In each one, a celebrity talks about a video game and then says, "I'm not a gamer; with my 3DS, I'm a _____." (The blank, of course, is filled with some other title relating to a hobby, career, or activity.) The goal here is obviously to sidestep any negative connotations associated with the word "gamer" and, more importantly, to attract those potential customers who don't call themselves gamers but who might enjoy a casual game once in a while. They want everyone to know that 3DS games are not just for video game enthusiasts; they're for everyone. It's also pretty clear that they're marketing to girls.
Both of these things are fine.
Do I like the commercials? Well, not really. Celebrity endorsements are meaningless to me, even when I like the celebrity, and in these cases, I can't say that I do. (Prior to looking them up for the sake of writing this post, I had never heard of Gabrielle Douglas, Dianna Agron, or Sarah Hyland. I'm sorry, but I don't care about the Olympics or gymnastics in general, and I don't watch Glee or Modern Family.) On top of that, the games they're advertising look pretty stupid. Even so, I appreciate what they're trying to do.
Not everyone does, though. The commercials have, predictably enough, provoked a minor backlash from those who are somehow offended by Nintendo's supposed abandonment of the word "gamer" and all those who self-identify as such. Browse the YouTube comments if you need an example. Why, they ask, does Nintendo think "gamer" is a dirty word? Why are they intentionally targeting everyone except gamers with their game-related ads? And if these girls are playing video games, aren't they gamers too? Why deny it? Why go out of their way to deny it?
The people behind these seemingly reasonable complaints are forgetting that "gamer" still is a dirty word to nearly everybody who isn't one. Even though we've seen, in recent years, a peculiar movement to redefine "gamer" such that the label applies to everyone who ever enjoyed a video game, most of us haven't forgotten that the original definition was considerably less inclusive. You don't become a "gamer" at the very moment you buy a handheld Nintendo console, and this is for the same reason that I don't call myself a "biker" just because I own a bike.
If you're correctly using the word "gamer" to describe yourself, it means you see video games as a legitimate hobby — you take them seriously, you spend a lot of time on them, and playing them is a part of who you are. It's easy to see why this could be alienating to someone who, for example, might just want a 3DS for the casual puzzle games and the kid-friendly platformers, or someone who likes to play iPhone games on a long bus ride but doesn't know (or care to know) the difference between an Xbox and a GameCube. This person isn't likely to buy anything marketed specifically to gamers, and Nintendo had only good intentions in their attempt to distance their product from such troublesome vocabulary. Did they have to do it explicitly? Probably not. But they successfully sent the intended message — that you don't have to be a "gamer" to play a Nintendo game.
It's easy to argue that everyone who plays games is a gamer but, if you don't take "gaming" seriously, what's the purpose of the label? I know how to bake cookies, but I don't mention in my Facebook profile that I'm a baker. Likewise, you don't need to call yourself a gamer just because you've played Angry Birds on your smartphone. Oh, you have an Xbox? I'm not impressed. Not even playing Call of Duty: Black Ops makes you a gamer. Not even Minecraft. And it's not even a matter of contrasting these (almost sickeningly) mainstream games with material which some might find to be a little more sophisticated. It's about devotion to a hobby. If you have as much passion for games as a devoted, IMDb-addicted movie buff has for movies, you can call yourself a gamer without sounding like a complete douchebag.
Personally, I don't even like using the word outside of discussions of the word itself, and I don't identify myself as a gamer despite the fact that I've been maintaining a gaming blog for nearly five months. In my own opinion, the word just sounds completely idiotic. The word "game" never needed to become a verb.
Unfortunately, this idiotic word is becoming absurdly overused by people who play only one or two games casually but nevertheless attempt to adopt the label so they can be part of some non-existent "nerd culture." There's another term which, by the way, doesn't need to exist. I'm not sure exactly when people decided that "nerd" was the new "cool" but it needs to stop. The so-called nerd/geek culture is composed almost entirely of fake nerds and fake geeks — a bunch of hipsters who choose to identify as nerds and geeks just because they want to be different, and they go on and on about how proud they are of their nerdiness and geekiness but they don't actually have any nerdy or geeky interests aside from their manufactured nerd/geek pride and a vague interest in "science" (which, to them, probably means spaceships and dinosaurs).
A nerd is, in as few words as I can manage, a person with relatively obscure interests that take precedence over the desire for social acceptance. It's not something you can become by dressing a certain way. It's not a label you can adopt by choice. Playing a video game or reading a book or watching a science-fiction movie does not make you a nerd. Wearing glasses does not make you a nerd. Doing your homework and getting good grades does not make you a nerd. If you've ever written or spoken aloud the phrase "I'm such a nerd," you're almost certainly not a nerd. If you're popular, you might have been a nerd many years ago, but you're not one now. If you ever made fun of the nerdy kid in high school, you're not a nerd. Likewise, if you ever made fun of the gamer kid in high school, you are not and never will be a gamer. So please stop saying you are.
To get back on topic for a moment before I wrap this up, I'd like to point out that Nintendo shouldn't be trying to market to hardcore gamers anymore, anyway. It's pretty obvious that Nintendo has built up a reputation as a creator of family-friendly consoles and a publisher of kid-friendly or otherwise casual games. Perhaps they've done this at the expense of the hardcore audience, and maybe that was a mistake, but right now I think they're better off trying to maintain the audience they have, rather than attempting to steal hardcore gamers away from Xbox and Playstation. If this means advertising the 3DS as a console for non-gamers, so be it. The people who were somehow offended by these "I'm not a gamer" commercials probably weren't Nintendo fans anyway.
