Love And Hate Of The Gaming Culture

Culture: the distinct ways that people living in different parts of the world classified and represented their experiences, and acted creatively. Within many cultures there are arbitrary groups, or rather groups whose actions are subject to individual will, judgment or preference, based solely upon an individual’s opinion or discretion. One such arbitrary group is ‘gamers’ and the ‘game culture’.

Two cultures in my life that I’ve devoted healthy portions of my life within are gaming and Electronic Dance Music (EDM). One has completely eroded into a bland mix of mass-produced material trend and regurgitated Billboard Top 40 ‘artists’ – the other… may at times be in grave danger of falling into the same pattern, but its cultural members are a bit more resistant, vocally skeptical, and with fast-paced ambition (probably because there are far less drugs in gaming than was in the formative to golden years of EDM). And, while I realize in truth no one, including myself, can be a ‘gamer ’till death’ due to cultural devolution and dwindling resolve when things turn in directions we’re not fond of, though we do love the idea of it. We’re passionate about games and almost everything about them. Our culture contains people from all walks of life; people who got their start on the Nintendo GameCube to people that dumped quarters into Pac-Man machines. I came from the starting point of the Atari 2600 around the age of 3 in 1980; it was my fathers system, but I used it the most. My favorite games in those days were Berzerk and Cosmic Ark on the Atari 2600, Starglider and Rouge on the Atari 520ST, Pole Position on the Amiga and Spy Hunter on the Commodore 64. When Nintendo put the NES on the market I discovered a more evolved style of gaming. Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt quickly evolved into titles like Iron Tank and Metal Gear, then into Micro Machines and Dragon Warrior, and so on and so forth; games evolved to be innovative and in creative play styles.

It was this era that gaming saw what I feel was the greatest evolutionary gains, the ‘golden age’ if you will, but not from Nintendo. The PC market was still very much on the forefront and DOS was where it was at: Wing Commander, Crusader: No Remorse, Rise of the Triad, Day of the Tentacle, Bioforge, and Phantasmagoria are just a few titles which linger in the back my mind as definitive ‘hardcore’ gaming titles of that era. Developers were using a more robust platform to create more robust games and until the past 3-5 years, the PC caliber of gaming was unmatched every way (and it’s still hard to hold a candle to it standing next to a console). PC’s had better graphics, faster processing, tighter usability, but retails stores weren’t keen on taking them back due to piracy (not that one wasn’t able to pirate the hell out of any generation Xbox game), so it sort of stifled the practicality of owning PC software and in a way helped promote piracy.

In my earlier years I was optimistic and hopeful, even enthusiastic about the coming years of gaming. Watching the growth and evolution of great experiences such as Stryder, Phantasy Star, Tecmo Bowl, U.N. Squadron, etc., I used to rally against restrictive video game legislation and would spend weeks researching and making appeal in written letter to members of Congress (sometimes getting positive response, for what little it’s actually worth). There was a profound level of potential within both the industry and the culture but, as time passed I have become skeptical and at times loathsome towards the things that have transpired. I find that now I often sit and feel that I would rather watch it burn or maybe even light the match, that for the most part it’s all been mishandled; not by anyone, but everyone. And, as I sat for weeks trying to write this essay, I found myself falling back to the most basic of questions: why? Why have I lost hope?

The short answer is that over the past 28 years I’ve watched ideas and proposals become reality and the cultural aspects that were once full of originality shift to being ‘out of touch’ and seemed self-serving; generally vapid. I desperately tried to see through the blinding assumptions of cultural ideology and game politics, including my own and still find myself questioning it all.

The long answer to the question is what follows in that as a culture we are:

Inclusive but Dimentionalized and Categorized

It’s become a classic case of ‘eating your cake and having it too’. We profess that we’re not bigots, racist, for equality and a myriad of other non-isms… yet it’s one of the great lies in our culture. No, we don’t go throwing around pejoratives like Halloween candy, but our attitudes and self-applied labels might as well do it for us.

Perhaps the most hypocritical part of the inclusive video game sub-culture is the exclusive boundaries between unified groups. Everyone has a label they apply to themselves or someone else prefacing ‘gamer’. We’re not separated by borders, religion, race (though there’s a rise in ‘latino-gamer’ as a term), creed, national origin, spoken language, so… we had to come up with some other way to point out a difference, and then exploit it. It’s been discussed almost as much as the question “Are Games Art?” (another topic I’ve written about at length), and people have their reasons for being proud to be ‘girl’ or ‘hardcore’, just as people will believe that games are or are not art.

We’re inclusive and we don’t really shun anyone from being a gamer, as a matter of fact trends within gaming such as the rise in popularity of MMO games and dissatisfaction if any game produced lacks any kind of multi-player or online mode of play lends credit to the idea we believe “the more the merrier”. Yet, despite this apparent philosophy we’re still bent on cliques, clans, and tribal behaviors even if it means that to the outside world we come off shallow; we categorize ourselves. Differences among items that fall into different categories are exaggerated, and differences among items that fall into the same category are minimized.

Really, what other social group shows signs of including people and then turns around and classifies them the moment they walk in the door? People claim those terms like ‘girl-gamer’ can be a badge of honor; a way of showing recognition and pride in the face of social boundaries in what is typically a male dominant facet of society. The same is sometimes said about ‘gay’ gamers. If we’re not supposed to deride someone about the two then we shouldn’t praise it either because they are things those to which they are applied cannot change; the status is a fact of circumstance, not choice. But, I’ve also gone on about that rather vehemently in the past.

We dimentionalize ourselves; we tend to order objects by their value on dimensions that we create or already possess. Things that are originally perceived holistically, without being decomposed into separate dimensions, come to be perceived analytically, in terms of their underlying dimensions. In example, the term “hardcore”. Not in terms of people, as in being a ‘hardcore gamer’, but rather defining a game as hardcore because the game is wildly popular or because people spend inordinate amounts of time on them.  A “hardcore game” refers to a game within a niche market. Often people will say that a game like Modern Warfare 2 is “hardcore” – and it’s not. It’s a mainstream game; a game tailored for mass appeal, sometimes also referred to as ‘casual’. Flashpoint is ‘hardcore’, Disgaea is ‘hardcore’, and Persona is ‘hardcore’ – why? They’re designed to cater to a very specific, often small audience and in many cases have huge learning curves and in this sense Modern Warfare 2 is closer to Mario Kart than Flashpoint.  The problem is that ‘mainstream’ and ‘casual’ become confused with the type of gamer rather than the type of game making the labels asymmetric. Even now I can imagine people thinking “Dude, MW2 is not a casual game – it can’t be compared to Mario Kart in any way shape or form” followed by a number of excuses as to how it isn’t and some threats by the hyper-sensitive. In the end it just boils down to people not wanting to be honest about it and continuing on so that they don’t feel something they like has been cheapened by a word.

There’s nothing wrong with ‘mainstream’, as mainstream games can be fun, challenging, beautifully done, and leave a lasting impression.  So what is my point in even bringing it up?

The point is that not only are we applying labels which serve to divide us while simultaneously boasting that we’re free from ‘isms’, but we’re not even applying them correctly; we’re very quick to throw around a label but slow to agree on what they mean and why. From inside the culture, understanding this just makes people using the terms or too lazy to learn what they mean semantically, sound unintelligent. From an outside perspective, it looks much worse.

Unified but Globalized

The gaming culture has always been unified in that gamers were equally gamers and today despite the sub-categories such as casual and hardcore gamers, they still are. They have a tie that binds regardless of race, national origin or creed – they’re all equally gamers and they recognize each other easily; two gamers may never agree on who should run the country, or which console is ‘better’, but can agree on which faction to pledge in MAG and share the same love for Zelda.

Within the gaming culture we can be whomever we want, and more importantly whatever we choose without any real fear of being completely ostracized from the culture as a whole. This may be largely because it’s not a physically manifested culture in the same sense that a culture like soccer fans or bikers would be, rather our culture is defined by a base physical action overshadowed by the arena in which the action takes place. Being a gamer affords the opportunity of existing in two places at once; we’re embedded deep beneath a dense Soviet jungle canopy trying to destroy an iteration of a walking tank and also sitting on a vinyl beanbag chair in mom’s basement guarded heavily by an army of empty Mountain Dew cans and pizza boxes, simultaneously. It takes on a quantum non-locality direction in that sense, but that’s exactly where the bond begins and while we do suffer dealing with a multitude of rather untrue stereotypes at times, we’re regular everyday people with everyday problems that sit down to what has become more of a series of technologically enhanced interactive books. In that we share common unifying experiences.

Different than unification, globalization is the pursuit of liberal economic (‘free market’) domination through cultural influence as it spreads over a geographical space over time.  Some would consider having a globalized culture sharing the enjoyment of a particular activity wondrous and delightful and being able to market and provide similar shared resources even an ideal goal; especially considering that in gaming much of the progression centers around multi-player and online capabilities, or at the very least enveloping a social market. It’s an industry dream not truly shared by the cultural members, and I’m not faulting the industry for taking expansive measures as that’s the driving purpose of business; to expand and generate a profit. The cultural groups in gaming unknowingly suffer from it at times, though.

The gaming sub-culture is an odd beast that generally co-exists in harmony with cultural appropriation (when business capitalizes on the subversive allure of a sub-culture) in ways that many other sub-cultures have been destroyed or that would spark the formation of a counter-culture (a culture in directly open opposition to social norms, like Beatniks). For a time, the gaming sub-culture evolved faster than outside businesses could keep up with. If the culture didn’t like something, the industry changed their principles and ideas to accommodate the culture / consumer environment. Sadly, this is not so much the case today – A growing number within the culture live with the belief that if the industry is met with enough cultural resistance, if the developers aren’t supported in majority of their efforts, or if a particular franchise is allowed to rest  (no matter how lackluster), the culture will collapse and disappear completely. This isn’t to imply that the ‘industry’ as an entity is a ‘great Satan’ or a call to boycott any particular item or company, but rather that as a culture we’ve become so enamored with the idea of quantity over quality and form over function that we’ve allowed  a design-by-committee philosophy to seep into what we are involved.

It has become a pecking order of disaster for the culture that used to pride itself on being a mover and shaker and that allowed its mavericks and dreamers to innovate their way to success. In a business climate fueled by fear and the “Peter Principle,” as it is today, a decision not made is a tragedy averted. So, decision by committee provides a safe and often anonymous process for finger-pointing down the line… inevitably leading to the creative, of course.

Wikipedia describes it The Peter Principles as: the principle that “in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” This means that anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging applications until it fails. We might say that cultures which contain members who remove themselves from being responsible for maintaining a balance will ultimately allow it to be enslaved.

Globalizing the culture has done a fair share of good things that the culture itself capitalizes upon  in terms of generating products that many have come to enjoy, but the negative side-effects have been detrimental to the culture being something misunderstood by those with the ability to accept us into what is considered ‘normal, high functioning society’. In time this will change as younger generations fall under the direction of those within the culture today, but unless the culture does a serious check on itself and maintains historical reference that gets passed on from generation to generation, the song will remain the same.

Some may argue that the culture is merely going through one of many cyclical changes and that one day soon it will bounce back to its former glory; a second golden age. There are no second golden ages, only brief periods that seem better because the years beforehand sucked… really hard.

Creative but Contrived

Gamers are a relatively creative bunch – spouting ideas of what a game should do, becoming analytical of the story-lines and characters and unintentionally providing content ideas for developers, and even creating some of it. That is really only the tip of the cultures creativity. Many gamers aspire to be involved with the gaming industry, from bloggers hoping to write for their favorite outlet or creating their own outlets in which to write, to attending a college so as to become involved with the development of games independently or with a large studio.

On both counts the gaming culture has been afforded great and numerous opportunities to be unprofessionally pre-involved via user-generated content (UGC). People, especially Gamers eat these things up, often times creating things of varying quality depending on what they’ve got to use and how familiar they’ve become with it. Games like Little Big Planet and the map tools in Halo 3 have given players endless hours of new content to provide one another, creating a sort of independence from the developer. It’s not just within the console market that UGC demonstrated that gamers are creative however; Neverwinter Nights and Dragon Age gave players a complete campaign building tool set to use and sites like ModDB showcase what fans and indie developers have created far beyond what was originally imagined with SDK engines like FS2-Open (Shadows of Lylat), OGRE (Torchlight), and Torque Game Engine (Silver Lining). Multi-user blog sites like and Hip Hop Gamer and aggregation sites like N4G provide the opportunity to both share and create things from a set of tools provided by their developers, and bring the culture to a full creative circle: play, create, share… (maybe pontificate a little…)

Trophies and Achievements summed up in a word: contrived. The ability to create or be creative is sometimes sadly bludgeoned by implementation of contrived goals. Gamers have spent just as much time seeking out and working towards arbitrary things as they have looking at a game and thinking about what could make them better.

Many arguments have been made as to how players perceive the trophy and achievement earning aspects of a game as integral: a much needed step in removing the monotony of gaming and “effectively” providing longevity and replay value. In some rare cases these arguments hold a small degree of water, but in most they don’t. Video game trophies and achievements boil down to a contrived method of keeping the hamster on the same wheel rather than building a better one; approaching the same experience from a slightly different angle rather than providing an original new experience. Being contrived has fed the hyper-competitiveness rife in the culture by edging gamers into using it as a metric of worth and value as a person within the culture but having little to no merit on which it is based.

How we became bent on pushing through a game simply to rack up a number of trophies and achievements that mean absolutely nothing, do not add to the experience of a game or even really elevate a status within the culture is beyond logical explanation (but if I had to guess it has to do with cost effectiveness), yet, it is exactly where we are in the culture. People will rent the worst of games just to amass a digital number that no one knows for sure whether or not the next generation of gaming will adhere to, remove, or alter. People will go so far as to hack and cheat in a game simply to increase a Gamerscore.

When GameInformer Editor Dan Ryckert was exposed by colleagues for dishonestly boosting his Gamerscore in April of 2010, tens of people were floored. The sad part wasn’t that Ryckert “cheated” so to speak, but that people actually cared at all. Were his actions something that could be considered “cheating”? Not really. He didn’t diminish the designed gameplay nor did he disrupt the experience of others within their copy of the game; the only thing Ryckert did was get false recognition and registration of achievements, thus when he finally got around to completing the achievement requirements he merely robbed himself of the childish giddiness of seeing an achievement unlock. Game achievements only unlock once through the innumerable times a player plays the game. It could be argued however, that he stole: stole a set of innocuous numbers. Those numbers still have no intrinsic, tangible value to other gamers playing the same game on different consoles or systems, or who have not played the game at all. In this sense – trophies and achievements fuel the fires of what? Absolutely nothing at all.

Still, we love to collect things like we love a list of things other people hate, be they packaged trinkets or points on a digital novelty card.

Perhaps it stems from the realization that many of the gaming victories are intangible but that we really want to have something to “show” for the “effort” – even if what can be shown is an imbalance; some people actively seek higher scores and accumulate trophies but until everyone places the same value on their accumulation, they’ll never really have cultural or industrial value. What does anyone gain by a high Gamerscore – and then, who knows how anyone acquired any of their rewards to respect it as anything worthwhile?  Personally, until the day comes my Gamerscore and Trophy Cards affect my credit score, make me more attractive to the opposite sex, look good on a professional white-collar resume, or reduces my insurance premiums I’ll not change my mind.

Passionate but Hyper-Competitive

Long ago, the hyper-competitive aspect could be seen in elementary school playgrounds with a line drawn in the sand which separated Nintendo fans from Sega fans. Over time new rivalries cropped up and old rivalries broadened; today it’s more of an Xbox 360 vs PS3, Nintendo DS vs iPhone deal. Almost any game-centric forum or website will have a cult of elitist automatons that, whether they know it or not, contribute heavily to the hyper-competitive obsessions found within.

It doesn’t just end with console wars franchise mascots. Walk up to any gamer and state anything negative about one of the following: Halo, Modern Warfare, Zelda, or God of War and one of two general responses will be given: a smile and a nod or an assault with a freestanding object. It’s passion for the game, either for or against it. We love games passionately and we hate games passionately, but irrespective from which side of the spectrum that passion originates, it’s all centered on caring about it deeply enough to let it have an effect on our emotions and physical behaviors. Call it obsessive, but not many people are part of something so stirring outside of sports – they’ve got their overzealous fans, and in some ways they outdo gamers (look at some international soccer fans…)

Everything is a game, and every game some kind of competition. That’s the loose perception of it anyway, but most video games today contain more active story elements and arcs than truly allows for a strict sense of competition, that is unless one takes into account the multi-player aspects in which there are a clear and present competitive set of goals. What were the last games which presented the words “you win” as the preface to the credits and not also a fighting game? The likelihood that someone thinks of a game developed after 1995 is going to be relatively low; Did Soap MacTavish ‘win’ in ModernWarfare 2, did Jack Marston ‘win’ at the end of Red Dead Redemption avenging his father’s death, did Master Chief ‘win’ in any Halo, and did Commander Shepard ‘win’ at the end of Mass Effect? No, and not because they’re unfinished franchises nor because they completed the assigned objective, but because they’re not competing with anything other than programmed circumstance; pass/fail goals are equally devoid of a ‘lose’ scenario in the plot. Games today are closed either by completing a set of story driven or task driven goals. “Winning” the game has hence become synonymous with ‘completion’ or ‘finishing’ but bears little to no resemblance with the semantic term itself.

For a clearer example of the cultures unhealthy obsession with “winning” ask whether or not one would consider the nightly news as a story-like series of unfolding events that the audience watches. In a sense, it is.  Then ask, if despite the various news programs penchant for telling the same story, there’s anything competitive about it – facts are facts no matter who tells them or how they’re told. Does MSNBC dominate CNN for the ‘win’? Now, contemplate the string of bloggers and alleged journalists who profess that Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo ‘won’ E3 (and sensationalism is the mark of a poor journalist). You should come to the conclusion that console manufacturers can’t win a conference in exactly the same way that CNN can’t win the news, yet gamers will sit and repeatedly believe that there’s always something to be won or they at least really enjoy the idea of it. Some things are simply finished and never won.  Likewise, does one ‘win’ dinner by eating all the food on their plate? And, when the argument gets made between the semantics and using the term as an idiom what does this argument really say about our ability to effectively communicate with one another let alone the same outside society we work to be accepted within?

We cannot claim that perception is context, creating our own vernacular and idioms and then be upset that people don’t understand ‘us’ or claim they are the ones ‘out of touch’, can we? At what point do we acknowledge the unhealthy obsession with ‘winning’ and being hyper-competitive for its own sake? As a parent, it’s a sibling rivalry and like all sibling rivalries, there’s no point whatsoever. As a gamer, it’s just stupid.

Closing

Maybe I am jaded and this is a lot of hyperbole.  I understand that cultures evolve and for the most part those within the culture will read some of this essay and remark to themselves “fuck him, we don’t need him anyway”, which is fine and in truth you don’t need me but the inverse is also true. It could be that I’m way off base and out of touch and unwilling to change as the culture does but that’s my choice. On the other hand, what if I’m not out of touch?

The culture has just become so big and expansive that we’re like this gelatinous blob jiggling about, always kind of looking at though we’ll either implode or explode and neither will truly happen. It’s great that the culture has thrived and become something the world admires to varying degrees, but sometimes things go too far too fast and we get so caught up in the material side of it all that we lose sight of the core elements the unity, the passion, the creativity, and the sibling-hood that the negative side-effects that can be avoided with just a little bit of thought and effort, aren’t. The culture will evolve and change over time as all cultures do, but it rests upon us, the past and current members to hand the things done right to the people who will be here tomorrow and to remind them that “don’t bite the hand that feeds you” doesn’t apply when that hand feeds you a choice between horseshit and bullshit – even if that biting the hand results in no hand at all for a time.

For now, I simply must watch and wait as things continue to evolve, questioning my faith.

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The Love And Hate Of The Gaming Culture by Shawn Gordon, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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