I am a fairly angry person.

I find I get wound up quite quickly and fly off the handle at a seconds notice with no real thought for what happens after I come down.

I was kicked out of 2 schools because of it. 1 college (UK college, not University) and lost one job because I was happy to tell my boss where to stick his tight fistedness!

Because of these things, over the years, I have learned to keep my temper much to the improvement of my blood pressure. I do certain things that relieve stress in a big way most days after work (i go gym, to MMA training, anything that I can work the anger through)

But over the last few days, I have found that gaming and it's offshoots are beginning to get on my nerves. So, I thought, it's time to let them out on here!

It's all about the stereotypes.

Every non-gamer seems to see the gamers of the world as childish people with no social interaction, living in their parents basement just waiting for the next installment of Call of Duty to come out.

It's a stereotype that doesn't usually bother me. I'm not like that in the slightest. I have a wife, a decent IT job and a scheduale that allows plenty of gaming if and when I aint out with friends or the family.

Recently though, it seems that this stereotype has been compounded more by certain things happening.

Firstly, the release of the long awaited Duke Nukem: Forever

I have been a fan of Duke since he was a side scroller back in 1991 (well, it was 1992 that I played it, but you get my point)

Duke's persona was always the crazy loud misogynist a-hole that fell straight out of an 80's action flick. But, as we saw from the terible reception "The Expendables" took, we simply won't accept that as an audience anymore. that film, and DN:Forever, were aimed at people like me. Of this I am sure. People that are old enough to remember the "good ol' days" of games and movies without being so old as to fall out of the key mature demographic for most mature games. People who think the 4th Rambo movie was a decent throwback to old movies while being OTT enough to be fun.

But like I said, we just don't seem happy to expect that anymore. After i got the very cool, echo of "Come Get Some" over the mic in DN:Forever, and I had realised that even the kid in me thought throwing crap around was just stupid. And after the child inside had used the whiteboard to draw some of the best graffiti genitalia ever seen. I started to feel offended that even game companies are starting to treat us gamers like the stereotypes. Dick and fart jokes may be fine (to a point) for a 90 minute movie. But they will not hold up a 8-10 hour game when that is all you are offering. Apparantly, Gearbox, and 3D Realms back in the day, seems to think that we as gamers need nothing more than digital boobs to keep us happy. Not true. At least, not as far as I am concerned.

Second, the recent and ongoing hacking issues.

It's not the "hacking" that gets up my nose. Well, unless it means the PSN is taken down for "maintenance". But it's the way these events are covered in the mainstream press. Seriously. At least one story in the Times last week wierdly ranted on gamers calling us all nerds and geeks etc. somehow because we had our personal details stolen from the codemasters website. I am not sure how one relates to the other, but when a ...ahem.... respected UK paper like that is saying those kind of things, then the general public is never going to be able to shift the stereotypes they have of us gamers.

Lastly, the gamers themselves.

I honestly do not mean gamers as a whole. But I do mean the gamers that really don't have any kind of outside social interaction.

I see it all the time on this site. I see it in the comments section for articles and reviews constantly. And it's the main reason my brief stint of spending time in off-topic stopped. Complete narrow-mindedness.

It doesn't matter what the topic, if someone has a different opinion, they are in for a lot of abuse. especially if they work for gamespot. Take Tom McShea's Infamous 2 review the sheer amount of hate aimed at him after that was tremendous. I admit I made a comment on there, but I like to think I was pretty polite and done what the comments section is there for. Commenting. I gave my opinion. And pretty sarcastically said that I believed that Sucker Punch may have wronged him in someway. All pretty light hearted I like to think.

But there are comments on there questioning Tom and his job and throwing straight up hate at the guy for just doing his job. That's simply unacceptable.

And don't even get me started on the comments that appear anytime Carolyn Petit does a review.

I feel disgusted just reading the comments people write. comments on her voice, her gender, saying she should hide in her cubicle away from the public. I really feel ashamed and embarrassed to say that I am a gamer when so many people act like that.

It's the "one bad apple" effect. If one person decides to openly rip into someone because their opinion difers from theirs, or because they don't like the way someone talks, and especially if someone says something so deeply offensive that it makes us regular gamers cringe, then we are all painted with the same brush and we all look like narrowminded fools.

Would you lay into someone who did a review because they were black? Would you dare write in the comments section of modern Warfare 3's review that you have been put off of this game because "the reviewer is asian and obviously has no idea what a good game is?" of course not.

Keep your disgusting comments to yourselves and stop making us all look bad. People can't take gamers seriously when some of us obviously haven't been trained in standard social discipline.

Anyways, that's my opinion and my rant. Feel free to abuse me. I can take it :D