I’m a gamer.

At a faculty picnic last week I was asked if I was a gamer by a very well-meaning (but completely out of the loop) fellow faculty member. I almost laughed- it’s been a pretty rough few weeks in gaming culture and I know this faculty member didn’t have any idea how contentious the question she just asked was. Still, I didn’t hesitate. I answered: “Yes, I am a gamer”. I’m a lot of things: a feminist, a scholar, an extremely amateur harp player, a fledgeling jogger, and so on. I’m also a gamer. I game. I game a lot. I game more than I should. I game less than some people.

In case you’ve missed it, here’s a quick summary of the current situation.

Following the Zoe Quinn/Anita Sarkeesian controversies last week, a number of gaming sites have called for the end of the gamer. Gamasutra, a site primarily targeted at and run by designers, has a piece asserting that “gamers are over”, and that they shouldn’t be marketed to anymore. Kotaku ran a similar piece identifying the “death of an identity”. Polygon compared certain gamers’ reactions to the Quinn/Sarkeesian issues to an “obstinate child [throwing] a temper tantrum” leaving the rest of us “stuck in the metaphorical grocery store as everyone was forced to suffer through it together”.

Of course, there’s been further backlash in response to both the growing voices of feminists in gaming and to these media outlets attacking or critiquing what they identify as the juvenile behavior of some gamers. Feeling their values and beliefs are under attack, groups have called for the boycotting of “SJW”, social justice warriors, and those who support them- including the above mentioned media outlets, a number of game designers and developers, and various media personalities. Organized under the hashtag gamergate, these players are calling for a return to fun (as if a move toward equality or more nuanced representation inherently means a move away from fun) and for developers, journalists, and gamers in general to keep their politics out of gaming. A number of devs and journalists have signed an open letter calling for a more inclusive, respectful, and civil gaming community.

I can certainly sympathize with those who want to get rid of the “gamer” label. Whether we like it or not, there are a lot of assumptions tied up with calling ones’ self a gamer, and many of them aren’t positive. Still, rejecting the label altogether seems like missing the forest for the trees to me. Yes, there is a violent, angry, vocal contingent of players in the gaming world. The tools we have for collaborating with others and sharing our views make them highly visible, just as those same tools give Sarkeesian and others the chance to reframe how we think about games. At the same time, diversity within our community is growing exponentially, as new tools and platforms make it easier for people to make games and share them. I’m not sure if this is optimistic or cynical for me to say, but the simple fact is we’ll never lose the “gamer” label. It’s here to stay. Rather than try to reject it wholesale, I think that more of us need to come out of the closet as gamers- in other words, by our visibility and the strength of our voice we need to make more apparent a new face of gaming.

The faculty member who asked me if I was a gamer plays a fair number of games herself, but she told me they don’t “count”- they’re board games. My parents play WoW several hours a week, but they’re not gamers because playing one game doesn’t “count”. I have students tell me all the time they’re not gamers because they only play social or mobile games, and those don’t “count”.

My response? Do it. Call yourself a gamer. Change what it means to be a gamer. It doesn’t matter if you’re good or not, or if you play shooters or not, or if you play for hours a day or not. Gamer can mean a lot of things, but only if we let it.