I’m a gamer and that’s hardly a secret or something I’m ashamed of. I’ve played video games since the late 80s, when the Nintendo 8bit system was the king of the hill, I’ve killed and been killed in online FPS games, I’ve fought through musky dungeons and organized massive 40-man raids. I have dominated the world and spammed ICBMs, forcing virtual Napoleons and Ghandis on their knees, begging for mercy. I’ve been the king of the world, and lost it all when a game crashed and the save was corrupted. I’ve ripped my headset off my head and throw it on the floor with force enough to shatter it in five(!) different parts, and I’ve cheered like there was no tomorrow when our raid killed an important boss. I’ve been there and done much of it. I simply love games and they play a major part in my life.
I, and many from my own generation, consider games an interactive art-form that is no less an “art” than say movies or books. For us there’s no question about it and we don’t care what the cultural establishment think about the subject. We know from personal experience that games can tell stories, involve you in the action, give you the feeling of accomplishment and boost your self-confidence. They can be short, quick and mindless, just occupying time, or they can present you moral or ethical dilemmas and force you take a stand and change your real-life perception. They can give you valuable training in co-operating, organizing as well as provide social know-how, experiences that may very well be put into use in other situations. The possibilities and potential is close to endless and that’s in many ways why we’re so fascinated too. Having grown up with games, we are not scared of this (relatively) new media, we embrace it and feel it’s a natural part of modern life.
MMORPGs
The gaming industry is growing rapidly and is even rivaling established forms of entertainment and popular culture like movies and music in revenues. It is also getting obvious that games have a considerable effect on the social structure and general social conditions. The reason is that people spend a lot of time playing games and in some cases, they forsake real-life on behalf of spending more time in-game. This is particularly noticeable with one specific group of games, the MMORPGs, Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. Examples are World of Warcraft, Eve Online, Ultima Online, Age of Conan, Warhammer, Lord of The Rings Online and many more. These games have a structure and game-play that basically requires you to spend considerable amounts of time to acquire items and accomplish goals. The effort required is often extremely time-consuming. It is a brutal reality that people spend up to 18 hours per day in-game and they do it for months and even years at the time. The fact that these games are centered around team-play, or, at least the need to work as a team to accomplish goals, introduces a social arena beyond any previously known complexity or imagination.
This cannot be fully understood if you don’t know one very widespread mechanism of the Internet. The relative anonymity leads many people to feel relieved of normal social conventions and standards, behaving pretty much like they feel like there and then. With no social filter in between people, and the lack of visual feedback from actually seeing the face of those you speak with, the tension level rise easily. Alliances are made and broken, betrayals and deception are commonplace and lies, cruelty and seemingly complete lack of social know-how, makes these waters harder to navigate than the Middle-East conflict. When this is said, the social complexity of MMORPGs also provides an arena for many people that are otherwise socially inept, to socialize. It can be people with mental issues, or disabilities that make it hard to socialize in real life. In online games they can live a life where their issues often aren’t that noticeable, they can be a more perfected version of themselves, gain accept, respect and feel good. The problem is of course that this does not necessarily resolve any issues, regardless of cause. While it can help people, it can also make them draw even more into themselves and avoid human relations to such extent that they literally have no life except of their online community.
A New Sub-Culture Ascends
My personal experience, primarily from World of Warcraft in the MMORPG-genre, suggests that a large portion of the people spending much time with these games are in fact people with issues of some kind (I’m one). A certain percentage are people with disabilities and serious conditions, but those are the minority. Those that really gets me thinking, is the considerably larger number of “normal” folks that use games as a way to escape the realities if their lives. Many are working, with wife and kids, seemingly successful. Yet they spend an alarming amount of time at home, online. Others are high-school and university dropouts, living on social welfare or their parents. Mind you, these are not retards, they may be somewhat socially inept geeks, but they are often very intelligent and otherwise perfectly capable individuals. Gaming, and gaming a lot, is more than a hobby for these individuals, it’s a way of life. Many jump tirelessly from MMORPG to MMORPG as they might grow tired of one, or they seek new communities and challenges.
Now, we live in a free world, and it’s really no-ones business telling other people what to do and not do, as long as they don’t harm anyone else. I fully respect this and neither do I intend to do it. After all, I’m part of the extended gamer culture myself. What interests me most in this aspect, is the fact that we have a new sub-culture, a group in our society, that both count a wast number of resourceful people, but also focus these resources on something that isn’t really productive in a conventional sense. They have been doing this for quite some years now, and to believe that this “trend” will just disappear is naive. Seeing the development of digital technology over the past 30 years, it seems unlikely that the evolution will grind to a halt anytime soon. There is a fair chance we’ll have a large group of gamers among us, and, they will become more and more noticeable as they grow older and their generation(s) assume positions of prominence and power.
What effect this “lost generation” of the 1980s will have on the society as a whole, remains to be seen, but that they will affect it, is certain. One possibility is that they will enhance one considerable issue most western nations are facing, a demographic crisis caused by a dwindling population. People simply don’t get enough kids and the gamers probably get less kids than the population average. Unlike the population boom after a certain “lost generation” after WW1, and to a much greater extent the generations lost in WW2, the gamer-lifestyle will doubtfully have a positive effect on the demographic situation. I have no solution to the population crisis we’re in, and it’s plain unfair to blame the gamers for it. Nevertheless, I’d just like to point out, that as far the spread of the gamers have got, they are simply too many to ignore. They are here and they are already in force!
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