These words mean just what I choose them to mean
The way we choose to talk about ourselves, about who we are and what we do, contributes not only to our own personal identity, but also to the identity of the culture we belong to. When we talk about ourselves as ‘gamers’ or as working in or aspiring to the ‘games industry’, we create certain expectations in those around us or boundaries around the discussion, even if we don’t mean to.
Both of those terms carry with them historical weight, but as time moves on, it can sometimes be useful to stop and reexamine them – to see if they still apply, and also to see if they’re still useful.
Let’s start with the audience: ‘Gamers’.
What does a person who plays games look like? If you delve into the statistics, they can tell you the shape of the ‘average gamer’, which sometimes, feels reassuring, but they can easily create a false sense of security. ‘We are all gamers then (or at least 68% of the population is) and it will only be a matter of time before everyone is like us.’
Unfortunately, that’s actually the least likely outcome of the increase in people who play games.
68% of the population equates to 14 million people. Try to imagine 14 million people agreeing on anything, let along all liking the same books or films or TV shows or music. Those 14 million people all play games, but they very likely wouldn’t class themselves as gamers. They don’t tell those sorts of stories about themselves or identify with some of the other aspects of a geek or nerd culture. They are just people who enjoy games, just as they enjoy movies or books or music.
The actual end-point of this increase in the number of people who play games is that the word ‘gamer’ will evolve to mean less and less an identity and simply become a description of what people do – amongst a whole other set of cultural engagement.
Which isn’t in any way a bad thing. This diversity opens up new opportunities and new audiences for creators, as well as creating a larger pool for the next generation of developers and artists to find what it is they want to do with their life. Even if they don’t identify themselves as ‘gamers’ in the same way that people do now.
Those same new developers are likely to step into quite a different space as the current games ‘industry’ – another shorthand word that is frequently used as a catch all term for everything associated in the creation, marketing, distribution, writing, and playing of games. Just as gamers are changing, the creation of games is changing too and it’s worthwhile reexamining whether or not using industry to describe so much of what happens is accurate – or useful.
Opportunities for game development have undergone huge shifts in the past few years. Everything from socially networked games, mobile phone gaming, motion control, digital distribution, free engines and middleware, crowd-funding, or alpha-funding, have all created an environment where previously boxed games funded by big publishers and sold on shop shelves is no longer the only way – or even the most desirable way – to create a game and find an audience.
Just like with ‘gamers’ there a greater diversity has evolved beneath the word ‘industry’ and the term no longer reflects all aspects of that. A 2-man team creating an iPhone game in their bedroom probably wouldn’t consider themselves part of an industry (and I imagine the industry wouldn’t either); an artist slaving away for the best part of a few years on a deeply personal project isn’t part of an industry; a writer reviewing or critiquing games is part of a different industry entirely; and an audience isn’t part of the creation process, – even if they might like to be, and even if sometimes they’re drawn – deliberately – into it.
And this is a good thing because greater diversity means greater choice – more ways to be part of the wider creative and artistic culture or, if you want, the industrial studio-led one.
I’ll admit, the world wouldn’t end if we continued to talk about things the same way, but sometimes adopted shorthands or stories sometimes don’t seem to fit properly. Sometimes you get older and how you identify yourself changes. A gamer at 16 may have other priorities by 20 or 25 or 30 and begin to try and find a better way to describe what they do. Someone coming from the ‘industry’ might be looking to break out, start something new, and find a better story to tell themselves about who they are and what they do.
The more options for stories we can tell ourselves, to find where in that growing population of 14 million people, the more diverse and engaged and personal we are, I think the better we can talk about what we care about to people who care too.
Filed Under: Gaming
