Video Games and the People Who Love Them.
A response to Chapter 6 of Understanding Video Games by Simon Edenfeldt-Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Parajres Tosca.
Society’s idea of video games and the communities that surround them has varied through the years, sometimes gamers are seen as hopeless nerds who would rather spend hours in a windowless arcade than socializing with others, sometimes gamers are thought of as basement-dwelling misogynists who live out fantasies online. Through most of societies shifting perspectives one idea usually stays the same; gamers are maladjusted escapists and video games are bad.
The writers of Understanding Video Games (whose collective names I will shorten to “Da Bois” for simplicity sake, and also because I would like my professor to regret saying that the responses could be informal) devote chapter 6 to defining the negative views of “gaming culture,” explaining how those views came about, and presenting arguments on behalf of game enthusiasts as to why those views are unfair.
Pretty much every new form of media goes through a phase where everyone’s bonnets are just lousy with bees about it. For video games that phase hit hard and is still kicking around today, although it is less prevalent than it was in the 1980s and nineties. The eighties were a time rife with concern for the moral maintenance of the nuclear American family. Communism, drug addiction, cults, the aids crisis, and religious stuff I won’t get into all kept parents worrying about the morals of their kids. Video games were treated a lot like rock music, Dungeons and Dragons, fantasy novels, or just about anything else that kids might enjoy that wasn’t morally or physically “constructive.” Parents were nervous about their children having hobbies that kept them isolated or away from home because they were afraid it might weaken familial bonds. These factors made it easy for parents, teachers, and politicians to demonize video games.
In more recent years the stereotypical image of gamers has been of overweight, pale men yelling into headsets about whether the physics of a female character’s supple rump are up to their standards, and although I can’t say that I haven’t run into my fair share of these “gentlemen” in my time as an internet Sherpa I can say with great certainty that the majority of us gamers aren’t nearly as insufferable. Some of the blame for that stereotype can be given to the content of specific games, the Grand Theft Auto series being a prime example. Yes, it looks pretty bad on behalf of gamers the a series about committing felonies is currently the “most profitable entertainment product of all time” according to GamesIndustry.biz but Da Bois argue that GTA creates worlds based on the glorification of crime organizations that is already prevalent in movies, music, TV, comic books, ect. The Godfather is the number one rated movie on IMDb and the third by the American Film Institution, yet society doesn’t have the same negative outlook on that property.
Movies and books have the benefit of being seen as massive mediums with a huge variety of genres. Spy movies can be well known for their objectification of women but that doesn’t make society wary of all movies. Video games are a new enough medium that society stills tends to see them as one genre and as a result lets any questionable subject matter or controversy taint their view of the whole art form.
As society’s loudest voices transition to a younger generation, one who grew up with video games, we will see gaming become a more widely accepted pastime.
