Je kent het vast wel als je vertelt dat je een gamer bent en mensen je opeens erg raar aankijken. Want nog steeds hebben veel mensen vooroordelen naar gamers toe, want zo zijn we allemaal bleke overbesekste maagden zonder enig sociaal leven. Ook hebben games verhaallijnen die minder inhoud hebben dan een gemiddelde Steven Seagal film, je snapt wel wat ik bedoel. Daarom heeft Cracked.com een top vijf gemaakt met redenen waarom het niet cool is om te vertellen dat je een gamer bent.

For instance, at the time of this writing, I have a still-unopened copy of Remedy's Alan Wake, a just-released game I've been anticipating for about five years, which I'm saving for some free weekend. It's an atmospheric horror tale which reviewers assure me is on the cutting edge of non-ridiculous video game storytelling. But I'm browsing around gaming blogs and message boards and I'm getting worried.

Oh-oh. What's the complaint that has everyone up in arms? Is there a cheap twist at the end? Is the main character two-dimensional? Is there a frustrating minigame where you have to carefully groom Alan's pubic hair?

No. It turns out somebody took a screenshot of the game, zoomed in 500 percent and counted up the pixels to make sure every frame was rendering at the maximum 720p resolution the Xbox 360 is capable of.

It turned out some parts of some frames weren't. All hell broke loose. Here are hundreds of posts on the subject at gaming forum NeoGaf. Here are hundreds more at B3D. Here's 2,000 posts on the subject at the Alan Wake site.

On some level we know this is wrong, because we know to hold films to a different standard. We know that advances in CGI couldn't save the Star Wars prequels, and that pretty 3D doesn't make Avatar the best movie of the year. Yet, in the next breath after mocking Avatar fans as slack-jawed yokels easily amused by a cheap technical gimmick, we will fly into a rage if some new game's technical gimmicks aren't up to par.