The Last of Us – nothing more than an overwrought, ladder-moving simulator (Credit: HBO/Warner Bros)
The barrier between video games and every other aspect of pop culture, already porous, has collapsed utterly. This is not, to be candid, what my pre-teen self expected to happen, back when I was lavishing untold hours on Super Nintendo classics. Even when these games boasted near-flawless mechanics, as in the case of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, or the sophisticated narrative of Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen, I considered them fairly disreputable diversions. It was generally agreed that they were the sort of mindless entertainments that could only be enjoyed alone in a room by children or adolescents, then kept out of sight.
The early world of internet gaming was a kind of messy bachelor pad, and we button-pushing boy masterminds abounded. Each of us had independently discovered these games, as we might have done with Roger Corman films or post-punk music, and we manspread across this open frontier. A process of acculturation equated console gaming and computer technology with maladjusted “nerds”, meaning that they held scant appeal for women or any other normies. Ensconced in parents’ basements or rat-hole apartments, the most successful gamers could demonstrate mastery alone or against others: crushing foes in one of the various Super Smash Bros fighting games or extending the virtual empire in their grand strategy game to the limits of the known world. In lives otherwise without purpose, in an economy that had been rapidly deindustrialising for decades, video games offered an opportunity for the cultivation of arete, or “excellence”, here confined to the movement of a mouse.
As Clifford Geertz wrote of machine gambling, the conclusion of his famous 1973 interpretation of Balinese cockfighting, video games were portrayed for years in the mainstream media as shallow, unedifying activities that lacked depth of meaning, investment, or consequence. They had, most assumed, nothing to do with the fundamental concerns of culture; they could not properly be called a “sociological entity”. Gamers, in turn, were all too often classified the way Geertz characterised “the socially despised and personally idiosyncratic” Balinese men who played the mechanical gambling games on the periphery of cockfights.
Not only were games derided, they were demonised, often proving a useful vehicle for media outlets. Tales of violent games and their bloodthirsty players got clicks. The Columbine murderers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, who played the first-person shooters Doom and Quake together, were villainous boy masterminds straight from central casting: a two-man “trenchcoat mafia” who used skills honed in these games to wreak vengeance on their better-adjusted high school classmates. After the 1999 Columbine massacre, the video game player became more than just a pitiable outcast; he was now a perpetual suspect, too.
But video games only grew in popularity, reaching ever-larger audiences and slowly raising “important questions”. Suddenly you had cultural critics, such as Tom Bissell, in a memorable 2011 essay for Grantland, expatiating about the literary merits and failings of big-budget games like the Elder Scrolls franchise. Where once all the video-gaming world had been the preserve of nerds, it was now supposed to be a welcoming place for everyone else. Stories about grandmothers fat-fingering mindless Candy Crush Saga games on their smartphones ceased to be novel; eventually they ceased to be stories at all.
Now, in the 2020s, video gaming has simply become culture. The fact that HBO’s big-budget, critically acclaimed new prestige television series, The Last of Us, is a faithful adaptation of a 10-year-old video game, offers compelling evidence. Mainstream pop-culture properties launched on the back of video-game success used to fail miserably, including the 1992 Super Mario Bros film or 2002 Resident Evil adaptation, reaffirming critic Roger Ebert’s point that “video games are not art”. Now nerdy video game culture is just plain old American monoculture. And the elites of this monoculture have elevated The Last of Us — a game beloved by many, but regarded by me as nothing more than an overwrought, ladder-moving simulator — to the level of middlebrow art: premium television status.
The reason for this shift is crudely simple: video games are where the money is. Worldwide video game revenue exceeds filmed entertainment revenue. In fact, where the global film and television industry brings in $100 billion in revenue, and the global sports industry roughly $75 billion, the video game industry produces more revenue than those two industries combined. And the multinational entertainment corporations have figured out how to package and repackage profitable intellectual property in as many ways, to as many people, as possible. It is only a matter of time before all the significant video gaming franchises — like all the significant comic books — are cannibalised by the Hollywood complex.
This process is proceeding apace. Last year gave us Uncharted — based on a popular video game from the same company that developed The Last of Us. It brought us, too, a television adaptation of Xbox Game Studios’ Halo. Neither was a critical success. As was the case with comics, what was lost along the way was exclusivity. Previously, these properties had belonged to a specific category of people, the video gamers. Now, they could be consumed, without the cultivation of any sort of gaming mastery, by everyone.
The war for exclusive control of these properties, which once resided on the video-gaming frontier, was waged — and lost — by the players roughly a decade ago. What began in 2014 as a targeted harassment campaign against independent game developer Zoë Quinn, for various alleged crimes against the integrity of game reviewing, coalesced into the fully-fledged “GamerGate” social movement. The nerds behind it took aim at the seemingly unethical collusion of the gaming press and various progressive groups, as well as the “mission creep” of social-justice ideology into games that had once been very nearly the private fiefdoms of their players. GamerGate pitted many veteran video gamers, interested in protecting their unique “gamer” identity, against the incursion of not merely what they considered “political correctness” into their territory but the millions of casual new video game fans who either didn’t mind or notice these changes or were actively interested in seeing them made. (Far more new players were in the former category than the latter.)
Initially playing out within the world of video games and video game journalism, GamerGate metastasised into a full-on political struggle, with many veteran “gamer”-identifying individuals ending up aligned with emerging Right-wing influencers who earned their stripes during this conflict, such as provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. Left-wing activists such as Anita Sarkeesian, backed by a new generation of video game players more closely aligned with the Left-liberal consensus of the Obama years, opposed them.
Video gaming, which had once been an intense, albeit neutral and private, experience, was now a major battlefront in the ongoing culture wars. And the conflict field-tested many arguments and strategies that would later be deployed by alt-Right and dirtbag Left-identifying people in 2015 and 2016. Though it still sounds somewhat absurd to make this claim, an argument can be made that GamerGate was almost as important as the violent ideological clashes that defined the turbulent Sixties; it was roughly analogous, then, to the Free Speech Movement that took place on the University of California-Berkeley campus during the 1964-1965 academic year, a seemingly minor event in the scheme of things that in hindsight had extraordinary societal ramifications.
When the dust began to clear, the video gamers understood that they were losing their games, much as the comics nerds had ceded their fandom to the vanilla-bland, focus group-crafted Marvel Cinematic Universe that now mined their beloved, pulpy stories for middlebrow movie ticket sales. This is exactly what happened to Uncharted, Halo, and numerous other in-progress video game-based projects — more than two dozen are slated for 2023 and beyond.)
My larger point is not whether GamerGate was “good” or “bad” — that issue was litigated to death at the time, a sort of Helen of Troy-grade topic capable of launching a thousand think pieces a day. My point is that it set in motion the politicisation of many whose identities depended entirely on being left alone on what had once been a vast, empty frontier. At the risk of overstating the claim — though it may not be possible to overstate it, given the declining fortunes of young men in the West — this development has contributed to the growth of a restive “reserve army” of incels, Neets(“not in education, employment, or training”). These forlorn boys have not only lost what they believe to be their rightful places in society but also the few pleasurable pastimes they had to themselves, which have been sanded down into something bland and digestible for the consumers of the monoculture.
Meanwhile, video games, like everything that gets too popular, have been absorbed by today’s dominant marketing methods. Much-hated microtransactions, subscriptions, and other bits of continuous re-selling are now built into games.
There is no “return to monke” possible here, and those video-game primitivists must be left to rage on the margins of society or assimilate and disappear. The final co-option of this community is the bitterest blackpill to swallow: both work and education have been video “gamified” by Human Resources managers trying to extract some cheap labour from all those Neets now idling on the sidelines of life itself. Where video gaming was once a private refuge from the workaday world, “gamification” is now a paradigm through which productivity is stocked. Neets can score points by reviewing digital documents, identifying images to be content-moderated, and other trivial but necessary tasks not yet amenable to full automation.
The true video gamers must face, to paraphrase Marx and Engels, their real conditions of life and their real relations with others. Capitalism, “the river in which we sink or swim”, has a swiftly-moving current that pulls them irresistibly into that future — which may contain even more ominous developments, such as the AI-fuelled redefinition of work. The loss is more tragic than many realise: a culture dependent on one of society’s last frontiers was destroyed and reshaped. And it is irreversible.
Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work
MoustacheClubUS 
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeI had to stop reading when the author cited the infamously poor wikipedia article for ‘Gamergate’ which has been the subject of an editing war by activists for nearly a decade.
Should we be surprised that a journalist skims over a story that was actually about journalistic corruption; that the journalists involved manipulated into a story of gamer misogyny, and conveniently ignored the fact that many female gamers supported the men in the community? On the back of all this, feminism has ruined great titles like Assassins creed and Dragon Age, just as Kathleen Kennedy and Disney have ruined Star Wars!
The fact is, Hollywood has lost it magic because it sold out its integrity long ago. Game adaptations are only good when they remain true to the game. The Witcher series lost its leading man by not being able to follow the path of either the game or the books! And the spin off was rubbish too.
Quite. Had Mr. Bateman spent ten minutes on YouTube he’d have found several articulate, amusing and entirely reasonable critics of the progressive left disassembling Gamer culture Because It Can. But, like his ‘Libs of TikTok’ piece, Bateman’s bias bleeds through.
Of course, the internet has no shortage of shouty morons click-harvesting when it comes to such issues. OTOH YouTubers like Gary (Nerdrotic) and the evil Overlord guy are genuinely well-informed (not to mention funny) when it comes to the sledge-hammer subtle ‘Message’ being forced on everyone by the big studios and legacy media.
Also going to add that Henry Cavill is neither NEET or incel and is a huge gamer which was why he wanted the role of Geralt in the first place! Just because Mr Bateman played some games when he was a kid doesn’t make him a gamer and able to speak with any authority about the community. I’d also question his journalistic credentials as he seems incapable of researching a topic thoroughly.
I mentioned his piece on Libs of TikTok where he either deliberately misrepresented the account, or didn’t bother understanding it in the first place.
His article, Anime: the new conservative battleground, was impressively inaccurate.
I mentioned his piece on Libs of TikTok where he either deliberately misrepresented the account, or didn’t bother understanding it in the first place.
His article, Anime: the new conservative battleground, was impressively inaccurate.
Quite. Had Mr. Bateman spent ten minutes on YouTube he’d have found several articulate, amusing and entirely reasonable critics of the progressive left disassembling Gamer culture Because It Can. But, like his ‘Libs of TikTok’ piece, Bateman’s bias bleeds through.
Of course, the internet has no shortage of shouty morons click-harvesting when it comes to such issues. OTOH YouTubers like Gary (Nerdrotic) and the evil Overlord guy are genuinely well-informed (not to mention funny) when it comes to the sledge-hammer subtle ‘Message’ being forced on everyone by the big studios and legacy media.
Also going to add that Henry Cavill is neither NEET or incel and is a huge gamer which was why he wanted the role of Geralt in the first place! Just because Mr Bateman played some games when he was a kid doesn’t make him a gamer and able to speak with any authority about the community. I’d also question his journalistic credentials as he seems incapable of researching a topic thoroughly.
Should we be surprised that a journalist skims over a story that was actually about journalistic corruption; that the journalists involved manipulated into a story of gamer misogyny, and conveniently ignored the fact that many female gamers supported the men in the community? On the back of all this, feminism has ruined great titles like Assassins creed and Dragon Age, just as Kathleen Kennedy and Disney have ruined Star Wars!
The fact is, Hollywood has lost it magic because it sold out its integrity long ago. Game adaptations are only good when they remain true to the game. The Witcher series lost its leading man by not being able to follow the path of either the game or the books! And the spin off was rubbish too.
I had to stop reading when the author cited the infamously poor wikipedia article for ‘Gamergate’ which has been the subject of an editing war by activists for nearly a decade.
I agree it’s bad, but not all bad, if we remember the old saw, “90% of everything is sh*t.” Elden Ring is art of the highest caliber. Seriously. I’m also cautiously optimistic for Starfield. But, yes, sadly, some studios are dead to me now. I don’t think I’ll ever give another dime to Bioware.
Agree completely.
What makes video games great are really not the same as what would necessarily make other art forms great.
One of my favourite ever games is an old RPG called Planescape: Torment. It had a unique plot and characters within a very interesting setting. The artwork and sound track were perfect for the story and setting. Someone made a novelisation of the game, and it was awful.
One point on Elden Ring: it is so influenced by Berserk, it’s about as close to an adaptation without being one.
Agree completely.
What makes video games great are really not the same as what would necessarily make other art forms great.
One of my favourite ever games is an old RPG called Planescape: Torment. It had a unique plot and characters within a very interesting setting. The artwork and sound track were perfect for the story and setting. Someone made a novelisation of the game, and it was awful.
One point on Elden Ring: it is so influenced by Berserk, it’s about as close to an adaptation without being one.
I agree it’s bad, but not all bad, if we remember the old saw, “90% of everything is sh*t.” Elden Ring is art of the highest caliber. Seriously. I’m also cautiously optimistic for Starfield. But, yes, sadly, some studios are dead to me now. I don’t think I’ll ever give another dime to Bioware.
No element of white western culture is sacred or respected.
White, western, male culture* invented and developed computers and all the programs, including video games, that they run. It is so strange that it should be so reviled when it is the wellspring from which the whole bleeding shooting-match originated.
*and, a little later, Japanese and Indian male culture
White, western, male culture* invented and developed computers and all the programs, including video games, that they run. It is so strange that it should be so reviled when it is the wellspring from which the whole bleeding shooting-match originated.
*and, a little later, Japanese and Indian male culture
No element of white western culture is sacred or respected.
Interesting essay but several points seem overstated. While the blackpill perspective here is indeed shared by many depressed incels, an at least equally valid perspective might be to see events of the last decade as gaming’s triumphant capture of the mainstream.
It’s true some elements of that triumph are likely non repeatable – the gaming subculture that contributed to Trumps 2016 victory is gone & cant be re-created in the same form. But the ‘reserve army’ of non integrated young men is still there, and will continue to affect the mainstream is all sorts of subtle but powerful ways, as history and even animal experiments (‘rat utopia’) suggests they always do.
The gamification of work is something gamers & gamer sympathetic activists have long argued for. At it’s best it makes work a much more fulfilling & pleasurable experience. E.g. see chpt3 ‘Reality is Broken’ (2011) by Jane McGonigal. Just because some of the less skilful implementations of gamification are annoying, doesnt mean it’s not a good thing overall.
Looking at current video games, while many have became bland or even vehicles for woke values, others are now more incel friendly than ever. Games let geeks extend their empires to the “limits of the known world” do they? Think bigger Bateman! Theres games that let them extend their empires to whole multiverses, some of them even with fetish elements that cater to incels unfulfilled longings – e.g. look up ‘subverse’. Some games now come with VR & support integration with physical props, doing an ever better job at compensating incels for what they’re missing out on. The great stream of capitalism not as hostile to disaffected young men as the article suggests.
Good points, but I believe the experiment you refer to was the Mouse Utopia – and yes it’s a disturbing parallel to the modern west.
Thanks for correction, and for understanding that I find these trends distrubing. Even if less so that the suggestion the dissafected young men (& some women) are now totally abandoned with out even good copes & escapeism.
Thanks for correction, and for understanding that I find these trends distrubing. Even if less so that the suggestion the dissafected young men (& some women) are now totally abandoned with out even good copes & escapeism.
Good points, but I believe the experiment you refer to was the Mouse Utopia – and yes it’s a disturbing parallel to the modern west.
Interesting essay but several points seem overstated. While the blackpill perspective here is indeed shared by many depressed incels, an at least equally valid perspective might be to see events of the last decade as gaming’s triumphant capture of the mainstream.
It’s true some elements of that triumph are likely non repeatable – the gaming subculture that contributed to Trumps 2016 victory is gone & cant be re-created in the same form. But the ‘reserve army’ of non integrated young men is still there, and will continue to affect the mainstream is all sorts of subtle but powerful ways, as history and even animal experiments (‘rat utopia’) suggests they always do.
The gamification of work is something gamers & gamer sympathetic activists have long argued for. At it’s best it makes work a much more fulfilling & pleasurable experience. E.g. see chpt3 ‘Reality is Broken’ (2011) by Jane McGonigal. Just because some of the less skilful implementations of gamification are annoying, doesnt mean it’s not a good thing overall.
Looking at current video games, while many have became bland or even vehicles for woke values, others are now more incel friendly than ever. Games let geeks extend their empires to the “limits of the known world” do they? Think bigger Bateman! Theres games that let them extend their empires to whole multiverses, some of them even with fetish elements that cater to incels unfulfilled longings – e.g. look up ‘subverse’. Some games now come with VR & support integration with physical props, doing an ever better job at compensating incels for what they’re missing out on. The great stream of capitalism not as hostile to disaffected young men as the article suggests.
Sorry but this seems to me like an article written by someone who doesn’t really know what he is talking about, an article about “gamers” and videogames by someone who only has played a handful of mainstream videogames and thinks he knows all there is to know, an article full of clichès and stereotypes from incels to neets to the corrupt gaming industry to the true meaning of “real life” and so on.
In truth videogames are a media of art, information and entertainment just like books and movies, and just like books and movies there are poorly written videogames, poorly developed videogames, cheap, recycled trash, lazy adaptations to already existent works, there are also political videogames and a quite a few of them try to retell history in a biased and subjective way.
If we take for granted that most writers, screenwriters, directors are frankly quite incompetent and terrible at their job, there should be no surprise alike when most videogames are cheap and poorly written, but at the same time when we are gladly suprised to see a visionary and well executed movie or read a creative and well written book we could think of finding those rare gems in the videogame industry, and trust me they exist!
So in conclusion i disagree that videogames have been “absorbed by pop culture” just like i disagree that “gamers” are purposeless neets that have been brainwashed by the collective ideology and milked dry by the capitalistic system; videogames when they are good just like art when it’s effective present a form of escape from the same collective ideologies and capitalistic views that are dangerous to the human soul, in other words good videogames can be healing but also they can be fun.
I’m a female gamer, and this article, like so many of Oliver Bateman’s articles reads as if it is composed more for the Guardian than for any remotely sensible purposes. There’s a massive female gaming community who roll their eyes at mentions of gamergate, because gamergate was never about female gamers and what we want, it was as per usual activists who have no real interest in gaming invading our sphere of interest and trying to dictate to us what we should and shouldn’t want.
My preferences are for MMOs, and with MMOs, all the players actually interact with each other constantly. I play alongside men, women, and trans players, I play with everyone from millionaires to those with severe disabilities, with everyone from students fresh into adulthood to retirees in their 80s. I have yet to meet a single player who is any kind of serious political activist, and the MMO I play, much like many others, has a fairly universal policy agreed amongst gamers that we don’t bring politics into gaming. That’s the only real outcome of gamergate, it ensured that actual gamers saw the mess activists tried to make and formed a consensus that politics of any hue have no place in our gaming experiences.
It never really worked in expunging their presence from the gaming press though.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the furore over Hogwars Legacy? A community manager lost her job related to that. Now the gaming press are using previews of it to give JK Rowling a metaphorical kicking.
I can’t say I particularly care for either the game or JKR (although she’s entitled to her opinion like everyone else) but the response from the gaming press is an utter disgrace. Bateman would do better covering that. Although if his anime article is anything to go by, he’ll probably start off by suggesting she’s the well known author of The Lord of the Rings or something.
Oh, I know the furore is there, but all I hear in my day to day gaming is people talking about what Hogwart’s house they got assigned, and how much fun they are having playing it (they give out plenty of early copies, and many who’ve got those copies aren’t on the woke train). In many ways, most gamers seem to be happy to have one game space that they know will be free of whining activists as they helpfully declared very noisily how they would be boycotting it prior to it coming out.
Oh, I know the furore is there, but all I hear in my day to day gaming is people talking about what Hogwart’s house they got assigned, and how much fun they are having playing it (they give out plenty of early copies, and many who’ve got those copies aren’t on the woke train). In many ways, most gamers seem to be happy to have one game space that they know will be free of whining activists as they helpfully declared very noisily how they would be boycotting it prior to it coming out.
It never really worked in expunging their presence from the gaming press though.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the furore over Hogwars Legacy? A community manager lost her job related to that. Now the gaming press are using previews of it to give JK Rowling a metaphorical kicking.
I can’t say I particularly care for either the game or JKR (although she’s entitled to her opinion like everyone else) but the response from the gaming press is an utter disgrace. Bateman would do better covering that. Although if his anime article is anything to go by, he’ll probably start off by suggesting she’s the well known author of The Lord of the Rings or something.
I’m a female gamer, and this article, like so many of Oliver Bateman’s articles reads as if it is composed more for the Guardian than for any remotely sensible purposes. There’s a massive female gaming community who roll their eyes at mentions of gamergate, because gamergate was never about female gamers and what we want, it was as per usual activists who have no real interest in gaming invading our sphere of interest and trying to dictate to us what we should and shouldn’t want.
My preferences are for MMOs, and with MMOs, all the players actually interact with each other constantly. I play alongside men, women, and trans players, I play with everyone from millionaires to those with severe disabilities, with everyone from students fresh into adulthood to retirees in their 80s. I have yet to meet a single player who is any kind of serious political activist, and the MMO I play, much like many others, has a fairly universal policy agreed amongst gamers that we don’t bring politics into gaming. That’s the only real outcome of gamergate, it ensured that actual gamers saw the mess activists tried to make and formed a consensus that politics of any hue have no place in our gaming experiences.
Sorry but this seems to me like an article written by someone who doesn’t really know what he is talking about, an article about “gamers” and videogames by someone who only has played a handful of mainstream videogames and thinks he knows all there is to know, an article full of clichès and stereotypes from incels to neets to the corrupt gaming industry to the true meaning of “real life” and so on.
In truth videogames are a media of art, information and entertainment just like books and movies, and just like books and movies there are poorly written videogames, poorly developed videogames, cheap, recycled trash, lazy adaptations to already existent works, there are also political videogames and a quite a few of them try to retell history in a biased and subjective way.
If we take for granted that most writers, screenwriters, directors are frankly quite incompetent and terrible at their job, there should be no surprise alike when most videogames are cheap and poorly written, but at the same time when we are gladly suprised to see a visionary and well executed movie or read a creative and well written book we could think of finding those rare gems in the videogame industry, and trust me they exist!
So in conclusion i disagree that videogames have been “absorbed by pop culture” just like i disagree that “gamers” are purposeless neets that have been brainwashed by the collective ideology and milked dry by the capitalistic system; videogames when they are good just like art when it’s effective present a form of escape from the same collective ideologies and capitalistic views that are dangerous to the human soul, in other words good videogames can be healing but also they can be fun.
as I have neither seen, let alone played a video game in my life, this meant as much to me as the detail of the molecular construction of the planet Jupiter in Cantonese.
Perhaps I should rig up a garden spray, and a fan, put a saddle on a chair arm and have a video of following the hounds and jumping a hedge or twain?
as I have neither seen, let alone played a video game in my life, this meant as much to me as the detail of the molecular construction of the planet Jupiter in Cantonese.
Perhaps I should rig up a garden spray, and a fan, put a saddle on a chair arm and have a video of following the hounds and jumping a hedge or twain?