Resuming from where we left off (and after a brief topical interlude):1
8.
If Google Ngrams is to be believed—and since it only tracks published books, and leaves periodicals and electric media content alone, its results must always be taken with a grain of salt—the notion of a “gaming community” slowly gained currency from the early 1980s through the mid-1990s, and accelerated after 1995. At around 2010, the curve suddenly steepens, slowing down after 2015 but still remaining on the increase.
It’s beyond my means to determine precisely when it became standard practice to refer to every collection of hobbyists with sufficient numbers to populate an active subreddit as a “community.” Obviously the internet was instrumental to both the new usage and the social shift it reflected. Think: it’s 1994 and you’ve got a Super Nintendo console and a small group of friends with whom you play Mortal Kombat II on evenings and weekends. These could be your pals from middle school, or they might be your college dormmates. Will you call yourselves the “Mortal Kombat community?” Probably not: three or five or even ten people are a group or a clique—not a community.
Despite knowing on an intellectual level that there are thousands of other people in the United States who regularly play some version of Mortal Kombat, it probably won’t occur to you to think of them all as constituting a national community. You’re not in communication with any of them. You’ve never traveled to attend any Mortal Kombat events or tournaments; you’re probably not aware that there are any. Maybe you sometimes visit the arcade at the mall to play people outside of your circle of friends, but in all likelihood none of them are asking you for your mailing address so they can send your their newsletter about Mortal Kombat get-togethers, tips, tricks, lore, new releases, outstanding players, etc. Chances are, you don’t even learn each other’s names unless you’re regularly at the same arcade(s) at the same time.
The situation changes after it becomes possible to connect to the internet and navigate to Mortal Kombat-themed websites, message boards, IRC channels, fanart galleries, and so on.2 Now you’ve got the makings of an imagined community: you’re aware that there are thousands of Mortal Kombat people forming a self-conscious cultural bloc (of a sort), and that you can count yourself as belonging to and participating in it. Moreover, it gives you and everyone else access the hardcore crowd. Circa 1995, there were people who’d spend hours clustered around an Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 cabinet at a high-traffic arcade, comprehensively discovering the ins and outs of every character, discovering glitches, developing slang, and so on. But most players didn’t have access to any of this. They’d find the game in a bowling alley and play one match against someone who wandered over and then wandered off, or pop in the SNES cartridge when a friend came to visit. For them, high-level play and the culture of the really dedicated players were terrae incognitae. But as the internet developed, more and more of it could be placed at the fingertips of anyone who cared to look for it. More people could get involved on a deeper level; more people could play online matches with a pool of players larger than any they would have found at an arcade.
Mortal Kombat is just one example. We could just as easily swap it out for any popular video game or wonky tabletop game we care to think of, and the conversation would be the same. And this was not an insignificant cultural development.
9.
Games have a peculiar way of binding people to one another. “The feeling of being ‘apart together’ in an exceptional situation,” writes Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens, “of sharing something important, of mutually withdrawing from the rest of the world and rejecting the usual norms, retains its magic beyond the duration of the individual game.” I’d venture that this is especially true when the game being played is on the esoteric side, rather inaccessible to outsiders, and the players are cognizant of getting their kicks from something the mainstream of society doesn’t understand.
The fictional Eltingville Club, appearing in comics and on television, satirized geek hobbyists who can’t stand each other, but are compelled to associate on the basis of their common devotion to comics, collectibles, and dice-chucking. Anyone who has ever been in this world understood Eltingville: internecine Dungeons & Dragons table drama is practically a cliché, and I’ve been in friendships with people I powerfully disliked, but who were reliably down to play Magic. The fighting game community is infamous for its grudges, shit-talking, and lapses into outright nastiness—and yet it endures as a stable bloc. Here we have the sine qua non of community: people staying together despite everything that separates them, as Ferdinand Tönnies says of the condition of Gemeinschaft.
The diversity, commitment, and universality of gaming communities is a fascinating phenomenon. For the last word, we might even substitute a Latin synonym: catholicism.
10.
It might be because I’ve taken a dilettantish interest in primitive Christianity lately, but I find it hard not to see points of contact between Greco-Roman mystery religions and modern gaming communities. I’m aware that this is a completely disproportionate comparison, but what the hell.
Mystery cults thrived during the Pax Romana; Christianity just happened to be the one that came out on top. These sects were alternatives and supplements to the public religions, meeting members’ social and personal needs left unfulfilled by official religious and civic institutions.
Even before regional “pagan” rites had the state religion grafted on to them, they weren’t very personal religions.3 Different places had different gods, and paying homage to a member of a local pantheon was usually an obligatory or transactional act. People understood that the deities publicly worshipped in one place didn’t follow a traveler or a migrant when they went somewhere else, and none of them took much of an interest in supplicants on an individual level (provided they performed the appropriate displays of piety and didn’t commit any truly outrageous transgressions). The mystery cults, on the other hand, were about establishing a heart-to-heart relationship with a venerated deity—a deity that would look out for their congregants wheresoever they went.
Esoteric cults to figures like Isis, Mithras, Cybele, Dionysus, Jesus, etc., that met and conducted their rites behind closed doors throughout the imperial provinces had a lot to offer people living under Roman dominion. In an increasingly urbanistic and cosmopolitan society, initiation into a mystery religion could be a pathway towards enjoying the pleasures and interpersonal support of communal involvement. Where there existed fairly rigid class boundaries and sometimes little room for individual enterprise, membership in a cult offered an outlet not only for impactful social intercourse, but an opportunity to make friends in higher places: many mysteries were open to people of all walks of life, and a wealthier member might not necessarily be privileged over a poorer one where the community was concerned. Traveling or relocating to a city where one had no family members was much easier and safer if one belonged to a cult and could make contact with the branch operating at their destination. During the chaotic third century, mystery religions provided services to their members that the dysfunctional Roman state could not, and their memberships swelled as a result.
We too live in an urbanistic and cosmopolitan society with a high level of inequality and alienation. The percentage of Americans living in cities has been on the increase for over a century. Although people are more often staying in place than during previous decades, it wasn’t until 2018 that the percentage of the population that moved from one place to another during a given year dipped below ten percent. To be sure, most never moved very far—the millennials who packed up and moved to Brooklyn in the last twenty years are rather overrepresented in the media—but I’d wager that if you asked a twenty-, thirty-, or forty-something who stayed near the suburban area in which they grew up about how engaged they are with civic organizations, or how well they know their neighbors, the answer is likely to be “not very.” Cue the links to pieces about sustained declines in church attendance, participation in youth sports, volunteerism, membership in service organizations, and public life in general.
These trends didn’t begin recently: Robert Putnam’s essay “Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital,” later developed into a book, was published in 1995. And what’s interesting about the cliques of people who played neoteric games in the 1980s and 1990s was that they were apt to be conscientious avoiders of those civic organizations whose decline the commentariat observes with such angst. The old stereotype of the sexless, geeky social outcast who haunted comics & games shops and felt that he had rejected the jocks and the normies to the same extent that they shunned him was not without basis in reality. At the Dungeons & Dragons table and in the Magic: The Gathering playgroup you could expect to find people who had little to no interest in Super Bowl parties, softball leagues, earning their Eagle Scout patch, joining a college fraternity, landing the lead role in the school musical, seeking a chair in the local Rotary Club, school board, or town council, and so on. In this respect, there was a countercultural veneer to these cliques: alienated by more established, respectable affiliative groups, they went their own way together.
The increasing popularity and accessibility of tabletop role-playing games, collectible card games, and video games (in spite of the old guard’s futile efforts to gatekeep them4) should be seen as both an effect of and a contributing factor to the death-by-a-thousand-pinpricks decline of more traditional social institutions. The fact that these activities are just fun is almost beside the point in light of the obvious personal benefits of aligning oneself with a particular gaming community (or the confederated “geek” community). A sense of belonging seems to come at a premium these days, as do routine occasions to get out of the fucking house and do something purposive and enjoyable with other people. It’s ironic: thirty years ago, teenage boys who got together and played Dungeons & Dragons were the butts of jokes. They were weird, they were isolated, they didn’t understand how to properly socialize, and so on. Nowadays a group of twenty- or thirty-somethings who sit down once a week to throw dice and play make-believe are apparently doing more in-person socializing than half the country.
There’s something to be said for a hobby that can open doors for you wherever you go. If you’re a devoted Magic player who gets a job in Detroit and has to move there from Dallas, you won’t be lacking for people to talk to or things to do after you bring your decks to a gaming shop on a few Friday nights. Transferring to a new college and need to make friends? If you’re not a stranger to Dungeons & Dragons, you might want to seek out the campus dicechuckers and tell them you want to roll up a character sheet. And no matter where you are, you can always get to talking with a group of classmates or coworkers about video games and see what happens. “Oh, you play Tekken?” “Oh, you play Smash Bros?” “Oh, you play Call of Duty?” “Oh, you play Helldivers?” “Oh, you play Mario Kart? Well, shit, if you’re not busy next Tuesday night…”
Moreover, at a time when socioeconomic groups are growing more definitely tiered, involvement in a playgroup provides an opportunity to make friends with people of different stations. A lowly Amazon warehouse worker visiting his local game store to draft Magic decks with engineers and accountants can earn the respect of his credentialed peers by being a consistently formidable and gracious opponent. Nobody at a local fighting game tournament (or a Barcade with three or four dudes clustered around an old Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 cabinet) cares what you do for a living; they’re just thinking about how well you play.5
This brings us to the role of initiation within playgroups. All of these complicated games involve a lot of mechanical knowledge, lore, and in-group lingo, and they take some time to learn. A first-time Dungeons & Dragons player will probably be asked to do at least a little reading beforehand so they’ll have an idea of what they’re getting into and what they’ll be expected to do. During the first few sessions they’ll need reminders, feedback, and spot lessons to learn how to be a player the rest of the group wants to have sitting at the table with them. A Magic neophyte doesn’t earn their wings until they can play a full game without asking questions about the rules, competently build their own deck, and give more experienced players a decent challenge.
We could rattle off similar criteria for Catan, Warhammer 40K, Dominion, Guilty Gear, League of Legends, etc. These are not games that are quickly or easily learned, and in many cases new releases or updates change how they’re played.6 Much of the pleasure of belonging to an esoteric gaming community is the abundance of things to learn, master, and apply—and much of the camaraderie we find in these spaces is owed to the tendency for players who lack dedication to get frustrated and move on.
11.
Of course, these communities aren’t without conflict—and I’m not talking about perennially squabbling Dungeons & Dragons groups or competitive gamers prone to losing their tempers and talking shit.
The KotakuInAction crowd will probably tell you that the gaming community (or communities) underwent a process of aggressive colonization that began sometime during the late aughts or early tens. They’ll blame not only normie “tourists,” but ambitious “cultural Marxist” ideologues seeking to amass clout, advance an agenda, and earn griftbucks. As I’ve said before, there’s at least a kernel of truth to this: there was something of a gentrification of tabletop and video games wherein the community hubs, mouthpieces, mythmakers, and product developers began addressing themselves to progressive liberals and their preoccupations. I’ve no interest in litigating the issue here; what I want to point out is simply that the gaming world wouldn’t have become a contested field in the culture wars if the territory hadn’t become worth disputing.
There’s more at stake than there was three or four decades ago, when the mainstream either completely ignored or quietly chuckled at nerdy games and the handfuls of local nerds who played them. Nowadays this stuff matters too much to too many people (and there’s too much money involved) for it not to have become politicized.
I can sympathize with the grognards who feel like their community suffered a hostile takeover by outsiders. I can also sympathize with the newcomers who looked at these increasingly popular games and growing playgroups and wanted in, while also wanting the products to be more reflective of, and the culture more accommodating, to people like them.
To return to a disproportionate and overstrained historical comparison: during the early years of the “Jesus movement,” its leaders were at loggerheads over the issue of whether the new communities should remain exclusively within Judaism, or if they should open up membership to gentiles (without requiring them to undergo circumcision and submit to traditional Jewish dietary and social codes). At the heart of the controversy was a conflict between priorities: was it more important to preserve the group identity and values of the original members, or to expand and grow? In early Christianity and in the early 21st-century gaming world, the figures insisting on the latter prevailed. And in each case, there was a lot of bad blood.
I remember being struck by how much the critics of the new female Custodes in Warhammer 40K sounded like Eastern Orthodox Christians with an axe to grind talking about the filioque. You know the filioque controversy? To hear the Orthodox tell it, the Western church unilaterally retconned the lore regarding the relationship between the persons of the trinity and expected the Eastern churches to go along with it. Were they mad because the issue was deeply implicated in a larger political spat, or because they felt it damaged the integrity of their sacred mythos? Yes. Am I talking about Byzantine Christians or woke-skeptical Warhammer nerds? Yes.
We shouldn’t be startled by this. Warhammer is just one cult among dozens or hundreds that have been moving into the spaces vacated by crumbling social organizations, and by the erosion of national, religious, and regional mythoi. Even in times of atomization and anomie, people have to take something seriously and hold something sacred—so why not an esoteric tabletop game with a devoted player community and a mountain of lore? And why shouldn’t some smaller or larger portion of the community get upset when it looks to them like the stewards of their cherished mythos are thoughtlessly cheapening it in the interests of ESG, or under pressure from outsiders?
12.
When the Roman empire’s adoption of Christianity put the popular spectacle of gladiatorial combat out of fashion, chariot races gobbled up its market share. Where there were arenas to host them, these were huge events. Early on, there were four racing “teams” identified by the colors the riders wore: the Blues, the Greens, the Reds, and the Whites. When the Western half of the empire collapsed, only the Blues and the Greens still competed in Constantinople’s Hippodrome, having absorbed the Reds and the Whites into themselves.
By the sixth century, the Blues and the Greens (not the racers, but their supporters) had evolved from chariot-racer fan clubs into de facto political parties. The Blues were associated with the aristocracy and social/religious conservatism, while the Greens counted more tradesmen and merchants among their numbers, and were more receptive to monophysites and their beliefs. An authoritarian state such as imperial Rome wisely eschews open factionalism, but it seems the Blues and the Greens’ development from fan networks into political coalitions occurred gradually and organically enough to be impossible to stop—and nigh-impossible to dismantle once they possessed enough clout to influence political discourse and decision-making.
The Nika riots eventually forced the emperor Justinian’s hand, and that was the end of the Blues and the Greens. But there was a period in the life of the Eastern Roman Empire where the line between fandoms and factions became blurry indeed.
Am I saying that I expect something similar to happen with the gaming community (or communities)? That tabletop gamers and the esports blocs will mutate into political collectives, or that organized fandoms might become political power brokers? Not necessarily—and not anytime soon. But in proverbial “interesting times” defined by institutional recession and collapse, widespread groups that can inspire camaraderie, motivation, and commitment in their members have an opportunity to expand their scope.
This isn’t to suggest that people who play games might mutate into some sort of revolutionary vanguard. Absolutely not. Never. Won’t happen. Don’t be silly. Like the proto-orthodox Christians, the destiny of gaming communities is to help preserve the integrity of the existing order during a period of uncomfortable change.
[TBC]
I thought of the last post as filler—something topical and easy to write about during a busy month. Why not? Bitch about the Democrats, talk about Gen Y and Gen Z, work in a flight of early-internet nostalgia and some crunchy techno-pessimism. It wasn’t something I was especially proud of or had put much thought or effort into. Again, it was filler. And yet in terms of metrics, it outperformed anything else I’ve ever turned out here. What the hell?
I complained about this to a friend, and he told me: “you are experiencing what happened to the entirety of the press over the past 2 decades in miniature.”
I nearly had a brain aneurysm.
Of course, by the early aughts, Mortal Kombat had lost much of the mystique and glamour it accrued between 1992 and 1996. I don’t imagine the online community was very vibrant then (but I could be mistaken).
Pagan religions, of course, didn’t call themselves “pagan.” The word means something like “villager” or “rustic,” and it’s what the ascendant Christians called people who still adhered to the old ways—a reminder that Christianity and the other mystery cults were concentrated in the cities.
The irascible grognards who played the games wanted one thing; the people who made and sold the games wanted another. Guess who won out?
I mean, sure, they might be concerned if you haven’t put on any deodorant in two weeks and have a habit of snarling racial epithets when they land a combo against you, but let’s assume you’re someone who typically doesn’t offend everyone you come in contact with.
As I mentioned last time, this new crop of high-intensity games is remarkable for how complicated they are. Scrabble? You can learn it in one sitting. Chess? If you can can memorize in two hours how all six types of the pieces move, great, you know how to play chess (though you definitely don’t know how to play it well). Bridge and mahjong can be tough to learn (and as I understand it, mahjong has dozens of variants), but they’ve got nothing on the accrued knowledge of wonky rules, gamepiece interactions, and errata brought to the table during a four-player Commander game between Magic: The Gathering veterans who’ve been playing for at least a decade. Risk doesn’t ask players to read and commit to memory a whole fictional bestiary for the sake of knowing whether to fight or run when a particular monster (or gazebo) materializes out of the gloom. Fighting games? If you’ve never played King of Fighters, go buy King of Fighters XV on Steam this minute, and let me know how long it takes you to memorize all 61 characters’ special and super moves.
Well I'll share this with people interested in ancient Rome and in gaming I guess. But you aren't actually the first I've read on the internet about it... https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/02-i-was-a-teenage-churchmouse/fandom/
re: filler: you were writing about the times, not your specialty. Though, since you brought you skills built by writing about your specialty you did bring a fresher voice to it.
I don't think there was any colonization of the gaming community from the left or the right. Instead what happened was that a bunch of teenagers grew up, adopted new identities (including political) and started imposing them on their hobbies as a natural progression.
It is kind of strange to think back on how unified the internet/gamers used to be. That is never going to happen again.