Video Games as Middle Class to Middle Class Art
A once in a millennia opportunity...
In the game of class warfare, it’s rare to see the elite get nerfed. But that’s what happened for a brief window around the turn of the millennia. Let’s dive into the how, why, and consequences of this exceptional period that we’re living in the aftermath of.
Enjoy!
Video Games: Middle Class to Middle Class Art
The Historical Gamer: From Wooden to Circuit Board
Ask a group of thirty-year old men about The Great Gatsby, and you'll receive a few positive comments; in an exceptionally well-read crowd you'll perhaps hear a few half remembered quotes recited. But mention Halo Combat Evolved, or heaven help you, ask for advice on a Fallout character build, and you'll instantly find yourself on the receiving end of several competing impromptu hour-long lectures.
While it would be easy to lazily ascribe this shift in interest from “high” to “low” art as some sort of cultural decline, I believe it is actually a change in style and complexity of a preexisting medium due to rising technology and literacy rates, and reflects a fairly constant phenomenon. While the literary elite, traditionally drawn from the aristocratic classes of any society, are always seeking challenging poetic and interpretive craft, the broader base of men that make a society work, her skilled laborers, administrators, and officers, have always been widely entertained by more action packed “heroic epics” and game playing (both in the from of sports and tabletop games).
Senet, Ludus Latrunculorum, Chess, and later the proliferation of playing card rulesets are just a few examples of this legacy of passionate game playing. They stand in stark contrast to the cruder games of chance, such as dice and knuckles, which were often derided by the educated classes and expressly forbidden (often by religious law), which nevertheless persisted among the laborer classes and fringes of society — being strongly associated with the overindulgence of alcohol, hashish, and accompanied by prostitution and brawling.
In contrast, the games I am discussing are those of sobriety (even when a beer or scotch is being tastefully supped), thoughtfulness, and competitive male interest. A place to prove the value of your ideas and mastery of abstract theory. Just like the arrival of Chess in the west, video games provided a bounty of unanswered questions to reward male investment in technical mastery, a theoretical horizon to explore — be it questions about frame rates and hardware, or the specific mechanics of a game that is yet to be thoroughly documented by the collective of mankind.
And as video games expanded from the existing framework of tabletop games with ever increasing complexity, something entirely new and distinct was emerging: technology, techne of play, and a burgeoning cultural form all at once. For all of these reasons, I would go so far as to say that video games were the most important art form between 1985 and 2010 because it was inherently a middle class to middle class art form.
1985-2010: The Gamer Golden Age
By the time the 1990s dawned, a fundamental shift had taken place in the world of video games. A hobby that had previously been bifurcated between an older and preexisting community of technology enthusiasts playing on home computer, and a more socially oriented youth arcade market, was now merging with the expansion (and increasingly interesting game catalogue) of the first Nintendo console in 1985, more standardized computer hardware and software, and frequent cross platform games such as the Gold Box roleplaying games.
Technological neophyte and programmer, preteen son and his father bespectacled with oversized 80’s frames, and everyone in between could now access the same game library in the comfort of their own homes. Gaming’s technical barriers to entry would remain for some time, but their damming effect had fallen below the waterline of what the majority of intellectually curious western men were willing and capable of putting in to experience the hobby. The result was a sea of new players flooding in, enough to form a true mass market.
Gaming was still expensive however, with many console games costing around $50 in 1990, which would be worth approximately $120 in today’s dollars. All of these factors contributed to a self-sorting among the user base: the high but not prohibitive cost of equipment implicitly suggests stable and prosperous family dynamics, the complexity of the product demands a category of player willing to troubleshoot glitches or installation issues, and be interested in exploring novel mechanics.
This meant that gaming as a social phenomenon was a western phenomenon, locked in developed nations by its cost and locked out of the Soviet controlled “2nd world” by the Iron Curtain.
And in the west, this walled garden of early gamer culture was a wellspring of creativity, artistically, technologically, and in game theory. On the developer side, this confluence of technological capability and growing market interest led to the birth of countless new genres of game which are with us today, a bevy of household acronymic names such as CRPG, 4X, and FPS.
These deeply complex games spoke to the generation of aspiring green eyed satraps, the sons of the western world’s middle class, who were unified by their curiosity and ability to engage in this new and non-prestigious activity. In fact, the low social status of gaming reached a sweet spot in this period as a tolerated hobby that was not raised to the level of spectator sport, along with all the over commercialization that would bring. Gaming was a private or social club sort of activity, reserved for quiet Saturday mornings and LAN parties with your male friends.
Over the course of these 25 years, players grew to become developers in a rapidly growing industry, and they brought with them player ideals such as an emphasis on novel rule systems, setting verisimilitude, and dynamic narratives that led to what many consider the industries creative heights in the early 2000s. It was a very rare occurrence, perhaps the only in human history, of rule from the middle-class in an artistic medium, but that is just what occurred as the children of the elite largely did not aspire towards such a niche and low status toymaking career, leaving room for men of the craftsman lineage and disposition to make games capable of achieving global distribution and popularity via cartridge, disc, and eventually digital distribution. The market of course still had to be satisfied of course, but it was nothing near as stifling as seeking patronage from House Medici or some fickle roman emperor. It was an industry with a clear succession of players to creators, and that new generation drawn from the tutelage of the old masters.
Post 2010: A Tribe in Exodus of its Kingdom
The increasing ubiquity of cheap technology and internet access completely revolutionized the world of gaming by 2010. Digitally networked games had become the norm over couch co-op, with online play including massively multiplayer online games already having experienced their first gold rush with the World of Warcraft (released in 2004). The industry’s annual revenue had begun exceeding $30 billion, making gaming a major industry on par and soon to be greater than the film industry.
Phone gaming’s importance cannot be overstated in this growth, as every westerner, and many non-westerners now held a small computer in their pocket all hours of the day. Today about half of all gaming industry revenue comes from mobile games.
As a real industry, the social taboo on gaming was gone, making a sphere that was unimaginably alien to women and girls of earlier generations suddenly one they could safely engage in without feeling at risk of ostracization. And for the more mercenary of the fairer sex, before them lay a male saturated space in which they could extract resources through the most basic of familiarity with the actual material.
Add an increasingly global player base due to the aforementioned ubiquitous technology, and it’s easy to see the recipe for an eternal September (a never-ending influx of new, inexperienced users, which deteriorate the online community's culture) laid out, just as the broader internet had experienced a few years prior.
If the confluence of unbridled global commerce and female interest dimmed the lights on the clubhouse atmosphere a bit, the “Great Awokening” hit with the subtlety of a fire alarm — the party was over. Amid this rising litany of anti-white and anti-male agendas, it quickly became clear there were at least two broad camps of “gamer” now: an imported professional managerial class of video games journalists, marketers, and executives overseeing the new “global gamer” culture, against the blooded gamers who had grown up in the wilderness of unreasonably deep challenge curves and relatively free creative reign for creatives.
The most direct result of this conflict was Gamergate, a backlash originally sparked by a fairly obvious case of inappropriate relations between a reviewer and a female game developer, but which quickly grew in the face of obvious (and soon leaked) instances of the games journalists and outlets conspiring to control industry narratives. Gamergate reached its peak in 2014 but never really had a definitive victory for either side: the industry powerbrokers remained in power (with reduced clout) and the Gamergaters were chased into the hinterlands but largely thrived as social media presence became far more relevant than institutional backing.
Terms like "gamer American" originate from this period, often used ironically but by their universal understanding they obviously signify a deeper meaning. We all intuit there is an archetypal gamer, not an entirely flattering image either, but one we relate to all the same of a person of a certain time and place, or if young, enamored with the values of that fallen Camelot. It has racial implications but is not racially purist. There are beliefs this person has about fairness, challenge, and the form of storytelling. But most interestingly, it is not limited to the time of the game’s creation as every year there are countless more men recruited into this culture through interacting with its adherents and literally playing through the associated gaming catalogue.
It is, in the truest sense, a tribal affiliation.
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We’ve also released a novella ‘Improvidence’, a Lewis & Clark style adventure across the post-collapse ruins of America following a new spiritual awakening: https://a.co/d/3AGjHU2
Read more from the archive on this topic:
Thank you so much for checking out Improvidence! And on price inflation, apparently Microsoft is backpedaling on the recent price increases too
The PC gaming heyday of the 90's was incredible. The computers were complex enough to create vast worlds, but not so advanced that it required hundreds of devs. Even deeply flawed games had a raw and unique vibe to them that is increasingly hard to do in our more sanitized age.