Sport

Before the time of enlightenment, "geek" is what you called someone, not what you admitted to. And by "enlightenment", I of course mean "mainstream blockbuster gaming". As such, I generally agree with the few people who say that you shouldn't call yourself a gamer - because playing games is just something we do, like driving cars, watching TV or playing sport. It's nothing to write home about, and the same applies to being a geek, in this sense. Naturally, you may feel free to ridicule anyone who sabotages their social life to needlessly repeat the same set of actions in solitude for the sole purpose of stat-building (suck it, World of Warcraft players).

Occasionally, and more importantly for the sake of argument, geek culture consists of geeks and the kind of people who call themselves geeks because they think Pokémn is retro and therefore cool, while the rest of us played Pokémon Gold/Silver to death and never want to set eyes on the bloody thing again.

As geeks, we've never enjoyed sports. Sport was that thing you had to do at school every week wherein the teachers would encourage the big boys with over-active thyroids to kick the shit out of you in some form of objective-based combat. That's fair game in something like rugby; as a geek in highschool, you'll probably be overweight, which is actually an advantage in rugby so you can finally dish out the pain yourself. Unfortunately, "sport" is boiled down to two things in England; cricket and football.

Cricket is boring for all concerned, but more importantly, it was one of few things you had to play at school which not only armed the aforementioned thyroids with bats, but also gave them armour while a bunch of their mates were given really hard balls to throw at you. Football is almost as tedious, but the massive and frankly illogical following in England makes it about a million times worse.

We don't like sports. We started playing videogames to get away from sports; and yet, even in my twenties people still assume I'll enjoy watching football or that I'll suddenly want to go out and play it with friends. Two words: FUCK OFF. I may have fun for about 2 minutes, but then quickly remember that I can't actually kick a ball and that I hate football.

If I want to compete with anyone, I'll play Halo on Xbox Live. That way, I'll have a gun of some description, all my stats will be available somewhere and more importantly, if someone's being a bellend, I can mute them and shoot their character in the face. Or in the case of Halo Reach, I can mute them, stalk their character across the map then pop out from behind them and snap their neck in a brutal and satisfying manner.

Gaming is the core of our culture; it's where we live out stories, experiment in fantasy, and if needs be, it's our sport - we can get together and kick some ass, all without worrying about destroying our favourite trainers because some dick forgot that it pissed it down yesterday and the field they've dragged us to has the consistency of chocolate mousse.