But you have given a lot of utter garbage about people in the 70s, 80s, being ‘ostracised’ for playing computer games. Its complete rubbish. I’d lay off those fake news sites.
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I watched Stranger Things and the nerds were definitely ostracized.
That’s a direct result of urban myths. You really think people were people ostracised for playing Donkey Kong when every pub had a Donkey Kong or Space Invaders machine with a queue of people lining up with their 10 cents to play it ? In my local they even removed the POOL table for one such machine…sacrilege.
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I don’t know what a Donkey Kong is, and maybe that was a thing in your local gamer’s guild, but here in the real world nerds were locked into their lockers on the daily.
There are many articles and blogs you can find about gaming culture through the years, and how it was perceived. For example:
https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2020/4/social-stigmas-of-gaming
https://open.lib.umn.edu/mediaandculture/chapter/10-4-the-impact-of-video-games-on-culture/
First-hand accounts, science, and research point to gaming being generally considered a sub/counter-culture during the first 30 years or so.
Few will have any statistics because such studies simply weren’t conducted between 1970 and 2000, but certain types of questions asked today give insight with regard to how various age groups perceive various aspects of gaming culture:
Anyway, I’ve pretty much completely beaten you down to the point of you responding with “fake news!” like some kind of QAnonite, so why keep this going further? You’re not willing or able to make any argument that doesn’t stem purely from emotion and the belief that your personal experience is a valid stand-in for the entire human race. You’ve yet to quote anyone or anything, aside from your own self, as evidence for the arguments that you’re trying to make.
It is truly pointless arguing with someone who wasn’t there and all they have is articles written years later to go by. It’s on par with watching John Wayne movies thinking they tell the actual truth about the Wild West.
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No, it’s not on par with that at all. That’s just you falling back on hyperbole because you don’t have an actual logic-based argument to make.
Anyway, my apologies for presenting empirical evidence that didn’t make the cut for you, a person arguing strictly from emotion and personal outrage. I promise I’ll do better next time.
Your ‘empirical evidence’ is little more than urban myths. You are like someone railing the myth that a penny dropped off the Eifel Tower will kill someone because ’ everyone knows its true ’ to someone who had dropped 1000 pennies off the Eifel Tower and knows hundreds who also did…all harmlessly. You can’t tell someone who was alive at a time when you were not…what actually happened then and what they experienced. I do not know of a single case ( out of numerous fellow gamers ) of anyone being called a geek or a nerd in the 70s for playing computer games.
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I don’t think you are allowed to drop stuff off the tower.
It’s a crime.
Of course I can, and I just did.
Just because you were alive at the time, doesn’t mean that you’re an expert on the subject matter.
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I’m more of an expert than someone who wasn’t 
But what goes around comes around, and give it 40 years and you’ll have someone who isn’t even alive now telling you what your life was like now based solely on urban myths, biases, etc, etc…and you won’t recognise it at all.
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You need to prove that, and so far you’ve refused to, instead opting to make a bunch of straw men about me believing things about the Wild West based on John Wayne movies and myths about dropping pennies from the Eifel Tower.
Just watch Stranger Things.
Yeah anytime I think of a country that truly cares about the safety and well being of its citizens i definitely think of China.
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The day drinker hates our freedoms.
Please do not mock our dearest leader Mr Xi Jinpeen. He protects us against the imperialist injustice of the Western pig-dogs. You depart for free new education immediately. Xiexie ni.
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Wait…when did Kojak get to be a world leader ?
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In the very early days, all games were single player, except those (like ‘Pong’) allowing one other person (seated next to you…) to grab a controller.
‘Socials’ among my contemporaries often disparaged gamers rather than devs or techies, for their perceived isolationist tendencies. They didn’t understand that it was also the technology which imposed limitations.
It is true that people who were comfortable playing solo appeared to be in the majority. Gaming then required patience, because loading times were quite long and, being tape, subject to drop-outs, bugs, and other irritations associated with physical media.
There were few Save points (if any, in some games). There was also the terror of the ‘Game Over’ doom-music splash-screen. Gaming was not for the faint of heart.
I suspect it was those gamers (or at least, the ambitious amongst them) who became the early developers of multi-player games. The technology had advanced sufficiently to allow players to get together virtually and to make gaming companies a shed-load of cash.
You can see it in EVE. The early game was harsh and unforgiving. Of course, there are still elements of that present, but expectations from gamers have changed. ‘Hardcore’ doesn’t cut it any longer,
There was also the culture of EVE’s original devs - Icelandic. Among other things, humour we might regard as ‘dark’ was commonplace. Here is a copy/paste from a light-hearted Icelandic cultural piece, quickly found via Google:
“A well-known example is when the famous outlaw Gisli Sursson (from Gisla saga) stabbed his nemesis Vesteinn to death with a spear. Instead of screaming in pain, Vesteinn simply says “hneit þar” before dropping dead, which roughly translates to “you got me there.””
‘GF’, anyone?
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+1
Right on right on, Altara. That post of yours is gold.
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Actually the interesting thing is that many of us gamers from back then in the 70s and 80s now refer to ourselves retrospectively as nerds and geeks in a tongue in cheek manner, but I don’t recall anyone actually using those terms back then. Most of us were introduced to computer games down at the pub or local mall…before anyone ever bought a home PC…and game machines like Space Invaders were widespread then. So, far from video games being something people were starting on alone in Mom’s basement, they were actually in as social an environment as it gets.
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