WP2: My History with Games; Our History With Games

This collection is meant to interrogate my ideas about video games at every level: emotionally, critically, and socially.

1. One reason that games mean so much to me is because of the relationships in my life they have influenced. Life long friends have been made through games. My relationship with my own father is strengthened through them. So many people I look up to are involved in games, so I interviewed two of them — my father, Jon Crispi, and critic Jacob Geller.
2. I’ve long held this idea that the games I played growing up worked in my favor, teaching me important and inclusive life lessons. I believed that I was lucky to avoid certain games, and luckier still to experience certain others (though which I would be unable to pinpoint). So, I collected almost every game I own or owned (a few large banks of games excluded) to work through what that collection says about me.
3. I also realized that much of what constitutes masculinity in games, even toxic masculinity for that matter, is determined by groups of people, not by a specific and individual definition. So, I surveyed 65 people in the online gaming space in order to develop an understanding of a broader cultural attitude toward games.

Interviews

The first section is an in depth reflection on two interviews I did. One was with my father, who has been a lifelong gamer just like me — though what that meant was very different in his childhood. The second is with Jacob Geller — a talented writer and critic of games and other artistic mediums.

Two Men I Look Up To and the Games that We Play

In my interviews I was forced to reconsider some things I held as truths about masculinity in games. The main thing that I decided was that there is no magical set of games that a child could play in order to be imbued with a healthy image of masculinity. Nor is there a surefire set of games that will ruin a child’s image of masculinity — even including those that we consider retrospectively quite heinous.

This gave me a very interesting perspective with which to approach part two.

Collection

The second part is an almost exhaustive list of games that I owned throughout my childhood and young adulthood. I went through them all and categorized them into sections based on their importance to me.

A Library of Games and Nothing to Play

In the collection I reflect briefly on why certain games mean so much to me, as well as why some don’t. I’ve come away with an understanding of what makes me fall in love with a game to this day, and I’m more understanding of where my experience is lacking. I cannot in good faith comment on aspects of gaming in the mid-to-late aughts that I was not engaged with in the same way that I have historically. I never really had to endure the intense toxicity of online multiplayer of the time — so where do I go from here?

Survey

The final part of my project was an in-depth survey about masculinity in games. I asked each participant about their own identity and relationship with games to gauge how opinions changed throughout communities.

Gamers Talking About Gamers

Final Thoughts

Between all three of my sections, one thing is clear: I have some rethinking to do. What Jacob Geller told me about how toxicity can be expressed by anyone — toward any aspect of the games industry — and is not limited to multiplayer experiences resonates with the answers to many of my survey questions. On top of that, the games that I played growing up feel less special and magical after analyzing the games others played in their youth. It’s more important to analyze how certain games might socialize poor masculinity than it is to generalize about what types of games they are.

I’m excited to use this new perspective to dive deeper into how games, especially from the aughts, developed a community of gamers known to be toxic and harmful — and hopefully to ideate on where we go from here.