10 Things Only Gamers Will Understand

We’re not quite sure how it’s happened, but literally every online game has children on it. We wouldn’t mind, but the fact is they’re somehow the most rude, obnoxious and potty-mouthed little creatures the world has ever seen.
You haven’t quite experienced anything quite like until you hear a voice that sounds about nine years-old screaming death threats and saying obscene things about your mother.

Throwing caution to the wind like a true rebel, you’ve literally spent the last four hours of a game not saving once.
Almost as if karma was serving up an extra-special dollop of humble pie, your game will, almost without a doubt, decide to completely freeze on you and force you to hit reset and lose all of your progress.
You will then not play on said game for weeks in retaliation.

As is the trend, many games now come with extra incentives to tempt you back in for another crack at the game once you’ve finished it.
At this point, you’ve seen all the story has to offer. You really don’t want to watch it all again, but you’re gonna. It’s the age-old unskippable cutscene!
This problem becomes particularly prevalent when you’re in a section where you’re fighting an utterly, ridiculously and totally unfair boss that kills you within two seconds. Every time you die, you’ll then have to watch the same damn clip over and over and over again until you’re found later that evening on the roof cuddling a pot plant in your underpants with a tea cosy on your head, reciting the dialogue like some crazy mantra.
But hey, whatever works, right?

Winter is coming (that’s when most games come out) and you, armed only with a pathetic coat, silly hat and your own resolve, have braved the elements to stand in line for the very latest smash hit game to hit the shelves.
You’ve been waiting months, obsessively checking every single gaming site out there for the merest morsel of information as your hype level grows, hits a peak… and then grows some more. This is the moment. The time when you’ve been waiting for, coming in just a few minutes at the stroke of midnight.
Flanked by your other gaming brethren, you storm into the store, reach the top of the line, purchase your new game, head home, pop it in your console, play it for two minutes, then collapse exhausted and fall asleep anyway.

Rather than do the sensible things when our console/game refuses to work correctly and take it back to somewhere certified to make repairs, we instantly turn to the net to solve our problems.
Whether it’s draping the Xbox 360 in towels to apparently stop it Red Ring of Death’ing, blowing on GameBoy cartridges in the vain hope that they’ll work or something else entirely ludicrous, we’ll try them all in our quest to not be parted with our stuff for any longer than is necessary.

“Boy!” you exclaim as you stroll through the nuclear wasteland/fantasy landscape/generic setting #281, “I sure do wonder what we’ll find in this place! Perhaps some exciting new quests that’ll reap many rewards?”.
Nope. Instead you’ll talk to some randomer who’ll tell you something you instantly forget and you’ll set off on a mission to literally the other side of the world to recover a spoon or something else equally pointless.

As part of the ever-ongoing problem of gaming being one of the most ridiculously expensive hobbies on the planet and they’re being so, so very many games out there that must be bought, we sometimes have to sacrifice that which was once held dear.
Often to get a new title you’ll find yourself rummaging through your gaming collection for things that’ll still hold some value. With nothing available, you’ll then take a game from years ago even though they’ll give you a pittance in the store.
You’ll use this to get some much-needed money off the latest title, but almost instantly you’ll find yourself inexplicably wanting to play the games you’ve parted with.

You’re pretty sure you’ve only been gaming for about half an hour but once you’ve finally tear yourself away from the screen you’ve found that the world has been taken over by giant ants and the apocalypse has come.
Ok, maybe not that bad, but it’s so easy as a gamer to find yourself missing out on so much of the day as time simply seems to vanish before your very eyes when you come out of a gaming spell.
People have lost entire chunks of their lives playing RPGs – you can completely skip over an entire decade thanks to Warcraft and Skyrim combined.

Those wily marketers. Not content with snatching away a fortune’s worth of our money already for just a game, they’ve now invented an even more expensive money-sink, the Collector’s Edition!
Of course we know that it’s just a collection of random stuff chucked in a box that somehow costs far more than usual, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want it!
Collector’s Editions are both causing a problem on our bank balances and rapidly causing us to run out of space to put the damn things. The boxes don’t usually fit in storage areas either, which is just plain inconsiderate.

It’s a beautiful thing, choice. Many games now are all about choice, giving you the ability to mold your own adventure through the quests, events and even your own character’s appearance.
The latter of these is a huge task that requires much preparation and thought. You’ll more than likely spend hours wrestling with the bizarre faces the games’ system generates, constantly clicking the Random button in the hope that the next face won’t look like a cross between Colonel Gaddafi and a pile of sludge.
When you’re finally finished you can jump into the game, to which you’ll probably never see your characters face again for the next hundred hours, making the task utterly and totally pointless.