Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel is out with a predictably bad take on gaming’s supposed corrosive effect on the youth. But honestly, it’s the sort of cultural conservative warrior voice that seems to have been missing in the discourse over the last ten years. Outside of Missouri Senator Josh Hawley’s attempt to regulate Candy Crush before actual sugary candy, games have been largely absent from the political arena recently. Ironically, the After Babel piece provides the blueprint for why this has been the case.
Nearly the entire growth of gaming over the last decade has been a direct result of mobile and, subsequently, the free-to-play model. And while revenue may be equal between mobile and PC consoles, players are certainly not, with mobile F2P active players likely exceeding 60-65% global player platform share. In the U.S. alone, 70% of smartphone owners play games. The massive growth in gamers from the free-to-play model has been nothing short of astounding.
Of course, the East is an entirely different situation with the current Politburo alternating between calling gaming “spiritual opium” and allowing global versions of Steam games through the Great Firewall.
Gaming simply won on its own playbook: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate. The free-to-play model turned everyone’s mom into a match-3 lover (the modal match-3 player is a 37-year-old woman)! Not every 18-34 male was a gamer in the decades prior, something reserved for “geeks.” Now, every football player hops on Call of Duty after practice.
A decrease in global and U.S. violence levels, along with increased play during the pandemic, has also helped the video game entertainment industry.
Roblox’s relatively uncontroversial rise to nearly half of U.S. kids still remains a remarkable achievement. In many cases, the parents of these kids are what we might call gaming’s first parental generation. They understand the difference between risks from games, risks from the internet, and what’s novel versus new.
Cultural video game critics need to get their facts right if they want to be taken seriously. In this piece alone, the author mistakenly claims Fortnite monetizes gameplay, a crucial distinction (“Success often depends on purchasing weapon upgrades, skins, and battle passes, making ongoing spending feel necessary”). There are reasonable discussions to be had about the costs and benefits of modern gaming to adolescents; however, every time an editorial-type piece is published on this topic, it comes across as activists needing to gasp for breath between each shock & outrage example. There’s an overwhelming use of oddball survey data, and obscure examples instead of real and public sources. For example, Roblox publicly reports $20 bookings per monthly unique payer. There! Evil monetization schema resolved!on schema resolved!