Transcript — What is the Games Industry Missing?
This is the transcript of a Youtube video, which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/9JbfFYUVR-U
This video is about things that are missing. It’s an expression of frustration and desperation and exasperation and hope. It’s an argument for the embrace and celebration of the subjective and the human in our experience and criticism of games, and as such it’s going to be a more opinionated video than my usual stuff. This may, in fact, be the most personal video I ever make. THIS IS NOT GAME MAKER’S TOOLKIT. And I make no apologies for that. This video is about how, in the 20-something years I’ve been playing games, I’ve gained a kind of superpower. I’ve developed the ability to see the invisible. Invisible people, invisible stories, invisible futures, presents, pasts. It’s a video about gaps, and lack, and the sort of mass blindness that occurs when a community lets itself become insular and complacent, when a medium defines itself so narrowly by what it is that it doesn’t let itself acknowledge what it could be. This is a video about what could be.
In 2018, black writer Tracy Oliver shared her experience of what happened when a film executive asked her what kind of movie she’d like to write next.
“When we were pitching Survive The Night, an exec plainly asked if black women like horror movies. He couldn’t wrap his mind around women of color even liking the genre. The reality is, a lot of black women love horror movies…And yet, because that particular exec most likely neither knows many black women, nor had done any research, he made the assumption that the horror genre isn’t for women like me.”
As I read up about the issues behind this conversation, I started to form the distinct impression that there’s a paradox at play in the entertainment industry. Consider this passage from The Washington Post:
“While Hollywood continues to debate diversity (or rather, lack thereof), the success of “Get Out” is another addition to the list of recent films directed, written by or starring African Americans that have gone on to become major surprise hits, commercially or critically — often both.”
There’s perhaps no better demonstration of this paradox than the idea of a string of successes long enough to comprise a list, where nonetheless each new success that adds to the list is somehow a surprise. And Tracy observes this tendency too:
“Even with Get Out, he was like, “Well Get Out is different.” That’s always the thing people say when something does well, that it’s the exception. I know that not to be true, but the justification that everybody gives is that Get Out is the exception, or Girls Trip is the exception, instead of it proving that Black people do watch horror, or that Black women can be in big comedies.”
The Washington Post calls this the chicken-and-egg problem — there’s this untrue assumption about which genres appeal or don’t appeal to which demographics that then self-perpetuates. For instance, certain kinds of people not being given a chance to write or direct certain types of films because “audiences just don’t want that”. And even when films repeatedly disprove this idea — become “breakthrough successes” and “crossover hits” and whatever other term we came up with that means “we were surprised when this thing appealed to a broader range of people than we guessed” it somehow still never manages to shift the underlying idea that it’s an ‘exception’. The biases themselves continue, and the result is predictable:
“Somewhere out there, a woman of color has a horror movie that’s as unique and fresh as Get Out, but she hasn’t been able to get through the door because of biased thinking around who should get to write horror movies”.
Part 1: The Demographic Ouroboros
“And to those of us in the industry who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films, with women at the center, are niche experiences. They are not — audiences want to see them and, in fact, they earn money. The world is round, people” — Cate Blanchett, Oscars acceptance speech (2014)
When we look back over gaming history, one of the trends the 2010s will no doubt be remembered for is “dadification”, the sudden wave of games putting the player in a fatherly role. 2010 — Heavy Rain, 2012 — The Walking Dead Season 1, 2013 — The Last of Us and Bioshock: Infinite, 2014 — Lisa: The Painful, 2015 — The Witcher 3, 2018 — God of War. The reason for the trend was obvious: male gamers born in the 70s and 80s were coming into middle age and becoming dads, and they wanted to tell stories about this new life-altering experience they were going through.
There were some who saw what was missing. There were some who asked the burning question.
“Where are the mom games?”
Because there’s no doubt that, alongside those dudes now making great games about being a dad, there was also a generation of girls born and raised playing games. Many of them have become mums. And yet, as of recording this, we have yet to see a single-player mainstream AAA title about being a mother. Not just featuring a protagonist who happens to be a mum, but a story about the experience of being a mother. Apparently one of the Bayonetta games has her taking her younger self under her wing, and I guess It Takes Two has a mother as one of the two main characters, but that’s all we’ve got.
In the last decade, alongside games about hero daddies we could have seen a half dozen or more beautiful, heart-shaking stories about what it’s like to be a mother caring for a small being. But we didn’t. There is a gaping hole where those stories could have been. A decade came and went, and we just didn’t get them. We would have been the richer for it, but we, as an industry and a community, missed our shot.
This entirely sucks. What sucks more, though, is the justifications, the “the stop whinging”s, the “games are for dudes” dudes. Many people still accept it as an intrinsic fact that men have always, and will always, rule the gaming world, like their dominance in the industry is an immutable law of nature, rather than the consequence of decades of deliberate marketing and development decisions that disregarded, downplayed and even mocked the kinds of games women and girls might want to play, that denied the existence of female gamers as any kind of substantial demographic, and that created a social environment that was often hostile and unwelcoming to women, both in the arcade and in the board room. It’s not hard to see how all this affects the kinds of games that get made. In the US, women comprise only 23% of game development employees to begin with, and it’s likely far fewer are mothers, considering the industry’s infamous level of crunch and overwork, and lack of flexibility for people who have dependants.
Is it any wonder there are no big budget games about being a mother when many women feel it’s pretty much impossible to be a mum while also being a game developer? This is to say nothing of the other factors that have pushed many women out of the business of making games and prevented countless others from entering it, including the male-centric culture of many video game companies, sometimes involving well-documented and widespread cases of sexual harassment — all vigorously defended by the usual voices jumping in to enforce the status quo with targeted campaigns of intimidation and threats when critics dare to bring up these problems and call for change.
This is how a glaring hole is created, one that sucks up the stories of half the world’s population.
This particular chicken and egg situation is fuelled by a very peculiar kind of closed logic — men play games more, therefore it only makes sense for companies to continue to make games that will largely appeal to men over women. Men play games, so we need to appeal to men, so then men will play games, so then we’ll need to appeal more to men. In her brilliant article “No Girls Allowed”, which outlines the gendered history of the games industry, Tracey Lien, like the Washington Post, calls this a “chicken-and-egg situation”. I like to think of it as an ouroboros though because it sounds cooler to say.
At least part of the reason this circular logic exists is because “women don’t play games and aren’t an audience worth pursuing” is one of those pieces of so-called conventional wisdom that is both constantly being disproven and stubbornly refuses to die. In 2015, Life is Strange came out of nowhere and surprised everyone with its critical and commercial success, thanks in part to the fact that it attracted a lot of female players and quite a few people who don’t normally play games. Dragon Age: Inquisition is one of Bioware’s best-selling games and, perhaps not coincidentally, it has nearly twice as many female players as the genre average.
It would be easy to think of these as part of a perpetual string of exceptions, like Tracy Oliver described, along with the increasing number of games that are doing well by remembering that people other than 15–25 year old dudes exist. But I think it’s time we stopped being so surprised. Anecdotally, I know quite a few women who I’m pretty sure would love games if they’d just been introduced to them as kids, or if they could look around and see well-advertised games that boast things other than perfectly rendered giblets and copious T&A. Some of my female friends are only getting into games in their 30s because boyfriends or husbands or excellent friends are carefully introducing them to titles they’ll enjoy, but it’s slow going, and they still feel far from welcomed or excited by the hobby as a whole.
I can’t prove it, but I believe that there is a whole invisible world of people out there who don’t yet, but who could and would love playing games, even in genres we wouldn’t expect them to. But we just haven’t trained our eyes to see them.
Part 2: Sorry, You Don’t Exist
“What motivates people in gaming is important for industry professionals to design games that cater to the demands of consumers.” -Teoh et al. (2023), The Validation and Psychometric Properties of the Gaming Instinctual Motivation Scale
Tracy Oliver blasts that studio executive for not having done his research on the fact that black people do in fact love horror, but sometimes even research is not enough to slay the ouroboros. What if, hypothetically, black people weren’t turning out to watch a lot of horror films yet because of the well-known problems of racism in the genre? How would the executive know there was a huge untapped market?
I work in academia, so take it from me — research is a valuable and important thing, but I’m about to tear it to shreds. Because there are some things it just can’t do. It can tell you in great detail what’s happening now, but it can’t tell you with any great accuracy what might happen if a bunch of things were very different. Sometimes, a new thing just needs to be made before we see how big the audience actually was for it. Market research would have told you that only 35% of MMO players are women, which according to the game industry playbook, means that anyone wanting their new MMO to do well should focus on keeping the dudes pleased. But then Sky: Children of the Light released to critical acclaim in 2019 and topped 50 million installs the following year. And by the way, its active player base is roughly 70% female. Market research is crucial, and useful, but sometimes it only serves to reflect existing realities back at us, trapping us all in our own reflection.
Here’s a question and I’m gonna give you a good 10 seconds to answer it. Look carefully. What’s wrong with this picture?
We’ll return to that screenshot in a bit, but first I want to talk about how we know what we think we know.
By its nature, a research study can’t directly assess the potentially millions of people it wants to describe, so it has to take a sample and generalise. The conclusions that come out of research are shaped by the data that go in, but the data that go in can be skewed by all kinds of things, including where participants were recruited from and who actually responded to the survey. And it’s been my suspicion for a while now that research on gamers has some big blind spots that are contributing to the ouroboros of ideas about why people play games.
The Gamer Motivation Survey, developed by Nick Yee and Nicolas Ducheneaut (aka Quantic Foundry) is a free online survey. You might have come across it already. You can take it right now and get an instant breakdown of your gaming motivation profile, which is pretty cool. You should pause the video and take it, it’s good fun. I actually remember doing the survey about six years ago, and I didn’t love it. And on retaking it for this video, it didn’t get any better with age. I immediately noticed, then and now, that there are a ton of questions on the survey about things I don’t care about at all, and no questions about some of my strongest motivations for playing games. For brevity, here’s the short profile I got.
Your primary (dominant) player type is the Slayer. Slayers want to be the heroic protagonists in a cinematic story. They are solo gamers who enjoy highly curated narratives and slower-paced gameplay. They see games as highly interactive action movies to be experienced.
This summary… doesn’t describe me very well. I give exactly zero shits about being a heroic protagonist, I like highly curated narratives with a slow pace but also plenty of other types of games, and I sure as hell do not see games as highly interactive action movies. I think when I said I like narrative in games it conflated that with on-rails cinematic action games, which…yeah.
So, straight away, this survey seemed to be pretty poor at capturing the kinds of games I love and the reasons I play them. That got me thinking about what kinds of questions I wish I’d been asked, and what an accurate description of myself as a gamer would look like if those questions had been asked. Here’s what I came up with:
Your player type is the Seeker. You love games that are clever, that challenge conventions, use mechanics in surprising and unique ways, and explore a range of feelings and environments. You place a high value on games that tell meaningful stories, prompt reflection and have relevance to the real world. You see games as both entertainment and art.
Here’s the thing. There’s no combination of responses I could give on the Gamer Motivation Survey that would yield anything like that description. Because the survey simply wasn’t looking for gamers like me.
And then I started thinking about all the other gamer types out there, the ones that go unrecognised by research that only ever seems to acknowledge the existence of conventional gamers — the Skirmisher, the Gladiator, the Ninja, the Bounty Hunter. How about “the Carer”, someone who wants games to tap into their desire to nurture and care for others, who want to show love and empathy and to connect deeply and authentically with other people? What about “the Maverick”, someone who primarily sees games as art, who seeks out games that do weird and unusual things, that experiment with form and genre and give the player emotionally challenging and perspective-shaping experiences? Those people, and maybe countless others, are invisible to this survey. And that’s partly because of the research it was based on.
Let’s talk about the history of research on gamer types please don’t go away, I promise this will be brief. Richard Bartle published his famous gamer taxonomy in 1996. He identified four styles of play. Then there was Sherry et al.’s 2006 taxonomy, which identified six gaming motivations. In the same year, Yee published two studies of gamer motivation, which identified five and three key motivations respectively. A year later, a study by Jansz and Tanis found seven. And this is by no means an exhaustive list of the literature.
Based on a quick look, this would seem to be a pretty exhaustive list of the various reasons gamers game — for Competition, Achievement, Social Interaction. But here’s what you don’t see. Bartle’s study was based on a forum conversation of about 30 MUD players. Sherry et al.’s sample was very young, with most respondents being middle and high school kids, although to their credit, it’s one of the very few of these types of studies that doesn’t heavily skew male. Speaking of which, Yee’s studies focused solely on MMORPG players, and one of those samples was 89% male. Whereas Jansz and Tanis’s study focused exclusively on FPS players, who were not only very young, not only pretty hardcore in how much they gamed, but 99% male.
What becomes clear when you take a closer look is that these studies do not describe the motivations of people who play games. They describe the motivations of largely young, very largely male people who play a lot of AAA games, or even just a lot of one type of AAA game.
And these biases are now self-replicating. Items for the Gamer Motivation Survey were written based on a literature review of motivations already identified by existing research, some of it 60 years old. So all the biases of previous research were basically just imported straight into the Gamer Motivation Survey. By letting their questions be so heavily coloured by outdated research using extremely restricted samples, Quantic Foundry kind of closed the door on finding new things in a medium that is constantly changing and doing new things. They also tested and refined their survey with a sample that skewed pretty heavily towards young male PC gamers, which they at least openly acknowledge These participants don’t represent the population of people who play games. But the Gamer Motivation Survey was built on their data.
And that’s how you end up with a survey that contains five questions about how much you love munching loot and collecting knick knacks and cheevos, and not a single question about how much you delight in inhabiting someone else’s unique artistic vision. A survey that asks you four times how much you enjoy being challenged mechanically, and not once how much you enjoy being challenged emotionally. One that asks you seven times how much you value games that let you experience fast-paced action, blood and guts, and blowing things up, and never once asks you how much you value games that let you experience any emotion other than adrenaline-fuelled excitement.
It’s, well, it’s the ouroboros again.
Bias in academic studies like these will go on to influence the kinds of games that get made, which will further meet the needs of conventional mostly white mostly male mostly young gamers, who will go on to be heavily favoured and focused on in studies, and so on, and so on, and all the while a vast range of other motivations and gamer types might be out there, waiting to be found if we just recruited from places other than Reddit and asked about things others wouldn’t think to.
Back to this survey, which by the way can be found on Quantic Foundry’s website. Say you’re a gamer, and your favourite game types are puzzle games, rhythm games, and point and click narrative adventures. You fire up a survey about gaming and you see this.
What boxes do you tick? Too bad, I guess you don’t exist.
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote: “every survey aimed at establishing the hierarchy predetermines the hierarchy by determining the population deemed worthy of helping to establish it.” Which is an academic way of saying that measurement isn’t a neutral act. When you measure something, you’re actively participating in drawing the boundaries of what is and isn’t legitimate. When you do a survey of games and you exclude games associated with more “casual” play styles, or when you do a survey of game makers but you exclude hobbyists, you are cementing an idea of what and who can be called a legitimate part of that space. You’re making a judgment. When Quantic Foundry, and every other academic for that matter, conducts their studies of gamer motivation, they are — however unintentionally — taking a position about what is allowed to “count” as a gaming motivation and who is allowed to “count” themselves as a gamer.
And from my profile, I’m not sure that I count. I have pretty low overall coverage on the six dimensions. According to Quantic Foundry I’m low on motivation to play games. But I spend a lot of time playing games. I really, really love games! I’m not low on motivation, I’m very high on the kinds of motivation the Gamer Motivation Survey doesn’t assess.
I say this not because I think this is bad research — it’s not. But it contains its biases, just as every research study does, and when you’re one of the people deligitimised and excluded by a research study, you notice those biases in a way others don’t. But even I understand why Quantic Foundry went the way they did. It could be that the motivations I wish they would measure don’t even exist in large numbers among gamers yet and wouldn’t make sense to include in a fairly brief survey. Even more complicatedly, the motivations I think are missing may be more prevalent right now in people who aren’t gamers, but might be in the future, if the industry changed to invite them in and give them the types of experiences they value. Quantic Foundry’s research isn’t bad, but it’s not the whole story, even if on first glance, it might look like it.
I can’t be certain, but I think that what people want from games may be more varied and constantly changing than we imagine. I think there might be a ton of all different kinds of gamers and potential gamers in the world, invisible even to the researchers whose entire job it is to study them because there is simply no box for them to tick.
Part 3: What If You Had a Gun?
“We’re happy to dominate some stiff AI and reap the accompanying achievement, and yet we’re increasingly aware of the limited set of verbs we have to express much of anything beyond shoot and loot. Games just love to ask, “What would you do?” and then cut you off before you can really answer.” -Tevis Thompson (2013), “Half-Lives: The Walking Dead: 400 Days, Sorcery!, and Depression Quest”
Critics and fans alike gush constantly about how video games are an empathy machine, how they let you embody any kind of person and live a life through that character. Go anywhere, be anyone, do anything. But how true is that, especially of the mainstream industry? The dadification of games was notable not just for its subject matter, but for the way many of these games defined fatherhood as violence, conflating protection with brutality, fatherly love with monstrous acts of cruelty.
At its best, fatherhood is a complex and life-affirming thing, made up of thousands of small moments of love, encouragement, and play. And yet, when a variety of developers decided to make a game about being a dad, all they could think of was a dad with a gun, or maybe an axe, who mostly shows his love by massacring as many people as possible. This isn’t true for all the dad games of the 2010s, of course. And to be clear, some of them are among the best games made in the 2010s. These aren’t bad games, well some of them are bad games but taken together, it’s hard not to conclude that they degrade fatherhood, reduce it to an ugly and grotesquely simplistic thing, partly because the real-life developer dads just wanted to project themselves onto a badass muscle hero daddy. It must be said that these dad games don’t do a good job at all of depicting what fatherhood is. But if we’re honest, fatherhood isn’t even close to the only thing narrative AAA games degrade by forcing them into the same sausage machine every other big budget game gets squeezed through.
I have no interest in making the argument that violence in games make us more violent somehow — I don’t think they do. But I do happen to think that games are art. And so, my question is the same one I asked when I toured the Uffizi gallery in Florence. Why is it all the same fucking thing? I mean, Jesus I get that you love the baby saviour, but Christ could you paint, like, anything else? Literally anything. Just do something else.
Lara Croft is an archeologist. Why is she able to do this?
As pointed out by Lucy O’Brien in her piece “Are Guns in Video Games Holding the Medium Back?”, the immersion-breaking dissonance that happens when “good guy” Nathan Drake or affable Marcus Holloway mow down dozens upon dozens of people in between bouts of quipping is a direct result of how constantly gunplay, and violence in general, are shoehorned into stories that don’t support it. Even in games that dare to have a story or a setting that is wonderfully alien or weird, the gameplay layer underneath is often just the same re-used can of SPAM. And no, making a game that has you play the same meat-grinder as always, but now your character feels a bit sad about it, does not count as innovation in this space.
It’s not hard to make games that don’t revolve around shooting, looting, collecting and competing. Literally every day, indie developers are making games about having conversations, warehousing, taking photos of stuff, cooking, unpacking your shit, snooping, climbing, swimming, flying, burning stuff, shopkeeping, blinking, translating, singing, bartending, embalming, and being a naughty little goose. Just to name a few.
Over the two and a half decades I’ve been playing games, I’ve found that the gaming community has been more than willing to rightfully excoriate a stale mechanic or a tedious trend — the escort mission, the stealth section, the water level, the quick time event. But when it comes to the most tired and overused verb in all of gaming, there’s barely a peep from anyone but the occasional critic bold enough to step out of line.
Before you come at the feminazi for wanting to take away your games, hold your horses. I’m not saying combat-driven games shouldn’t be part of the AAA space, I’m saying a lot of other types of games should. I’m not nearly the first person to wonder why the mainstream games industry is so dominated by endless iterations on the same types of characters, stories, tropes and mechanics. Games where being a father means being a serial murderer and being a mother isn’t possible. I can’t be the only person to have seen the yawning black hole at the center of the games industry where a world of much more interesting games could be, and I know I’m not the only person to feel like I’m ageing out of the hobby, like I’ve grown but games have largely stayed the same, stuck in an endless promise of slick action, massive violence, high-fidelity graphics and Chosen One storylines.
I believe the community wants a greater variety of mechanics and experiences, because when the industry fails to deliver — which it largely has — modders just do it themselves. No-enemy mods have found an audience, from Dark Souls to Alien: Isolation. SOMA’s no-enemy mod was so popular it became an official game mode. One of the best things to come out of Skyrim has been the mod The Forgotten City, which got made into an award-winning philosophical time loop mystery. In 2018, Ubisoft introduced Discovery Mode to the Assassin’s Creed series — a conflict-free mode where you can just hang out in a lovingly crafted piece of ancient history. A year and a half after release it had already had 2.3 million players.
If the best thing about games is that they can let us do anything, why do they keep making us do the same things? If games can let us be anyone, why is it so hard for me to find a well-funded game in which I can be an elderly person, or a Libyan child, or someone fighting on the non-American side of an international conflict, or someone who finds a way to choose peace over perpetual violence, coexistence over colonisation? For an industry whose entire job it is to create hundreds of these so-called empathy generators every year, I see a pretty lackluster selection of the kinds of people and behaviours I’m being asked to empathise with.
The grim reality is that now, the industry has cultivated a player base that doesn’t expect any different. Players have become so conditioned by superficial variation that they don’t even realise, or care, how much games are just repeating the same fundamental gameplay loop with different coats of paint. It brings to mind a quote by Martin Scorsese from a now-infamous article on the domination of cinema by big-budget superhero movies and franchise spin-offs, using an analogy we’re familiar with by now:
“It’s a chicken-and-egg issue. If people are given only one kind of thing and endlessly sold only one kind of thing, of course they’re going to want more of that one kind of thing.”
The first step to making change in the AAA industry is to recognise that it should change, and part of that is training ourselves to see not just the latest heroic murder simulator put in front of us but the void where a more unique and special game could have been, if we just demanded it.
Part 4: I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art
“What is game design missing? I ask this question not just in terms of cultural elements. Not just in terms of diverse protagonists. Not just in terms of references beyond fantasy and science fiction and modern day warfare. I ask this question in terms of game mechanics and game systems. I ask in terms of adrenaline, dopamine, oxytocin, opioids, and other reward systems. I ask in terms of gameplay that helps a wider range of people understand themselves and their responses to stress and to the world.” -Rose Brie Code (2017), “Slouching toward relevant video games”
In 1970, artist John Baldessari burned all of his paintings, amounting to 13 years’ worth of creative work, in an expression of protest, frustration and liberation from the formalism he felt increasingly constrained by. The following year, at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, he produced his best-known work, “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art”, an act of penance playing on the well-known schoolroom punishment, requiring the line to be written repeatedly on the exhibition walls.
In 2016, Rose Brie Code adapted this catch-cry into a landmark essay titled “Video games are boring”. In it, she describes being asked about games by her non-gamer friends, and then largely failing to find games that they would love, be moved and interested by. In her conversations with them, she learned more about that glaring gap that so often goes unseen and unacknowledged. She found that her friends didn’t care about fighting, fast-paced action, or realistic graphics. They cared about three things: having moving experiences in which they could grow or change as a person, not being repulsed or insulted by the game’s representation of people like them, and seeing their own interests and cultural tastes reflected in the work.
When asking her female friends what they wanted in a game, it may surprise you that “a female protagonist” wasn’t in the top three answers. It didn’t surprise me. The women I know who don’t game require a whole lot more than a conventional, violence-soaked AAA power fantasy with a chick on the front cover. Rose Brie argues that many potential gamers want soothing experiences, relief from the stress of daily life and the constant overwhelming system shock of hypercapitalism, and artistic works that engage their empathy and their humanity.
They also don’t want to be actively hampered from entering the hobby by a lack of accessibility. Many games assume a pre-existing degree of video game literacy or experience, and give little consideration to newer players. This is explored wonderfully in Razbuten’s series, Gaming for a Non-Gamer, in which he experiments with having his non-gamer wife play a variety of games and finds that she struggles with things he wouldn’t even think twice about, such as being able to tell the difference between the intended path and non-traversable set-dressing or the need to occasionally take your eye off the center of the screen to read critical information off to the side. Raz finds that games contain controls that are never explained, and that tutorials are easy to miss, and often either omit key mechanics or front-load too much information at once. He identifies some simple things that games could do to reduce confusion, such as ensuring that new players are explicitly prompted to do a tutorial, or showing the location of the button on the controller when a button prompt pops up.
But even when a gamer has all the existing experience and skill you could ask for, games sometimes make it needlessly difficult for certain people to remain in the hobby. For instance, adults who have jobs, kids, and less than 6–8 free hours a day to play games. The length of many AAA games basically makes them inaccessible to anyone with adult responsibilities. This is not even getting to easily implementable functions that would make sure that you can pick a game back up easily after you’ve been away for a while, such as the option for a quick refresher of the controls or a “previously on…” style recap of the story up until then. And don’t get me started on the worst offender…
This isn’t to say all games should be 10–12 hours in length, but we have to admit that there are many ways our hobby just needlessly excludes people — even those who actively want to participate. This keeps the category of “gamers” artificially constrained to a very limited type of person. There’s nothing immutable about the dominance of teenagers and young men in our hobby. We made that happen, the AAA industry is still making it happen by acting like those are the only people who matter, and rendering everyone else all but invisible.
Part 5: This Is Not Game Maker’s Toolkit
“One of the first essay discords I joined was incredibly picky about the work I did, but all of their constructive feedback was ‘do it like this creator’. At the time it was when people like Joseph Anderson were incredibly popular, so the expectation was that any games coverage had to be these groaning, hours long analyses.” -hotcyder
“I feel a lot of my fans really just want me to be another Contrapoints or PhilosophyTube who primarily makes political videos.” -i am error
“Meanwhile, I stuck to my guns and I finally got one video out that received a few thousand views, but the very first comment I got on that video was, ‘You should make videos more like Game Maker’s Toolkit.’” -SocraTetris
There’s a closed-mindedness and reluctance to change at the center of the games industry, one that permeates the culture, from who gets hired to make games to what games get made to who they get made for. And I’ve noticed this same conservatism bleeding into content about games. I don’t just make video essays, I also watch a lot of video essays and I’m constantly surprised at how un-surprised I am at what’s out there. Firstly there’s the predominance of a certain type of voice behind the mic, one that becomes so obvious the longer you watch video essays about games you can no longer deny it.
I want to stress that I strongly believe there’s a place for everyone in this hobby. I’m not interested in telling anyone to shut up and go away, but I do think that it’s on all of us to ask ourselves why the games video essay Youtube scene is so overwhelmingly white and male. Of course, the relative scarcity of women making essays about games on Youtube is not a natural law, any more than the absence of mum games in the plentiful era of dad games.
Years ago now, when I told my boyfriend I was thinking of starting a games essay channel, the first thing he brought up was Gamergate. Women and minorities who want to enter this scene face a very scary obstacle course of doubts and fears — will I be harassed, will I be preyed on, will I get doxxed and threatened the next time the internet decides to lose its collective mind? The ordeal of being a woman in the games criticism scene has led some critics to quit, and countless others to never start in the first place. Their voices were and are crucial and their relative scarcity is part of what perpetuates the ouroboros. As we’ve seen, the industry has a lot of blind spots and biases and the kinds of people who fall into those cracks are more likely to see them as well as other ways the industry could be doing better. Without their perspectives, the hobby only becomes more closed-minded and insular. And we get stories like this:
“And yes, I noticed that most of my inspirations were white men who weren’t, at least publicly, neurodivergent. I fixated on this aspect for a while. I tried to hide myself in my videos as much as possible. I stopped using facecam. I talked faster than normal. I tried very hard to achieve peak relatability, to pass as just another white guy on the internet talking about games. And it worked. I even received a comment that read, ‘Why is your channel avatar black when you are obviously white.’” -SocraTetris
Oof. Did it just get sad in here?
We should not feel good about the fact that we’ve created such a narrow idea of what a “gaming Youtuber” looks like that people who look or sound any different from that feel they need to literally hide themselves to have a chance of making it.
I’m not arguing for a kind of skin-deep diversity where everyone looks different but has the same takes. Diversity of opinion and taste may be the most needed kind of diversity in the gaming hobby right now, and part of achieving that is to welcome in and listen to a variety of different kinds of people, but the other part of achieving this is the kind of content everyone already here is making. I want to tread lightly here because of my love and respect for this community, and for that reason this was by far the hardest part of the video to write. So I want to take just a moment to clarify that while I’m criticising certain Youtube trends, I’m not having a go at any particular creator or channel doing any of these things. I myself have done some of these things, and I adore some of the content I’m about to discuss, just like I adore (most) dad games. We can love and validate individual works and still point out how needlessly predominant they are compared to other types of content we’d like to see a lot more of.
That said, when I spend time on gaming Youtube, I find a certain sameness of perspective and tone that’s difficult to ignore, a thousand and one channels making videos that feel like a copy-paste of what’s come before, and relatively little content you could truly call creative or vulnerable or that experiment with the video essay format. I see dozens and dozens of videos covering Zelda and Final Fantasy and Metal Gear, and paltry coverage of many incredible indie gems that deserve infinitely more attention. I see hours-long review videos undoubtedly born of passion and love and made with sweat and tears, and almost nothing in them is as impressive as the time SocraTetris made a one-minute video essay consisting entirely of lines in the style of Disco Elysium attributes. It’s when you see one of these rare sparks of artistic flair (and I’ve linked some great examples in the description) that you realise how little we’ve explored what we could do with this format if we weren’t so blinkered by the cycle of videos about how Silent Hill is a masterpiece begetting more videos about how Silent Hill is a masterpiece.
And I more than understand that a lot of us are just amateurs who picked up a $50 mic one day and started ranting about their favourite thing and haven’t found their own identity or voice yet, and that a lot of people find their voice by first copying their own inspirations before branching off. I’m not here to judge anyone for being in the middle of this process. But the fact remains, that what we have right now in the games video essay scene is an incredibly narrow self-replicating spectrum of content. The ouroboros, chewing through yet another video about the philosophical inspirations behind Bioshock.
I don’t want to suggest that deviating from convention is easy or that it’s something everyone should do, or that the blame is entirely on the shoulders of creators. Don’t think I haven’t noticed that when essayists do put out videos that are challenging and inspiring and unflinchingly personal, they receive the inevitable response — “this video is too subjective”, “you cover the facts alright but I don’t need your life story”, “get your goddamn feelings out of your discussion of games”. A heck of a lot of gamers would rather watch another Dark Souls lore rundown than something quirky, personal, or artistic. Many of them seem to have seen so little of anything that isn’t an angry gamer rant, a clone of Game Maker’s Toolkit or a 4-hour long retrospective about their favourite game series that reads like a Wikpedia page, that they think anything different is some kind of mistake.
In the games video essayist scene, one of the most common complaints you’ll hear is creators saying they feel pressured to only create the same type of content lest they deviate from their channel’s brand and alienate the part of their audience that wants to be fed the same type of content over and over. This isn’t helped by the silent pressure of the ever-looming algorithm, the presence of videos similar to yours with 100k, or 500k, or a million views because they made the right kind of video with the right keywords at the right time. Many creators feel compelled to copy what those uber-successful creators have done in the hope that if they do something similar they’ll hit it big too. And so, in an attempt to make the random whims of the algorithm seem a little less random, sameness predominates.
So it’s not just the rest of industry trapped inside the ouroboros, it’s us Youtubers as well — infinitely covering the same major titles and the same topics in the same ways because that’s what the algorithm likes, keeping things “objective” and familiar because that’s what the most vocal part of the audience likes, copying what we’ve seen before because we’re too scared to try doing something new. Gamers, developers, critics, fans, creators — we’re all just stuck on repeat, trapped in a rut we can’t even see.
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“Sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place; either way something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories”. This quote is from Carmen Maria Machado, about a scholar discussing African stories of slavery, in a book about an abusive gay relationship — two types of stories that have historically been repressed.
Kel Coleman’s short story, “I Wear My Spiders in Remembrance of Myself”, is about Aniyah, a black queer girl who is plagued by invisible spiders, that climb out of people’s mouths, crawl up her body and hurt her. Only those with similar experiences, of having been treated as less than because of race or gender or sexuality, can see the spiders on Aniyah’s body, and no one can see them all.
I’m struck by this theme of conspicuous missingness, the experience all these authors seem to be describing in one way or another, of looking around and seeing so clearly what other people can’t see or even admit the existence of, like the spiders of racial trauma, or the gaping hole left by countless years of silenced histories.
At the risk of equating the existence of too many Call of Duty games with horrors like misogyny and racism, I recognise the feeling. And I’ve never felt it as strongly as when I look around at the games industry, at the gargantuan abyss at the centre of it, containing all the narratives we could have, all the protagonists we never get to see, all the verbs we seldom get to perform, all the possibilities for storytelling and mechanics going unexplored and underfunded as we collectively shower praise on shiny derivative goop and make the same games again and again.
And this is the impossible challenge if you’re standing on this side of the argument. How do you communicate to other people that there’s a problem when the results of that problem are invisible? What do you point to as evidence when what you’re trying to point to is, by definition, just a lack? You can do your best to make these gaps visible somehow, to try and point them out to others so they can be seen, so they can be filled. But it’s a hard task, and the pushback is inevitable.
I can totally see why it exists though. If games already reflect your own gender, your own hero fantasy, your own motivations to kill or collect or compete or complete, your own sexual preferences, your own political biases — it won’t feel like anything’s missing at all. Anything different or new must seem like an unnecessary and forced intrusion on a landscape that is already complete. Any calls for change must seem like, well, forcing politics into video games, a catch phrase that holds no water but nonetheless refuses to die.
Another related excuse I’ve seen is the “economic realism” one that goes something like, “It’s just supply and demand. These are the games that make money. Doing it differently would lose money, so stop forcing your politics into and so and so.”
But there’s a reason I chose to start this video by talking about the film industry. And that’s because this issue, of bias and blinkered-ness, isn’t unique to games. Hollywood has its own pervasive, and repeatedly-proven-wrong, ideas about what will and won’t sell — “people don’t want to watch films with female leads”, “audiences aren’t interested in films about black people”, oh where did all these surprise commercial and critical successes come from, who could have possibly seen them coming? So, for the claim that the games industry keeps cranking out all those million dollar games because they’re just “financially safe”? Hollywood thought a neverending tidal wave of superhero movies and action franchise sequels were “financially safe”, until they started bombing pretty hard.
I’m quite convinced that film industry executives are so out of touch with audiences that they legitimately can’t tell a hit from a flop, or a safe bet from a trashfire, and I don’t think game industry executives deserve any more credit. In fact, I have this wild idea that broadening your audience is, in fact, good for the bottom line. Yes, supply and demand exists, but as Scorcese has noted, it’s not a one-way street. Supply doesn’t just meet demand, supply also creates demand. Risk-averse CEOs sitting behind a pile of spreadsheets might think it’s a good financial decision to continue making games that appeal specifically to young adult men, apparently because young men have lots of free time and disposable income, but do you know who has the most spare time and money? Boomers.
In yet another example of “industry decision-makers probably don’t know shit”, about five years ago, Rose Brie’s studio, TRU LUV, created a mobile game based entirely on the hunch that there was a large unharnessed market of potential gamers out there not motivated by traditional adrenalin-based gameplay loops. It was designed to tap into the less commonly explored ‘tend and befriend’ instinct, the late discovery of which is itself the result of sex bias in medical research. That game is #SelfCare, in which the player takes care of an on-screen character via mini-games like picking through tarot cards, doing laundry, and giving your character a massage.
Despite pretty much every game design expert she consulted telling her she was designing her game “wrong”, #SelfCare had 500,000 downloads in the first six weeks after release, with no advertising, far more than the expected few thousand. To date, it’s surpassed 5 million installs. It’s simply not the case that there’s no market for games like these and no money making potential in an experience millions of people are clearly interested in having.
So, on a purely economic level, the case for diversifying the types of games being made and who they’re made for is solid, but on a cultural and artistical level, there’s just no argument. Games are art, and when we make room for all genres and voices in art, we all benefit from the result. But is it any wonder games have such a hard time being recognised and respected as art, when the industry doesn’t even respect its audience enough to stimulate them in any but the most basic of ways? The very best art elevates us, it grows us, it makes room inside of us for new stories and perspectives, it challenges convention, it gives a raw and powerful voice to the marginalised and the unheard, and most importantly, it speaks to our better natures. It speaks to the wise and humane and eternal in us, not the horny teenage shithead in us.
As Rose Brie points out, catering to a narrow range of motivations and demographics risks making our entire industry artistically bankrupt and culturally irrelevant.
“Care and characters will make games that are both culturally relevant and physiologically stimulating to more people. These are games that will help us understand ourselves and our lives. These are games that will carry us into a more respectful, more respected, and strengthened future. This is where video games can shine not just as bright as but brighter than other media. This is an industry I would want to work in.”
The word “industry” has come up a lot in this video, and I want to say that despite the fact that I’ve been using the term “games industry” to mean the larger industrial mode of production that characterises the AAA industry, the field of game creation is obviously so much more than just Blizzard and Ubisoft — if it weren’t, I wouldn’t still be playing games. The video game production space is not one homogenous entity, it’s a worldwide network of many different communities and industries, some of which you’ve almost definitely never heard of but should have. Yes, an incredible indie scene does exist and yes, it is successfully addressing some of the problems I’ve complained about in this video, but indie games still live on the periphery of the hobby, forced to compete for our time and money against vastly bigger and better funded studios. Let’s not pretend it’s not incredibly rough out there for indies — the vast majority will never turn a profit or even reach most of the audience who might love them. Do you think my non-gamer friends who barely know their Marios from their Zeldos know Kentucky Route Zero exists?
I want much more than what we have now — a hobby in which tiresome, bloated AAA behemoths suck up almost all the funding, advertising reach, review column inches and conversational mileage, leaving scraps for everything else. I want more than scraps for struggling indie developers, and I want better from the AAA space for good measure.
What would happen if we, collectively, refused to make or consume any more “boring art”? If we agreed to escape the ouroboros together by opening our eyes to all the things we’ve refused to see until now — the stories we’ve been robbed of, the player types we refuse to look for, the range of non-violent experiences and mechanics games could be exploring, all the new people and perspectives we could have in the hobby if we didn’t put up barriers to their entry, the critical voices that could light up the landscape if we dared to stray from the predictable and the expected?
There’s a whole world of possibility out there for us. What if we’ve only just scratched the surface?
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