Thread by @SecretGamerGrrl

Yesterday I was talking to a friend and somehow we got into arcades and private pseudo-arcades and pinball and such, and looking at various venues, and I stumbled across this random "article" (which was like, 4 sentences and a single image formatted like it was an article) about

one person's setup spent at least half of that very brief word count rambling about how it's the sort of thing most people would find really embarrassing/would have gotten you beaten up at school and I just have to ask.

How the hell did this utterly ridiculous lie get started?

Like, I get the weird collective fiction that D&D is/was a weird game for nerds and you got shoved into lockers in school for playing it. That one isn't an accurate representation of reality either, but the "weird game for nerds" bit is hard to argue against, and there WAS the

whole Satanic Panic thing for a good decade or so that for a lot of us meant it was this hobby you had to keep on the downlow in case some group of crackpots with Concerns tried to cease all your books and throw them on a bonfire or whatever so the legend at least has some source

But there has NEVER been even one single day in the entire history of the world where video games were uncool. Or even when they were ever anything but explicitly, emphatically cool. Especially arcades. Like, when arcades became a thing they were instantly the thing out of touch

newscasters freaked out about being entirely too popular and if your children went to them too much they might lose their virginity and join some kind of gang where they all wear leather jackets and spike their hair up and listen to loud rock music and not respect their authority

And like, pop culture of the time? Let me just find some famous arcade scenes from popular movies real quick...

Terminator 2, TMNT, Tron, Nightmares, for those curious on sources. Doesn't matter what the context is, arcades are always presented as cool, as are their regulars.

And this was absolutely true in real life too, from when arcades first became a thing, until they lost their popularity fell off sometime in the '90s.

And do you know why their popularity fell off? Because the new Cool Kid status symbol was that you had whatever the newest game

console was, and people could come and play whatever the coolest new games were at your house rather than grab a roll of quarters to fight the crowds.

And hey if you were that kid with a game boy? That was also super cool. Here you are, bringing those cool cool video games along

with you outside, the place people are forced to go when their parents want them to stop sitting inside playing video games.

And then there's PC games. Have you heard of this one game called Doom? It's shareware so bring me a blank disk and I can make you a copy. You run around

blowing away these big huge demons with a shotgun and rocket launchers and stuff and there's just gore and explosions everywhere. And when you take a bunch of damage your guy's face gets all bloody. Don't let your parents see it, they'll probably freak out.

So OK, sure, in the

early days of the medium video games, people who play them, and anything granting access to them were like, the very definition of cool, but you know, TODAY...

... this hasn't actually stopped being true, ever, anywhere. Everyone still plays video games. It's the single-most

mainstream, popular, accepted, generally agreed to be cool way to spend time. People will come over to check out the cool new game you just picked up. Or get together with you to watch a GDQ live. Or go check out that super niche arcade downtown with Killer Queens set up and some

pinball machines based on every movie released in 1994 along one wall.

And yet, somehow, over the last eh, decade or so? This narrative has been fabricated where a bunch of people just started building up this whole identity around having been "unpopular kids who got beaten up

because they played video games," and like... I can say with about as much certainty as I can say anything that that just straight up is not true. I'm totally open to the possibility that you were unpopular, and that you were beaten up, but trust me, it wasn't because you like

video games. Might be that you liked "the wrong games" if you were in a peer group that got sufficiently brainwashed by marketing to get into the whole "console wars" mindset or otherwise factionalized. Could be that you made "I like video games" your entire personality and never

properly developed the sort of basic social skills and appreciation for things outside of your personal interests to become someone worth spending time around. If you just got randomly beaten up a lot and have no other possible explanation, maybe do some soul searching on whether

you're some flavor of queer. It's usually that. Bullies pick up on it much earlier than their targets do. Things might suddenly make a lot more sense after you come out and look back on things.

But you absolutely, 100% were never a social outcast of any sort due to liking games.

And it's always extra weird when I see this sort of thing from like, kids who are presently in their teens/20s/whatever. Like, odds are weirdly good that you have a teacher who used to play Mario Kart or like, Phantasy Star Online or something with me back in the day, or Risk of

Rain 2 earlier this year. Seriously for some reason I know a ton of teachers all over the world. And they're all always griping about how grading your tests cuts into the time they'd prefer to spend gaming in some form or another.