In response to the rather embarrassing firestorm that has been going down on Twitter, a few gaming journalists have penned pieces vehemently stating that gamers are dead. At face value I’m here to tell you that’s a load of old twoddle, but also that the authors themselves know this to be twoddle too.

Gamers as a subgroup aren’t dead, it’s just that identifying yourself as a gamer doesn’t mean anything. That’s the point they are trying to get across.

Calling yourself a gamer is fine, but it really doesn’t tell us anything useful about who you are. It’s like saying you’re religious, or a sports fan. Knowing you’re religious doesn’t tell me which religion you follow, or which sub-sect of that religion, or which parts of that religion you think are right and which are outdated. Knowing you’re a sports fan doesn’t tell me which sports you follow, or which teams, or even which players you like and which you don’t.

Saying you are a gamer narrows my knowledge of you down by a pretty useless degree. I know you play video games. I don’t know which games, which genres, which consoles. I certainly don’t know anything about you as a person, your political and social ideals or what you stand for.

Leigh Alexander’s piece is hyperbolic, angry and largely insulting for no reason…but the core of what she is saying is bang on. There is no gamer, we are all gamers. The stereotype is dead, we’re not all teenage males playing games in our parent’s’ basement.

Does that mean that teenage males who play games in their parent’s basements are scum? No of course not, it just means that we need to stop identifying all gamers as such, stop making games purely for one subset of gamers and realise the diversity of our group.

Call yourself a gamer by all means, I do. But realise that your view of what being a gamer is, isn’t the be all and end all of it. I’m a gamer, my dad who plays Candy Crush on his phone is a gamer, Leigh Alexander is a gamer (whether she likes it or not) and I’d wager that Saddam Hussein was probably a gamer. Does that mean that me, my dad and Leigh have anything in common with Saddam? Should we be grouped in with Saddam? No, of course not.

We’re all gamers and that’s all fine, but forgive me if I need to know a little bit more about you before we become BFFs.