It was quite telling how much the wider ideological implications of gamergate for generational polarisation were missed by quite a lot of polisci until years later
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I also have always been surprised at how few people pick up on Steve Bannon having got his start running goldsellers in WoW. They learned in games that breaking the rules is more profitable than sticking to them.
A reason might be that whereas other media (such as movies etc) from the offset targeted a broader age range, computer games initially were focused primarily on kids and young adults. It took a generation for society to accept games (if it happened at all) as an entertainment category for all ages.
By the time you get to the late 2000s and early 2010s at least in cultural studies and some wider areas of arts and humanities there was a recognition that gaming and gaming worlds were now shaping adult social attitudes and behaviours. There were also disciplinary barriers to polisci at play
Possibly because the original demographic simply got older and didn't stop playing, so it became embedded. Like the first generation who grew up with television, or even radio before that. Just reminds me of the Douglas Adams quote, "Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal ..."
On this note, I do find it interesting that at 44, I have essentially have lost interest in most television - at least in terms of things I find hugely exciting to watch - but not games.
There are a lot of similarities with comics, especially in the perceived blurring of form and genre. "gamer" is an identity with demographics attached, but the median Fortnite player and the median Hearts Of Iron player are quite different people.
Quite a few are. But there was a tendency to compartmentalise the gaming world away from areas of professional focus
Strategy games were always more my thing, so also an element in terms of colleagues I chatted about this with at the time of being in a slightly different niche to heart of gamergate
I ran a simulation gaming module in the early 2010s, but unlike luckier colleagues in War Studies, I had the experience many other academics had in teaching during that period that departments and uni management wasn't willing to invest time and resources in equipment for this kind of stuff
I think this is also part of it. The gaming ecosystem is so broad that you have everything from candy crush to Minecraft to Duolingo to GTA to Mario. We'd never elide "book readers" or "TV watchers" like we do "gamers"
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Strategy games were always more my thing, so also an element in terms of colleagues I chatted about this with at the time of being in a slightly different niche to heart of gamergate