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Matt Stapleton

Dr. Eatman

English 8520

13 December, 2018

The Identity of the Gamer: “Serious Leisure” in Academia and the Internet

Video games comprise a very unique part of modern day culture; with the advent of

smartphones and laptops, as well as the general shrinking of electronics as a whole, they have

become more available in the past fifteen years than they ever were previously. However, this

adds tension to the role of someone who likes video games passionately, at least in reference to a

similar term to the broadening of “nerd culture” in recent years in the form of superhero movies

and the permeation of science fiction. To be a “gamer,” as I will refer to the term throughout this

discussion, you find yourself immersed in something that many individuals of most backgrounds

can enjoy on a number of levels. Simply put, it doesn’t really make you special or unique; hence

the strange dissonance that being a gamer really entails in being a personality trait or clique. This

is where the term “serious gaming” comes into play: as discussed by Holt and Klieber, a serious

gamer “perseveres with the challenges of a game through many hours and puts forth great

personal effort in meeting the required tasks” (230). Rather than being a “casual gamer” and

spending small amounts of leisure time playing a game for enjoyment, these “serious gamers” try

to make their hobby more than just a game, and there are many ways to define this identity. In

this piece, I would like to investigate what makes video games so prone to this redefinition, as

well as what the rhetoric of a gamer is when taken into consideration within an academic

environment.
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Within the understanding of serious gaming, there have been many ways to apply

meaning to such a hobby that have arose alongside the advent of social media within the past

decade. One particular site that has brought about such change is twitch.tv, a free streaming

service wherein “streamers,” who produce content, are able to play a variety of video games for

viewers, who consume their content. With some of the more popular streams gathering hundreds

of thousands of views, the ad revenue and subscription fee that users can opt into has allowed

many gamers to make a living on this platform. Of course, these gamers divide themselves into

further subcategories that reflect various aspects of their personas, as well as being a form of

marketing towards viewers; the most popular of these include casual gaming, where users watch

a player leisurely make their way through a game; speedrunners, where players exploit the

mechanics within a video game to beat a self-imposed challenge often within a larger

competitive community; and eSports, where gamers becoming athletes of a sort and can practice

and compete for prize pools that have recently skyrocketed into millions of U.S. dollars in recent

years. These content creators are shaped by their viewing communities in a way, with their

identities “changed in the unity of prehension,” to draw upon a dialogue of strangers from

Cooper (25). That is to say, they may not be consciously aware of the change in identity that the

communities they foster across such a variety of categories causes, turning them from a

perceived casual gamer to one using gaming as a means to an end — in this case, as a job. Even

beyond the scope of eSports, Twitch streamers are entering a marketplace where they compete

with one another to vie for viewer’s attention; with the discussion of this as serious leisure,

Stebbins writes that “careers in serious leisure frequently rest on a third quality…significant

personal effort based on special knowledge, training, or skill,” which these streamers exemplify

within a niche that traditional content creators cannot compete in (256). In that regard, these
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gamers form their identity as personalities and entertainers much like talk-show hosts and sports

announcers, where it becomes less about the actual game they are playing and more about how

they present themself as a gamer.

To discuss video game monetization further, the identity of a gamer becomes wholly

tainted once the actual production of video games comes to the forefront. As much of a tool of

rhetoric as they are, video games are inherently consumer products, and thus the communities

fall victim to the advertising by production companies. One discussion within academia is that

“the video game business…is not to provide search or social or entertainment features, but to

create rapidly accelerating value as quickly as possible so as to convert that…into wealth,” with

the assumption that they cannot function outside of the intended purpose of being sold to

consumers (Bogost, 103). This claim is supported by video games being the top entertainment

industry, even beating out television; as an example, in 2015 League of Legends, a popular

competitive video game, even averaged 11 million more viewers for their eSports champion than

the NBA finals (Canning and Betrus, 67). The rhetoric surrounding video game advertising has

actually mobilized a large part of the gaming community in recent years, as companies like

Electronic Arts and Bethesda become exposed for malicious practices that prey on consumers,

offering incentives that are locked behind paywalls. “Freemium” games specifically have been

targeted as of late, with their “surge of interest by virtue of easy access, followed by a tidal wave

of improbable revenue” that encourages consumers to dump more and more money into a

product that continually bottlenecks their progress (Bogost, 103). Along with these consumer

practices, they also increase a level of toxicity in the gaming community with the products

designed to be played by anyone on their mobile phones; rather than being an entrenched gamer

who grew up with video games and owns every console, “casuals” who don’t own video games
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as part of their identity participate in this culture and are seen as lesser individuals. It comes

down to the legitimacy of play: the concept that some amount of gameplay is inherently worth

more than other play, with those who are spending four hours of their day within a low-

investment game such as Candy Crush being a less important experience than a “hardcore”

gamer who spends four hours playing a big-brand title such as Call of Duty.

I believe that this issue persists within academia as well, with the identity of games and

gamers coming down to what games should actually be analyzed. In many cases, games only

seem to be worthy of literary studies if they are contributing to a discussion about education or

trying to communicate a strongly-written story. “Video games attempt to collapse the distinction

between narrative as a story and narrative as performance,” Buse writes in a 1996 journal,

through which the classic arcade title Pac-Man is analyzed as something that requires

imagination to truly grasp the full expressive plot (167). By contrast, literature from the early

twenty-first century begins to skew towards “educational games” as the market becomes

inundated by various titles and a breadth of new genres. Gamers themselves changed alongside

these expanding avenues to play video games and as a result, the marketing and campaigns by

companies began to appeal to broader subjects without needing a storyline; competition being a

key drive without the need for story meaning that games could become less “literary” in a way,

and thus less important for analysis within the academic community.

While serious gaming became a trending topic within the academic community, the

schism becomes apparent with more recent work; one such interaction that I believe is worth

analyzing arises between Young et. al and Tobias and Fletcher in their respective call-and-

response pieces “Our Princess Is In Another Castle: A Review of Trends in Serious Gaming for

Education” and “Reflections on ‘A Review of Trends in Serious Gaming.’” Young et. al viewed
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video games as a tool that could be used to teach student various subjects in education levels

from kindergarten through their senior year of high school, finding that “it seems prudent to

suggest implementing…games only in concert with good teaching” (72). In effect, games do not

serve as powerful educational tools on their own based on their findings; Tobias and Fletcher

discussed this, believing that these results needed to be supported by discussions outside of the

scope of gaming literature in order to properly assess how much the positive effects actually

derive from the act of playing a video game. An important distinction is made at the end of the

piece that describes a hotly-contested subject within video game rhetorical studies: “the need for

a common, agreed-upon definition of what we classify as games and thereby what to include in

studies of this sort” (235). Their response argues that first-person shooters cause aggression in

players, which may cause their reflexes to intensify and disrupt the results of the study. The

feeling that there is an “urgent need for an agreed-upon taxonomy of games to use in sorting out

the effects of different types of games on different outcomes and students” expresses a strange

bias that different video games are inherently different to players, and as a result are inherently

different to one another (235).

This too speaks to the different interpretations of what games are “legitimate” for study,

and in a sense legitimate for play. While different games certainly can flex and develop different

skills than others (for example, a puzzle-based game may test memory more than a first-person

shooter), trying to categorize video games into specific genres for study becomes a major

contention point that adds to the growing disruption within the identity of a gamer. I believe that

this disruption has begun to manifest within the gaming community in the form of the virulent

toxicity that has been reported on by many major news organizations, as well as discussed

thoroughly on a variety of message boards in all manner of game genres. “This head start in the
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world of digital gaming enjoyed by middle-to-upper class, well-educated white males can still be

felt today,” Condis describes while referring to the permeance of white avatars in a variety of

video games in recent history (8). As white males have been the primary audience for video

games starting from the first computers in the 1960’s, the disruption that these “lesser” games

has caused in their community by allowing disenfranchised groups to participate manifests in

these newfound categories that they try to place on games. Female gamers were not originally

part of their society and of the development teams behind design on these products, and there is a

huge disparity of male-to-female eSports players; even within the niche speedrunning

community, an unusually high amount of people who now present as female garnered their

popularity while they were male-presenting, such as the prominent Legend of Zelda speedrunner

Narcissa Wright. These categories serve as a new way to keep the various communities very

white-focused, due to a resistance to change. With many casual-defined games being ones that

have predominantly female playerbases, such as Candy Crush and Farmville, the importance

male gamers place on having real video games and casual video games to designate what is

serious gaming rather than casual leisure seems to be an attempt at reclaiming these social norms

that persisted from the beginning of video games.

(Non-Essay Discussion)

I am trying to incorporate more readings on the variety of “education game” analysis that persist

within academia at the moment; the essay took a surprising turn away from the discussion of

nihilism and masochism, and instead towards sexism within the gaming community as a result of

cultural norms. With my final revision, I would like to incorporate Petersen’s “Too Strong”

before the current final paragraph listed above. I have found additional sources akin to Condis’s

piece of male nerd culture to incorporate, but I would like to discuss with you some of these
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changes briefly before adjusting some of my paragraphs. I may also need to change the flow of

the essay, although I personally feel that incorporating the various categorizations would help

supplement additional discussion on sexism within the gaming community.

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Bogost, Ian. “Rage Against the Machines: The Real Danger of Videogames Isn’t Violence, It’s

Swindling.” The Baffler, no. 24, 2014, pp. 96-103.

Buse, Peter. “Nintendo and Telos: Will You Ever Reach the End?” Cultural Critique, no. 34,

1996, pp. 163-184.

Canning, Steven, and Anthony Betrus. “The Culture of Deep Learning in Esports: An Insider’s

Perspective.” Educational Technology, vol. 57, no. 2, 2017, pp. 65-69.

Condis, Megan Amber. “Playing the Game of Literature: Ready Player One, the Ludic Novel,

and the Geeky ‘Canon’ of White Masculinity.” Journal of Modern

Literature, vol. 39, no. 2, 2016, pp. 1-19.

Cooper, Marilyn M. “Listening to Strange Strangers, Modifying Dreams.” University of

Alabama Press, 2016, pp. 17-29.

Holt, Nicolas A. and Douglas A. Klieber. “The Sirens’ Song of Multiplayer Online Games.”

Children, Youth and Environments, vol. 19, no. 1, 2009, pp. 223-244.

Stebbins, Robert A. “Serious Leisure: A Conceptual Statement.” The Pacific Sociological

Review, vol. 25, no. 2, 1982, pp. 251-272.

Tobias, Sigmund and J.D. Fletcher. “Reflections on ‘A Review of Trends in Serious Gaming.’”

Review of Educational Research, vol. 82, no. 2, 2012, pp. 233-237.

Young, Micheal F., et al. “Our Princess Is In Another Castle: A Review of Trends in Serious

Gaming for Education.” Review of Educational Research, vol. 82, no. 1,

2012, pp. 61-89.