Once upon a time I was young and impressionable, as I imagine you all were at once. Once upon a time I believed what they wrote in game review magazines and online.
Becasue of that naivety I almost missed out on something great.
I read somewhere once that people like me, who play RPGs for the story, are "story whores," that we shouldn't think of playing a game as reading a book. I have a few arguments with that statement. First of all, at least for RPGs, that's part of the point. You should be imersed in a world unlike your own and identify with at least one of the cast. You should feel their ups and downs, and despair and rejoice respectively. You should find in yourself a little bit of wonder. The point of RPGs to many is a means of escape, as is writing, as it reading, as is drawing. This is just a basic truth of humanity. We cannot always be ourselves, sometimes we have to be someone else, and so when I read and when I play games my goal is the same: I want to immerse myself, if only for an hour or two, in another world. With this fundamental similarity, who can argue that you shouldn't enjoy an RPG like a good book?
Oh, that's right.
People who find their escape elsewhere.
There's nothing wrong with that, don't get me wrong, but as a fellow human, who can deny someone else their little bit of enjoyment?
I would argue someone who is ignorant.
These are the people, my otaku friends, that we see everyday at our schools and workplaces. The people that are not "us" but, rather, the ominous "them."
These are the parents, the brothers and sisters, the coworkers and the friends who don't understand why we use the mediums we do as means of escape. Perhaps, using my analogy, they are the people who say "gameplay is always the most important," and this is true, on some level, but by taking this caloused approach to gaming they only manage to shut themselves off from something that could be, as Tamaki Suoh would say ", good experience."
And why are we stereotyped?
Because, simply put, we don't reach out.
We should show them, once or twice, what we are, and argue that we are only human. We should be gentle, and if they don't listen, then that's their loss and they are missing out on something that could potentially open their eyes to a whole different culture. We must believe that we are normal (because we are the most normal people out there, being confident that we love what we love and not conforming), and we must show them that we are just like them, just people looking for a means of escape. We must remind them that "otaku" is not just applied to anime, games and manga, but to other things as well; after all, all an otaku is is a person passionate about what they are doing.
We are not wrong.
We are not nerds.
We are not social outcasts.
We are people.
We are people who, just once, should stand up and shout to the world that we want to be heard and we want others to understand the phycology of anime and all else we love.
After all, as Lloyd Irving says, all life has value, even one as hectic and full of passion as ours.