I’d never really seen it all laid out nearly like the author does int hair article.
For example, one of the most iconic images of gaming in the ’90s and ‘00s were LAN parties. A bunch of people taking their computers/consoles to events or friends’ houses to play games like Doom, Halo, Quake, Unreal, etc…
There [in the Global South], unless you came from a wealthy background, it’s likely that you instead went to places called LAN houses, Cyber Cafes, Locadora de Jogos, PC Bangs, Game Clubs, etc. There, you would pay hourly to play, either on PC or consoles. In US media it’s an image often associated with Korean e-sports, but it’s far more present globally than LAN parties ever were.
Even within the U.S., LAN parties were never that common. The images have become romanticized in recent years, but back then for every LAN party there were dozens, if not hundreds, of “hey such and such got that new game, let’s go over other house and play it on their [insert 90’s console].” The rose-tinted glasses have caused people to see them as more prevalent and important than they actually were.
Overall, this is something I’ve thought about, mostly in the context of mobile gaming, although the Western core bias isn’t surprising. Sure, there’s a lot of slop in the mobile space, but there’s no shortage of slop in the console or PC gaming space either. It seems that’s just a rationalization for the underlying reason, that the demographics of mobile gaming aren’t the real gaming demographic.
Same deal with youth gamers. I find it wryly ironic when zoomers and younger millennials complain about Roblox not being real gaming, it’s brainrot for gen alpha kiddies. Meanwhile, I’m old enough to remember when their beloved Minecraft was the not serious, no point “game” for the young’uns and not a game for real gamers.
until the rise of broadband cyber cafes were prominent in the US too
We used to go to one in our mall to play counterstrike.
same lol
Meanwhile, I’m old enough to remember when their beloved Minecraft was the not serious, no point “game” for the young’uns and not a game for real gamers.
My experience was that Minecraft started out as a game played primarily by adults and adult turbonerds that built 1:1 replicas of the Enterprise or Middle-Earth before it became wildly popular among kids and primarily associated with them.
Now it’s an adult game again when those kids became adults
Sure, there’s a lot of slop in the mobile space, but there’s no shortage of slop in the console or PC gaming space either.
I don’t know, I’ve been binging Vinesauce’s mobile game ad streams over the holidays and am increasingly convinced the whole industry is a truly Lovecraftian nightmarescape
The mobile games that are good aren’t discounted by “Serious” gamers as far as I can tell, honestly. Infinity Blade, Downwell, Crayon Physics, Jelly Car, Monument Valley, Alto’s Adventure, Pokemon Go (sorta’), etc. all seem fairly respected when they’re brought up. The mobile gamespace, for whatever reason, just sucks fucking ass and people trying to vindicate it seem out of touch. I found some Japanese game called Pythagoras’ Perpetual Motion on iOS that’s a fully featured singleplayer puzzle platformer with a nice soundtrack and decent visuals and no one’s heard about it because games like that are impossible to find due to whatever factors.
Candy Crush by comparison sucks ass. The closest non-mobile-ish equivalent to it I could think of is Peggle or any of those drop-'em’ups like Puyo, etc. and they all offer way better experiences.
I found some Japanese game called Pythagoras’ Perpetual Motion on iOS that’s a fully featured singleplayer puzzle platformer with a nice soundtrack and decent visuals and no one’s heard about it because games like that are impossible to find due to whatever factors.
Isn’t iOS just a fucking nightmare when it comes to game preservation? Old games stop working between iOS versions and get completely memoryholed and purged. From what I understand tons of great iOS games are now lost media
The game’s about to become literally impossible to find in a year or two
IIRC Infinity Blade isn’t available to buy any more.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Meanwhile, I’m old enough to remember when their beloved Minecraft was the not serious, no point “game” for the young’uns and not a game for real gamers.
I’m a younger millennial and I remember this and still feel this way lol (also roblox is fun as hell and would’ve loved to have had it growing up)
minecraft never had a point or objective, it was just the sims but blockieryeh people complained about minecraft having no end game for so long that when Notch finally added a final boss it was in a dimension called The End.
Even within the U.S., LAN parties were never that common. The images have become romanticized in recent years, but back then for every LAN party there were dozens, if not hundreds, of “hey such and such got that new game, let’s go over other house and play it on their [insert 90’s console].” The rose-tinted glasses have caused people to see them as more prevalent and important than they actually were.
Throughout the 80s and 90s, people just went to the arcades, and you didn’t necessarily had to play the arcades to actually hang out with people or watch other people play. There’s a bit of rewriting of history where gaming is viewed through a console/PC lens when arcades were the dominant form of gaming until the late 90s/early 00s.
I must say I chuckled when the author put lan party and purchased games in the same sentence.
In my particular experience sharing pirated games was 99% of the point of a lan party.
In a way it only reinforces the author’s point, everybody had a different experience that is alien to the people who weren’t there. Attempting to make it all fit into a single narrative will erase most of it.
The games industry, and by extension gaming journalism only concerns itself with the global north’s signifiers and the average global north’s gamer’s experiences because they are the ones bringing in the money. Just like cinema, all they care is the domestic sales, while everything else is an afterthought.
A different business model from the US, adapted for a different reality than that of the US. It sounds obvious, but for years free-to-play was vilified as something uniquely evil — while gatekeeping online games behind owning a PC and paying $60 plus expansions plus subscription was the morally superior way. A stance obviously taken by people who could afford all that.
F2P games are still seen as lesser today among elitist anglo gamers.
Aren’t most of those games propped up by the absolute scummiest predatory monetisation practices
Depends if it’s designed to be a game in the first place or just a cash grab. Not saying that the “hardcore” F2P games (Dota, CS, OW, LoL etc) don’t have a absurdly priced skins and gambling mechanics but at least they weren’t built specifically for maximising dark patterns and sometimes their community fights back over monetisation practices
Most but there’s some good f2p games.
Yeah and for good fucking reason
IDK, I feel like the crux of this articles argument is “Anglophone Gaming Press primarily focuses on games actually released, or played widely within the Anglophone Games Market. And this is necessarily insidious for… reasons >.>”
It just doesn’t strike me as a particularly compelling issue. Even if the gaming market is becoming increasingly international in scope (Which is a good thing!), language barriers do still represent a real barrier for communication, and frequently either inform, or dictate genuine differences in how two cultures, or sets of cultures, are going to develop. Until we all decide to speak Esperanto (or Mandarin) that’s likely going to remain the case in the future.
Furthermore, while gaming markets are today international, they don’t have international origins. They each grew up around particular regional industries (especially so in computer games development), and those origins still impact the development trends of particular national games industries to this day. If the author wants to write a book specifically about the history of gaming in Brazil for Anglophone audiences to gain a better perspective on international games development, then they should do that! It would most likely be a positive addition to the current discourse.
I just don’t get why they took it so personally, that the Anglo Gaming Press & Academia would focus primarily on the parts of gaming history that are most relevant to it’s own development.
Come on, the issue isn’t that the anglophone press only focuses on anglophone games, it is that the anglophone press writes about anglophone games as if that was all of games
Yes, my point though is that up until the last 4-6 years or so, this has been a mostly legitimate phenomenon.
If you want to understand how the Call of Duty series became the culturally predominant image of what “videogames” are in the West by the mid-2010’s, you would be better served by analyzing the history & development trends of the Western Gaming Market, rather than whatever the hell was going on with MapleStory, or Vietnamese mobile gaming, even if the latter two have larger playerbases. Those aren’t who western games companies are selling to, and aren’t who they hire to make directorial decisions. Those people’s experiences are, in the abstract, no less valid or meaningful than those of westerners, but they aren’t relevant to the immediate question.
Conversely; if one is to understand, and properly contextualize, the growth of the modern Chinese games industry in the international market, then this will necessarily require a broadening of the scope of the conversation around videogames.
These are phenomena dictated by material developments within the industry, and they will change as the composition of the industry itself does.
The largest movie industry in the world for probably like two decades now has been Nigeria. Have you ever watched a movie from Nigeria?
No, and i had no idea.
I remember this dude. He’s the dude who wrote/edited that massive tome on the history of CRPGs.
