the same behavior whe

n they're frustrated with something else, and they'll take it out on their phone. Somebody says something they don't like, and they throw their phone or throw something else. In my opinion, it's not prevalent in gamers. I think it's probably something that an equal amount of people do just across the board in society. At number two, there are people who still call every single console a Nintendo. Yes, in 2022. I interact with several non-gamers that still refer to every gaming console as a Ninte

ndo. And this is something that has bothered me for a very long time, as a Sega fan in the 1990s, because while I had a Super Nintendo and liked it, I had to go fast, understand? I get that the Nintendo Entertainment System was called the NES. I get that its sequel was called the Super Nintendo and its sequel called the Nintendo 64, but even the Nintendo consoles aren't called Nintendos anymore. On top of that, while the most recent one, the Nintendo Switch, is absolutely dominating the market,

Nintendos had a couple of duds and even confused people with the names of their consoles, like the Wii U. That didn't sell very many, and people were like, I don't know what this is. You'd think at this point that whole every-single-console-is-called-a-Nintendo thing would be over, but nope. And finally, at number one, gamers are losers who will be hashtag forever alone or never get a girlfriend or a boyfriend or whatever. We have to say this is typically a stereotype that affected guys, but it

certainly has affected other people. So this is gonna be one that's really hard to rebut without being super cringe. But let me tell you, old Falcon ain't having trouble in that area. And I doubt you are either, honestly. It's like saying somebody who likes a certain band or a certain TV show or something can't get a date. It's weird. If somebody can't get a date, it's probably for reasons beyond the fact that they like something. I don't even think that at the height of the stereotype's popular

ity, only cool jocks got girls. Yeah, there were stereotypes, and these stereotypes probably did have some root in some bit of truth, but I think it was exaggerated, personally. I don't know. Have you seen the United States? I don't necessarily want to imply that there's a negative connotation in this, because for me, there certainly isn't, but we are not exactly a nation of jocks. Yeah, we have athletes, but we aren't all athletes, and I think it's obvious. The population is kind of a dead give

away that there's no specific type of person that is favored in terms of who gets to have kids, and you don't really get to have kids without having a partner, I mean, unless there's a large contingent of single-celled organisms that play video games. And yeah, obviously, there are people that adopt, but that costs way more than an RGB lighting setup, let me tell ya. But yeah. I am 100% sure that gamers are not by default forever alone. In fact, gaming leads so many people to each other. Video g

ames are an enjoyable shared interest that when you find somebody who also enjoys them, that's like the best possible thing. Just to be clear, I'm not saying that gaming has taken over and gamers are the new jocks or anything. I'm saying that the stereotype that gamers can't find love, or even just a date, I don't think they were ever true. I think they were a media creation, because frankly, it's been a long time since the nerds inherited the Earth. And that's all for today. Leave us a comment.

Let us know what you think. If you liked this video, click Like. If you're not subscribed, now's a great time to do so, so click the Subscribe button and don't forget to enable all notifications. As always, we thank you very much for watching this video. I'm Falcon, you can follow me on Twitter @FalconTheHero, and we'll see you next time, right here on Gameranx. Right here on.