The Gentrification of Video Game History
We’re not all suburban kids who got a Nintendo 64 for Christmas
Last year, the New Taipei City Youth Library organised an exposition about the Golden Age of RPGs, celebrating games from 1980 to 1999.
It had all the classics you might expect — Wizardry, Ultima, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Diablo, Fallout, Chrono Trigger, Baldur’s Gate, etc… But also many you probably never heard about, such as Legend of the Sword and Fairy, Xuan-Yuan Sword, Heroes of Jin Yong and The Twin Heroes.
You see, during the late 90s and early 00s, Taiwan was a powerhouse of game development, arguably only behind the US & Japan. They produced hundreds of games, played by millions of Chinese language speakers, going as far as influencing local literature and TV. Modern hits like Naraka: Bladepoint are openly advertised as spiritual successors of that lineage.
But we don’t talk about Taiwanese games. For a myriad of reasons, from language barriers to plain old sinophobia, they are not part of the “video game canon”. They don’t matter, it’s a small, local thing.
And is not just Taiwan.
Which games matter and which don’t
In 2019, Mia Consalvo & Christopher A. Paul published Real Games. The book examines why some games are seem as legitimate and worth talking about but not others — why Counter-Strike, StarCraft and EverQuest are “real games”, but Kim Kardashian: Hollywood and Mystery Case Files aren’t.
The book identifies three main areas that are commonly discussed when assessing if a game is “real” or not — the game’s pedigree (its developer), the contents of the game itself, and its payment structure.
This helps us understand how games like Free Fire can reach 150 million daily users but have basically zero presence in gamer circles & media — it’s a free-to-play battle royale mobile game created in Vietnam.
But I think the book lacks a fourth area, rarely discussed openly, but just as important: Who is playing these games.
In the case of Kim Kardashian: Hollywood and Mystery Case Files, it’s mostly women. For Free Fire, is mostly low-income people from the global south — Latin Americans, South & South-East Asians, etc.
The book itself paves the way for this:
“Early scholarship showed by example and omission which games were worthy of study, and which were not. […] It’s also likely that these games were the ones we wrote about the most because they were the ones that we ourselves were interested in playing.”
If we live in a US hegemony, where US-based media, academia and culture dominates the conversation, then it’s only logical that the examples & omissions come mostly from Americans writing about their interests.
India has more than 4 times the population of the US. They also play games, of course, so they have huge hits like Real Cricket 20, a mobile game with 50+ million downloads.
But popular games in India will never be discussed outside of the country unless they’re first presented via a US-based media like IGN, because few non-Indians read Indian games media — even if it is in English. China is another great example — Black Myth: Wukong isn’t the first Chinese hit on Steam, its impact comes from being the first one to grab Western media & gamer’s attention.
Different nationalities all have their own game history, their cultural memory, with their own hits and particularities, but they’re rendered invisible to anyone but themselves.
Even if we have things in common — and we often have — we rarely communicate directly. Over time we’re gaslighted into believing these shared elements aren’t that important, maybe they don’t even exist… our common history is erased as we submit to the default, US-centric one.
There are many examples of this — one of the most common is how Europe’s home computer scene in the 80s is often erased and replaced by the events of The Video Game Crash of 1983, an event mostly restricted to North America. The Amstrad CPC, C64, ZX Spectrum, Amiga, demoscene, etc… all get replaced by the all-mighty NES.
And if that’s happening to Europe, just imagine the rest of the world.
The erasure of different ways of playing
To be clear, this isn’t about individual games. It’s a more complex issue, that compromises our understanding of game history, culture & identity
For example, one of the most iconic images of gaming in the ’90s and ‘00s were LAN parties. A bunch of people taking their computers/consoles to events or friends' houses to play games like Doom, Halo, Quake, Unreal, etc.
As celebrated as these LAN Parties are in media, it’s important to remember that owning a gaming PC was still extremely expensive for most of the world at the time — especially for those in the Global South.
There, unless you came from a wealthy background, it’s likely that you instead went to places called LAN houses, Cyber Cafes, Locadora de Jogos, PC Bangs, Game Clubs, etc. There, you would pay hourly to play, either on PC or consoles. In US media it’s an image often associated with Korean e-sports, but it’s far more present globally than LAN parties ever were.
Looking at these images you might say they’re the same thing — a bunch of people in a room playing games together. But think about the business and cultures behind them.
- In a LAN Party, you have people who purchase computers and who purchase games. They gather once in a while, play multiplayer games together, and then return home with their PCs. There, they might play other styles of games, more single-player focused.
- In a LAN House, players did not purchase the computers or the games. With less people buying those, it is harder for a local industry to develop. And if they are only playing there, in a multiplayer environment, paying by the hour, it’s less likely they will play lengthy single-player games such 60+ hour RPGs.
Moreover, LAN houses and game clubs are permanent places. Social areas where people gather every day after school or work, similar to an arcade. This mix of communal gaming and the high piracy rates means traditional metrics such as official sales numbers are irrelevant when analyzing these environments.
So LAN Parties and LAN Houses might look the same, but they represent entirely different economic realities, that lead to different gaming cultures, social interactions and business models.
The erasure of different business models
A good example is the rise of MMOs during the late ’90s and early ’00s. The business model for American MMOs like Ultima Online & EverQuest was quite costly for the player. They would buy the game in a box, buy the expansions in a box, and then pay a monthly subscription to play the game.
In South Korea, people played on PC Bangs — the local version of Internet Cafés. They did not own the computers, so why would they own the games? And why would they pay a monthly subscription on top of an hourly fee?
So Korean companies had to try different business solutions. They first tried charging the PC Bang companies license fees so their users had free access to the game, then ended up with the free-to-play model.
A different business model from the US, adapted for a different reality than that of the US. It sounds obvious, but for years free-to-play was vilified as something uniquely evil — while gatekeeping online games behind owning a PC and paying $60 plus expansions plus subscription was the morally superior way. A stance obviously taken by people who could afford all that.
Back to Mia Consalvo & Christopher A. Paul’s Real Games:
“The general reticence of those who talk about and cover videogames online to take free-to-play games seriously has been a result of a particular set of assumptions about how games are supposed to work and what they are supposed to be.”
Asian free-to-play MMOs like MapleStory and Fantasy Journey to the West have always been more popular than World of Warcraft, but prejudice erased them. Just as well, it did not benefit Western developers, journos and academics to concede that they weren’t the centre of the MMO world. So you have decades of academic works that are aware of the size of Asian titles but do not engage with them. This led subsequent works to also ignore them — after all, if they were important, surely the reference works would’ve examined them, right?
Today, we have gacha — a different type of free-to-play. And things only got worse. While gaming expands across mobile and the Global South, the dire situation of games media and academia means few new voices get added to the conversation. A lot of the media discourse seems stuck in 2012, with the same people talking about the same games to the same audience, with the same biases and interests.
The erasure of informality
To this day there are LAN Houses and game clubs in Brazil where people gather to play PS2 soccer games modded with updated teams — the legendary Bomba Patch, arguably the best-selling game in Latin America.
“That’s not a game, it’s a mod!” — types the reply guy in the replies.
Yes, it’s a mod. The most popular games in Brazil are mods of all sorts — from adding Portuguese language to games like Skyrim & Breath of the Wild, to elaborate full conversions. PokéTibia is a Pokémon MMO with more players than many official MMOs, while GTA Motovlog is a branch of extremely popular GTA San Andreas ports for Android focused on driving bikes. It’s what happens when you have talented devs but no local structure to support them to make their own games.
Most Brazilians know about these games. But if you ask them “what’s the most popular game from Brazil”, they will struggle to answer … maybe an indie game on Steam? After all, we’ve been told over and over again that GTA Motovlog and Bomba Patch aren’t “real games”.
Counter-Strike, Day-Z, Garry’s Mod, DOTA… these are all mods as well, but they are considered “real games”. Why?
Here I would like to bring up another essential reading about games, Brendan Keogh’s The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist (BTW, it’s free!)
A lot of people make videogames in a lot of different contexts, and some of those people make money doing so. Yet, the legacy of aggressive formalization persists and still strongly influences perceptions of just what videogame creation is among researchers, policymakers, students, and videogame makers themselves.
The first video games were technological experiments and hobby projects, shared freely in disks, code sheets and magazines around the world. Corporations formed over time, but this hacker culture never went away — it carried over to BBS games, MUDs, Freeware, browser games, Flash games, mods, homebrews, open-source projects, crackers, emulators, demoscenes, private servers, fangames, MiSTer, bootleg consoles & games, RPG Maker, BYOND, AGS, Ren’Py, bitsy, etc…
All of those are continuously erased by the “industry” side, which enforces a formalized, sanitized, easily digestible and — especially — fully monetized concept of video games.
That’s why Counter-Strike is considered a “real game” but Bomba Patch isn’t.
The erasure of self
The first time I played Pokémon was on an emulator at my local LAN House. I spent countless hours there, I know they’re an important part of Brazil’s culture, their influence has been extensively documented in local news, essays and documentaries.
And I spoke with people from Korea, Spain, China, Russia, Italy, the Philippines, Malaysia, etc who all had their own local equivalents. But even so, when I first wrote about the rise of multiplayer games for the CRPG Book, I didn’t mention them.
This is why this topic is so important to me.
Decades of videos, articles, essays and books on game history that failed to mention experiences like mine made me erase my own experiences — to think what I lived didn’t matter… it was a small, local thing.
TRUE video game history was something else:
This homogenized, US-like image of gaming history is spreading. People across the world learn it from big US-based sources — Wikipedia, Netflix, influencers, podcasts, books, etc — or from local influencers parroting those sources. Some Brazilian influencers now say things like “in 1998 we were all playing Pokémon on original hardware and trading monsters at school with the Link Cable”, erasing our cultural memories and replacing them with an idealized copy of US-based experiences.
This is why I admire that exhibition in Taipei so much.
It was small, held at a local library, like a passion project from the curators. But in that space, their history is proudly told and their games are rightfully placed among the worldwide, all-time classics. The more spaces like that exist, the harder their history will be to erase.
Thanks for reading!
