Is there more to gaming than playing?

The future of gaming is undoubtedly exciting but how did we get here? Are gamers more than just players and how are they redrawing the lines of new media and consumption?

As we venture deeper into the domestic constraints of the pandemic-led quarantine, many of us have turned to gaming for entertainment. In the US alone, video game spending was reportedly up 60% in the month of April. Indeed, today there is a gaming platform for every kind of user, with the average mobile phone having as much processing power as the previous generation of consoles (ignoring the dwindling problem of mobile battery life).

So whether you are a new to video games or a veteran player, there’s no denying the cultural ubiquity and level of access games have today. Yet, it wasn’t always like this. Games in the past were often mysterious and skill-walled activities relegated to the youth of their time. If you really wanted to learn, you had to learn by playing and through your own digital elbow grease of searching for the relevant communities to learn from.

Understanding the gaming community

It’s this community aspect that poses the question: is there more to gaming than playing. Because I argue that gamers today are much more than just players. Gamers today are skill seekers, documentarians, and active learners. They are going through the complicated processes of sharing knowledge and producing content that I believe is growing at a rate unparalleled to other industries.

Give this go: A quick youtube search for your favorite game will reveal hundreds of hits of users sharing, teaching, and discussing the best strategies, the latest meta, or just reviewing their latest thoughts on whether the game is even worth playing. Whether it’s a mobile farm game, PC shooter, or console racer, each game today has a respective community of content producers and online consumers. But this wasn’t always the case. This evolution had to start somewhere.

Before the online platform revolution of Twitch & YouTube, gaming knowledge was primarily discussed in web-based forums or magazines. You had to physically go out and buy it and not every game had a strategy guide to browse through. That left the typical gamer at the time with a lot of questions about how to play the game, let alone where to find a relevant community to learn this from.

In new media academics, the process of learning any type of skill is known as expertise development. It’s mainly the process of learning how to do something within a particular environment at an expert level through methods of best practice. As a concept, its not limited to professional or classroom settings and in fact, expertise development may occur in all domains of activity in which people participate.

Which brings me back to video games and the idea that one can be an expert outside traditionally considered domains and this includes virtual environments. The idea and potential of virtual-based expertise development has quickly transformed our cultural outlook on video games from being a waste of time to a process of skill acquisition and technique.

The Expertise of Warcraft

Mark G. Chen, a new media & communications academic from the University of Ontario Institute of Technology looked into the process of expertise development in World of Warcraft (WoW) way back in 2008. Primarily, he was interested in the driving force that pushed gamers to voluntarily donate their time to develop content and third party resources for other players who wanted to get better & understand more about WoW.

According to Chen, WoW was a prime example of expertise development throughout its infancy because it exhibited an intricate virtual environment which at the time did not provide players the level of external information access that we have come to enjoy in the present day. You could spend hours playing a game like WoW in a certain way only to discover that there was a more efficient way right under your nose.

This is because the internet pre-2005 was a significantly different place. Not everyone blogged, not everyone streamed, and most of expertise development was refined to the blindfolded approach of trial and error. Sure, you had online forums, and strategy guide magazines but online forums from a UX standpoint were disorganised and magazines required you to leave your house and spend actual money to obtain them.

Therefore, if you wanted to be good at a game as massive and complicated as WoW was at the time, you as a new gamer had to engage with the associated community to understand things like level efficiency, itemization, and questing routes. This process of learning about diverse forms of strategy is what Chen understood as a virtual form of expertise development. A process that quickly evolved from word of mouth and in-game chat, to online forums and strategy guides, and now to the present day — where the production of live streams and video content dominate the process of expertise development in gaming.

By keeping the details and strategies of WoW tightly under the wraps, Blizzard created a scarcity of information that created a sense of wonder and discovery for new and veteran players alike. Like in real life, you had to ask people for help within the game, or discuss with friends outside. The quick fire google search at the time often revealed a forum that left you with more questions than answers. This in turn created mystery for a world that by not showing you all its cards, made it feel more real than virtual.

The gaming community levels up

Over time, the process of expertise development would quickly evolve directly in-line with the evolution of digital technology. The deployment of faster internet gave creators the ability to upload higher fidelity content that wasn’t restricted to the picture/text-based media of online forums and magazines.

Slowly but surely, YouTube, Daily Motion, and other streaming platforms became a hotbed for gaming knowledge giving consumers an unprecedented level of content to consume. This in turn, raised the collective skill-ceiling of all gamers, which directly made newer games more competitive and their gamers more demanding for a competitive-based experience.

Thus, if a game was boring, the gamer would find something else to play, which created an industry effect that pushed AAA developers to create or transform current games into skill-based training rather than knowledge-based experiences. As of today, May 16th 2020, the top games being streamed on Twitch are Valorant, Call of Duty: Warzone, Fortnite, & League of Legends. All of these games primarily prioritize skill-based training over knowledge-based acquisition.

Chasing the Meta

Comparing the process of expertise development in old video games to those of the modern day is akin to comparing the speed of a scooter to a ferrari. When it comes to the level of access, quality, and consumption of expertise development, gamers today are acquiring knowledge at an unprecedented level.

With this comes a significant evolution in how the skill-based modern games of today have pushed gamers to learn the in’s-and-out’s at a faster pace. One only has to look at the previously mentioned most popular games on Twitch to see a trend. From Riot’s MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) League of Legends to Activision’s Battle Royale genre CoD: Warzone, these games are largely driven by a game-state called the Meta.

The Meta (short for metagaming) is any strategy, action, or method used in a game, which transcends a prescribed rule set, uses external factors to affect gameplay, or goes beyond the supposed limits or environment set by the game. In old games like World of Warcraft, a meta can often last an entire expansion (which could be as long as 1.5 to 2 years) with the occasional patch tweak. In today’s modern games, the meta is constantly evolving (which can be as short as every 2 to 3 weeks) and is followed closely by a journalistic gaming community ready to investigate, test, and play the new changes to find the latest competitive edge to report to their respective followers & community.

For example, if we go back to World of Warcraft, expert practice for a knowledge-based game was often translated as being informed about the best gear for a certain class of character, the most efficient talent mastery for a certain player role, or the best place for a certain type of monster loot. These were all changes that by their very nature had to be changed slowly. Quick changes to fundamental aspects of an MMO could risk confusing or even alienating the community from their beloved virtual environment.

In contrast, high paced and skill based games like League of Legends or Call of Duty: Warzone require constant tweaks to remain fresh and fun. Primarily because the foundations of these games rest in skill and not knowledge. A session or match for both these games can last from 30 minutes to an hour (World of Warcraft in contrast is an infinite character based progression). In these games, there is no visible in-game journey beyond aesthetic skin-based improvements. With each new session, is a restart of the gaming experience. By tweaking the variables of gun stats, hero abilities, or map drops, the skill-based experience stays the same but the strategy to win is fresh and in constant evolution.

Therefore, with the advent of these increasingly complicated and more dynamic games is a clear shift in what popular gamers are demanding from in-house development companies. They yearn for fast paced and skill-based experiences that are in stark-contrast to the slow-paced and time consuming experiences that MMOs like WoW used offer.

In fact, this trend can be directly studied by viewing the evolution of the WoW genre itself. For every expansion of the game, the designers and developers slowly tweaked the game from requiring time and effort to prioritizing access and facility. Today WoW is on its sixth expansion and is considered a much easier game to get into with a much higher skill ceiling to master.

Min/maxing is the new norm

Which brings me to my second point right after the meta which has come to be known as min/maxing. The process of min/maxing refers to the act of designing a character or game experience in such a way that one minimizes the possible weaknesses and maximizes the strengths for a competitive edge. This process has fundamentally changed how individual players communities approach the games they play.

Nowadays, gaming has become as competitive as playing a real life sport. You don’t just play for leisure, you play for pride, victory, and glory. It’s why popular video games have multiple seasons where character attributes and dynamics are tweaked constantly to shift the balance of certain playstyles. The art of min/maxing helps the developer keep the game fresh and the community interested and on its heels.

Clearly, both the meta chase and the process of min/maxing implies the gamer today is much more than just a player. In fact, I argue gamers today have evolved into skill-based competitors who are actively researching and documenting the latest competitive advantages that a particular game-state has to offer.

The tools of the ‘communicative’ craft

However, this wouldn’t be a full analysis of the evolution of ‘playing’ if we don’t look into the relevant tools of communication. As we discussed earlier, in the past gamers would engage in the creation and adoption of multimodal literacy practices through a process called paratexting. Paratexting in gaming is essentially a process where gamers create game-relevant texts and resources that engage in complex literacy practices and knowledge sharing.

In popular games from World of Warcraft, to League of Legends, and Warzone, in order for a gamer to share or develop expertise, they too go through the process a paratexting but rather then utilizing traditional paratexts such as gaming magazines and online forums, the modern gamer today is most likely streaming and talking to their audience in real time through what academics call digital paratexts.

The rise of the digital paratext

One reason for the rise of the digital paratext can directly be correlated to the rise of consumer-generated-media platforms (CGMP) such as Twitch and YouTube. These streaming platforms act as a new contact zone or hotbed for the digital community looking to learn more about their favorite game. There is no denying that these platforms have fundamentally changed the way consumers interact with game content while at the same time providing a new form of income for those that provide it.

But these platforms and their creators also depend on player-developed tools such as FRAPS, Audacity, and Discord that make it easier for gamers to engage with their audience and share their experience of playing. For example, Discord specialises in in-game voice commentary between gamers while FRAPS and Audacity are player developed tools that serve to capture video commentary by the player as the game is being played. Tools like these ultimately serve the function of aiding the documentation of the gaming experience by making communication and recording increasingly easy and accessible.

I’d also quickly mention the past rise of in-game ‘add- ons’ that act as ‘third party self-contained user interface modification component’ (sorry for the jargon) that alters the games original interface with the aim of simplifying (or complicating depending on how you see it) the gaming interaction. These add-ons allow users to mould their gaming experience to a personalised playstyle that often coincides with the search for a competitive edge.

Thanks to the growth of streaming platforms and player developed tools, gamers will often undertake the task of becoming voluntary or professional media creators, crafting content that focuses on specific or multiple aspects of gameplay, engaging in thought-provoking discussions about the current meta or how they plan to min/max for the future. These developed tools and media platforms aid both the teacher and the student gamer, due to its ability to both simplify and deepen the revolving cycle of user-generated gaming content.

A recap so far:

Let’s go over this quickly:

• First, a gamer that is passionate about a certain video game, will engage in a process of expertise development. This is primarily done by engaging with the Meta and how the Meta is actively defined by the gaming communities consensus on min/maxing and understanding of expertized gameplay and best practice.
• In order to access the Meta and be competitive, gamers must consume user generated content such as paratexts which are increasingly in digital form, perpetuated by a combination of consumer-generated-media streaming platforms and player-developed tools. By consuming these digital paratexts, gamers will thus become experts themselves.
• This will lead the expert gamer to the ultimate stage, which I argue is now seen as being a content creator (unless you are a playing competitively in an e-sport). They are now part of the content creator community and will teach others about the game.
• Lastly, content creation will in turn raise the collective skill ceiling of the gamer community and will push the in-house game developers and designers to evolve the game’s design, dynamics, and meta to keep it fresh and exciting.

Therefore, if expertise development is dynamically defined by the online community, and in turn, that online community actively generates external resources, which aid the acquisition of expertise, we can clearly denote a revolving cycle, one that pushes new and experienced gamers alike, to learn, create, and share all aspects of a video game.

Gaming is indeed more than just playing

There is no doubt that playing a game today represents a significant paradigm shift in the way a gamer plays a game. Whether that is by looking at the production, circulation, or experience, I believe the evolution of playing is as multi-dimensional as it is undeniable.

As a final note, I’d mention that as we experience the acceleration of game game design and digital communication technology, game developers and designers will have to create games that push the limits of this cycle on expertise development. The state of gaming is always in flux and the popular MOBAs and Battle Arenas of today could very wel transform into the MMORPGs of tomorrow.

In 2004, the release of WoW was ahead of its time because it provided an online experience that veteran players will agree is impossible to recapture today, even with 2019s re-release of WoW Classic. Today’s popular gamers aren’t as interested in MMORPGs with the majority of them fixated on fast-paced skill-based meta progression than slow-paced character progression through knowledge acquisition.

But I believe this norm could change again. On the horizon, we have emerging technologies like virtual reality that will provide a ground shifting experience similar to when WoW was first released on the PC.

Designers and developers working with platforms like the Oculus could very well recreate the perfect platform for the next knowledge-based MMORPG game and shift the popular gaming industry once again.

With all that being said, I can confidently say that there is much more to gaming than just playing.

Although the process of expertise development has pushed our minds into virtual worlds of button mashing and communication, I believe we shouldn’t get too comfortable:

• How will this revolving cycle of learning and sharing evolve as virtual reality enters our homes?
• How will we experience the game content of tomorrow if streaming platforms shift from the 2D screen to the 3D headset?
• What will games look like? Will the MMORPG genre come back into the limelight? Or is the competitive fervor of battle arenas and royales simply too popular to resist?

Popular gaming aside, enjoy your quarantine and play a game once in a while. These are all questions for another day.

Alessandro is an aspiring product & UX designer with a passion for all things tech and gaming. Follow him here on medium for more coverage on his latest insights and curiosities.

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