I sat down to write the blog post on Gamers yesterday, my mind full of ideas and messages I wanted to convey about the gaming subculture of the internet, put my hands on the keyboard, and sat. For about twenty minutes, I couldn’t figure out how to start. Honestly, I was bewildered. The ideas were definitely there, rolling around in my head like a ball of yarn, but I couldn’t find an end to start from. Every time I would pull at an idea, picking out a promising thread, I would find that it was actually a loop in the middle of the roll, on both ends fraying into a thousand different threads. I had no point to start from.

I wanted to explain in a single eloquent, concise post how gamers are actually the most creative and in many ways the most intelligent of the subcultures of the internet, and are practiced in seeing an issue or puzzle from multiple different perspectives, a skill which has become increasingly useful and necessary in the real world today. I would show that immersing one’s self into a fantasy world which they must save, rather than being a negative action which is useless to the real world, can actually result in a very positive thing. I wanted to describe how Gamers have a close bond with one another, a bond which in many cases surpasses national and cultural boundaries, creating a unified group identity. Because of this identity, I would show, using many references that I had collected during my research (I call it research, but I admit I am an aspiring gamer myself, and I merely bookmark things I find which could be relevant to this project), Gamers have become a culture based on mutual cooperation and charity.

Realistically, the amount of writing needed to convey everything I want to say about Gamers to the extent I would prefer would fill a novel. I could say the same about each of these subcultures. When I started this project, I had no idea how difficult it would actually be.

Eventually, I am sure I could churn out a fairly passable description of how Gamers are admirable in their novel approach to relationships. However, the best description of a Gamer cannot be found in a block of paragraphs, written by a professional. It is found in the monumental creations made by players on Minecraft servers, by the heroic tales of teamwork and accomplishment by elves, deathknights, and dwarves in World of Warcraft, in the dedication and focus of those who achieved high scores in games such as Pac-man, and in every other video game ever made. Gamers are the artists of the Internet, and without them, the internet would be a shadow of what it is today.