The Truth Behind the Fanboy and Why They Exist

Part 3: The Pre-Acceptance Era

There have always been fanboys in the world, and particularly in the video gaming community, but due mostly to the social stigma previously connected to gaming they were not as obvious or as often encountered then as they are today. If you are a relatively young gamer you may not be aware that as recently as ten years ago the idea that video games could be played in the home as an acceptable form of solo or group social entertainment was not a well-accepted notion.

Gamers who preferred to play their video games at home on home game consoles were thought to be deviants of one type or another, with a number of popular stereotypes being associated with them, including chronic virginity, the suspicion that upon graduating from college or university they aspired to live in their parent's basement, and that the use of home gaming consoles automatically leads to obesity and oily skin numbering among the more popular of these stereotypes.

During the PAE video games were widely considered to be a form of social entertainment that properly belonged in public venues, and invariably required the gamer to stand in line for access to games -- which were contained in large cabinets either tucked into the corner of your favorite pub or restaurant, or placed in a room that was dedicated to their use.

These intentional-use spaces were often called "Game Rooms" or "Video Game Arcades" and at the height of their popularity were widely considered to be a modular form of entrainment that could be added to various venues such as shopping malls, cruise ships, and pizza restaurants as a source for additional income, and to provide underage consumers with an isolated space in which their predilection towards violence, profanity, and vandalism could be channeled into less destructive activities.

The large cabinets that housed the much smaller gaming systems were engineered to protect the game system and provide an armored receptacle for the collection and temporary storage of tokens that were used as the barter system for the payment required to access and play the games, while in less formal environments tokens created by the national government were traditionally used.

In the PAE maintaining the hobby of video game play absolutely required the gamer to obtain a supply of small metal discs called "coins" whose primary function was to activate said video game entertainment units, as well as serve as a form of barter that can be exchanged with municipalities to arrange short-term rental of parking space for your personal conveyance device, payment for access to public transportation, and access to public "necessary rooms" whose function was primarily for the disposal of human waste products generated by the vending machines from which gamers utilized coins to obtain food-like commodities called chips as well as libations like Jolt Cola and Mountain Dew.

To put this in perspective for you, gaming was held in such low regard in the early part of the era that gambling casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City ceased using coins in their slot machines, switching to printed tickets to disburse prize winnings in order to distance themselves from the arcade games whose rampant violence, strong language, and overt sexual content was thought to be so offensive it might somehow rub off on the morally pure activity of gambling through the common connection of coins.

The end of the Pre-Acceptance Era is generally accepted to be September 24th, 1997, when religious leader, game designer, and Astronaut Richard Garriott (AKA Lord British, AKA General British, AKA Richard Garriott de Cayeux) invented the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) genre in order to explain the game that he created called Ultima Online, which historians now credit as partly a source for the sweeping re-evaluation of home video gaming by society that eventually lead to its wider acceptance as a social activity -- and is still being used today as a virtual training camp for the Occupy Movement.

Extensive research via the TSA's Top Secret Information Cataloging and Retrieval System -- Codenamed "Google" -- reveals that General British flew on board Russia's Soyuz TMA-13 space vehicle for his trip to the International Space Station in orbit above the Earth, where he spent 11-days before returning to the planet below on board the Soyuz TMA-12.

The first words of each visitor to the International Space Station are traditionally recorded for posterity as part of the foundation documents for the joint-effort between the major Western powers that is the space station -- so following his journey on board the Russian-built TMA-13 spacecraft and its subsequent docking with the Space Station, General British was shown to the large observation port in the Space Station, which offered an excellent view of the planet below which, at the time, showed North America and parts of Central and South America.

When asked for his comment, Garriott looked out the window and replied "I can see my house from here!"

A disgruntled Sergey Aleksandrovich Volkov, Russian Cosmonaut and the pilot of the TMA-13 for the trip, pushed Garriott out of the way to take a look for himself -- irritated by what he thought was a less-than-respectful observation of the ISS tradition -- and then remarked: "Oh, wait... You can see his house from here!"

The period of change from the PAE to the Enlightened Era took less than two years, when on March 16th, 1999 Sony Online Entertainment launched the 3D fantasy-themed MMORPG Everquest (usually called EQ) and the world agreed that gaming at home was actually pretty cool, and through dedicated game consoles (as well as Windows PC Computers) it could be a socially-relevant and acceptable activity.

When the official announcement was made on March 17th, 1999 that home video gaming was "OK" video game console inventor, entertainment engineer, founder of the video game industry, and all around swell-guy Ralph H. Baer, reached for comment by a staff reporter for the TASS news service allegedly replied: "No shit, you are just figuring this out now?"

Baer, recipient of the the 2004 National Medal of Technology from (then) president George W. Bush is credited not only with inventing the video game console and founding the video games industry, but also make a pretty damn good Mojito!