Video Game Culture

Abstract

Video game culture has become more varied, more diverse, and a greater source of revenue since the golden age of arcade games in the 1980s, thanks to the greater sophistication of the underlying technologies and the maturation of game development. Modern video game culture encompasses a broad spectrum from casual gamers, who constitute the majority of the gaming public, to professional e-sports players who compete in live-streamed video game competitions. The gaming community has inspired diverse related media including music and literature, but the change in gamer demographics has also led to a regressive social movement that has highlighted issues of race, gender, and class within the community.

Overview

Video games originated as early as the 1950s with simple games developed by computer scientists for their own amusement and that of their coworkers. Spacewar!, the first widely available computer game, was a simple spaceship combat game developed in 1962, and spread throughout the professional and hobbyist computer programming community. The first generation of video games—a classification used by historians and video game professionals to designate different periods of video game history according to the technical specifications shared by most new systems introduced in that period—began in 1972 with the Magnavox Odyssey and Pong. Around this time, video game cabinets began to be featured at arcades. Arcades, originally called amusement arcades, had been around since the early twentieth century, and offered a variety of coin-operated games from skee-ball and ball toss games to pinball.

1982 was a watershed year in early video game culture: Disney's release of Steven Lisberger's Tron combined live-action and computer-animated elements in a fanciful story about anthropomorphic computer programs competing in video games, and Buckner & Garcia's one-hit wonder "Pac-Man Fever" went gold, celebrating the overwhelming popularity of the Pac-Man series of arcade and console games. Both were released in the midst of the golden age of arcade games. Though console games had been around for a decade, they were achieving mainstream popularity for the first time thanks to the release of the Atari 2600, ColecoVision, and Intellivision.

The video game crash of 1983, a three-year recession caused by market saturation, temporarily set the industry back, but the ups and downs of the industry did not change the basic fact that video games had become a permanent part of popular culture. The growth of home computers helped subsidize the cost of developing better sound and graphics capabilities, beyond what had been useful for most business applications, and the 1985 release of the Nintendo Entertainment System ushered in the third generation of console gaming, introducing some of the character-driven franchises that would remain popular more than thirty years later: Super Mario Bros, Metroid, Castlevania, and Zelda.

Just as the adoption of personal computers (PCs) helped fuel gaming in the 1980s, the increased popularity of the Internet, which had largely been restricted to academics, computer professionals, and niche hobbyists for the previous decade, drove online gaming in the 1990s. Meanwhile, consoles took advantage of optical drives to offer games with more advanced graphics, three-dimensional environments, and complex game play. Mobile phone games were introduced around the same time (beginning with Snake on the Nokia mobile phone in 1997), remaining about a decade behind console games in sophistication, though the iPhone and iPad narrowed the gap by the 2010s.

The twenty-first century has been marked by the introduction of motion control, beginning with the Nintendo Wii (part of the seventh generation of video games), and the mainstreaming of high-definition graphics, large hard drives, and Internet connectivity. Many games began featuring downloadable content, or DLC, additional gameplay features that are available only by downloading from an online store. Furthermore, the Internet connectivity of modern consoles has led to a revolution in independent, or "indie," gaming that was previously limited to computer games, as small studios and individuals are able to put their games up for sale (or for free) without incurring the overhead costs of physical media and distribution. Many of the award-winning games of the 2010s were indie games, including Gone Home, Bastion, and Journey.

By the 2010s, the video game community had changed in a number of important ways. The divide between console games and PC games had become porous. Many AAA (blockbuster) games were released for both the PC and at least one console, and when they weren't, it was often because of exclusivity agreements, rather than technical limitations. PCs had become more console-like, with advanced controllers and special gaming keyboards easily available. Consoles had become as sophisticated in processing power, memory, and graphics as personal computers. Even tablet computers like the iPad could be used to play many games formerly limited to consoles.

Furthermore, the demographic of the gamer had changed. In 1982, while most people had played a few games of Pac-Man, most people who spent significant time playing video games were young; public discourse about video games revolved almost entirely around children. In the 2010s, while game consoles had remained fairly steady in cost (the Atari 2600 retailed for $125 in 1982, or $321 in 2017 dollars, roughly the cost of a PlayStation 4), individual games could be as much as twenty times the cost of an Atari game, in constant dollars. In part because of that greater cost, the gamer demographic expanded to encompass a large portion of adults; about half of frequent gamers in the United States are between 18 and 50.

The variety of games changed as well. Online gaming became much more common, but at the other end of the investment spectrum, so did casual gaming. Encompassing both party games like Dance Dance Revolution and mobile or social media games like Candy Crush, casual gaming revolves around simple game play that doesn't penalize wavering attention or a long period between game sessions. Casual gamers skew older than other gamers, and include many people who don't self-identify as gamers, despite devoting time to video games on a daily or weekly basis. Because of in-game purchases of special bonuses or other gameplay enhancements, some casual gamers spend as much on their games as the most devoted role-player.

Further Insights

MMORPGs are Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games, that is, role-playing games played in persistent open worlds with thousands of players exploring the setting through quests and other game play. Growing out of text-only MUDs (multi-user dungeons) hosted on university mainframes beginning in the 1970s, MMORGSs were popularized by Ultima Online and EverQuest in the late 1990s. While many of the games are based in epic fantasy, like genre paragon World of Warcraft, science fiction and superhero games have also been popular, including branded games like Star Wars Galaxies.

Many MMORPGs charge a subscription fee, but more interestingly, nearly all include some form of virtual economy: the exchange of goods and services within the game using the game's virtual currency. Inevitably, the virtual economy overlaps with the real-world economy in several ways. Virtual currency may be purchased in-game with real-world money, for instance, but virtual goods may also be sold from one player to another in an exchange of real-world money that takes place outside the game. eBay banned such exchanges in 2007 because the legalities were not clear. In addition to the possibility of fraud, such exchanges can violate the terms of service for the MMOs in question, and some authorities have suggested they might be considered gambling.

Monetizing certain activities in the virtual world is called "gold farming," referring to the rote and often boring actions that some players perform over and over again in order to generate virtual wealth to sell to players with less free time. While this provides an opportunity for scams, in the developing world gold farming has also provided opportunities for individuals (and even companies) to benefit by doing labor at what would be a very low wage by the standards of the developed world.

Video game culture has always had a social or spectatorship element. Arcades rarely carried more than one cabinet of the same game, and idle players would often congregate around a game, either waiting their turn to play or watching a particular good player. Gamers growing up with consoles in the house as children similarly played games like Super Mario Bros, in which the "two-player mode" required players to take turns playing, rather than playing simultaneously. The twenty-first century saw the rise of the formalization and commercialization of video game spectatorship.

Services like Twitch began offering live streaming of video games in the late 2000s, and by 2014 had become the fourth-largest source of Internet traffic during peak times, leading to the parent company's acquisition by Amazon. Boasting over 100 million monthly visitors and almost 2 million broadcasters, Twitch allows the audience to watch live gameplay, with broadcasters (ranging from game companies to individuals) raising revenue through both advertising and subscriptions.

While much of Twitch's content is simply individual players or groups showing off their skills, they are also one of the broadcasters of a growing sector called e-sports. E-sports consist of organized video game competitions among professional players. Fighting, first-person shooter, and real-time strategy games are especially popular in industry commanding about half a billion dollars of annual revenue and a worldwide audience in the hundreds of millions. Video game competitions have existed since the heyday of arcades; the competition and controversy over attempts to attain the high score in Donkey Kong were the subject of the documentary film King of Kong. Live streaming made the monetization and professionalization of such competitions possible, by making the events available to a larger audience.

Advances in game sophistication and telecommunications technology fueled the growth of e-sports in the 2010s, with several championships aired on cable television in the United States. Following the expansion of collegiate outreach programs and the North American Collegiate Championship, some universities even began offering e-sports scholarships. E-sports have even had their own performance-enhancing drug scandals, centering on the use of Adderall and other stimulants.

In addition to the increase in the diversity of types of games and types of gamers, twenty-first century video game culture has become robust enough to support outgrowth into other media. Adaptations of specific video game properties into other media—for example the films Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil—have only had moderate success, but the culture itself has inspired nerdcore, a hip hop genre inspired by video games, comic books, and science fiction, and chiptune, a form of electronic music that developed side by side with 8-bit video games.

A vast array of podcasts comment on video game culture, from the wide-ranging discussions of The Indoor Kids (hosted by Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon, best known for their award-winning autobiographical film The Big Sick) to the views of vintage games on Retronauts. Gaming culture has even developed its own distinct genre of fiction, the litRPG book. Neither a game book in the sense of the Choose Your Own Adventure series nor a media tie-in book, a litRPG novel is usually a fantasy or science fiction novel that incorporates the tropes of video games, such as boss battles and leveling up. Typically at least one character is aware of "playing a game," and comments in a fourth-wall-breaking way. Many litRPG books are hosted online, often serialized, but some are commercially published.

Issues

Video game culture has antecedents in comic book and manga fandom, the sci-fi convention scene, computer hobbyists, the tabletop role-playing community, and the online Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) that had their heyday in the 1980s, before Internet access became mainstream. Most of these subcultures have historically been male-dominated; while this has largely been true of video game culture, and remains true for certain strata in the culture (notably the live-streaming audience and first-person shooters), the twenty-first century saw growth in participation by female gamers. The changes in video game demographics and aesthetics led to a culture war within the culture, best symbolized by Gamergate.

Gamergate began as an online movement attacking game developer Zoe Quinn, including the publishing of her home address and other personal information (an attack strategy known as "doxxing") and allegations that she had traded sexual favors for favorable publicity of her games. When these attacks led to articles criticizing the largely young, white, male demographic associated with the movement, and in a broader sense criticizing the ways in which "gamer" had been perceived as synonymous with "young, male, and white," the so-called Gamergaters broadened their attack to include journalists they felt were hostile to them, launching doxxing attacks and letter-writing campaigns to advertisers in the name of "ethics in game journalism." Several prominent female journalists and game developers left the field entirely, some in response to death threats.

Gamergate was just the first of several prominent incidents hinting at deep troubles in some sectors of the culture. In 2016 and 2017, a number of prominent gamer personalities faced controversy over racist, anti-Semitic, and sexist speech. The best known case was the Swedish YouTube personality Felix Kjellberg, better known as PewDiePie, who had begun vlogging about games in the early 2010s and became the most popular YouTube channel in 2013, a position he monetized (for millions of dollars a year) through ad revenue and a channel on YouTube's paid subscription service, YouTube Red. He was one of several online personalities who began making anti-Semitic jokes and racial slurs and claiming to do so ironically or parodically, while being embraced by the growing alt-right movement. Though PewDiePie lost many of his sponsors as a result, many in the community pointed out that he was only the most famous of many individuals in the culture who had long traded in casual racism.

The gender disparity in gaming is not nearly as pronounced as in the twentieth century. Between 40 and 50 percent of gamers are female, depending on the study. Notably, the average age of a female gamer is older than that of male gamers, implying that boys develop an interest in gaming earlier, which may contribute to the visibility and risibility of male voices in gaming: young male gamers become accustomed to predominantly male gaming spaces (such as stores, chat rooms, and online games), with age-peer female gamers becoming common only later in their life experience. This and the fact that women constitute the majority of casual gamers feed into the stereotype some of these young men espouse of women as less serious, less dedicated gamers—and of the gamer identity, by extension, being implicitly male-coded.

Terms & Concepts

AAA: A blockbuster game with a significant development and marketing budget, usually developed over a longer period of time by a large team, representing a greater financial risk for the studio; and, by extension, studios that produce AAA games, in contrast with indie developers.

Console Game: A video game played on a dedicated console that requires hooking up to a television or other display, in contrast with games played on PC-compatible computers (PC games), on arcade cabinets (arcade games), or on phones or tablets (mobile games). Popular consoles include the PlayStation and Xbox series, and the Nintendo Wii; consoles are often further differentiated from portable games, played on handheld consoles such as the Nintendo 3DS.

E-sports: Electronic sports, typically consisting of video game competitions, especially those between professional players.

Gamer: A player of video games, but usually used to specifically indicate someone who spends considerable time and attention on video games and might be invested in other aspects of related pop culture (for instance, nerdcore, tabletop roleplaying games, Brandon Sanderson novels).

Gamergate: An online movement of predominantly male gamers upset with various issues related to the media coverage of games, noted for the targeting and harassment of journalists and gaming industry professionals, especially women.

LitRPG: Written science fiction or fantasy about or influenced by the tropes of MMORPGs, and especially those in which characters are aware they are playing a game.

MMORPG: Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game; games played online (either on a computer or console) in a persistent open world.

Open World: An open world is a video game setting in which players can explore freely instead of moving around a static screen (Pac-Man) or navigating a setting in a linear order (Super Mario Bros). Some open worlds are procedurally generated, meaning the game creates new spaces as the player moves into them, while others are persistent, meaning they have been pre-generated.

Bibliography

Condis, M. A. (2016). Playing the game of literature: Ready Player One, the Ludic novel, and the geeky "canon" of white masculinity. Journal of Modern Literature, 39(2), 1–19.

Freed, J. (2017). Gamergate, violence and video games: Re-thinking a culture of misogyny. Media Report to Women, 45(3), 6–23.

Paaßen, B., Morgenroth, T., & Stratemeyer, M. (2017). What is a true gamer? The male gamer stereotype and the marginalization of women in video game culture. Sex Roles, 76(7/8), 421-435. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Sociology Source Ultimate http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=121841594&site=ehost-live

Quinn, Zoe. (2017). Crash override: How Gamergate (nearly) destroyed my life, and how we can win the fight against online hate. New York, NY: PublicAffairs.

Rowsell, J., Pedersen, I., & Trueman, D. (2014). Playing as a mutant in a virtual world: Understanding overlapping story worlds in popular culture video games. Literacy, 48(1), 47–53.

Ruberg, B., & Shaw, A. (Eds.). (2017). Queer game studies. St Paul, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Shaw, A. (2015). Gaming at the edge: Sexuality and gender at the margins of gamer culture. St Paul, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Sims, C. (2014). Video game culture, contentious masculinities, and reproducing racialized social class divisions in middle school. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society, 39(4), 848–857. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Sociology Source Ultimate http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=96338038&site=ehost-live

Sørensen, E. (2016). Cultures of video game concerns in a comparative view: Report of a two-day workshop. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 17(2), 39–51. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Sociology Source Ultimate http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=114704832&site=ehost-live

Tomkinson, S., & Harper, T. (2015). The position of women in video game culture: Perez and Day's Twitter incident. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 29(4), 617–634.

Suggested Reading

Cade, R., & Gates, J. (2017). Gamers and video game culture: An introduction for counselors. Family Journal, 25(1), 70–75. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=120618081&site=ehost-live

Fox, J., & Tang, W. Y. (2017). Women's experiences with general and sexual harassment in online video games: Rumination, organizational responsiveness, withdrawal, and coping strategies. New Media & Society, 19(8), 1290–1307. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=124424894&site=ehost-live

Gray, K. L., Buyukozturk, B., & Hill, Z. G. (2017). Blurring the boundaries: Using Gamergate to examine "real" and symbolic violence against women in contemporary gaming culture. Sociology Compass, 11(3), n/a. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=121502344&site=ehost-live

Lorentz, P. (2017). Playing videogames: The multidimensional media experience. New Media & Society, 19(9), 1498–1504. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=124739571&site=ehost-live