Videogame vernaculars and 2015
Growing up I accepted readily the narrative that playing video games was niche, unhealthy, and/or a phase. By the 2010s this narrative was reversed in many of the social spaces I inhabited. I attribute this not to gaming's improved graphics or story-telling but to everything else becoming more like a game. Social media was like a game, movies looked like games, exercise was like a game. Dieting was an early score-keeping trend and it just keeps progressing.
In the gamification of all cultural activities, video games of a certain kind are getting left behind. It's like home recording did to live music. Music is still made, in massive amounts, and plenty of it is good. But it is music with a different purpose to that which was practiced by bands: to be listened to online by others at home, not in big rooms with big speakers. Neither motivation or delivery of the music is better or worse. The mediation process just changes what gets emphasized. A lot of music these days is listened to with headphones; that wasn't true in earlier eras. We've changed the way we consume music by changing our utensils for doing so.
So it is with games. I have so often recalled the shock that new graphics brought nearly every year from the 1980s to the 2000s, that I am starting to suspect its my recollection of the shock more than the shock itself that I'm really feeling, like remembering a photograph of childhood and not the childhood itself. Even so, the shock was real. For at least a generationally-long amount of time, video games were reinvented in every significant way. Opinions differ on when this falls off; I'll stick my flag down on 2015, but I'd accept the mid-2010s generally. In that year, top-of-the-craft games came out. They looked better than the ones before, but the ones after looked mostly just-as-good. Were games personified in a human athlete, 2015 was the first season the play didn't run quite as a fast nor recover quite as quick. Just a bit of a slow down, a slight bow to the facts of mortality.
One doesn't have to be a historian to remember that a whole lot else occurred in the mid 2010s that shifted many parts of the world onto paths that feel different than where we thought we were headed before. Within games, I argue the opposite occurred: the medium froze in its maturity, like film in the 1970s. It wandered so far into its own potential that it rubbed gracefully against unexpected limits. Weather systems, daily NPC schedules, procedurally-generated content, ray tracing, simulated hair, the simulation of living and breathing cities...there were miracles being asked for and delivered, and once they were delivered strange things happened. The graphics were photo-realistic, the load times were faster, and the systems were complex and expertly designed and...
...I think in the 1990s game players imagined that if one day games could satisfy all the fantastical things we imagined, something significant would happen. If my favorite game could be bigger, longer, and look like the real world, that would mean something, right?
Adolescents, 10-12 year olds in particular, are undervalued socially and culturally for the unique blend of stubborn imagination and increasing practically they operate with. They have seen enough limits of things - their parents' patience, their friends' humor, their own strength and courage - to understand with the sharpness of newcomers that the world is made half of potential and half of limits. Yet they still prioritize the ambitions of childhood to conquer worlds of their own imagining. They see more simply and more quickly the truths of the world because their ontology is new and precocious. It is still possible that there are dragons in the world, for a 12 year old. Distracted and fumbling adults that we are, we give up on this possibility always too quickly.
In video games, 10-12 year olds have objects that resemble the worlds they imagine: limit-and-rules-based, to be sure, but with the right tools and moves one can manipulate the world in magical ways. And at 10-12, human beings are skilled enough to move past childish things but still imaginative enough to see their transcendent value. How many adults play poorly, binging bad shows or grinding bad games, forgetting how to really enjoy the media? I'm guilty of this plenty of times. 10-12 year olds are at the edge of this drop down, at times failing to enjoy what is fun because they can now imagine being too-old-for-this.
Back to games, though. When I was 11, I think it was, the games that formed my virtual vernacular were in place. Video games are tangible virtual worlds. Their manipulability places them forever distinct from film or video. All video game worlds are basically ball pits in different configurations: jump in, move around, see what happens. The joy of the ball pit is in being somewhere physically absurd and pointless and to see what your body might do and feel.
If I were a determinist I would posit that the maturation of video games coincided with the closure of consumers' collective dreaming regarding the heights of our virtual technologies. Adjacent and cousin to games is film and in that realm the potential of computer generated imagery or CGI seemed as massive as it did protean to audiences of the 1990s and well into the 2000s. By the 2010s we had seen all that we were going to in these terms because of the iron triangle and economics - you can have things good, fast, or cheap but not all three, and at the same time audiences are getting harder to impress because they've 'seen it all before'.
It is sad to watch video games grow middle-aged. On the one hand, they are better than ever: diverse, creative, mature, still asking some large and even political questions, but consistently productive and reliable as forms of entertainment. Much like 45 year old professionals continuing to hone their skills, games are getting a lot better at a lot fewer things. Developmental milestones are now more true to their name: they are miles and miles apart. The biggest innovation in gaming in the 2020s is the fantasy that virtual reality is finally here and at last we can live in the software worlds we grew up in. That much of our wonder and escapism into those worlds relied upon our imagination filling in the broken textures and foggy maps of the 1990s software is something not mentioned by VR boosters. Video games were amazing for all the things they couldn't and thus didn't show: what's behind the locked doors? Where does the virtual sun go? What does that line of dialogue really mean? What was that ancient world/war mentioned in passing really like? What would it feel like to really be this hero, who never sleeps, never tires, never dies, never aches, never ages?
Great media deliver us to fantasies half on the backs of our own imagination. Novels, poetry, songs - in the silences and gaps we pour our imagination and feed ourselves what we are hungry for: wonder, explanation, detail, versimilitude.
As games got 'better', the gaps got smaller, the silences became fewer. I'm not nostalgic for the small maps and bad character models. But complexity does not make all things better. Silence cannot have better audio quality. Darkness looks the same in 3D or 4K. And in silence and darkness our imagination produces the desires we cannot name but yearn for.
Video game vernaculars in 2026
Thanks to decades of spreading through culture and millions of children growing up learning how to 'feel' their way through a virtual avatar moving through software, we arrive in the 2020s with a sturdy shared cultural knowledge of video games' vernacular. We know fall damage, hit points, experience points, leveling up, and non-player character limits, as well as the implications for how reality functions thanks to these hard lines.
In the early 2010s my roommate at the time asked if sunsets in real life ever reminded me of the ones in games. I answered with a half-yes: I knew what he meant but I didn't agree. I think by the 2020s that has changed for me; beautiful real landscapes often remind me of those I've 'seen' in software.
Real-world 'purists' that had their heyday in the 1990s would probably be 'grossed out' by this fact. I can't really change my reaction to a nice sunset though; mental associations are pretty automatic and anyway not very significant most of the time. If a sunset reminded me of a novel I'd read, or a film I'd seen, would that be better or just acceptable to a broader swath of society? By the 2000s, I imagine most consumers recognized the impact and skill involved with cinematography: setting up a shot for ideal aesthetic conditions. Lighting, contrast, and positioning of actors and objects get talked about enough by critics, hobbyists, and fans alike that it's normal to think: hey that castle reminds me of Harry Potter.
Video games are at that point for a lot of the younger people in the world. How many kids now see a landscape and hum Minecraft's minimalist music? Is this them emerging from a media shelter into a more dynamic real world, or is this them bridging a comfortable childhood into an unpredictable adulthood with the use of media, same as the heartbroken use poetry and the philosophical use novels to bring themselves to accept the painful truths of real, mortal life? I guess I want to say people can become addicted to poetry and novels, Quixotic in their detached romanticization of the real. How many love songs have given first-timers weird ideas about love?
The vernacular of video games is remote control. The sensation of playing is audiovisual and remote-physical. It is the gymnastics of the avatar. When we play we sense we are inside the game but through a translator, our avatar, navigating rather than living in a space bounded by the laws that only resemble and not follow those of our natural world. What does it mean that the dominant media form of the 21st century so far is remote control in software? How does this habit of manipulating small digital forms in vast digital worlds affect our reactions to the real, or to each other? Do we see a return of the mind-body dichotomy, in which the mind acts above a meat puppet of a body, feeling but not having the emotions and sensations of it? Do I come to think of my body as I would my video game heroes?
That is taking it too far but it brings us to an interesting point in a conversation. Extremes can widen what's possible to ask. Novels insist upon world-constructing causal relations between all things: first this, and so that; followed by this, which caused that. The story moves forward. Postmodernism played with our assumptions in this regard, but did not truly decimate them except for the really aliterate or disinterested. Postmodernism was really just about sniffing at authors: "Oh, really?" In its juvenile and sophomoric aberrance though, postmodernism is symbolically impoverished. It's the back side of a hammer, pulling out nails; only half the answer to the contractor's problem.
In digital vernaculars, remote manipulation, a genuinely new literary and thus ontologically language is being born. We are and are not our social media accounts. We are and are not our email addresses. We speak and do not speak through our text messages, emoji, memes, and now LLM-assisted projects. We exist and exit from digital software worlds constantly. We are not 'always online'; we are always in and out of the gate, letting the cold air of reality in and taking the warm air of digitality out. Life is not deconstructed as in the postmodern project, but neither is it fortified eternally like a modernist TV drama. Our roles are uncertain because the door keeps swinging: am I here, or there? Is my mind where my feet are, and do I know where I'm going when I take a walk outside?
Just another era
In 500 years our present time will be between a paragraph or a chapter in whatever media future humans study. Maybe it's more fun to say the 2020s will be either 3 or 3000 memes aggregated into a fluid digital tapestry people can look at if they're curious what 21st century idiots got up to. For fun, I'll predict that our time will look like a second Dark Age to most historians, in the sense that we developed complex systems that we understood less and less of. Think for a moment of the technologies facilitating my writing and your reading of these words. How many of them do you understand? We live and work in magical times because the very material, very scientifically assessable technologies we use are basically magic to the vast majority of us aliterate users. Your smartphone is in your hand and in your face all the time, yet you have no idea how it really works. And neither do I. Magical.
Video games' core appeal is their sense of magic. The surreal sense of controlling a tiny character so directly with our hands is the first thing we forget as we play, more and more. After decades of play I can sometimes, if I'm lucky and lucid, recall that bizarre sensation of remote control of software. Have you ever stared at a friend's chin upside down long enough so that it looks like a little head without eyes? Or looked at someone's eyes upside down so long that your brain flips them in orientation, and they seem suddenly horribly but charmingly misshapen, and the both of you laugh at the mundane change of perspective?
We can pull ourselves briefly from our set perspectives. Walk on all fours, close your eyes and wander your apartment. Perception can be interrupted, and thus perceived for the first time, when we introduce limits. Video games do this to new players and the magic almost never ceases: the wonder of control and manipulation of something that has no tangible, felt physics, yet responds in its tiny world to the made-up laws of momentum and gravity is a wonder to behold.
That wonder is mundane by the 2020s. More than the internet, more than transportation, and more than chemical food and medicine, I believe video games have done the most to inject new vernaculars into our cultural practices. Having done the most that is new, games are central to our operations going forward. The networks of the internet are a profound metaphor that can feel like a mandate (we can connect so we must; we can share so we must; there is data so we must read it), but all we find in networks is what we find at popular bars: loud, messy, discordant crowds. There is as much wisdom in a crowd as there is sky in a cloud.
In games, though, we find means of individual expression and escape that resonate with something deep and weird within us. That same instinct to draw shapes of our own, sing songs of our own, echoes in the idiosyncratic gameplay of the millions and millions tapping and clicking their way through small rules for small rewards. If I can win in the game, can I win in real life? How much do I detach from reality, and when I return how much have I brought back from that detached state?
I have to wrap up now; I have no more ideas to share. This is something I'm playing, toying with. Unfinished thoughts; elsewhere smarter people have said it all better. But like a game, I need to play it out for myself.