Judging from the above rant, the title of which should be unfit for printing in any form, it would seem not. The attitude of being "in the club" has so permeated the hardcore audience that, even now, in the dawn of gaming's greatest era, the time in which the joy to be had playing videogames is no longer a dirty secret - no longer a secret at all, in fact - some are finding it hard to celebrate. Or perhaps it's something deeper, more insidious.
After all, wasn't this the plan? Haven't we all along espoused the kind of near-universal acceptance of videogaming that we're now seeing right before our very eyes? Haven't we always dreamed of the day when we could share the experience with, well, everyone? We may have, but, as they say, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. And in this case, it would seem the enemy is us.
The Escapist has spent a good, solid four years delving as deeply into the finer points of the videogame industry as our talents and resources would allow. The result, I'm proud to say, has been the creation of a back catalogue of magazine-quality feature articles addressing the creation of games and their impact on society at large in a way no one has before, all wrapped up in a high-art layout and served with a side of near-masochistic attention to detail. But we've all known the magazine has more potential than to be a breeding ground for pseudo-intellectual wankery about "the meaning of games."
Two years ago, we began to address that, scaling back the pretense and opening our eyes to what you, the readers, have shown us is the evolving world of videogaming; a world in which it's OK to be hardcore, it's OK to spend hours on end in the dark playing games; a world in which no one really gives a shit anymore that there are people who like fake people more than actual people. My friends, this has been the trippiest part of the long, strange ride: the realization that while we've been preaching to the choir, the heretics have been lining up for baptism.
What we realized in the past two years or so was that, while we of the Old Guard were pacing around in the echo chamber of our own circular arguments, debating with ourselves over how to convince the populace at large that games are important, dammit, the populace at large was figuring it out for themselves - and beating us to the punch.
