The evolution of “gamers”

 
This was originally written as a lengthy post for Reddit. The question was, “how were developers having ‘gamers’ as an audience?”

I think I can speak to this as both a developer and as an executive in the video games industry. I apologize in advance for the giant book I am about to write.

“Gamers” are, in large part, a marketing construct, for sure. That is not a knock against people who identify that way — all sorts of aspects of identity these days are driven in part by marketing.

The first thing to realize is that it’s moved over the years. When looking at a marketing persona, the best way to judge it is by looking at the marketing materials targeted at that audience.

Google Images isn’t perfect in its filtering, but watch the progression of ads:

1970s ads:

1980s:

1990s:

2000s:

Among the gradual shifts that I think most gamers with a few decades of history would recognize in the gamer market:

  • Early games had a streak of the cerebral to them. The heyday of the strategy game, for example, was in the 80s (RTSes were and still are in some circles, seen as a pale, simplistic, reductionist “filthy casual” version). The RPG fell from prominence in the 80s, was revived in the 90s by Diablo (seen by most RPG purists at the time as also “filthy casual”) and to some degree MMOs was its salvation. Might and Magic and the early Elder Scrolls games were about it, and they were not mainstream hits. Instead, sports games were beginning to define the power structure in the games industry.

  • Sex was always used to sell (uh, that Gex 3 ad… wtf?), but the target demographics clearly shift over the course of the decades. Early consoles were “whole family” sorts of activities, and the ads reflect that. Early arcades were pitched as places you went on dates.

  • I’d personally pinpoint the moment when it started tipping into the current image as during the 90s. Now, this is also when I became professionally active. But stuff like the infamous Ion Storm “make you his bitch” ad (and I must point out that John Romero is a friend of mine), and the rise of FPS culture, was a huge huge factor. The shift from PC gamers all playing Hack and Red Baron and GATO to Wolfenstein was massive. And with those came a sort of “bro-ish” element. The treatment of sexuality between Leisure Suit Larry and Duke Nukem clearly underwent a shift, and it’s not clear it was for the better (apologies to the Duke guys, also friends of mine). You can almost call this the gap between Gamer Mark I and Gamer Mark II.

  • The 1990s is also when we as an industry twigged to the idea that we could intentionally cultivate the gamer identity, and the geek identity. With Ultima Online we were one of the first to do a “collector’s edition” box, for example. The practice of creating art books and statuettes and the like, to more heavily monetize the core consumer, began to take hold — think of it as early microtransactions, where we found ways to charge the whales more money. E3 and other events shifted really noticeably from the shy, geeky, shared enthusiasm sort of vibe to the loud, garish, booth babe and guns vibe. In the arcades, the vibe moved towards fighting games, and the birth of the FGC, which had a much more confrontational, trash-talking vibe in general than other earlier games communities, just because of the nature of the game (it also was much more inclusive and diverse, because at this point, aracde machines were in urban areas, poorer areas, and arcades were somewhere safe for teens to go). What happened in UO can in some ways be seen as Gamers Mark II beating down Gamers Mark I.

  • By the 2000s, you could lay most of the top games of the year down on the floor and look at the covers, and they’d almost all be a big burly dude with a gun. I actually got in the habit of doing this every year, as I judged for the various awards panels. (Can’t do it anymore, most of the games are Steam codes and have no covers). FPSes had basically swallowed PC games up entirely, to the point where a Rollercoaster Tycoon, a Sims — really, anything else — was an outlier. PCs started to become a backwater, with sales dwindling year on year. Those who remained were MMO players and early e-sports — everything else died off. MMOs accounted for a vast share of PC gaming revenues by mid 2005.

    • In consoles, we had more variety. But there too, we saw FPSes begin to conquer all, with Halo. Halo was also “a filthy casual” game to core gamers at the time. The idea of an FPS with built in aim assist to compensate for a crappy controller was anathema. The dominant strain of RPGs became the JRPG, which is a heavily cinematic form with very few of the classic “rpg” traits from its antecedents. The new “core” was redefined around these console players, who were of the bigger, brasher, bombastic school. In 2004 I drew a cartoon of the gamer that looked like this:

    • With this came the growing awareness that IP trumped all, including gameplay. The first awareness of this came via sports licensing, really, but soon it became clear that building protectible IP was a much more defensible way to hold market share than making original games. You can’t protect gameplay legally, after all.

    • As another example, the boom in geek culture as a media culture also affected other fields. Print SF/F fell through the floor, and it wasn’t just because of ebooks. The slower paced, perhaps more thoughtful vein of SF gave way to media SF. In the mid-2000s I was able to walk up to the reg desk at Comic-Con on the second day, register for $10, and walk around halls and chat with comic book people. Ten years later I have to register six months in advance, and comics people are crammed into less than 10 percent of the hall. The vast majority of the floor is given over to selling plushies, statues, toys, and brand extensions.

    • The renaissance in PC games, driven heavily by the chokehold of first parties on console development, pushed mid-tier devs back to PC, and in tandem with the giant boom in puzzle and casino-style games, created what we could today call the casual games market. The notion of “casual games” did not exist until the late 90s/early 2000s, born of the rapid branding of the core gamer as interested mostly in sports games and shooters. There was active discussion of whether it was even a segment that could make money. A good way to trace market shifts is to look at what GDC ends up running as Summits. When a trend goes mainstream, the Summit goes away because the talks all move to the main conference. In the early 2000s, it was the Casual Games Summit. A few times here I have used the “filthy casuals” lingo… it’s important to realize that this is something this marketing taught players to think. Prior to this market segmentation, nobody lumped Tetris into casual games. Or Dr Mario. Or Puzzle Fighter. Casual games was invented as a term in order to better target a market, and with that came an intentional shift in the art styles, aimed at capturing mainstream people stuck at their desks in boring jobs who just wanted to pop some Qubeez in the five minutes between phone calls.

    • Eventually the accessibility of dev tools (Flash; a variety of BASIC descendants ranging from VB to DarkBasic, BlitzBasic, and so on; eventually Unity) enabled an independent movement. This actually started in the “casual” segment on portals like Miniclip. It eventually enabled what today we call “indie games,” and its roots in games that were not aimed solely at the circumscribed “core gamer” market segment is likely what enabled it to tackle the breadth of subjects and diversity of gameplay. This segment ended up migrating back to PC once the web portal market ceased to be a viable revenue source. A lot of older gamers embraced it, because they see the echoes of Gamer Mark I in it.

    • However, as the Internet rose, big pubs, the ones who curate and enforce the core gamer identity on console, were also forced to migrate back to PC. The online revolution necessitated it, for one. Digital distribution, anti-piracy measures, the lure of subscriptions and later microtransactions — all of this pushed in that direction. And of course, the fact that online multiplayer sucked on consoles. So much of the most core of the console players moved back to PC, but this time they were Mark II. PC gaming, which had been a peaceful backwater with “higher brow” content so to speak, was invaded by its children. Worse, though, as this happened in PCs and as consoles turned into PCs (which they have almost completely by now), these publishers ignored all the lessons of the Mark I gamer community, and abdicated all community management and moderation, and today we have voice chat on XBLive.

    So… today, we have this market concept of “core or hobbyist gamer.” It’s quite a mix of subcultures: predominantly male, tilts towards console shooters, sports games, certain types of JPRGs (way more women involved in this one), fighting games (way more ethnicities involved in this one), and PC shooters-and-children-of-shooters. It’s bombastic, loud, verbally confrontational, uses lots of trash talk, is drenched in Achiever and Killer play, and frankly trends younger. Outside of fighting games, it’s mostly strongly narrative, except in multiplayer. It is a hobbyist culture, marked by marketing trappings around other geek subcultures. It’s passionate, loves its media, etc. In some ways, “John Romero will make you his bitch” is, in the end, exactly summing up that culture’s image. When it goes towards cute or casual, such as in the case of Nintendo games, it is massively driven by nostalgia and powerful brandbuilding. It still wants greater complexity and depth — these are gamers, after all! — but only so much, because frankly, they are a broader segment than the grognards of old and have been trained towards blockbuster, easy to consume experiences, mostly. They are very much a captive market segment, that has been intentionally created via marketing messages as a sort of “cool geek,” mostly so that we can sell them a lot of stuff.

    “Casual gamer” has become identified with Socializer play, short play sessions, and a more mass market bent. Often these people do not self-identify as gamers, or as gamers who “grew out of the hobby.” But often they grew out of it during one of these shifts. Indie games are where casual gamers, Mark I Gamers, and ex-Mark II gamers who are looking for something new end up converging.

    Mark I gamers are still around. They’re older. They drop out of games. They move to tabletop. They back Kickstarters for remakes of games from the 80s and 90s. They avoid voice chat like the plague. They form guilds and whatnot and move towards games with less crudity in the community.

    All of this is easily visible when you take something like the stats from EEDAR and break them down in detail. That said, we are all gamers. Shit, dolphins play games. Cats play games.

    I don’t mean to sound down on this core gamer segment. There are parts of it that are gross, IMHO, as when Gathering of Developers thought it would be a hoot to project porn eight stories tall on the side of a building during E3. But when I think of that incident, I definitely think of the modern notion of a core gamer, and the defenses of the content in various GTAs, for example. But there are also wonderful amazing communities built, amazing charity drives and gatherings and all sorts of awesome stuff. My personal take is that we should be criticizing behaviors, not the segment per se.

What I see is scale and fragmentation.

Here’s some plain old realities on how communities work:

  • Groups always fragment into subcultures as they grow. There’s a threshold size.

  • Smaller groups enforce behavior via peer pressure.

  • Medium groups enforce behavior with dictatorial kings, because peer pressure stops working when you don’t “sort of know” everyone.

  • Large groups have to invent proxies for these. Taboos, governments, etc. Something that serves as the unifying force.

  • Groups that form taboos and other cultural traits can form them based on different principles. From a distance, they’re mostly a wash — humans are very good at fitting morality to group identity rather than the other way around. (Think of even the schisms among progressive groups for examples of how by-and-large similar taboos and virtues can end up with camps at each other’s throats).

  • When you get a mixed group together, they tend to segregate, sometimes by force and sometimes by inclination. Sometimes we call this “ghettoes” and sometimes “safe spaces” and sometimes “segregation” and sometimes “ethnic neighborhoods.”

  • Physical circumstances make this hard in the real world. The Internet arguably makes it too easy.

  • Another way to put it is that it’s better to have cell membranes than not.

  • When you get a mixed group together and limited resources, the big one tends to exterminate the small one whilst in competition. Othering and labeling become rampant.

  • The only known way to prevent this is for both groups to consider themselves one group, of some higher order. Seeing disparate subgroups not as Other, but more as positions on a team, with valuable roles to fill.

  • This usually means someone has to take control and set firm rules and enforce them. These rules may or may not be enlightened. Cultures have been successful in all sorts of ways.

  • It also usually means things we variously term “assimilation” “miscegenation” “cultural appropriation” “loss of cultural heritage” etc. This can happen with greater or lesser degrees of respect, tolerance, violence, and exploitation.

  • If the groups lose sight of common higher order group membership, it’s important to know that mixed groups of varying opinions do not end up moderate if they start to argue. They end up more extreme than they would have otherwise. There’s a (depressing) dynamic whereby moderates of group A will move towards the extremes of group A in order to differentiate themselves from the moderates of Group B, and vice versa. Sitting in the middle just ends up with ostracization from both sides, so people tend not to do it.

  • If it’s not possible to make them see themselves as one big group, there’s this discipline called “diplomacy” that creates an interaction framework to minimize direct and overt harm. This discipline is mostly only learned by people who have to move across cultures a lot, and learn that every culture is a cult, in a sense.

  • There is some large-scale, cruel, inhuman, POV on this which doesn’t care about individuals, but sees this as just how cultures evolve. The wars between Tumblr and chans are just passing thoughts in the overall cultural brain, so to speak, and much like we don’t care about the portions of our own biome that we slice off when we pare our nails or chemically exterminate when we wash our hair, the larger groups, once large enough, can’t see the consequences on the level of individuals any more than we mourn the loss of gut bacteria when we take an antibiotic.

So…

Yeah, of course people are splitting up into little cultures. Games got big. Conflict was inevitable. The cultural values impressed upon the child cultures are strongly dependent on what the people who had control at a larger scale did. Early Internet libertarianism went hand in hand with goofy hippieish stuff too, just look at the avatars of said culture the forms of people like John Perry Barlow. Now we have the libertarians and the hippies fighting, two children from one culture that have grown apart.

Abandoning the word “gamer” is surrendering the common ground. It is another step down the road of Othering, like calling people neckbeards and basement dwellers. It is a tribal behavior not distinct from any other games played with language in order to make their cell membrane stronger. It is, after all, very hard to say “this is us and what we stand for” and not say “and that’s them and they are the Inferior Unwashed.”

So… plenty of people mourn for the loss of civility. But what they are really mourning is the sense of mutual belonging. That there was a commons, and everyone there had more or less the same ideals and more or less the same interests.

When you ask if it is all a bro-space, try to think of it as more like a language. Cuba and Argentina and Spain and the Philippines may all speak Spanish, but are culturally quite distinct. “Bro-space” in the fighting game community and “bro-space” in FPSes are likewise quite different, but since you aren’t comfortable with the basic tenets, you see them as more similar than different. I assure you that between themselves, they see each other as more different than similar.

Unless some flag gets planted that we can all salute, the trends will likely continue down to the Balkanization at the “small tribe” level once again. I see lots of gaming guilds at around that size, effectively isolate from the larger currents of what “games culture” is or could be. Nowadays, traveling across gaming requires visas and border checks, it feels like. The next step is the atomization of “games” into genres with their own unique names as they decide to simply secede.

Hmm… sorry, that was a giant philosophical reply that probably was not what you wanted to hear.

[edit: also, the idea that your gaming community may be held together more by friendship than by the original animating impulse of the game is incredibly common. The game is the excuse, perhaps the ritual by which you gather, but the point is the social ties. Migrating away from playing the games themselves is typical.]

The common flag was in fact that both sides love games. Both sides feel like marginalized outsiders in the larger culture. Both found refuge in games, and in their ability to bring people together. By and large both sides were socially progressive, compared to the broader society, too, though with different slants to them (this is one of the areas where labelling made matters worse).

At this point, some good fences to make good neighbors is probably in order. Let inflammation subside. The moment when there could have been diplomatic settlements is long long past, and the common ground fell prey to scorched earth tactics quite some time ago. It didn’t help that there were definitely third parties in the mix making matters worse on purpose.

There are some subs trying to make dialogue happen. It’s… in fits and starts at best. I don’t think they can affect the broader course of things.