Where are my black-rimmed spectacles?

Sometimes I feel like a gaming hipster.  All I need is a weird hat and some worn out sneakers.

When I use the term hipster, I'm of course referring to what the word has come to mean today in 2011 -- Someone who doesn't like something simply because someone else has heard of it.  The easiest example I can provide you is the music hipster.  A teenager walks into a music store and starts flicking through CDs, calling each one of them crap.  When the clerk asks him how he knows they are all crap, he replies, "Because I've heard of them."  Another aspect of "hipster-ism" is they like to say, "Oh, I knew about that before it became popular."

I sometimes feel that way about PC Gaming.  I remember when I was a teenager, I would ask my parents for certain PC games for Christmas.  I would get bizarre looks and often they would ask, "Well, where would I get it?"  At that time, most people just didn't play PC Games.  They were too busy with their Sega Genesis or Super Nintendo gaming consoles.  "You want Doom for Christmas?  What the hell is that?"  Exactly.

I remember being in awe when I first started playing the original Half-Life, and it wasn't solely because the game was so brilliant (though that had a lot to do with it, of course.)  No, it was because NO ONE knew about it, and I felt like I had discovered the equivalent of the Lost City of Atlantis.  I would sit there thinking to myself, "Why the hell aren't any other people playing this game?!"

Sometimes, I wish it was still like that, as bad as that would be for PC Gaming sales.  To be more realistic though, it wasn't the fact that "no one" played PC Games in the late 90's.  That was only my perception, because the world was a lot bigger then.  The social media facet of the Internet hadn't yet blown up in our faces.  With the invention of things like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and online blogging, now EVERYONE knows EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING.  (Yet human beings are still stupid.  Go figure.)

Sometimes, you can't even get past the BETA phase of a game before the entire thing is reviewed, recorded, and played through for you.  John often says he regrets the Beta of Cataclysm, because it altered his exposure to the game since he knew everything that was going to happen before he played through the content for real.  That is exactly what I'm referring to here.

I think it's great that there is a community out there that is so dedicated to PC Gaming.  But there are times when I wish they would all just go away so that I can once again be surprised, and once again feel that I stumbled upon some lost treasure of a game.  Luckily, the solution for myself is quite simple, because I can just put on a pair of digital blinders.  But I also like to talk about games with other people -- gamers I know at work, ones that I know through WoW, FB friends, and of course John.  And it gets really annoying when I start a sentence with, "I just got *insert name of game here* and it's a lot of fun.", and they answer with, "Oh I saw *insert name of website here* do a video about it, it's not that great."

So, I suppose that I'm a bit of a gaming hipster at heart.  I haven't touched Dungeon Siege III yet, simply because every time I checked my e-mail or looked at my updates on FB or YouTube, I had a message/review/video about it.  That's a stupid reason to not play a game, I'll admit.  But all that over-saturation killed my desire to play it.

On the bright side, at least with all this over-saturation, I never miss any obscure indie releases.