Triumph In Blog

Revenge of the Nerds

Are video games actually important?

Video games–everyone feels the need to have some kind of opinion on them! After only 45 years or so of video games as common fixtures of our everyday lives, video games have undergone a rapidly accelerated life cycle of becoming annoying and misunderstood, at least compared to other media. They are the youngest distinct art form we really recognize as a society–so young in fact, that most people refuse to even identify them as such, or simply decline to acknowledge that they exist. But there’s no denying that they have become an enormous, bloated money laundering operation like many others in our culture, so anyone who likes to keep up with the times and expose themselves to new things is going to have some kind of feelings about them.

What’s very strange to me, though, is how overwhelmingly negative the perception of video games still is from essentially every angle, regardless of knowledge base. People who know jack shit about video games will sneer at them for being childish, but people who spend all day playing them will also sneer at them the same way, the exception being the one or two games they grew up with or something. Even still, there are a pretty large number of people who seem entirely married to video games as if they’re the only game in town, and keeping up with the news of every dogshit algorithmically generated 80 dollar advertisement for a tech company is a healthy lifestyle.

Why is there so much negative polarization around video games? Why did we get to this point with them so quickly, where every possible perception of them seems to be in some way pathetic? Why does the whole world of video games and the media surrounding them seem to be infected with bad actors, grifters, and manchildren? Why (and how) are they still around, and why have they seemed to stagnate in the last decade or so?

Many of the answers lie in the obvious fact that video games are one of very few widespread art forms that only came into existence on this side of 1970. Things like movies, or music, or books, even television, they all came into being in a world before endless inescapable profit decline drove the world off of a big cynical cliff. Nothing ever escapes being commodified or cheapened, of course, and the culture industry has existed as long as industry itself has been a concept; the primary cultural difference is the desperation. Lumiere didn’t explicitly make his films because he needed them to be marketable, and neither did those guys who recorded that racehorse. Clair de Lune wasn’t trying to hit a target number of online streams to ensure that Clair de Lune 2: reloaded could be produced, and twelfth night didn’t have a display window at barnes & noble selling copies to finance thirteenth night. But video games? Video games were seemingly first conceived as cheap novelties, meant to dazzle people and waste their time either to siphon quarters out of them or just get them on board with paying hundreds of dollars for more useless, single-function home appliances every fiscal year.

It’s hard to conceive of video games as prestigious if you think about them too hard. Movies, paintings, novels: these things get to have long, storied histories of true believers and visionaries, people who made things they loved and rendered abstract ideas into physical space. There are no video game art movements, and there are no universally high-brow, respected video games. Video games didn’t have to fight to get where they are, and there was never a time where they got to be radical, different, or important. Tech companies found a new way to get people to waste their time on the couch, and new ways to sell licensed slop shovelware to public venues as arcade cabinets. Thus, video games were sort of financed into existence from the top, and, like everything, they keep getting more expensive and more mass-marketable.

The only issue with stopping there, though, is that it’s just empirically untrue. Don’t get me wrong: I love applying marxist economic frameworks to vague social trends, patting myself on the back and calling it a day. But are all video games really just Pac Man and shit? In 45 years, is it possible that nobody has thought to be a little more ambitious, and succeeded? As someone who has spent and continues to spend a lot of time with video games, it would be a little crazy and sad of me to spend so much of my life mindlessly chipping away at high scores on galaga.

If you don’t know anything about video games, you could be forgiven for kneejerk-answering “yes” to that presumption. Just this last week, three different major game presentations occurred, orchestrated separately by Sony, Microsoft, and whoever the fuck is paying Geoff Keighley anymore to generate interest in “new” titles for the next two years. These new titles include only the things that had the money behind them to advertise at the showcase, i.e. the things that our massive tech overlords have faith will be able to effectively tranquilize us and siphon more of our money away. The money required to meet those criteria is so massively, massively disproportionate to the cost of the majority of games you might not even believe it if you don’t already know. The floor for most of these games is in the ballpark of 100 mil before you even have the ads budgeted; these are the only things anyone sees unless they actively try very hard to poke around and see what else is out there. Even the “indie game” developers who have generated buzz in the last 15 years have almost all been subsumed into AA and AAA studios, or simply funneled into the same insidious trends of the market that made these big games what they are.

And what are they, these expensive mainstream games that get all the attention, that set the tone for what even people who don’t care might believe about video games? They are remakes, they are sequels, they are prequels, they are soft-reboots, they are ripoffs, they are asset-flips–they are nothing. Every game uses the same engine, every game follows one of three gameplay models developed circa 2011, every game is centered around live-service development over time, and every game includes predatory recurring charges to access the actual features of the game once you have it. Everything is gambling behind a couple layers of obfuscation; everything is an update to a decaying gameplay model that’s been chugging along, half-functional, for a decade or more; everything is flashy particle effects with bloom, so you can show off the power of your overpriced hardware; everything is jiggling anime tits and ass to imitate and inevitably devalue sexuality, and feed a senseless culture war engine that burns women as fuel; everything is a waste of years’ worth of time, money, and effort on graphical upgrades nobody asked for that don’t even look very good, because the semiconductor empire needs blood to grease its wheels; everything is designed from the top to the bottom as a way to imperialize your time and make you a thoughtless repeat customer.

To answer one half of the question I started this tirade with, that crap above is why some of us who like video games and play them a lot are often very critical of them. It’s hard to advocate that something can be meaningful, unique, or even simply fun when any example someone uninitiated might think of is probably the most derivative garbage ever conceived by man. And the worst part is that among those of us “gamers,” the likely majority of us seem to not care at all! Everything is an op and nothing is really making much money, sure, but since probably 2016, 2018 or so, essentially every AAA game has been 100% indistinguishable from any other. They have to be making the money back, because we have settled the fuck in! Dark Souls 3, the last dark souls game, was in 2016, but every action game we get now considers itself a “soulslike,” hell at this point that’s usually in the sales pitch! Games in the last 5 years or so have started advertising themselves explicitly as “X meets Y” references to older, more recognizable games from peoples’ childhoods, and everyone is eating it up! What the fuck did they say at the summer games fest about that “new” anime slop game “fractured blooms?” That it was “Doki Doki Literature Club meets Silent Hill?” And these were the people who put DDLC out! What the fuck does that mean!

That studio, Serenity Forge–I recommend you go have a look at their oeuvre, try to figure out where the fuck that money is coming from. This is why video games as a concept have so many detractors, because from the outside it must all seem like this kinda shit. Rockstar can spend a couple billion to make a couple billion off the 12th or 13th installment of GTA, even when the last few have been so mind-numbingly tedious that they spawned their own in-game player-operated economies, like EVE online. It’s as cynical as maybe any industry in the entire world, and it keeps getting worse, and everything is so sterile and poisoned by desperate clawing at mass appeal. So what do I like about video games, and why did I write this?

Of the two directions from which video games get shit on, the direction I haven’t discussed yet is actually my personal least favorite. When people who care about games and love them critique them, it rings of tough love. But what about those uninitiated that I keep referencing? To be up front and blunt (for once:) I think it’s the stupidest, most narcissistic, incurious, and annoying thing in the world when people who don’t play video games or know anything about them try to give them shit, as a form. Because to me, it makes no fucking sense! I have so far given a lot of different reasons as to why video games are heartless, thoughtless ploys for money from saps who like monotony. However, I didn’t forget what I posed earlier, and indeed, since the 80s, there have actually been quite a few attempts (successful and otherwise) at ambitious, visionary video games that further the craft and give it meaning. The conceit is that they’re not often profitable or well-advertised, and many of them are quite old, or foreign, or maybe even impossible to play on current systems.

Now, does this setup remind you of anything? Let me explain my vexation with a pedantic comparison. Suppose somebody doesn’t know anything about video games: never really played them much, no interest as an adult person whatsoever, only knows the big, famous, cheap ones, like mario or call of duty or whatever. If this person deliberately chooses not to interact with video games any more deeply and just avoids them in general, but still feels the need to make it publicly known that they dislike the things based only on their limited knowledge of the mainstream hits, this is sort of a drop in the bucket. It’s not necessarily strange, given their purchase in the minds of adult people, that video games would be considered juvenile pigswill with nothing to be gained by learning about them. Imagine, then, the same scenario but with, say, film instead of video games.

Much like video games, movies are an industry propped up by money laundering operations and cheaply-produced copycats, distributed by decaying institutions and an endless spawn/die cycle of streaming services. Popular film has been a wasteland of big budget “blockbusters” and pseudointellectual phonies for decades now–movies made by auteurs or movies with small budgets struggle more and more with every year, and many of them are entirely inscrutable to anyone who doesn’t dedicate a significant portion of their free time to studying them. The popular, expensive ones that even people who know nothing about film would recognize (fast and furious, superhero stuff, disney animated stuff, legacy franchises like alien or star wars, etc) are absolute lowest-common-denominator garbage made to stuff seats via brand-name recognition, and maintain the equilibrium of a very rotten culture industry. The unpopular ones remain in semi-obscurity and require some curation to find, and even more to understand–most of them, like with video games, are either old, foreign, underfunded, or simply don’t exist anymore.

But, in all of that, do we believe that film is a worthless format, with no real merit to it? In all these gaudy award shows built off of bribe money, all these bullshit rotten tomatoes tugs-of-war about ratings, all these DoD-approved action movies that dispense american ideology to the youth through caped mouthpieces–is it reasonable to just write off film entirely? If that someone who knew nothing about video games was instead someone who knew nothing about movies, would it be anything less than the idle babble of a toddler if they moaned about how movies are all trash? Think about how you might regard the film opinions of people who have no working knowledge of films, or ability to think critically about them: the proverbial “guy who has only seen boss baby.” This is not an informed opinion that matters at all, nor is it fair in the slightest. It reflects only incuriosity, closed-mindedness, and stupidity.

Why is it different for video games, then? Is it just because they take longer to play? Is it that curating the obscure ones is harder because you also have to be some kind of computer hardware geek? Why is it that we seem to accept the dismissal of video games an art form just because most people (including the ones who like them, most of the time,) are too lazy to understand them and treat them with some respect? We don’t do that for anything else, no matter how sick a perversion of its original form it is in the current day. We have booktok, we have miniseries, we have AI-generated music, we have karate kid: legends, but somehow everything is a perfectly acceptable, adult hobby except for video games. Why is this the case?

Basically what I’m saying is “if video games bad nobody panics, if movies bad everyone loses their minds,” because I’m the fucking joker of video games. Unfortunately, I believe that’s typically the way it goes! I think the youth of video games as a form and the speed with which we went from Myst and Earthbound 30 years ago to Genshin Impact now spoils even some open-minded peoples’ faith about the sanctity of auteur video games. That could be the best reason they aren’t taken seriously at the same rate as other forms, their general decline notwithstanding. Nevermind the fact that in AAA gaming there are barely a handful of auteurs left, and one of them is Hideo Kojima–an annoying pervert surrounded at all times by yes men, whose only aspiration since MGS concluded has been to use what little fame he gained to meet and attempt to impress as many hollywood actors as possible. It definitely rubs me the wrong way personally when people think they’re too cool for video games, mostly because a lot of people I’ve seen espouse this dumb sentiment are usually smart enough, worldly enough people to know better.

I personally believe that a lot of the psychology of video game naysayers stems from the fact that their biggest blocs fall in age ranges consistent with being the first generation to grow up having a lot of video games at home as kids. I think a lot of people subconsciously associate video games with wasted youth in this way, and come to resent video games as a childish pursuit that replaced a significant portion of their memory with sitting in front of a TV. But kids were doing that before them, just without controllers, and everyone still seems to love TV, right? The TV critics definitely lost the battle, because fucking everything is just evolving to be TV one way or the other nowadays.

That’s a different story for a different time, though. In any case, I think detraction from the idea that video games can be art is unfair, and unfounded. There’s nothing really provably “wrong” about just not being interested, but the disdain with which video games are met is, to me, deeply upsetting. Some of the most important works of fiction in my entire life are video games, and every year I feel like cashing out myself when I see the new releases, only to be reeled back in by something tiny and obscure that I took a chance on, or something old that I overlooked when I was younger. Some of the most rewarding experiences with art patronage come to you in this way. The slow descent into obsession with a form you didn’t understand at first, the search spurred on by a surprise encounter with that one heavy hitter you didn’t see coming. This is 100% possible and honestly happens to me frequently in the world of video games, because I like them and I’m willing to give a chance to games that might not be getting commercials on TV, or might not be on the front page of steam. Why rob yourself of this experience by shutting them out wholesale? What are you flagellating yourself for? Or, who are you trying to impress? Or or, where did you get this idea that something as large and sprawling as a video game, with this incredible, inalienable advantage of interactivity between creator and observer, couldn’t possibly have any artistry to it?

This goes both ways. I got to this conclusion by demonizing the haters, but the lovers have it bad too. It is possible to love something incorrectly, no two ways about it, and I believe that if you truly respect something and care about it, you will be critical of it. Being some sniveling hipster who hates shit just means that you’re gonna miss out for yourself, and that you’re an idiot. But clamoring for the trough of gloop as soon as a company you recognize rings the bell for you? Buying whatever comes out and crosses your field of vision first? I don’t like to blame the consumer for everything (don’t read my last writing lol) but you cannot be fucking helping by doing that. Again, video games, like everything, are at the point they’re at now because the cheapest, shittiest stuff keeps selling the most, and this horrible positive feedback loop is the fuel for this speculative interest bubble that will no doubt burst with GTA 6’s release.

The future of video games is financially uncertain, if you didn’t know, but at the end of the day I hardly think it matters. My big question is “are video games important as art,” and the answer really is yes. I firmly believe that if you have ever liked a video game at all, for any reason, then that’s because you were an observer of at least one person’s artistic endeavors, and pursuing the “why” is an incredibly rewarding journey. When I was a kid, I played whatever had the coolest box art at the blockbuster, and tracking some of the things I happened to like as an adult and asking myself some big questions about my own taste led me to some of the most insane things I’ve ever seen. I’ve met people, I’ve written a lot, I’ve found inspirations, I’ve fundamentally changed the way I think and approach my life as an adult man–a lot of that is due to video games, yes. Not sitting around playing cod as a teenager, not getting mad playing fighting games as an adult, but by playing singular, off-the-wall auteur experiences from artists who make things with care, and with style. But it’s all part of the process anyway if you love it!

End of the day, you don’t need to be sam hyde with bulging veins and red skin choking through clenched teeth about how video games are “penis poop” made to demoralize you. You don’t have to be a creepy old man crying about woke, you don’t have to be a journalist with a fake job braying about accessibility, and you certainly don’t have to be a “multifandom enjoyer.” There is no one correct position to take about how or why video games are in the exact position they’re in, at least not in any way that would be demonstrably different from analysis of any other aspect of our crumbling culture. The only thing to do is to accept that, at their core, these are ideas realized into material form by human beings with the intent that a player will engage with them and take in some kind of emotional depth that cannot be easily described sans the interactive element. No matter how much liberty has been taken with regards to this concept by people cravenly trying to make money, it can still be absolutely true if you want it to be. So why not want it to be?

For me personally, I seem to rant and rave a lot about how I believe that too many people are dumb, incurious bastards, so perhaps I’m giving this “issue” more credit than its worth. Not many people have strong feelings about much of anything at all, so perhaps it should be taken with a grain of salt, my central conceit that video games have a lot of “negative polarization” associated with them. At least 9 trillion people play some kind of mobile game every day somehow, and most of the people who get on my nerves grandstanding about video games sucking are just annoying NYC leeches on twitter, who I follow anyway because I’m addicted to being irked. Not mad really, I can’t get too autistically worked about this stuff anymore because it’s just too tiring, but I do get very annoyed. So it’s a hard sell that any of this is a significant cultural issue.

But I care about it anyway, because video games are the only fuckin video games we’ve got! Nothing else offers this level of interactivity, and nothing else can immerse you in a world or a feeling so thoroughly. Nothing else can inspire cooperation and competition at such a fast pace, at least not without requiring knee and shoulderpads. Nothing else really gets to be this complex, few things get to be this long, and basically nothing else gets to ride the thin line between drama and joy so finely, so frequently. People get to having strong opinions about this stuff because, as I have intimated, they are long, large, and complicated pieces of work. There are a million different ways to interact with them, and they require so much more commitment than any other form. Besides like a really dense book I guess. But you know what I’m saying!

So video games are important as art, yes. If you don’t believe me, let me list a few small things down below that are very easy to pick up and learn to play by their own terms, while also being incredibly unique, affecting, stylish, and not explicitly made for children, as most people believe video games are. Nobody will ever read this, but maybe someday someone might scroll to the bottom of this page, wince at how overwritten this post is, but also accidentally notice one of the following titles, and have their whole life altered:

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