Madden And The Gross Territorial Nerd

December last year I went on a little rant about Madden, a rant that was spurred by the one and only Jeb Wrench talking about how he likes those games. I’ve since considered making a larger blog post about it, but it either boils down to a simple one-sentence summary or just eventually results in me restating the tweets.

So I’m going to do both.

Here’s the sentence: Don’t Be A Gross Territorial Nerd. You don’t own gaming and game spaces, and the people who play games that you don’t like deserve to play games too. Games are for everyone. Games are for the Madden player who buys one game a year and they’re for the person who downloads every free itch.io title they can. Games are for everyone and everyone includes people who commit the sin of liking sports.

The actual tweets are below the fold, for easy finding later.



1 Comment

  1. But also, please don’t assume that people are trying to be arseholes just because they get sick of having another culture’s sports hype regularly overwhelm their shared online space. I don’t resent Madden because I hate sports (because I don’t, really) or jocks (even though I generally do), I resent Madden because I get frustrated with the constant assumption that the USA’s things are everybody’s things.

    And, more importantly, the impression from outside gaming* that the Madden base is the same as (or even particularly similar to) the nerdgaming base, because while both are legitimate “gamers”, that only serves to illustrate how “gamer” when NOT being used possessively has basically become a meaningless term.

    I recognise, however, that none of that is the fault of people who enjoy Madden (or actual American football), and that all any of wants to do is enjoy our games. It’s not gonna end my life and it’s not reasonable if I go out of my way to be a jerk about it, and in any case the public understanding of gaming groups will improve over time.

    Buuuut I do continue to hope that people will at least consider what it is that bothers me.

    (*Not speaking strictly about people who don’t play games, which is basically nobody, but rather people for whom gaming is not particularly important.)

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