I sometimes grow tired of hearing about the PC master race, and about how powerful PCs are. When I grew up I played games like lemmings, worms, King's Quest, 7th guest, warcraft II and all kinds of games that were just great fun games that were really played best on PC with a mouse and a keyboard.

Nowadays, it's all about this or that rig, this PC gamer being awesome because he has the most powerful hardware, etc. etc.

To me, PC gaming was all about the alternative experiences it offered. It seems to me that in our day and age the focus really is in the wrong place.

Well, then. You are just a member of the PC lesser race.

I always liked it for mods, not graphical, though those are nice.

Don't like controls, remap it (sometimes use 3rd party), fallout new Vegas is like a whole new game for instance, add tons of quests, rebalance etc.

There are still different games, however at a console oriented site you're going to get what's here, particularly when a lot of the console threads are arguing about graphics anyways. Part of pc gaming has always been about specs, over clocking, benchmarking, etc because that's a hobby in itself.

Not that, every PC gamer does this, but generally the most enthusiastic ones do. And when you go to an gaming enthusiast site, your likely going to get this.

Guess I'm part of the pc peasants too then.

I used to enjoy messing with games, edit civ.exe to change the game, make an editor for Dune 2, change the textures in Wolfenstein 3D, create levels in Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Half-Life. Never had the best rig for that, I played fs4 at 10 fps or something.
I gave up on mods since most are created by people with 'master' pc's, instantly turning the game into an unplayable mess on my modest pc.

I still like pc for the experimental things like Dear Esther and Proteus for example, adventure games or a good similator. No time for modding anymore.

I both agree and disagree.

I don't worry much about power. I don't care about ultra-high settings or my games looking better than consoles. I want my specs to be near recommended levels but I don't worry much about them beyond that. I care a lot more about performance than graphics.

However, when you say that the focus is on the wrong place, I think you're giving way, way too much prominence to those few who do go all out in terms of power. They might be the most vocal group but they hardly represent all PC gamers. In fact, I'd probably guess that people playing on out-dated PCs far outnumber those with state of the art systems. Look at all the free-to-play games out there, all the indie games and bundles. There are tons of them and many of them are selling very well.

There is nothing wrong with people who love playing games at ultra-high. It's as valid as any other form the hobby takes. I think it would be wrong and misleading to say that they represent most PC gamers, though. They're just one small fragment of the whole, which is actually incredibly diverse.

Uh, the PC gamers who only care about raw graphics are in the severe minority, and I doubt anyone on this site actually feels that way. It is all about the games. The most popular games on PC are hardly the most demanding ones.

But then there's Battlefield, which is extremely beautiful AND is hella fun to play on PC. So it shits all over your argument. Like a lactose intolerant gorilla.

Speaking of which, i just got done playing a round of League of Legends and shit talked the Darius on our team the entire match in all chat. I was playing Darius. Shit talking yourself in LoL is way more fun than shit talking others. Try it sometime!

It doesn't shit all over my argument at all. I was mentioning that when the focus is purely on graphics it's in the wrong place. Sure someone who doesn't have a "master-ultimate" rig may not enjoy certain great games, that's a given, but my OP and story don't contradict that, I'm aware of it. I'm just saying that growing up I was more like SvennoJ and loved my PC games to bits. I find myself unable to relate to the Master Race sentiment that's, for example, in your sig. I shit all over that. ;)

Great thread. My PC was never bleeding edge, just powerful enough to run the latest exclusives smoothly.

PC will always be special. It has nothing to do with graphics.

This seems to be a personal problem the experiences your talking about have been and  can still be found especially in the indie scene just because you letting a certain type of PC gamer get to you does not erase that.You may be more suspectable to this right now because we have a pretty supstance difference in PC and Console graphics at this point in time.

pc people aren't all about graphics, just check the steam games library of vgc members, most of their games are bad looking games, they own them exactly for the reasons you mentioned. the game i play most on pc atm is legend of grimrock and surely not for the graphics.

but still, nothing wrong with it to play the games you own with the highest possible settings with as many fps as possible because that just increases the quality of the game you like even more. same with mods, skyrim is great on console but it's even better with mods, smoother frame rate and whatever else.