Games have a long history in humanity’s existence, being a pillar of basic human interaction. Sports make up a large portion of what we know as ‘games’, with contests of athleticism long being a way of asserting physical and social dominance. That being said, games of intellect or chance (like gambling) have likely been around just as long. This post, however, is going to focus on video games, and how they have recently been co-opted into the mainstream.
I find it hard to place the abstract concept of ‘games’ into a single category of popular, high, or any other kind of culture, because it’s much too broad. The Olympics, for instance, started off as a strictly Grecian religious festival and essentially ceased when Greece was conquered, only to later be revived as an international competition (History 2010), effectively opening the games to all people, and all forms of culture.
Another, more modern example of games crossing boundaries of culture is video games, specifically the popularization of video games. Starting off as a niche in the ‘geek’ or ‘nerd’ subculture, video games pretty much stayed that way through computer and arcade games, until Nintendo came around. Though a Japanese company, Nintendo’s consoles were popular enough in the US, causing video games to become rooted in popular culture. However, it isn’t until the recent explosion of video game streaming and ‘e-sports’, that video games were truly co-opted into the global mainstream.
Using the Frankfurt School's theory on popular culture as a culture industry, artifacts of pop culture share “the same features as other products of mass production: commodification, standardization, and massification.” (Kellner, 2007). Video games are a perfect example of this. Before they were integrated into mainstream culture, video games didn’t have ‘massification’. They were always commodified (being a commodity) and one could easily make the argument that video games have always had some element of ‘standardization’. However, video games had yet to be mass produced until they were being mass consumed.
This tells us a couple things about video games. First, they were always a product. Created and sold for profit, consumed for entertainment. However, though an artifact of a subculture, they weren’t a part of mainstream culture. It wasn’t until video games evolved and opened the doors for new ways to be entertained by video games that they were co-opted by the mainstream.
To better understand how the origin of video games affected their growth in popularity, I want to discuss a common side effect of popularization- politicization. As video games became more popular, both the games and the culture of the players became more politicized. This has happened with most things in popular culture, but I want to compare video games to a specific example.
Penny (2019), describes the politicization of another nerdy-gone-mainstream artifact, being fan fiction. Fanfiction was politicized in a very different way than video games, illustrating an interesting comparison. A main factor in the rise of fanfiction is because it is, as Penny describes, “a space for women, community, and political activism”. Jenkins III (1998) agreed with Penny that fanfiction was mostly female dominated. He didn’t dip into the politics of fanfiction, but argued that it allowed “a degree of dignity and respect otherwise lacking” for those writing.
Right now, video games have reached a level of popularity that people from all different cultures and political ideals could be involved with video games, but it’s nowhere near the levels of fanfiction as far as being ‘a space for women, community, and political activism’. Unlike video games, fanfiction became popular with politics at its heart. Being unsatisfied with the current state of media, people wanted to make a space for entertainment that also represented what they believed.
Video games were originally popularized by ‘nerds’, who, in this case, were typically male. So, before being co-opted, video games were made by and for men (or boys, usually white and upper-class), meaning the men were satisfied with whatever they consumed. Not only that, but producers of games themselves tend to resist politics as well (Campbell 2018)
Fanfiction, however, was made in response to commodities like video games in order to compensate for what people felt was missing. Fanfiction, in that way, is inherently political like Penny described. In order to politicize video games, there had to be consumers of video games who were unsatisfied with the way they were, which wasn’t possible until they were popularized.
So what does all this mean? To sum up, video games started off as entertainment for pretty specific subcultures, staying that way until at-home consoles like Nintendo allowed for video games to experience ‘massification’. Since it had already been commodified and standardized, this increase in video game consumption caused video games to become part of mainstream culture. This unique type of rise into popularity comes with unique consequences, such as a dramatically different form of politicization from something like fanfiction.
Campbell, C. (2018, June 20). Why are game companies so afraid of the politics in their games? Polygon. Retrieved December 1, 2021, from https://www.polygon.com/2018/6/20/17480666/video-games-companies-lying-politics.
History Editors. (2010, January 6). The Olympic Games. HISTORY. Retrieved November 30, 2021, from https://www.history.com/topics/sports/olympic-games.
Jenkins, H. (1988). Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan writing as textual poaching. In Critical Studies in Media Communication (2nd ed., Vol. 5, pp. 85–107). essay, EBSCO.
Penny, L. (2019, August 19). We can be heroes: How the nerds are reinventing pop culture. Wired. Retrieved December 1, 2021, from https://www.wired.com/story/culture-fan-tastic-planet-fanfic/.
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