“We” Didn’t Have Better Games. We Had Better Ads.
Dip rejects nostalgia-dipped understandings of the current video game culture and industry.
One of the most difficult things to navigate is the unreliability of memory. I have pretty terrible recall in general; this is an ongoing issue for me. On the bright side, it encourages me to look stuff up and compare what’s in my head to what’s in the archives.
I won’t make a claim as ludicrous as saying that this drawback-tendency pairing is what points me away from nostalgia, but it definitely does something close. While I do have good memories of “the past,” I am often enveloped in the feeling of being “shrouded” by my smallness.
I embrace the smallness, though; it feels more truthful than centralized meta-narratives of “the past.” The present era of influencers and data colonialism produces way more information than periods of more centralized media. This has led to lots of self-evident badness, including misinformation, fake news, and post-truth info ecosystems. That difference, the shift from publishers to platforms, is a big part of what has been spurring the ascendancy of the nostalgic turn, encapsulated in the idea of “Mak[ing] America Great Again.”
With this, there is the longing for the past and its image of a shared reality, alongside all of the implied horrors (if one’s a marginalized person) it brings. This is similar to the way that the nostalgia for the Progressive Era (especially since it came after the Gilded Age) overlaps with the traumatic Nadir of American race relations; the same time period is remembered and experienced in completely different ways. Double consciousness is a wild thing.
Photo by Compagnons on Unsplash
To bring it to video games, the idea of them moving from a toy to a counterculture is a nostalgic image, fueled by marketing campaigns that basically target the same group; cis boys in the 80s, teens in the 90s and 2000s, the nostalgia of those adults in the 2010s, and so on…
This pattern is probably true for many ideas of history in general; PR teams shaping things to create a certain feeling that folks may or may not be able to latch onto depending on who they are.
There’s recently been a shift, though; the onset of the pandemic was critical for this. I’ve always been a “core” gamer, even if I don’t fit into the “model player” archetype.
Mobile games are where the growth is at (though even that is slowing down), and though the “core” is still shaped around a blockbuster model, there is a lot of fiscal and player power coming from cozy, casual, and other games not “meant” for the “model player.” This shift towards inclusion has been… poorly received, with movements like Gamergate and its 2.0 rendition as the most radioactive examples.
This anti-inclusion movement seems to find the most ridiculous things to complain about, often revolving around puddles, the attractiveness of women, and the existence of Black people. The more naked bigotry is often hidden behind other concerns; Gamergate is still talked about as being concerned with “ethics in games journalism.” This leads people towards yearning for a time where games were “better,” “less predatory,” and (this often goes unsaid) “white.”
However, I’m not sure that games are worse-in-quality than they’ve ever been; the furthest I’d go is that the latest entries in many a big series are not hitting the same. Like with anything else, though, looking to the mainstream for the crème de la crème is like getting mad at the snake oil for not curing you. Popularity ≠ quality!
Don’t get it twisted, though; there are games that stink. For every Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, there are like eight Pokemon Legends Z-As (sorry) and a couple of Oblivion Remastereds (this one hurt). But when hasn’t that been true, in every artform or medium?
So, the problem isn’t (just) that the games themselves are getting worse. At the very least, that claim is a big one to make without doing a (rigorous, even if it isn’t “academic”) study and being clear and honest about its subjectivity. We can say that the industry (if it exists…) is cooked, though. Things have not been great for a while.
The sheer amount of layoffs in the 2020s while the industry was doing as well as it ever has is in line with wider economic trends that pair profit with pitilessness. This policy hurts even the mainstream’s ability to do interesting stuff, as evidenced by things like the cancelled Assassin’s Creed game set during Reconstruction. These economic concerns feel like a better point of cleavage than nostalgia, even if we wanna have conversations about art.
After all, those Gamer™ concerns, be they about quality, content, pricing, or features, are better explained through economic means than cultural ones.
It’s really interesting to see how you can look at many points in history and see people complaining about the art of that time along nostalgic lines. Moving a lens over to the industry itself helps contextualize why changes are happening, what the forces are that shape the games being made, and where some of the ideas of what “the past” “was” comes from.
This also helps with not thinking of games solely as commodities. There are actual people who make these things. That has to be a core part of the conversation.
When that concrete aspect is left out, the conversation often becomes rooted in vaguely empirical aspects like how “realistic” the game is or how many features it has, in ways that are themselves shaped by PR campaigns.
Chasing that stuff, none of which has all that much to do with the art and the fun of games, must be measured against the tradeoffs, like the crunch and other labor issues that shaped the development of games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part II and Intergalactic. It’s not worth it.
The long and short of it is that Gamers™ need to read the Combahee River Collective statement, get 9000% less bigoted, and start to analyze the world around them in order to change it. This process looks like it’s getting started with stuff like the Player’s Alliance. Unions have been popping up as well. That’s how the games that do suck will start to suck less, and all of the other noise about non-issues will sort itself out.
