This will be my first proper post delving into the world of video gaming and the community around it. I intend this as a sort of jumping-off point, a little bit of background info, links to back it up, a bit of opinion. I will be covering most of the subjects I touch on in much more detail in coming posts, as well as linking recent goings-on to larger trends on and offline.

Now you may be wondering why anyone would tackle an issue in the gaming media. Gaming is just a subculture, and a specky one at that. It’s all just a bunch of nerds sitting in the blue glow of an LCD screen, getting lost in unreality. The thing is, if we look at straight facts and figures, the gaming industry is huge, both in terms of revenue and consumer base. In 2008, the video games industry OVERTOOK Hollywood in both of these, and has only continued it’s upward trajectory since. Gaming has become a global hobby, game developing has become easier to get into, at least on a technical level and developers and gamers alike have overcome their fair share of controversies over the years. I will go into all of this but first I will start of by briefly going into the more cultural side of things.

There’s increasing talk about ‘games as art’, a fascinating intellectual discourse that doesn’t just delve into whether Shigeru Miyamoto can be held on par with the greats of traditional arts, but because of the peculiar interactive nature of games, what the concept of art actually entails. To add my own two cents to that discussion though, I must remind the reader of Marcel Duchamp’s famous quip: ‘’Art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.” While monsieur Duchamp was justifying his more shock-value pieces, I am just as interested in the ‘indifferent’ part of this quote. A game can shock you, sicken you, offer an escape from dreary reality, give you an epiphany, or do nothing at all. It still shouldn’t be dismissed outright. A lot of the discussion at the moment, mostly from self-proclaimed ‘cultural critics’ like Anita Sarkeesian, seems to be centred on the supposed ‘worthiness’ of ‘art games’. They are quick to dismiss games that don’t fit into their ideological or aesthetic views as nothing more than crass entertainment. This reeks of the anti-degeneracy campaigns of both the extreme left and right, examples being China’s Cultural Revolution and the National Socialist’s dismissal and banning of ‘Jewish art’ in Germany. One was an attempt to erase the old, ‘reactionary’ culture of China and the other an attack on ‘harmful modernity’, but they both led to the same thing: bland, boring, ideologically-‘inspired’ dreck with little to no lasting value. Even then, we must call it art.

Of course, video games are a very young form of entertainment or art or whatever you wish to call it. Moving pictures have existed for well over a century, photography another half-century more. Dyed pigment on some sort of medium has been around for millennia, and attaching deeper meaning to any crafted object probably for as long as our ancestors were able to make something with their own hands. Storytelling, and by extension theatre, similarly so.

There have definitely been growing pains, especially since the medium started off as pure ‘time-wasting’ entertainment. The earliest video games were essentially electronic versions of tabletop games and sports. However, as soon as video games started to get stories and deeper game worlds, they became what should be considered art. To go back to old Marcel, it may have been good, bad or indifferent, but it was art. This began in the late 70s, but really boomed in the mid-80s with advent of affordable, easy to use home computers like the venerable Commodore 64, and the legions of bedroom programmers it spawned. As developers realised what they could do with their exponentially improving technology, and a growing and maturing consumer base, they moved to more mature-themed games. Sierra On-Line gained fame and notoriety with series like Leisure Suit Larry and Phantasmagoria. The first first-person shooters (FPS) hit the market in the form of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. Fighting games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat became massively popular as well, a gaming phenomenon I look back on as as distinctly 90s as neon-coloured clothes and the Vengaboys. Like all new media, video games faced a moral backlash, coinciding with the panics over heavy metal and tabletop role-playing games, namely Dungeons and Dragons, in the 80s and 90s. In the United States, the people behind this witch-hunt were the usual suspects of Tipper Gore, Hillary Clinton and ilk, but one man has been left in the collective consciousness of gamers everywhere. That man is one Jack Thompson, a now former Florida attorney. He started a legal and media campaign against games like Grand Theft Auto, which was fought by the gaming community. The reasoning all these moral guardians used was that video games caused violent behaviour in their players, especially children. This attitude is as old as time itself, a new media being seen first as something for the children, and then as it spreads to other ages and matures accordingly, it supposedly becomes a danger to the children, since the hobby/music style/film genre/whatever is still seen as ‘kiddy stuff’. Thankfully for reasonable discourse, the gaming community struck back with a united front, supported since by psychological studies proving no link between violent media and violent behaviour. This is why you don’t challenge nerds to a debate, because they love those facts and figures.

Throughout the 2000s, the mainstream media and politicians calmed their rhetoric, with the exception of the occasional shock piece on neglectful parents who played World of Warcraft or tenuous connections between mass-shooters and FPSs. With the growing ubiquity of video games in the 2000s, these stories can be easily dismissed as uninformed fear-mongering, since the reports could have just as easily connected any of these horrible acts with watching television or drinking carbonated drinks. This can all be summed up by saying a lot of people play video games, a few people are mentally unstable and once in a blue moon, those two overlap. If video games did cause violence, we should have seen an exponential, global rise in violent crimes. Instead, violent crime rates have plummeted. Therefore, if I were to engage in the same thought process as the news media, I could say that video games actually lower violent behaviour in their players. I won’t do this, however, since I have yet to see a study that proves it (see how it’s done?).

Another trend tied to video games and their perception by the public started in the late 90s and continues to this day, and can be said to be chiefly behind the current controversy. That is the emergence of the so-called ‘New Media’: online news outlets, discussion forums, bloggers (hey hey), vloggers, let’s players, image boards, social media of all kinds, the list could go on. With video games already being technology-oriented by their very nature, the gaming community was very quick to move online. Most of the early online publications were just Internet extensions of already existing print magazines, like PC Gamer. However, since anyone can publish anything online (just look at me), and since video games were still considered a bit underground and ‘sub-cultury’, a lot of the first fully online gaming news sites were staffed for a large part, if not fully, by elevated fans and bloggers. This is not to say that actual trained journalists didn’t work for or operate these sites, just that they had a contingent of gifted and sometimes not-so-gifted amateurs contributing to them, unlike the well-established mainstream news and even entertainment publications.

This is where things get complex. These gaming news sites have grown along with gaming, gaining more readers and increased clout in the industry. However, since they are glorified fanzines, and I suspect because of an attitude still inside the hobby itself that it is ‘nichey’ and underground, despite not being so for the past 20 years, these news sites have not bothered with ethics policies. In some cases it is even unclear if the writers and editors are even aware that such a thing is needed. Just as with other news and analysis websites, a few have asked for a subscription fee, to ensure that they cannot be influenced by who advertises on their sites. However, the sites with the largest readerships, like Kotaku, Polygon et al., relied on advertisements on their sites. Since they are gaming sites, games publishers would advertise on them. This has lead to situations where a site reviews a game that was being advertised on it, the ad revenue of which it needs to continue functioning. You might already guess some of the consequences. Now, add to this the rapidly expanding independent game development scene, individuals and small teams working on smaller projects with a wider range of subjects than the so-called AAA studios (equivalent to the large established Hollywood studios). Since they too have come out of the fan-base, they have connections to the games bloggers and journalists, not just in business, but in their personal lives as well. Combined with next to zero transparency in reporting on the games sites, conflicts of interest have been rife. To further mix things up, I return to the subject of my very first blog post, what I call the Young Left. For some reason, both games journalists and a large section of indie developers have completely adopted the tenets of identity politics and the new outrage culture that is taking over left-wing politics, and has entirely for younger supporters. This has led to writers slipping in their political views into reviews and analysis of games and the larger gaming community. This would not be a bad thing, since everyone is entitled to their own view, if it weren’t for a few glaring problems. The most obvious one is that they are supposed to be reviews. You wouldn’t expect a film or book reviewer to complain about the politics of a piece, but, depending on the medium, the plot, the prose, the cinematography, the editing, and on and on. Not the politics. Especially since video games as still for a large part awarded with a number score during review. This in turn leads to problems as studios often determine things like employee bonuses on what aggregated score a game gets on a site like Metacritic. This means that if a reviewer gives a game a lower rating because of something that offends them in it, it can directly affect the pay of the developers. In addition the undisclosed cozy relations publications have with indie developers sometimes lead to situations where a game will be promoted not because it is any good, but because a friend has made it, or it adheres to their ideological beliefs, or both. This works the other way as well, since the indie market is smaller than mainstream games, developers are competing with each other in a more direct way than the larger studios. If a journalist attacks an indie game for whatever reason, their friends in the indie scene could be expected to benefit from decreased sales for their competition.

This is the state of gaming and the community around it in the present day. This semi-hidden world of intrigue, corruption, online activism and of course the games themselves is just too interesting to be left to the wayside. I have heard complaints that this is a minor or even a non-issue. ‘It’s been going on for years, nothing’s happened before, what’s the big deal?’ or ‘There are bigger issues in the world’. This is a terrible attitude. When something is wrong, you don’t let be and possibly fester and get worse, because it’s not important right then or, even worse, because it has always been that way. With such a large industry, and attitudes and operating methods of the both the gaming and mainstream media, the repercussions outside of the current goings-on could be significant, not just to gamers, but to the public at large. After all, it’s probably only a matter of time until the public at large is gamers.

For further reading, enjoy this interactive timeline of gaming journalism’s cock-ups over the years. Notice that there is a distinct increase in activity as the blogger-staffed sites become the norm around the late 2000s. If your interest has been piqued, remember to do your own research and come to your own conclusions as well. This is still very much on on-going situation, and an extremely divided one at that. Know thy enemy, thy friend, and any random bystander for good measure.