Gamer Nation: The Rise of Modern Gaming and the Compulsion to Play Again - Hardcover

Geissinger, Eric

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1633883795 ISBN 13: 9781633883796

Verlag: Prometheus Books, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

A tech-industry insider takes a critical look at the effect games are having on our short- and long-term happiness and assesses the cultural prospects of a society increasingly obsessed with gaming.

The American "game economy" has become an enormous enterprise, devouring roughly one-ninth of America's entire economic output. This overview of arguably the most influential segment of the entertainment industry examines the perspectives of gaming enthusiasts, addicts, designers, arcade owners, psychologists, philosophers, and more. Weighing the positive and negative aspects of games, the author considers their effect not only upon the players but upon culture and society. What trade-offs are being made when people play games for twenty-plus hours a week?
    
The author puts particular emphasis on Candy Crush, whose enormous popularity has left all other games far behind. Since 2013 it has been installed over a billion times and its simplicity has disrupted previous game-design assumptions, proving new games don't have to be sophisticated and graphically immersive.
    
He also offers insights from interviews with experts on the mechanics of manipulation. Sophisticated psychological tools are used to design games that are compelling, irresistible, and possibly addicting. In a few case, obsessive game-playing has been the cause of death.
    
Whether you enjoy games as a harmless pastime or are suspicious of their effects on the quality of your family's life, you'll want to read this wide-ranching exploration of the growing game phenomenon.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Eric Geissinger is the author of Virtual Billions: The Genius, the Drug Lord, and the Ivy League Twins behind the Rise of Bitcoin. He has worked as a technical writer for Silicon Valley software companies for seventeen years. His short fiction and poetry have appeared in several literary journals. He lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York with his wife and two daughters.

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From Chapter Nine - Flooding the Colosseum

The facts speak for themselves: Americans are spending more money on games than ever before and far more time watching, playing, and talking about them. The game economy, broadly speaking, is growing four times as fast as the rest of the economy and shows no sign of slowing down—its growth rate is rapidly increasing, not levelling off. At some point a limit will be reached: our economy and our time will achieve maximum gaming saturation. Where is that point, when will that time arrive, and what are the costs of getting to the end of that particular road?

I don’t think it’s as far away as we think. Games have achieved unprecedented economic and coercive power. The origin of their power lies deep in our biological roots—we did not all grow up making music or writing poetry, but we did all grow up creating and playing games. Despite the size and growth of games in our economic and cultural life, little attention has been paid to the dangers they pose for our short- and long-term health as a nation. Taken along with the entertainment sector (writ large) and the four trillion dollar healthcare sector, at least half of our national economy is consumed with entertaining us or keeping us healthy—both worthy goals but requiring a vast quantity of resources. Where is this taking us? Are we destined to become a nation of gamers, and is this a productive and worthy result?

Having Too Much Fun to Work

The growth of gaming is an underreported topic with very few critics paying attention to what’s going on, but there are a couple of important exceptions. Recently, people have woken up to the fact that many able-bodied men of working age are not choosing to work and are instead finding sufficient pleasure and challenge from video games to opt out of the everyday economy: “22 percent of men between the ages of 21 and 30 with less than a bachelor’s degree reported not working in the previous year—up from only 9.5 percent in 2000.”

The problem isn’t so much a lack of desire to work or some newfangled type of modern laziness. The issue is that work is nowhere near as rewarding as many of the games: “‘When I play a game, I know if I have a few hours I will be rewarded,’ [one of these young men] said. ‘With a job, it’s always been up in the air with the amount of work I put in and the reward.’” The “reward” in this case is more than financial: it’s emotional and clearly linked to competence and skill.

More disturbing from a social perspective but not for the individual gamers in question is that this group of unemployed but game-playing young men are actually happier than their peers:

"Happiness has gone up for this group, despite employment percentages having fallen, and the percentage living with parents going up. And that’s different than for any other group,” says the University of Chicago’s Erik Hurst, an economist at the Booth School of Business who helped lead the research.

The source of this newfound happiness is video games: 75 percent of the time this group used to spend working is now dedicated to the computer, and the majority of that computer time is spent playing games. It’s not only that more young men are playing video games, the real problem seems to be innovation in what researchers call “gaming/recreational computing.” While it’s typical for leisure time to expand and contract with increasing or decreasing opportunities for leisure activities (and how fun they are), what is happening now is different from in the past. What researchers claim in the 2017 paper “Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men” is that innovations in gaming and recreational computing are the cause of about half the increase in video-game playing since 2004. This is a strong causal claim: it’s not that young men are playing more games because they have more time, it’s that they are playing more games in large part because the games themselves are more rewarding. Increasing sophistication in the video-game market, better targeting of potential customers, more manipulative and addictive game-play—these are just as important as choices individual gamers are making about whether to play or not to play.

This sounds a bit fishy. Is it really possible to create demand and create more gamers who play longer just by enhancing the games being designed and released? This seems like an unlikely claim, but nobody has a problem when comparing it to a corollary from the world of television. The so-called Golden Age of American television, typified by shows such as The Sopranos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad, generated huge numbers of new viewers because of their higher-than-average quality and entertainment value. When thinking of television or movies we have no trouble assuming that better quality products drive increased audience numbers. People are still choosing to watch or not watch the television shows, but it’s possible to distinguish between viewers who watch television regularly (and would have seen the shows anyway) and those who are drawn to television based upon their interest in specific high-quality shows (and who would otherwise not be watching television). The same sort of dynamic takes place in the video-game industry. More entertaining video games don’t just reward current players but bring in new players and increase the time everyone spends playing them.

This sort of thing can be tracked, and that’s exactly what was done. Cheaper gaming options, along with higher-quality video games across the board, contributed to the majority of the increase in time spent playing them. Salaries for young men don’t lag those of their older peers for equivalent work. Demand for labor in the United States remains relatively high and robust. It’s not that these men are having more problems finding work than they ever had before. Yet something is happening: “There is a large and growing segment of this population that appears detached from the labor market: 15 percent of younger men, excluding full-time students, worked zero weeks over the prior year as of 2016. The comparable number in 2000 was only 8 percent.”

The short-term pleasures of gaming are difficult to compare to the negative long-term effects of dropping out of the job market, not pushing for a better job, or failing to search for work as hard as one might. Gaming is an immediately enjoyable but empty pleasure; figuring out how to get a better job is difficult but might have significant and meaningful long-term value. I find it hard to imagine that any mature man will look back on a five-year slice of his twenties during which he was living with his parents and spending the majority of his time playing video games and consider it a positive experience. Yes, it might have been fun at the time, but it also represents a complete dereliction of responsibility. It’s putting off the inevitable. You can’t live with your parents your whole life. You can’t get a less-depressing and higher-paying (or intellectually rewarding) job by not engaging with the real world. You can’t meet real friends, go on trips, or find the love of your life by sitting at home playing video games. Doing so winnows away the possibilities for a dynamic life, stripping them down to the most basic level: the game.

This data shows the power of sophisticated and addictive games taken to the extreme: millions of young men opting out of the economy because the lure of games has become too strong—a force far more powerful than the more nebulous reward of economic benefits, societal expectations, or education beyond a high school or college degree. In...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Prometheus Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1633883795
• ISBN 13: 9781633883796
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 277
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar