Gamers vs. Normal People

Disclaimer: The phrase "normal people" has different meanings in different contexts when I use it. Sometimes it's a pejorative, meant to imply dreadfully boring, uncreative, uninteresting. Other times it's a compliment - the opposite of reactionaries, a group that is unaware of and would be put off by the bizarre grievances expressed by cranks; individuals who simply want to live a peaceful life and stare at you blankly if you mention anything that has ever happened online. The latter meaning applies in this instance.

The toxic culture that infests many spaces on the internet can make it seem like there is a consensus about what normal people enjoy, when that couldn't be further from the truth. This idea is especially popular in gaming communities, where high school Nazis desperately want us to believe that no normal person cares about a game with a female main character, that regular people can't envision a Black person being able to solve puzzles, that your neighbors would flee in disgust from seeing a small trans pride flag in the background of a cutscene. Even their less blatantly bigoted ideas reveal an unwillingness to accept the concept of "adapting to a set of circumstances you aren't used to" as seen in the utter derision of games with control schemes deemed strange or outdated. "I do not understand it, nor do I want to try to understand it, this game should play the same way the other games I play do" cry masses of losers in comments sections who also curiously believe they have a high IQ, typically a measure of how fast somebody can learn to perform tasks (its racist origins notwithstanding). We cannot allow loudmouths whose entire life's philosophy is Devotion to the Comfort of Sameness to define what "normal" people appreciate because they occupy an environment where normal people typically take one look at it, decide everybody else is weird, and leave.

Normal people, who interact with the world in a way that doesn't assume the worst in it, want to live. They want to experience. They want to feel joy, and wonder, and mystery, and tell their friends and family stories of the last thing that made them laugh.

Think of the history of video games. Think of arcades. Think of how Pac-Man was a sensation and people were huddled around the Centipede machine. At home on the NES, think of Mario collecting mushrooms to grow bigger and jumping on other mushrooms that walk around (and trust me, plenty of thought has gone into that if Flash animations were anything to go by). Those games, conceptually, are weird. And yet, normal people embraced them. Normal people turned them into a household name. Because they were new, and different. I was going to write a snarky sentence about how they also had the backing of corporations interested in seeing their products succeed, which is true, but throwing money at something doesn't always guarantee its popularity.

If you're a game developer who cares about games as a medium of expression, or even just as a medium with still-unexplored ways to have fun, you have to stop thinking about how to attract "gamers". It's time to embrace the Normal Person instead. It's scary, I know. Normal people are generally outside whereas we're on the computer. That's a hurdle I myself have to clear. Baby steps. But I think we would be surprised and delighted by how regular everyday people might react to works that deviate from the norm versus how a reactionary "gamer" would. A lot less clown emojis, I imagine. Normal people are much more receptive to novel ideas because they typically crave novelty.

My anecdotal evidence of this, perhaps the entire basis of my thesis, is the time my cousin who exclusively played Madden and Call of Duty saw me playing Goblet Grotto and said "That actually looks like a lot of fun."