Embarassed to be a gamer?

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I hear yah, I have a friend that spends an un-godly amount of time on that game and all I see him doing is standing around or traveling from one place to the other, I guess don't get it.

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They can be fun, but the traveling is always a nightmare in these games. It adds up incredibly fast even if you do next to nothing. You can play for an evening and wind up spending an hour or more, easily, just going from place to place. Where sometimes nothing will be up, so you have to go traveling again.

I'll pipe in about the expense part. The 15 or 20 bucks a month is dirt cheap for 24/7 entertainment that starts and ends at your command. It's one of the cheapest forms of entertainment possible. You can spend the equivalent on going to a single movie for an hour or so.

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I think it depends on where you work, and how old your co-workers are. It also depends on what kind of job you are doing there and whether you want/need your co-workers to respect you. If you're the geeky IT guy, they'll expect you to be a gamer, whether or not you came out and told them about it. However, if you work in an office environment with a bunch of old farts who are scared to use their computers for anything other than e-mail, I wouldn't tell them that I'm a gamer. People like that are likely to see video games as childish activities, and by extension, will see you as being a child.

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This is EXTREMELY true. Being into video games can ruin your credibility with computer-phobic older people, who still remember reading that Dungeons and Dragons was spawning murderous delusional children in their own basements who went to school to stab people and thought they lived in imaginary worlds. Older people swallowed a ton of propaganda before games started being more accepted as mainstream and non-psychotic by a large number of people. That all is pretty recent.

Plus, people are often looking for openings to take digs at you or look down on you or put you down. Hand them out very carefully, especially at a new job. Lots of times the first thing the office troublemakers do is try to feel you out for weaknesses and ways they can feel superior to you.

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Most people have a preconceived notion of what MMO gamers are like: no job, no hygiene, no friends, no sunlight, live in mom's basement, play 20 hours a day, etc etc....and of course some believe that gaming/hardcore gamers fit into the D&D category.

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Actually MMORPGer's have a worse reputation than pen and paper RPGer's. Let me explain SAT style:

MMORGP is to pen & paper RPG

as

cybering is to group orgy

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Don't think I follow ya there.

The last thing that sounds "cool" to me is a group orgy between pen and paper MMORPG'ers. Even among those that make it to their 20's without being killed in a freak wedgie accident.