Consider, for starters, the fan base. Gamer culture is already insular, but Final Fantasy fans were so wild-eyed and devout that they seemed like a monastic order living inside craggy caves on an unnamed planet. They'd hang out in clusters, painstakingly dissecting snippets of character dialogue, musing on the subtle distinctions of green magic versus the black stuff, bitching about how recurring characters like Bahamut - Bahamut? - had been reskinned for the latest version.
Eventually, it became terrifying for any self-respecting gamer to admit that you hadn't played a Final Fantasy game.
A Self-Identified Group
Game developers haven't cured cancer, fed the poor or eradicated global strife. They make games. And yet many are treated like saints, more respected than the president of the United States and loved more deeply than most gamers love their own kin. And yet, to those of us on the inside, this is not an aberration. This is, simply, the way it is. It may seem strange unless you belong, unless you're in.
Love, as Shakespeare says, makes fools of us all. The poor Heaven's Gate folks loved Do deeply, and believed in him and the way of life he represented. We love games, and the people who make them, and from the games themselves we get a physical and spiritual sense of well-being, and a communal feeling of belonging. For the games we do truly foolish things like stand in line, overnight, outside, for the chance to (maybe) spend buckets of money on devices that do (essentially) the same thing as the ones we've already bought, five times over.
Is this the same as swallowing a poison pill to get to heaven? Are gamers at risk of becoming a massive cult rivaling all the religions of the world, drawing in the young and disaffected, focusing them toward the goal of ... something? Perhaps not. Perhaps there is a wide disparity between wearing a T-shirt and committing mass suicide, and one would have to argue that the cult of gaming itself reflects multiple cults, each seemingly at war with one another over rival systems and even games. But the similarities are unmistakable, and one must ask oneself what would happen if Miyamoto weren't such a gentle soul?
What if, standing before the assembled might of his fans, he hadn't said "My vision does not have to be your vision. I am only one person," but rather "If our will is so strong that no hardship and suffering can subdue it, then our will and our [Nintendo] might shall prevail?"
Russ Pitts is an Associate Editor for The Escapist. He has written and produced for television, theatre and film, has been writing on the web since it was invented and claims to have played every console ever made. His blog can be found at www.falsegravity.com.
