When Gamers Run The World

Tom Armitage ponders what might happen If Gamers Ran The World:

Barack Obama is 47. By contrast, David Cameron – who leaps to mind as another potential national leader in the coming years, whatever you may think of that fact – is 42. I got to thinking about what a national leader might look like in ten years time, 2018. Let’s suggest, based on Obama and Cameron, that they’re 45.

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They would have been a gamer all their lives. Not someone who once played videogames, trotting out the same anecdote about “playing Asteroids once” in interviews; someone for whom games were another part of their lives, a primary, important medium. Someone who understood games.

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To explore what a gamer might bring to the world, I’m going to break the talk up into a number of sections; in them, I’ll examine some fairly large “issues”, and look at the kind of games that might teach us something about them.

Scarcity
The next 50-100 years are likely to be characterised by scarcity: the increasing scarcity of natural resources like oil, and the realisation that cheapness is often just an illusion. Cheap oil is an illusion. Cheap food is an illusion – you might notice in the shops that whilst the price of cheap bread is rising rapidly, expensive bread is rising in price much more slowly. We’re slowly being reminded of the real cost of things. How does your behaviour behave when things become expensive? And how do you behave if you’ve grown up never knowing that some things used to be cheap?

A gamer looks at scarcity and says “oh, this is just survival horror”. Survival horror is, fundamentally, about surviving terrifying situations in the face of scarcity of resources – usually ammunition and health. You can’t play Resident Evil as if it was Quake; that leads to death very quickly. Instead, the player has to make judgment calls about every action. Save points, in early survival horror, are rationed just like ammunition; saving now means potentially not being able to save later. Using this magnum round now means not having it later. Taking the SMG as Claire means that it won’t be there for Leon.

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The shift to survival horror is a big shift for an economy based on wholesale, overpowering victory. There’s no longer any bonus to highscores and killing everything; the only victory is survival. And when reduced to those raw elements, survival is, by its very nature, horrific. Thinking about bare minimums is frightening. And gamers – or, at least, fans of one particular genre – are already well-versed in what survival looks like. [...]

[Via Qwghlm]