A Reckoning

A couple weeks ago, as we all tried to distract ourselves from the inaugural sword of Damocles, a prompt went around Bluesky, inviting people to share their “most millennial complaint.” Moira Donegan answered the call: “Playing video games is not cool,” she declared, “and it was a mistake to elevate this anti-social pastime that mostly involves engaging in solitary fantasies of domination and violence into a respectable hobby.”

Predictably, Donegan got dragged for this. Kim Kelly got dragged for agreeing with her. Many people insisted that this was, in fact, a boomer complaint, not a millennial one (Donegan acknowledged that possibility herself). Many other people called her an idiot, ignorant, uneducated, a loser. Some people, rather perversely, called her a sexist. A few attempted to ridicule her idea by analogy: Can you imagine if people talked this way about books? About literature?

I have spent many thousands of hours of my life playing videogames, but I was not one of those people. In my heart, I knew the truth: “solitary fantasies of domination and violence” might be a bit dated, but Donegan was more right than wrong.

* * *

The next day—Inauguration Day itself—Edward Ongweso Jr. dropped an essay on his Substack that was both apt for that most Damoclean of occasions and relevant to this debate about games. To begin with, he traced the contours of the gambling industry and connected it to other contemporary American enterprises that prey on the poor and nearly hopeless, desperate people hoping for one big score—buying in on the right meme coin, hitting the most improbable sportsbook parlay, literally winning the lottery. He explained what an enormous, lucrative business gambling has become, how it has eclipsed the vast market for illicit drugs. From there, he moved on to consumerism, AI, exterminism, things falling apart, rough beasts slouching toward Bethlehem—it's all worth reading. I got stuck on the bit about gambling, though.

Since surpassing illicit drugs in revenue, gambling has been eclipsed in its turn by an industry that stole not just its crown but its name. Before videogames grew to be a market juggernaut that generates nearly a quarter-trillion dollars a year of revenue, “gaming” was synonymous with “gambling.” This etymology isn't the only strong connection between the two businesses.

Ongweso's essay draws extensively on the work of sociologist Natasha Schüll. In her 2012 book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, she wrote of slot-machine players, whose obsessive behavior had by then come to represent the vast majority of casino revenue, that “what addicts them is the world-dissolving state of subjective suspension and affective calm they derive from machine play.”

In a conversation with former Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges, Schüll elaborated: “What they’re playing for is not to win, but to stay in the zone. […] This is more about mood modulation. Affect modulation. Using technologies to dampen anxieties and exit the world. We don’t just see it in Las Vegas. We see it in the subways every morning. The rise of all of these screen-based technologies and the little games that we’ve all become so absorbed in. What gamblers articulate [in interviews] is a desire to really lose a sense of self.”

Of the industry, she said, “It’s predation on a type of escape where people are driven to exit the world. They’re not trying to win. The casinos are trying to win. They are trying to make revenue. They’re kind of in a partnership with the gamblers, but it’s a very asymmetrical partnership. The gamblers don’t want to win. They want to just keep going. Some people have likened gamblers to factory workers who are alienated by the machine. I don’t see it that way. This is more about machines designed to synchronize with what you want—in this case escape—and [to] profit from that.”

This is an apt description of slot-machine players and gambling, of course, but as Schüll alludes to with her remark about “screen-based technologies and the little games that we’ve all become so absorbed in,” it might be an even more apt description of gamers and gaming. What are microtransactions and battle passes and the endless treadmill of live-service content if not revenue-extraction machines synchronized with players' desire for anesthetic escape?

For players who don't want the jackpot, who want only to keep going, to stay “in the zone,” the gaming industry now offers myriad games without lasting victory, without an endpoint, without closure. Many people have drawn connections between slot machines (and Skinner boxes) and certain types of game before—these are the perils, we hear, of F2P games, of freemium games, of mobile games, of bad games, trash that's beneath the contempt of real gamers. But the Faustian exchange of a steady flow of microtransactions for the opportunity to live in the zone forever isn't just made in trashy mobile Gacha titles anymore; it's everywhere. The bad apples have spoiled the bunch. Every game is a slot machine now. One battle royale after another, forever. One raid after another. One puzzle after another. One match after another. One content drop after another. One achievement after another. One season after another. Forever.

It's not even limited to games. People think of “gamification” as the process of making “real-world” activities more like videogames, but it's actually more a matter of making everything (including videogames) more like slot machines. What is a social media feed if not an experiential slot machine, one that rewards you, quasi-stochastically, with entertaining content? The algorithm puts just enough boring chaff (and ads) in front of you, for just long enough, that the dopamine-rush thrill of your last hit fades, and then bam, something that's just the sort of content you crave slides across your screen, and the rush is back. Over and over. Forever.

One of the reasons I started this blog at the start of last year was that I was getting sick of social media; I found myself posting to Twitter and Reddit less and less, interacting with other human beings less and less, but scrolling more and longer. Pulling the lever, waiting for something good to turn up, but really just paralyzed by that hope, that expectation, the not-quite-pleasure of having an itch and believing that it's about to be scratched. Any minute now.

One of the reasons I got into TTRPGs was that videogames were starting to feel the same way.

* * *

“But not all games are like this," you might protest. More and more of them are, of course; battle passes and games-as-service content drip-feeds and meta-progression mechanics are oozing their way into every genre, into every storied franchise (this crap has even slimed its way into Civilization now, much to my dismay), but it's true: There are some indie games, some retro games, and even the occasional rare few examples of AAA auteurism that prove the rule.

The thing is—and with apologies to the folks who love games and think that pornography is inherently, irredeemably bad and wrong—you could say the same of pornography. Porn doesn't have to come from some giant, sleazy media company. It doesn't have to be celebrated at lurid awards shows in Las Vegas or shot in some dismal corner of the Inland Empire. It doesn't have to involve human trafficking or drug abuse. It doesn't have to be violent. You can make porn with your partner or with your friends. It doesn't have to be for profit; you can distribute it for free or ask for donations. You can write fun, clever scripts, build fantastical sets, make amazing costumes, and tell interesting stories that just happen to be smutty. Or if you're not likely to do any of that yourself, you can probably find porn like that on the internet somewhere, or at least at a film festival—porn that makes you laugh, makes you think, fosters human connection, gives you new ideas.

But is that what you think of when you think of porn? Is that what anybody thinks of? Is that what you assume any significant percentage of pornography consumers are consuming? If somebody says to you, “Yeah, I love porn,” or if somebody tells you, “I can't wait to get home and watch porn until I fall asleep,” does your mind go to that Shangri-La of ethical, creative, uplifting pornography? Or do you just think, Wow. Gross.

When somebody says they're a gamer, what do you think of? We joke about the word; we love our memes. “They targeted gamers,” we chuckle. “Gamers rise up!” We explain that “Sure, I play games, but I'm not a gamer,” or “I'm a gamer, but not, you know, a hard-r gamer.” That ironic distance masks real aversion. Gamers gave us Gamergate. Gaming, especially online, means encountering puerility, misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, a whole raft of antisocial behaviors. It has a whiff of sulfur about it, the perfume of the extreme right. To tar all of gaming, and everybody who enjoys videogames, with that sulfurous stigma might be unfair, but it's not entirely unfair. Yeah, there are plenty of kids and women and old folks and others who aren't of that ilk enjoying games—or if not truly enjoying them, at least experiencing a world-dissolving state of subjective suspension and affective calm—but it's those hard-r gamers who drive the discourse, they who are the face of the hobby and the drivers of the industry.

* * *

The industry has embraced, with both arms, a vision of videogames as ludicrously profitable narcotic slop. The most vocal, visible gamers—gamers as an identity group—are unpleasant reprobates, many of them Nazi fellow travelers. Are these facts enough to damn games and gaming? Probably not. Most cultural products in the profit-driven hell we inhabit are crap, after all, and practically everything has detestable, and noisy, partisans. There are still diamonds in the rough, games that make us think, that make us laugh and cry, that teach us things, that expand our horizons.

Here I have to turn from objective facts to my own fragile, anecdotal, peculiar subjectivity. For me, playing a videogame, even a game I once loved, or a game of a type I once loved, even a game that isn't precision-engineered to lull me into that world-dissolving state of subjective suspension and affective calm, now often feels palpably, uncomfortably hollow. I emerge from time spent playing a videogame like a sleeper emerges from a dream, holding on to a few rapidly fading emotions, bewildered by the dissonance between how intensely things mattered just moments ago and how pointless or incomprehensible they seem now, in the light of day. I'm left with vague memories, or just impressions, and maybe a haphazard sort of narrative that, like a dream, retains some waning interest to me but falls to boring, incoherent pieces the moment I try to explain it to somebody else.

I am a dreamer, of course. You're reading a blog (ostensibly) about TTRPGs; how could its author be anything else? I'll never be one to turn up my nose at escapism: I've loved science fiction and fantasy since I was a little kid, I love novels, I love movies, and I still love games. We all deserve a little escape once in a while; the real world isn't always a great place to be. But to return to that analogy raised by the angry mob on Bluesky—how would I feel if somebody dismissed novels as a disreputable, antisocial waste of time? I'd roll my eyes. Solitary, sure, but never antisocial. To read a novel is to enter into intimate discourse with another mind. It's escapism, sure—the world dissolves—but it's escapism with an endpoint, a clearly marked exit. Through the novel, we immerse ourselves in other places, other times, other lives, and then we return to our place, our time, our life richer, wiser, more thoughtful.

I might've learned a little about medieval history from Crusader Kings 2, a little about trains from Railroad Tycoon, a little about everything from Civilization, but I don't know that even those games truly enriched me. I don't think they taught me anything important about myself or anybody else. The vast majority of the videogames I've played taught me nothing at all, imparted nothing to me. There are very important exceptions, of course—I've written about a few of them here, like SOMA, Cyberpunk 2077, and above all Disco Elysium, and there are others, farther back, that meant a lot to me and changed me in meaningful ways. Planescape: Torment and The Longest Journey come to mind.

In the big scheme of things, though, these games are oddities, exceptions, lightning in a bottle, relics of a bygone age. There will never be another Disco Elysium. There will never be another Planescape: Torment. There might be another Cyberpunk 2077, but it's probably a decade away, and I'm not holding my breath. For every gem, there are a thousand mindless treadmills, a thousand carbon-copy cash-ins on whatever the latest extractive fad is, a thousand software-shaped delivery vehicles for the algorithmically driven microtransaction apocalypse. We've all heard the story: StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty made less money for Blizzard than a single $15 microtransaction horse in World of Warcraft. Whatever games were when you were a kid—whatever they were before that moment, before that horse buried Wings of Liberty—is dead and long, long gone.

There's still cool stuff happening in the world of videogames, of course. It's happening in spaces that are less commercial (like the whole constellation of indie games sites driven by donations and pay-what-you-want offers) or entirely noncommercial (like the beautiful community that continues to churn out world-class content for my beloved Quake nearly three decades after its release). Some of the most interesting games of the past decade have been treated with outright hostility by the industry; think of Robert Yang's long war against the homophobes at Twitch. Cool stuff still comes out of more conventional games spaces, too, often when people play games in unintended ways. Look how much more interesting a tactical shooter becomes when a streamer plays it as though his life actually matters—the live-die-repeat treadmill of gameplay gives way to something more affecting, more truly immersive, more like the empathy machine we've so often been promised games could be.

Give me empathy in videogames. Give me auteurism. I'd rather play a new Quake map—and have direct contact with somebody else's mind, their ideas, their creative spirit—than step back on the treadmill of MMOs or CCGs or MOBAs or PvPvE FPSes or whatever fresh hell the industry unleashes next. But better yet, get me off the computer. I'd rather play a board game with family than play Quake by myself. And I'd much rather play a TTRPG with friends: tell a story together, experience something new together, escape the world together without leaving it behind entirely. I don't want to dissolve the world, to annihilate it. I want to make the world richer, more enjoyable, more inhabitable. Better.

Good luck to me, right?

* * *

I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the first Trump administration, near Inman Square, where there's a cute little commercial row. It's a slice of small-town Americana in the city: no national chains, just a bunch of local small businesses, including the sorts you hardly see anywhere else anymore, like old-fashioned travel agents and mom-and-pop delis. There was a store there (I think it's still there) that sold textiles, candles, plants, cozy home goods. They were very into hygge back in 2016; there was a sign in the window for months after the election that asked, “HOW CAN HYGGE BE PART OF OUR RESISTANCE?” I always laughed.

The answer, of course, is that it can't—not really. Maybe making things hyggelig gives you a sense of control in a crazy, off-kilter world and that buoys your mental health and keeps you from falling completely and irrevocably into despair. Maybe. And maybe your Animal Crossing village or your Tears of the Kingdom contraption or your collection of Hearthstone cards does the same. But those things also anesthetize you. They remove you from the world, numb you to pain and struggle and sorrow and pity, and remove you from other people, from everybody else experiencing those things, people you might be able to help, people who might be able to help you (not entirely unlike hygge, in fact, although that's an essay for another occasion).

Yeah, you make friends playing videogames, once in a while. You see the same handles in the same lobbies, or you run into the same opponents, or you run dungeons with the same guildmates. Once in a while, a real connection is formed. People famously have gotten married to friends they made playing MMOs. But 99% of people? 99% of the time? Ships in the night. Traveling companions for a time, but not heading to the same destinations.

Videogames are not inherently antisocial, but the industry has shaped the vast majority of them, including the biggest and most popular, into something profoundly antisocial, something socially corrosive. The vast majority of players have quietly acquiesced. Even superficially “social” multiplayer games are not fostering real connection; they are offering a shared experience of quietism, no more social than slot-machine gamblers making small talk, or sitting side by side in amiable silence, as the life seeps out of them.

Are videogames a moral abomination? Have they no redeeming value at all? Should everybody quit playing them? Of course not. It's not like we'd all turn away from our screens and suddenly, in a great upwelling of solidarity and togetherness, join hands and defeat fascism with the power of love or whatever. If we didn't have videogames, we'd have other vices. We already do; everybody has vices, and there's nothing wrong with that. But we could certainly stand to be clearer-eyed about them, about what they're doing to us, about who benefits from them.

I texted my best friend (the man behind Roman Balan, for those of you following my Stars Without Number campaign, and like me a lifelong enjoyer of escapism and player of videogames) about Moira Donegan's post when I first saw it. I sent him a barrage of messages that began with “I'm probably too much of a coward to weigh in, but…” (look at me—12 days later, I've worked up the courage) and ran for nearly the length of this blog post. When I was finally done monologuing at him, he delivered a more eloquent and far more succinct summation of the whole thing. He quoted the late, great David Lynch: “I wish what every addict wishes for: that what we love is good for us.”