I do have a past as a flaming fanboy getting into repeated arguments in fourms here and there blasting angry rhetoric at other flaming fanboys... and I don't look back on those days with any pleasure at all.
But I don't regret the passion, nor the sentiment behind those days. I regret the actions I carried out in those days, but I can easily make the distinction between my own foolish actions, and the things I believed I was protecting by those actions. Otherwise, how could religion be justified at all? I believe in laying the blame for fanboyism and brand loyalty where it belongs: on the people who actually carry out their own (perhaps mislead) personal choices.
Besides, I still vastly prefer Nintendo's games, and Nintendo's game philosophy, to anyone else's. My views have changed a little since those days... well, I think the word "matured" is a little bit better.
The fact is that since those days, my understanding of Nintendo has matured. I mean, who really wants flaming brand loyalty anyways? Nintendo's never asked for that. What they want is to make games that they can believe in, games that they believe are high-quality, and that they believe push the medium forward. And heck, if another company makes that (in small or large innovations, from GTA 3 to Halo), there's nothing in a Nintendo's fanboy's beliefs that forbids them from playing that! In fact, as believers in quality and exploring videogames, it's almost a Nintendo fans
duty to play and explore these games.
And of course, Nintendo's gaming philosophy IS beautiful, but it isn't nearly the only way, nor should it be. Nintendo would've never pushed for adopting cinematic sensibilities like Konami and Metal Gear Solid has, nor would they have ventured out and tested the boundaries of pop-culture violence and sex like DMA/Rockstar North has with GTA3. And of course, Nintendo doesn't make FPS', where do FPS fans get their fix without Halo, without Half-Life 2?
Yet, those games don't work for me. They don't make me believe in the medium, they don't make me believe in magic, and they don't inspire me to drop hundreds of precious dollars on the hardware I need to play them. (Also, the hardware they play on... the interfaces aren't to my tastes) So obviously, even though I have come to respect other games and other systems, I still can't
love them.
But Nintendo... I've matured and gotten a better understanding of their philosophies, and I still believe in them, call myself a fanboi, and almost exclusively buy their systems. But I've come to believe that to be a fanboi of Nintendo, I have to believe in videogames the way Nintendo does, not to put down other games, but to see them critically. Not to merely enjoy videogames, but to see them as a field where innovation and quality should be striven for. Not to merely play them, but for gosh sakes to understand them.
So I believe that I AM a fanboy, that I do exhibit brand loyalty, and that I do still argue on the side of Nintendo. But I like to think that the fanboy that I am, and that I'm trying to be, is exactly the type of fanboy that Nintendo can be proud of.
~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com 
Topic: The curse of Brand Loyalty (Read 14236 times)
