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I am not a real gamer. I'm just putting that out there now, in the spirit of Fat Amy, to spare anyone the trouble of investigating whether I am in fact a real gamer. I'm not. Not that I imagine those investigations would be especially time-consuming: as I understand it, the conjunction of controller and vagina is usually considered sufficient to make the diagnosis, leading to no end of false positives in the detection of not-real gamers. But in this case, it's true. I'm as not-real as they come. Crafting is boring. Sandboxes are tediously over-large. Put me in a FPS and I'm more likely to bumble into a corner aiming at my own feet than I am to score a headshot. Or an anything shot. The idea of these things - yes, I love the idea of these things. I think about the infinite, unscrolling worlds of No Man's Sky and a part of my heart leaps as if I was a real explorer paused on the cusp of the unknown. I imagine delving far into a BioWare game and becoming one of those people who speaks with true affection about the alien lover whose breasts I glimpsed and heart I shattered in the deepest outposts of the galaxy.
Maybe I caught one too many screenings of the old PlayStation "Double Life" TV spot at a formative age and this idea of the leisure-time adventurer connected via whirring CD-ROM to a world of endless possibility became permanently fused with my nascent ideas of "aspiration". Not, actually, that the ad looks particularly aspirational now. It looks grotty in the way the 90s took for gritty. And the thing it was selling isn't that much more attractive than the paedo-chic visuals in the end.
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