You own the soundtracks to about 70% of the games you own
More than likely all of your favorite songs are either in a dead language, a made-up one, a foreign language, or theyre instrumental. You can be driving in the car and get swept away in nostalgia of that original Chrono theme, or be moved to tears when Dearly Beloved strikes its first few notes. You probably also know what Dearly Beloved is.
Youre really good at maths, though you might not realise it
350 base spell damage, multiplied x1.5 for weakness bonus, tack on another 150 damage for that potion you just chugged, divide that all by 30% to account for the enemys armor reductions, and you have a single turn of a casual battle. All of it flows into this magical guesstimate in your mind, and more often than not youre pretty darn accurate.
Youre reconciled with the fact that luck plays a large part in life
And its usually of the negative kind. You go into a battle understanding that the enemys Blastoise will never hurt itself in confusion. You just assume that you randomly chose the wrong branch in a dungeon. You might not even blink the fact that the final form of the final boss has a randomly cast AoE instakill spell. Regardless of the instance, you almost always have a strange and sad gamer-prayer or button sequence that might work over 50% of the time and, when it doesnt, you qualify it with a shoddy excuse. Its ok, weve all been there. It couldn't be helped.
5 hours sleep constitutes "sleeping in"
When there are no chapters in a game, that just means theres no reason to stop. Plot advancement after plot advancement and suddenly its four in the morning and you really need to pee and eat and do the other things that humans are supposed to do. But thats alright, because its a weekend/you can skip that first class/you totally have enough sick days. For you nothing beats waking up on a bright and clear morning, grabbing some cereal and mountain dew, and sitting down to immerse yourself back in the world you left not five hours ago.
Youre an RPG Gamer
Youre in it for the long haul. You buy a game and understand that it will, just like a good book, take a few weeks (or days, dependent on sleep) to finish. Youre the type of gamer who cant say youve played a game unless youve finished it, and even then you feel like youre doing a disservice to the game unless you go online and watch all the alternate endings. You dont truly understand the appeal of CoD or Saints Row, and wish people would respect the time commitment of a good game.
Not you either? Okay, let's press on.
On first glance, no-one can comprehend what youre playing
That garish mass of pixels and cacophonous tornado of crunchy beeps and static might lead outsiders to believe that youre in a state of denial about the resolutely crashed nature of your console or PC. But to you, that intricate, abstract visual composition and complex symphony of aural expression is inherent to the carefully constructed matrix of a deeper gaming experience. Some people think that a David Lynch film is just a load of weird images edited together, but you understand that true, pure communication must transcend traditional audio-visual means and speak on an instinctive level that normal narrative devices are just too clumsy to attain.
You stop for quiet reflection at least once every gaming session
Where most gamers rattle through their games, hungry for ever more of the experience that feeds their fun-receptors, you know that in order to really appreciate a game, something more than the token pee and food breaks of the normal player are required. You know that once every hour or so you must sit back, ideally closing your eyes or at the very least staring into middle distance, and meditate upon the full significance of what you have experienced. Just let the music wash over you and process the greater levels of meaning and emotional communication exuding from your game. Candlelight and joss sticks optional.
You see metaphors in EVERYTHING
Nothing is just a thing. Everything has deeper meaning. Some might see that discarded crisp packet as so much urban detritus, but you know that that particular crisp packet, discarded on that particular day and illuminated by that particular sunlight, fluttering lightly in the breeze next to that particular dog turd, makes a profound human statement about the emotional interplay between childhood innocence and a fuller, more adult understanding of the world.
60% of your games look like theyre from 1991
High polygon counts and super-resolution textures are simply the whorish make-up hiding the vacant expression on the face of a game with nothing to say. Many of your games might, at their most advanced, look like theyre running on a modified SNES with an extra RAM unit taped on, but to dismiss them as basic would be churlish and uncultured in the extreme. By not filling every centimetre of the screen with gleaming particle effects and over-polished motion-blur, theyre just leaving more space for significance. Its not the chunkiness of the pixels that people should be paying attention to. Its the empty squares between the pixels.
