Gaming Provincials

I had a really good history teacher. Awesome lecturer, always made the past interesting. At one point in a particular lecture, he brought up the term TPs, Temporal Provincials. To any good historian, that is their f-word, worst thing a person can possibly be. You see, a Temporal Provincial doesn't just live for the moment, they are completely unaware that other moments in time even exist, and completely dismissive of what could be learned from knowing they do, let alone what happened in them.

Which brings me to what's on my mind today, Gaming Provincials. In a neophilia fueled industry like gaming it's almost impossible to find someone who has only ever played only one game, but still provincials continue to exist. In this case it isn't so much that they only play one game, it's that they don't have any awareness at all of where the games they played come from, or where they could go. Obviously there are levels to this, but what I want to focus on are the ones where GP could be the f-word, since those people give me a fucking headache.

This would be the FPS player who can't imagine anyone enjoying any game besides counterstrike, or thinks that all games must have kill boards... since all games must have teams trying to kill each other. Or people whose first online game was EQ, and simply cannot fathom that anyone would want to play an MMO sans elves, xp, and loot. More lately, people who feel that anybody that doesn't rip 99% of their game play and interface from WoW are just terrible developers who could never understand their pain at not having thirty clones with mildly different paint to choose from.

I'm not naming any names in this post, but I think I'll start using the terms in comments when I think someone applies.