Boomers vs. Videogames

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Mar 29, 2022

Filed under: Column 170 comments

Normally when I make a video for YouTube, I take my transcript and turn it into an article. This usually involves cutting out the parts that won’t work in print: Bits of footage, audio gags, jokes where my narration disagrees with the slides I’m showing, and so on. This video is quite short – about 14 minutes – and it has a lot of these sorts of video-only shenanigans. If I cut them all out, then there wouldn’t be much left.

So rather that clean up the script for print, I’m going to publish it as-is.Actually, I did get rid of one gag related to mispronouncing “Marcin Iwi?ski”. I don’t know how well this will work, but I’m sure you’ll let me know in the comments. Anyway, here it is…


I’ve said before that I’m older than your typical YouTube videogame creator.  I’m older than the Mortal Kombat franchise. (1992) I’m older than the original NES. (1985) Older than Pac-Man. (1980) Older than the original Atari. (1977) I’m even older than Pong. (1972) I’m fifty, which means I’m about a year older than commercial videogames.

Because of this, I sometimes get comments where some kid will hit me with an “ok boomer” when they think I’m being out of touch. At first I didn’t think anything of it. I figured they were just using the “ok boomer” meme figuratively, not literally. Like saying “ok grampa”. 

And fine. It’s no big deal. This is YouTube. We’ve all been called worse. 


Link (YouTube)

But then I noticed a trend of people calling the original Doom a “boomer shooter” and I realized that there’s an entire generation of kids out there who have no idea what “boomer” actually means or where the generational demarcation points are. “Boomer” just means “old person” now, and that makes it really confusing to discuss generational differences. 

So let’s talk about the boomers, and then we’re going to talk about who is really screwing up the videogame industry these days. 

Rise of the Boomers

While these guys are towering icons of boomer culture, the Fab Four aren't themselves boomers. Born in the early 1940s, all four of the Beatles fall into the 'silent generation'. As the name suggests, people don't talk about the silent gen very much.
While these guys are towering icons of boomer culture, the Fab Four aren't themselves boomers. Born in the early 1940s, all four of the Beatles fall into the 'silent generation'. As the name suggests, people don't talk about the silent gen very much.

While we divide the generations up according to birth years, a generation is really more about culture than it is about age. The baby boomer generation is comprised of people born between 1946 and 1964. What really set these people apart wasn’t their age, but their lifestyle.

Earlier generations treated education like an optional bonus on the way to the workforce. They either had no public schooling, or they left school in their early teens so they could help support their families by working at a farm or a factory. The boomers were the first generation to experience the full 12 years of schooling in significant numbers.

Earlier generations were tightly connected to their extended families. It wasn’t uncommon to grow up under the same roof as your grandparents, aunts, and uncles. The baby boomers were the first generation to grow up in the newly-forming suburbs. For those boomer kids, “family” just meant the “nuclear family” – mom and dad and the kids.

Mass media – and television in particular – gave baby boomers a strong sense of cultural identity. Culture was homogenizing, making it possible for everyone to experience the same TV shows, the same movies, and the same music. When the boomers went off to college – something they were far more likely to do than their parents – they might travel a thousand miles away to a place they’d never been to before. And when they got there, they would discover that they had more in common with their new classmates than with the families they left behind. This sounds normal to us now, but at the time this was a very radical shift. The new generation was rejecting the culture of their parents and forming their own.

This new phenomena was given a name… the “generation gap”. These days we use the term to talk about the common divide between the old and the young, but back in the 1970s this specifically referred to the tensions between boomers and their parents. Incidentally, this is where the clothing chain The Gap got its name

To most of you, this should sound pretty familiar. Full K through 12 education? Nuclear family? Living in the ‘burbs? Distinct generational identity marked by particular mass media? That sounds like kids growing up today. And I think that’s what makes the boomers so interesting. They were the first modern generation. Their childhood experiences have more in common with today’s kids than with the generations that came before.

The baby boom generation ended in 1964. Yeah, I know it sounds weird to say that the height of Beatlemania marked the end of the baby boom, but if the boomer period lasted any longer then you’d have a bunch of boomer kids who had boomer parents, and that’s not how generations work.

People born between 1965 and 1980 are called Generation X. That’s me. I realize that we’re all just “old people” to the under-thirty crowd, but our generations are pretty distinct. Gen X has its own TV shows, movies, and music.

Okay, hopefully we’ve got the generations all sorted out. So let’s talk about what this has to do with videogames.

Dawn of Gaming

Boomers might not be big fans of videogames today, but their generation is the one that got the industry started. Boomers built those primitive early machinesAtari founder Nolan Bushnell is technically a couple of years too old to be counted as a baby boomer. But these lines are blurry and he has more in common with his hippie-bus collegages than with the rest of the Silent Generation. while Gen-Xers like me were literally still in diapers. Boomers designed the first arcade cabinets and invented the first gen home gaming consoles.

It wasn’t until the late 80s that my generation was finally old enough to make our own contributions to the hobby. Which brings me to the idea of Doom being a “boomer shooter”. 

Doom came out in 1993. Here is the team that made Doom:

This picture perfectly captures the personality of everyone involved. It's remarkable.
This picture perfectly captures the personality of everyone involved. It's remarkable.

By 1993, Baby boomers were nearing 50. You’ll notice that these guys are NOT 50. The same was true for most of the people who played the game. I was 22 at the time. I’m sure a few middle-aged boomers played a little Doom when they could steal a few minutes away from their families and careers, but Doom was overwhelmingly a game by and for the 20-somethings of Generation X. So when you call it a “boomer shooter” you’re off by about three decades. In fact, Doom was my generation’s first major contribution to the hobby, so seeing it called a “boomer shooter” really stings. 

Some people try to justify the term by saying “It’s a boomer shooter because it goes ‘boom'” For one thing, all shooters go boom. That’s kinda the point of a shooter. Secondly, this is like saying the original Civilization is a millennial game because it covers millenniums of history. That’s just confusing for no reason.

Here I have to admit that language prescriptivism is a doomed undertaking. Yes, there are over a dozen better terms we could use for these games, but the term “boomer shooter” has stuck and people are going to continue to use it regardless of how annoying or wrong it might be. I can’t change that, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth complaining about.

And speaking of complaining, let’s talk about the generation that’s ruining this hobby…

Blame it on Boomer

I began writing about games professionally about 14 years ago when I became a contributor at the Escapist. That was right around the point where the industry finished its first big round of consolidations that saw the big publishers gobble up all of the smaller studios. At the time, most of those publishers were run by baby boomers. And so for years I’ve been referring to the industry leadership as “boomers”. But as I ran the numbers in researching this video, I realized that this isn’t really true anymore.

So let’s do a quick CEO headcount and see who’s running things these days. And just to be clear, I’m just focusing on western developers here. The generational divide works differently in Japan and I’m not qualified to comment on that culture, so I’m not including them in this list.

Let’s start off with the big one:

Phil Spencer is the CEO of Microsoft gaming, which means he’s in charge of Xbox and a sizable chunk of PC stuff. He was born in 1968, which means he’s Gen X.

Tim Sweeney is the CEO of Epic Games. He was born just a year before me, so he’s also Gen X. 

Bethesda is owned by Zenimax Media. For years Zenimax was run by baby boomer Robert A. Altman. But Altman has since passed away and Zenimax is now owned by Microsoft. Which means Phil Spencer controls this one, too.

Take-Two Interactive is run by Strauss Zelnick. He might not look it, but he was born in 1957, which makes him the first baby boomer on our list.

Cartoon villain Bobby Kotick runs the slaughterhouse at Activision. He was born in 1963, which means he’s one of the youngest boomers out there. If he was any younger, he’d be Gen-X. Oh but wait, Microsoft just bought Activision and Kotick is probably on the way out. After the merger, this will be another superconclomerate for Phil Spencer to run.

Ubisoft is the house of microtransactions, DRM and NFTs, and that place is run by Yves Guillemot. Born in 1960, he’s a boomer.

CD Projekt is run by Marcin Iwi?ski. He was born in 1974, which puts him on team Gen-X.

Andrew Wilson is running the lootbox factory at EA. Like Iwi?ski, he was born in ’74, so he’s another Gen Xer.

2k Games is run by David Ismailer, who doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. We don’t know his exact age, and pictures of him are hard to come by. Still, he’s clearly not a baby boomer. Heck, is this guy even 40 yet? Is this our first millennial CEO? I don’t know. Maybe this is an old picture or maybe he’s another immortal like Strauss Zelnick. Whatever. Let’s just assume he’s Gen-X and move on.

Just to be inclusive, let’s throw mobile / social games developer King.com into the list. King is run by… 

Oh.

Ok, so King was bought by Activision, which was bought by Microsoft, which means this is another company that has fallen into Phil Spencer’s hands. Is anyone keeping an eye on this guy? It seems like he could do a lot of damage if he wanted to.

And finally we have the wildcard, Valve. Like Bobby Kotick, Valve head honcho Gabe Newell is close to the line between boomer and X-er, landing just on the boomer side.

So there it is. That’s the industry as it stands in early 2022. What a disappointment. I always hoped that the generational turnover would bring us a better class of leadership, but here we are. My generation is running the industry, and things are as bad as they’ve ever been. 

To a certain extent, I think the failings of the Gen-X CEOs are a lot less forgivable than the failings of their boomer predecessors. Videogames didn’t show up until boomers were in their 30s, and the industry didn’t really take off until the generation was well into middle age. These people didn’t grow up playing games. The hobby isn’t personal to them, so I can see why they would look at games as just another disposable consumer product.

But I can’t give a pass like that to the Gen-X guys on our list. Take Andrew Wilson for example. He was 11 when the original Famicom came to the west and seventeen when the Super Nintendo dropped. He was nineteen when id Software unleashed Doom on the world. Even if he didn’t personally experience these things, he should have some appreciation of them through his peers. He ought to understand how games work, what makes people connect with them, and he ought to understand the deep impression a well-crafted game can leave on the audience. Which makes his constant assault on the hobby all the more offensive. 

It’s nice that his team apologized for the disaster of Battlefront 2, but it’s even more mystifying that they made the blunder in the first place. How could you not know how damaging lootboxes would be to the experience? How could you not know how offensive this would be to your customers? Your audience isn’t some mysterious unapproachable alien group. They’re not strangers with a different language and cultural background. They’re not on the other side of some impossible generation gap. Your customers are the people you grew up with. It’s the culture you grew up in. You should know better. Being a Gen-Xer that doesn’t understand what gamers want is like being a millenial that doesn’t understand smartphones.

And this is what I find really depressing about the state of things right now. 

Today’s gaming industry is one where you use a privacy-invading launcher to buy a DRM locked game with always online single player where you use an in-game shop to buy lootboxes to gamble for NFTs as part of some godawful pay-to-win design. Videogames are barely a hobby at this point. It’s basically a bunch of morally and artistically bankrupt companies looking for the next grift. Okay, these companies aren’t ALL that bad, and I think a couple of them actually try to do right by their customers.  But still, the overall state of the industry is horrendous and we mostly have Gen-X to blame for it. What a disappointment.

I guess we have to wait another 15 years for my generation to retire, and hope millennials are better stewards of the industry when they get to the top.

 

Footnotes:

[1] Actually, I did get rid of one gag related to mispronouncing “Marcin Iwi?ski”.

[2] Atari founder Nolan Bushnell is technically a couple of years too old to be counted as a baby boomer. But these lines are blurry and he has more in common with his hippie-bus collegages than with the rest of the Silent Generation.



From The Archives:
 

170 thoughts on “Boomers vs. Videogames

  1. Dreadjaws says:

    Ha! You think that’s depressing? In Final Fantasy XIII… oh, wait, wrong article.

    Anyway, sure, you can be disappointed by the way Gen-X-ers are handling the industry, but I don’t see reason to be surprised. I doubt any of these people came from humble beginnings and as such it’s very likely that like most rich people they’re simply completely out of touch with reality. And look at how many crypto bros are gamers even though they know their mining ruins the hobby for many others.

    Bottom-line: some people are just pricks.

    1. Zaxares says:

      Yeah, I suspect the cause of all of the recent deplorable trends in gaming is because, ultimately, these companies are run by business execs, and business execs are after profits above all else. It’s kind of like that famous saying about people and power: “People think that if they were to get into power they would behave very differently from the people in charge. The ugly truth is that, in order for us to get into power, we would have to behave very much like them.”

      1. Dreadjaws says:

        Yeah, it’s a sad state of affairs but generally speaking those who get into power is because they desire it.

      2. Zak McKracken says:

        “business execs” is the keyword here, I think.
        Their aim is not to make their gaming pals from back in the day happy (if they even were gamers at any point), their aim is to make a successful company — with definitions of “success” ranging from “makes lots of money” trough “makes *me* lots of money” through “sells for lots of money”.

        Even putting all snark aside, and with the best intentions, you don’t become boss of a company like that if you spend time playing lots of games, or your main interest is in making games that your friends from 20 years ago would have celebrated. You must organize the company in a way that it produces games in today’s market, for today’s customers, and does so profitably. That includes addressing customers who’s taste you don’t understand and moving to new genres/modes of playing that are economically promising.
        Even then, of course, there seem to be loads of video game companies crazy out of touch with their audience, but then I’ve met tons of people who liked ME2 better than ME1 and loved the later Asscreed games. And people who played WoW like crazy, which to me is absolutely incomprehensible. If I had to run a video game company, the I would be sure I couldn’t trust my own instincts about what’s going to sell and what isn’t. If I did what I personally liked, nobody at the company would get it, and I wouldn’t like the result, or even if they did, it would likely fail horribly, except for that tiny target audience that shares my ideas about video games. If I let go of that and tried to do what “the market” wanted, there’s a good chance it’d also fail, because I’d have no idea what would work and why.
        However, I will never be in that position because in order to get to that point you need to have a very different career than I am trying to have, and a very different mindset than I want.

    2. Syal says:

      Have we hit Gen XIII yet, or are we still on Gen 12?

  2. Tariq says:

    2k Games is run by David Ismailer, who doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. We don’t know his exact age, and pictures of him are hard to come by. Still, he’s clearly not a baby boomer.

    Found his LinkedIn page. Gonna hazard a guess from his LinkedIn username (di73), which tracks based on the year he entered college (1991), that he was born in 1973. Sounds like the sort of thing someone who majored in law would do.

    Anyway, generational explanations aren’t probably going to explain why videogames are ruined. You’re better off looking at gender (they’re all men), ethnicity (they all look like white folk), and socio-economic class (they’re all rich as hell) as better predictors.

    Which tells you that in 15 years we’re still going to see the same old nonsense again.

    1. Joshua says:

      Yes, it’s almost something like running a business is the primary motivator as opposed to the generational culture. Millennials* will be doing the same thing if not worse.

      *On the flip side of the premise, Baby Boomers tend to like to use the word “Millennials” as young adults these days. Using 1980, the oldest Millennials are hitting 42 this year, and I’m sure the generation has more than their fair share of grandparents. So, there’s also a good chance that many major studios already do have Millennials in executive and/or key roles.

      1. MrPyro says:

        Using 1980, the oldest Millennials are hitting 42 this year

        Please don’t remind me

        1. Sven says:

          I’ve always found 1980 a weird start for millennials. I was born in 1981, but I feel like I have much more in common with Gen X than millennials. I played Doom (and Wolfenstein, Keen, Sierra games, etc.), I watched 80s cartoons, and I grew up with VHS tapes and land lines, the Internet was little more than a curiosity for me until I went to university, and I didn’t have a cell phone until I was over twenty. My colleagues that are millennials are all much younger than me.

          1. Shamus says:

            I agree that 1980 is a weird start date. For one, it cuts GenX short. Our generation is only 15 years long.

            And yeah, it does feel like people born in the early 80s have more in common with me (a decade older) than with the folks born in the mid 80s (slightly younger). I’m not sure what the shift was that makes a 1982 person feel more GenX than millennial, but there does seem (anecdotally) to be something to this.

            1. MarsLineman says:

              I think it has to do with having had an analog childhood. If you were born in 1981, then you probably didn’t have a computer at home until the 90s, meaning you were already past the age of 10 when you first experienced home computing (and if you did have a computer at home, it’s unlikely you were using it for much social interaction). There are plenty of studies showing that personality becomes more or less fixed by roughly age 10-12, so your most formative experiences are largely during those early years (at least in terms of baseline personality traits). And if you were born in 1971 or 1981 your first ten years at home were pretty similar in terms of technologies used– mostly TV, radio, and perhaps some home console/ arcade gaming (Atari, NES, etc). And crucially, your social life was fully analog– either in person or over the analog phone.

              Once you get into the 90s, home computing becomes far more popular, and by the 2nd half of the 90s, the internet really starts to take off. And with the internet came messaging, email, etc meaning that social lives started to move more and more towards the digital/ online. The oldest millenials were mostly fully formed by the time these trends became dominant, whereas younger millenials’ entire social structure/ home-life became radically changed when they were still in their formative stages. How kids relate to each other socially (using voice/ in person for older generations, versus online chat/ messaging for younger generations (and then social media even later) has likely strongly influenced cultural mores/ generational standards. And in that sense, the oldest Millenials have a lot more in common with Gen Xers than they do with the youngest millenials.

              1. Chad+Miller says:

                I’m also early-80’s birthdate myself and it feels the same way to me too. There’s some discussion in Stephen King’s On Writing about his experience as one of the youngest people to remember “before TV.” In a similar vein I feel like I’m one of the youngest people to remember “before the Internet”.

                1. Philadelphus says:

                  Eh, I was born 1989, making me a younger millennial, but my family didn’t get a computer (and thus Internet access) until, like, ’98 or ’99. So I still definitely remember “before the Internet”, at coming-up-on-33.

                  Funnily enough, as a kid, I used to try to “store” subjects in my memory that I wanted to know more about but didn’t have any way of accessing information about at the time, on the assumption that my adult self would magically have some way of getting information on anything I wanted to know. And then I grew up and hey presto Google and Wikipedia came along, and I still to this day occasionally have my memory jogged about something I wanted to know more about as a kid and just…go look it up. It’s still wild to me that I lived in exactly the right time frame of history for my childhood assumption to come true.

                  1. tmtvl says:

                    My grandfather was a librarian and it took a few years after I got introduced to the internet to go from “I want to know something, I’ll look it up in a book” to “I want to know something, I’ll look it up online.”

                    Even now I like learning about things from books and getting further information from the web, rather than just looking everything up online.

              2. Joshua says:

                I think there’s also a HUGE shift in what’s called Free Range Childrenr. I was born in 1977 and got my first computer in 1989, so I line up with other Gen X’ers in that regard. However, as a child I was basically left unattended for good periods of time after I hit 7 or so. I would go play outside or in my room after getting home from school (I was also a “latchkey kid” until dinnertime. I remember riding my bike to friends’ houses or to the park a half mile away all the time. At some point in time during the mid to late 80s, leaving children to go roam around the neighborhoods unsupervised fell out of favor due to fear of predators, and now we have “play dates”. Granted, I may be wrong about the time period where this cutoff occurred, but it’s a huge generational culture shift.

            2. Nixorbo says:

              ’82 boy here – for what it’s worth I definitely feel more Elder Millennial than Late Gen Xer. I listen to a podcast (We Got This With Mark and Hal on the Maximum Fun network, give it a listen!) and I have much more in common with my mid 80s wife and friends than I do with them, who were both born roughly 5 years before me. The early 80s nostalgia that Late Xers remember fondly I vaguely remember and have no great attachment to (He-Man, Thundercats, Transformers, basically all that stuff that’s being rebooted by Netflix these days that fanboys won’t stop complaining about) while the stuff I watched – The Disney Afternoon, Tiny Toons, Animaniacs – they were apparently a little too old for but all my younger college friends also grew up on. It’s not until ’88 or so that people younger than me feel like they had a different childhood

              TL;DR – I posit there’s a 4-year range on either side that you share the most in common, the people you went to school with.

            3. Liessa says:

              Yep, also born in the early 80s, and I know exactly what you mean. Depending on your exact definition of when ‘Gen-X’ ends (I’ve heard it put anywhere between 1980 and 1985), I fall right on the edge between Gen-X and Millennials, and I’ve never really felt I fit in with the cultural stereotype of either group – however I do feel a lot more of a connection with Gen-X. I think it’s probably due to being the last generation that can clearly recall a time before the Internet (or rather, before use of the Internet became widespread).

              1. Simplex says:

                “I fall right on the edge between Gen-X and Millennials, and I’ve never really felt I fit in with the cultural stereotype of either group”

                That’s why I love that “Xennials” are a thing.
                https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials
                “Xennials are described as having had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood. “

          2. Smosh says:

            I’m born in 1982 and I feel I have little in common with either. Millennials grew up with the internet, but I only got it in my teens. Gen X were adults when they had computers, but I had access to one as a child.

            I’ve seen the argument that around 1980-1985 there’s a micro-generation which grew up in the middle of the tech shift, and spent the years of their childhood and youth *while* everything changed, not before (GenX) or after (Mils).

            1. Liessa says:

              That’d be me as well. I was in my early teens when the Internet really took off, and I distinctly remember that in the space of around 1 year, suddenly EVERYONE had an email address and a website. (My parents, being software engineers, were early adopters.) Smartphones didn’t really take off until my last couple of years at university, and I didn’t get one myself until several years later. So while I’m familiar and comfortable with this technology, I can also remember the Before Times.

            2. Simplex says:

              “I’ve seen the argument that around 1980-1985 there’s a micro-generation which grew up in the middle of the tech shift, and spent the years of their childhood and youth *while* everything changed, not before (GenX) or after (Mils).”

              Sorry for posting same thing for the third time but I agree with those postulating a microgeneration:
              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials

          3. Simplex says:

            “I’ve always found 1980 a weird start for millennials. I was born in 1981, but I feel like I have much more in common with Gen X than millennials. I played Doom (and Wolfenstein, Keen, Sierra games, etc.), I watched 80s cartoons, and I grew up with VHS tapes and land lines…”

            You just described me. There must be more of us (dozens!), because someone came up with the term Xennials:
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials

            Shit, I was born in Poland so we actually had a ROTARY phone in mid 90s. My then girlfriend who was from a vilalge never had a phone in the early 90s so she actually did not know how to use one (she was same age as me).

            TL;DR: I also disagree with that 1980 cutoff.
            By that logic a person born in 1981 is a millenial just like a person born in 1995. Those two people had radically different childhoods (regarding access to modern information technology).

      2. Chuk says:

        Why would they have more than their fair share of grandparents at 42? Seems to me like they are having kids later than Gen X did (and *way* later than Boomers).

        1. Joshua says:

          Sorry, that was indeed poorly worded. There’s more than a fair chance that some of them are grandparents at that age. 20-21 year-old (more than legal adult) having children who go are then 20-21 when they have children. You are correct that percentage wise, this is probably less likely than older generations.

      3. Agammamon says:

        This is certainly true – like Gen-X is always forgotten, I have to remind myself that the ‘Fucking Millennials’ are not the same group as the Gen-Zers.

        Everything’s in a ‘fucking Boomers’/’fucking Millennials’ binary as shorthand for ‘old’ and ‘young’ but the Millennials are firmly in the middle-manage stage of their careers while Gen-Z is just entering the workforce in number.

        1. Nixorbo says:

          Elder Millennial (1982) just turned 40 two weeks ago checking in.

    2. SidheKnight says:

      You’re better off looking at gender (they’re all men), ethnicity (they all look like white folk), and socio-economic class (they’re all rich as hell) as better predictors.

      I doubt any of those factors is going to make much of a difference. The main cause of the gaming industry being in this state is the economic incentive. For profit corporations (especially publicly traded ones) have a mandate to maximize profits.

      Back in the infancy of this industry the best way to maximize profits was to make a better quality product, whether by having better tech/graphics, innovative gameplay mechanics, getting a license to a famous IP, or targeting an unexploited niche market.
      Nowadays the best way to maximize profit is to have mass broad appeal (which leads to the most famous AAA games being all rather “samey” and generic, but usually serviceable and good enough) and add lots of recurrent monetization (lootboxes, microtransactions, DLC, live services, etc).

      I doubt black/female/humble-origins executives are going to be any less greedy than the current crop. At best, you’ll get games that target wider/more diverse audiences, but they won’t be any less predatory as long as there’s enough people willing to buy lootboxes and all that crap.

    3. Lasius says:

      ethnicity (they all look like white folk)

      “White” is a skin colour not an ethnicity. By ethnicity most of them are US American, though some are French or Polish.

    4. Ninety-Three says:

      Anyway, generational explanations aren’t probably going to explain why videogames are ruined. You’re better off looking at gender (they’re all men), ethnicity (they all look like white folk)

      Excuse me? The videogame industry was overwhelmingly white and male from its inception and it has only been getting less so over time. If you think videogames are now ruined on that axis and were ever historically not ruined, your issue isn’t them being too white.

      1. Daimbert says:

        Yeah, my thought on that was that the only way that could matter if they didn’t understand their target audience because of that, but given that the audience always was predominantly the same on those traits that wouldn’t be the reason for screwing it up, and this is made only more unlikely given that the person complaining — Shamus — aligns with them on those traits as well. So it is more likely to be an attitude that follows from a businessperson’s mindset rather than from gender or ethnicity.

    5. Taellosse says:

      I think Joshua has the right of it on this question – generational zeitgeist, gender, race, and class-during-childhood are all going to play a role in how a given person with decision-making power behaves, but the largest factor is always going to be the environment they’re in and the vector of the choices they made to get there – which means that their status as a senior executive of a large, publicly-traded company is going to do most of the work of influencing the general direction of their thinking.

      The traits and skills that lead a person to becoming a CEO in the world of Western capitalism hasn’t changed that much since capitalism was invented (this type of person is distinct, in many respects, from the set of traits that people who found successful companies exhibit, it should be noted), and so long as the broad framework of that environment persists, the people that are most successful in it are going to tend to be pretty similar to each other, no matter when, where, how, or who they were born.

  3. Thomas says:

    I’m not optimistic that the people at the top matter very much. If Ubisoft games with lots of microtransactions make a lot of money and shareholders continue to invest in chasing the latest trends using the most basic level knowledge about industry cash cows, we’ll get people at the top who do those things whatever their background.

    The behind the scenes stories about Anthem suggest the EA higher ups gave some really good gameplay advice to Bioware on Anthem. Despite clearly knowing something about games, they still drove Bioware into the ground and burned 6 years of money on Dragon Age development chasing live service games.

    We need consumers who aren’t vulnerable to exploits in human psychology (which is either impossible or will take mass cultural change) and smart investors who believe the best videogames will also sell the best.

    EDIT: And corporate structures that promote competence

    1. tmtvl says:

      EA used to be pretty good back in the ’90s. I would think some of those good guys are still around, hidden in plain view.

  4. Chris says:

    We never even managed to get a proper name like the other generations.

    The thing that really irks me about the term boomer shooter is that Doom and Quake are so quintessentially GenX in presentation.

    1. AdamS says:

      This is a result of younger people blaming the boomer generation (fairly or not) for a lot of socioeconomic problems currently facing the world, causing “boomer” to mutate into a catchall for “out of touch person who is older than me and doesn’t understand all the new ways my life has gotten harder since you were my age”

      From there it came to just mean “older person who remembers things being different than they are now.” Lots of linguistic drift happening.

      1. eldomtom2 says:

        I actually think it happened the other way around. I saw the monster-drinking boomer meme on 4chan long before I started hearing about “the boomers are to blame for everything”.

      2. Gndwyn says:

        It makes all kinds of sense that Gen Xers would care more about the difference between Boomers and Xers then Millennials would, and that Gen Z would care more about the difference between them and Millennials than Boomers would.

  5. Jimmy says:

    Bad people cynically making money is not a generational thing so I doubt things will improve for AAA gaming any time soon.
    I think the only reason we had a golden age of gaming is because the type of people who will exploit any industry to carve out money hadn’t latched on to video games yet.

    The name boomer shooter is spectacularly dumb. At least it is another tool to allow you to easily identify people who haven’t put much thought into things.

    1. Thomas says:

      I’d go further and argue it’s mostly technological. The original arcades were grossly exploitative with difficulty spikes designed to pump people for cash.

      Then we had a brief period where games were on PCs and home consoles but there wasn’t a good way of charging people for micro payments (particularly as a lot of people wouldn’t use their card details online in any form).

      Then online shopping platforms became standardised and it once again became possible to make microtransactions, and we went straight back to the arcade system, but now with a couple of decades of research into human psychology to make it more manipulative.

      1. Abnaxis says:

        That’s a really good point. I never thought of microtransactions as “it’s like a pinball machine, but it’s virtual and you feed it your credit card instead of quarters,” but it makes so much sense when you look at it like that… also it’s really depressing…

        1. Daimbert says:

          I don’t think it’s really the same thing. In those cases, you literally paid to play and you could extend the value of each play by gaining more skill, and as long as you were having fun you’d keep paying (one issue with making arcade or pinball games too challenging is that if you don’t get to play long enough to have fun you’d stop playing that game and it wouldn’t make money). So the games were designed to be more addictive from the start so you’d want to play with difficulty added on to ensure that you couldn’t “finish” it too quickly and get bored with it or play too long to cost it money per hour. So that model best fits the MMO model than the microtransaction model: in an MMO, they try to get you in early so that you are interested in playing but add all sorts of time sinks so that you don’t finish it too quickly and so keep paying them to play it.

          I think microtransactions grew out of the expansion and pre-order model: people are willing to pay for extra content and expanded online sales services and the ability to have different players have different sets of content means that a company can add content on the fly and charge people for it, and so adding extra content is a lot easier to do and a lot more profitable than coming up with a completely new game. The FIFA lootboxes tie into that since while some of them increase abilities a lot of them simply provide classic players and so are more about personalization than real easing of difficulty.

  6. Mervyn Bickerdyke says:

    “I can’t change that, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth complaining about.”

    And that’s the point where you now have covered the “Get of my lawn!!”-part of being a boomer :-P

    Anyone else has to think of the “Avoid becoming your parents”-commercials?

  7. bobbert says:

    I only played DOOM2 only because my grandfather had a copy. He was a furniture salesman. I don’t remember off hand his numbers, but he was in the navy on an aircraft-carrier during the Cuban Missile Crisis (you can work them out from there).

  8. Gethsemani says:

    Several commenters have already pointed out that generational belonging matters less than socioeconomic background and professional vocation in terms of explaining why all CEOs behave a certain way and make similar decisions. But let’s talk about “OK, Boomer” for a bit and what it meant when it originally dropped:

    Boomers are (by and large, exceptions exist obviously) people who can’t empathize with Gen Z and Millenial woes like not getting steady employment, being unable to afford college tuition and being excluded from the housing market. “OK, Boomer” is the response to a 70-something telling you that you could make money if you only get a steady job and put in the hours to work your way up, because that’s how they did it. Only that’s not how modern hiring practices work, the Barista is never going to get a shot at running their own franchise branch and are likely on a short time or on-demand contract that cuts them out of a career path and messes with the rest of their life. “OK, Boomer” in this context is a signal that the person you are talking to is too old to understand the realities of life for young people.

    As such I thought it was a good message. It was a very particular insult about being too far removed from the struggles of young people to understand it. It is kind of sad that it has become a generic clapback at anyone older than you, because as a political statement it succinctly captured a lot of the frustration that Gen Z and Millenials feel: The frustration that our parents and grandparents got a lot of good stuff but squandered it so bad that we have to fight tooth and nail and still get less then what they got just from coasting along.

    1. Abnaxis says:

      This.

      I had to hear so many effing Boomer go on about millenials “living in their parents basement expecting the government to give them hand-outs,” and “OK Boomer” was such a great way of summarizing that feeling even if they always assured me I was one of the “good ones.”

      At the same time though, I’m pretty sure that generational gap exists across more than just Boomers. Gen X was plenty happy to pile on blaming millenials for not being able to afford the cost of living after the housing bubble burst as well. From that perspective, I’d argue that “OK Boomer” has ALWAYS encompassed more old people than just boomers, it more irks me that it encompasses more than just describing the lack of empathy of older generations.

      1. Orophor says:

        While the 2008 housing crisis sucked, it was hardly unique. In fact we go through pretty consistent boom and bust cycles like this an have since the 1600s: https://www.investopedia.com/timeline-of-stock-market-crashes-5217820

        Every generation had challenges to face. It’s true some of the challenges today are very complex, but we also have far better tools to deal with them than prior generations. We’ve got better farms, more clean drinking water, better healthcare, better information access and sharing than ever before.

        1. Supah Ewok says:

          That better information access feeds our understanding of just how screwed things are moving towards, feeding the general existential angst that is crossing all generations now. Ignorance isn’t a virtue but knowledge doesn’t mean happiness.

          After all, those farms, clean drinking water, and healthcare are not necessarily evenly distributed – or more accurately, access to the products thereof. And we have seen in real time that distribution becoming less and less well distributed and as of yet that trend is not reversing. That is plenty enough for societal anxiety.

          1. Orophor says:

            Fair point. To me the greatest challenges we face today are systemic. We need to change things to be more equitable, sustainable and renewable. I see some hope in the solarpunk movement: https://www.tc.columbia.edu/sustainability/news/stories/solarpunk/

            Not a panacea sure, but I think a step in the right direction especially is we share and distribute the renewables widely to the global south and other countries that never got the boost from being an early industrial nation or being a colonial power taking from their colonies.

    2. BlueHorus says:

      Very true. But sadly ‘the meaning changed once other people started using it’ is true of almost every phrase, given time. Sometimes it’s deliberate, sometimes not.

      (EDIT: And wow, almost every other example I can think of is political)

    3. Jaloopa says:

      OK boomer ;)

    4. fyr says:

      I hate to break it to you, but most Gen Xers I know had it the same – not getting steady employment and being excluded from the housing market was just the way it was. There was no point into going into many types of jobs because there was no work – teaching, trades, anything blue collar – because it was full up and would be for the next 20 years (at which point they’d hire someone young instead), and you need steady work to buy.
      And yes, the crappy boomer parents said the same things and the kids complained about the same things :) But there was no internet so the only widespread stuff anyone could do was write to the newspaper.

      1. Abnaxis says:

        I think this was meant as a reply to me? If so then respectfully no, Gen X-ers really didn’t have it the same. In fact, I get kinda annoyed that the “millennial” label covers such a wide time range, because even within millennials the ones born before 1990 had it way different than the ones born after 1990, because that’s the birth-year corresponding to whether you were an adult of not before the housing market crash. I was born in ’84 so I “only” lost the white-collar job I had lined up out of college and had to do factory temp-work for a couple years when the crash happened–at which point I actually got a job in engineering for 60% of the pay I would have had five year earlier–but I at least already had an apartment with rent locked in before the cost of renting went up 50% in my area so I could scrape by. Conversely, my brother-in-law (6 years younger than me) got stuck living with his mother because there were literally no other places to live he could afford even though he had work.

        Meanwhile–with all due respect to Shamus and the rest of you Gen-Xers that suffered foreclosures–the whole reason the housing market crash happened to begin with is because Gen X-ers were buying houses without reading the fine-print close enough and lenders predatorially took you to the cleaners over it. You still had access to that easy credit, home-ownership, massive over-building in real estate, and the economy in the 90s enjoyed the longest economic expansion ever recorded. Boomers might have been squatting a lot of the good-paying, blue-collar work, but at least more jobs actually got created instead of tanking with the economy when you were entering the workforce.

        Again respectfully, saying something like “hate to break it to you but Gen Xers had it the same” without recognizing the advantages you had and the hardships subsequent generations had to deal with–in large part because of mistakes your generation made–is exactly what “OK Boomer” was coined for.

        1. Shamus says:

          Okay, now you’re really getting tribal about this. You’re lumping large groups of people together, villainizing them, and then over-simplifying complex socio-economic problems to justify further villainizing the Other.

          You’re very eager to tell someone they’re out of touch and they don’t understand your life experiences. Fair enough. But it never occurred to you that you might be doing the same? Maybe Gen-X had problems of their own? Maybe boomers faced Real Problems when they were young?

          Shit man, were you even alive in the 1970s? It was brutal.

          In short, I’m totally willing to listen to your problems, but I’m NOT willing to entertain your ignorant dismissal of stuff stuff I experienced and you aren’t even old enough to remember.

          1. Abnaxis says:

            Ah crap, I didn’t think about how close to home some of what I’m saying probably hits for you.

            I’m not trying to villainize anyone. My general attitude towards this whole thing is that every generation gets stuck with the messes and the successes of the generation before it–and in the case of millennials, we got stuck with way more mess than success relative to other generations, primarily because of the housing bubble burst. This is why I get annoyed at “we had it exactly the same as you did”–it’s the basis for every “millennials are lazy and just want to complain and have everything provided for them” nonsense, which is how I was reading fyr’s comment.

            That’s not to say that boomers and Gen X-ers didn’t suffer when the housing crisis struck, but it hits different. Young adults are way more affected by economic crises. The macroeconomic situation you come into adulthood in has a profound effect on your future success. Speaking as a millennial, it’s night and day the difference between my own experiences with the crash and people who were just graduating high school when it happened, even though we’re the same “generation.” I’ve had to completely jump careers twice to escape the fact that my starting salary was 30% less than average because I graduated college in 2009, and I’m one of the lucky (AKA older) millennials.

            And while all this is going on there are hecklers in the cheap seats watching millennials struggling, complaining about our lack of loyalty, and telling us that we need to suck it up because you had it just as bad. Like, yeah things sucked for everyone in 2008-9 and recessions happen on a (roughly) 10 year cycle, but A) X-ers at least had the 90s boom to help you find your feet before the crash happened and B) speaking on a purely aggregate, macroeconomic scale your generation had some power to prevent the crisis than got us all stuck in that situation to being with. I couldn’t even vote until one presidential cycle before the crash happened!

            1. Shamus says:

              For the record: I think the practice of dumping on millennials and blaming them for today’s problems is terrible. Particularly since so many boomers dealt with “GET A HAIRCUT YA HIPPIE!” when they were your age. They ought to remember what it’s like to be on the other side of the generational turnover, and so when a boomer shows a lack of empathy it really makes me sad. (And scared. Who’s to say I won’t do the same thing if I’m lucky enough to hit 80? Is everyone doomed to rage at the young, or is something else causing this?)

              1. Abnaxis says:

                Who’s to say I won’t do the same thing if I’m lucky enough to hit 80? Is everyone doomed to rage at the young, or is something else causing this?

                I like to hope everyone’s not doomed to rage, or at least not doomed to rage as hard as they are now. I’m not exactly unbiased, but it feels like there’s a deeper divide between millennials and older generation than what came previously. Like, I know generational divides have ALWAYS existed, but the millennial one is especially acerbic in both senses of the word.

                I think there’s a lot that’s passing-special about the millennial generation though–it’s the first generation that’s collectively objectively worse off on every economic measure compared to previous generations since we’ve been tracking them, it’s the first generation to come to adulthood while we’re still figuring out how to social media intelligently, and ideological divides are much deeper these days than they used to be.

                Hopefully that’s just a passing confluence of intensifying factors that will eventually iron themselves out.

                1. pseudonym says:

                  I get that you are angry, but it is unfair to blame other generations for this. It is also unproductive.

                  World-wide and nation-wide economic trends are hard to change. One of the few things that can counterbalance this is government policy. Unfortunately due to human nature the policies tend to lag behind. This sucks, but there is not much that can be done. If you are living in a country where you can affect policy then that is something that can be done, but still it takes time for these policies to have measurable effects

                  As for our generation having it bad, did you look at WW1? An entire generation almost disappeared (France was hit worst), and the survivors lived long enough to see their children march off to WW2. Absolutely horrific.

                  I think there’s a lot that’s passing-special about the millennial generation though–it’s the first generation that’s collectively objectively worse off on every economic measure compared to previous generations since we’ve been tracking them,

                  Yes. This doesn’t feel fair. However these problems are widely noted, also in the policy changing bodies. So I have hope things will change for the better.

                  1. Abnaxis says:

                    I get that you are angry, but it is unfair to blame other generations for this. It is also unproductive.

                    It’s not though, because I don’t excuse myself from generation blaming.

                    Most actions I take, I take with the perspective that 20 years from now, future generations are going to blame my generation for its blunders. When they come for me, I should be able to give them an account for what part I played in preventing it. Blame isn’t bad if it motivates you to do something useful to avoid it coming down on yourself.

                    Yes, the world is a big place with lots of people in it, and individuals can only have so much effect on the aggregate direction of society. That’s not an excuse to shrug and say “what’re you going to do? Economic trends are hard to change…”

                    1. pseudonym says:

                      If you read my reply you would notice that I did NOT “shrug and say ‘what are you going to do?'” I explictly stated that there are things that can be done (affecting government policy). I just noted that this is difficult and it would take quite some time for these things to have a noticable effect.

                      In any case, doing something now might not solve the problem now, but in 10 years from now. That is why I am patient, that is much different from “shrugging off things” as if I don’t care.

                      It’s not though, because I don’t excuse myself from generation blaming.

                      Most actions I take, I take with the perspective that 20 years from now, future generations are going to blame my generation for its blunders. When they come for me, …

                      So let me get this straight. Because you *assume* people will blaim you in the future, you think it is only fair that you blaim others unfairly now? Others, who did not do anything to you personally?

                    2. Abnaxis says:

                      If you read my reply you would notice that I did NOT “shrug and say ‘what are you going to do?’” I explictly stated that there are things that can be done (affecting government policy). I just noted that this is difficult and it would take quite some time for these things to have a noticable effect.

                      I’m conflating your response with some of the others people have had. My problem with your response is that you’re not actually addressing my issues–the housing market crash was a catastrophic failure of economic institutions. This isn’t an issue of needing to be patient while we gradual move the needle to a better place, this is an issue where we needed a course correction before we slammed into an iceberg.

                      So let me get this straight. Because you *assume* people will blaim you in the future, you think it is only fair that you blaim others unfairly now? Others, who did not do anything to you personally?

                      While it’s not a big assumption to make, I’m not necessarily assuming anything. Rather, I genuinely believe future generations are well within their right to look back and say “WTF possessed you to let these problems fester?” whether they actually do it or not. Fundamentally, that’s what the generation gap is.

                      To put it another way, my contention is that instead of everybody collectively rolling their eyes with each generation when the conflicts arise, we approach the generation gap with the understanding that the only reason the gap is so universal is because literally no generation ever could ever collectively manage to have their time in the driver seat without fucking something up in hindsight, and actively work to make sure our progeny have to be downright petty when they come looking for something in us to criticize fifteen years from now.

                    3. pseudonym says:

                      To put it another way, my contention is that instead of everybody collectively rolling their eyes with each generation when the conflicts arise, we approach the generation gap with the understanding that the only reason the gap is so universal is because literally no generation ever could ever collectively manage to have their time in the driver seat without fucking something up in hindsight, and actively work to make sure our progeny have to be downright petty when they come looking for something in us to criticize fifteen years from now.

                      Pointing blame at an *entire* generation in hinddight for the problems today, in my mind always feels petty. Real life problems are more complex and multi-faceted than one generation “fucking something up”. Also I feel framing it as a generational conflict is diverting attention away from a real problem that is actually causing a lot of harm: the growing gap between rich and poor.

                      This isn’t an issue of needing to be patient while we gradual move the needle to a better place, this is an issue where we needed a course correction before we slammed into an iceberg.

                      You did not read what I said. I said that such a course correction will take time to take effect. So even if it is performed immediately, patience is still needed.

                      I’m conflating your response with some of the others people have had.

                      I realize now that WE are not having a discussion. YOU are having a discussion with a strawman of conflated arguments. An exchange of ideas where we gradually come to understand eachothers viewpoints, this is not.

                    4. Syal says:

                      and actively work to make sure our progeny have to be downright petty when they come looking for something in us to criticize fifteen years from now.

                      I will forever remember this generation as the one that banned drinking straws out of kneejerk rage.

                  2. Abnaxis says:

                    I realize now that WE are not having a discussion. YOU are having a discussion with a strawman of conflated arguments. An exchange of ideas where we gradually come to understand eachothers viewpoints, this is not.

                    This actually completely baffles me, and tells me we are talking past each other so hard something has gone awry.

                    From my perspective, this is a recap how our exchange has gone:

                    –I put forward the idea that we should hold previous generations responsible for things that got worse while they were the generation with the most collective power. I haven’t explicitly stated so, but a heavy focus of my grievances are for institutional problem s left to grow for so long they lead to a catastrophic failure on a national/global scale (e.g. the 2008 financial crisis, the January 6 riots).
                    –You counter that it’s unfair and unproductive to blame prior generations for problems that arise during their tenure, because course corrections take time.
                    –I respond that I don’t think generational blaming is unproductive, because it motivates me within my own generation to try to make course corrections on my own with an eye toward minimizing my liability to future generations. I also try bring up the fact that while institutional change takes time, there are off-ramps on the road that leads to catastrophic failures (like the housing market crash) that don’t take so much time to implement.
                    –You repeat what you said earlier without actually addressing the fact that I believe catastrophic failures are avoidable. You then say I’m not actually having a discussion with you, I’m burning a strawman effigy of you because I conflated you post with someone else’s in this discussion.

                    For the record–the post I conflated you with is Shufflecat’s below. From my perspective he’s sayin the same thing, except with much much more detail filled in for why it takes time for change to take effect. Because I thought there was that extra detail in your earlier post, I thought it would be more apparent what I meant by “course correction,” because I was assuming more content in your post than was there.

                    Second, I feel like there is some assumption underlying your point that I’m missing. I don’t know what the point is of bringing up that course corrections take time, unless you’re trying to make a point that the catastrophic failures in institutions are unavoidable within the scope of a single generation? The point I’m trying to make is that people should be accountable for catastrophes they had the power to avoid, even if those catastrophes require collective action to avoid, so the best I figure is the point your making is that nobody has the power to avoid the catastrophes?

                    1. pseudonym says:

                      This actually completely baffles me, and tells me we are talking past each other so hard something has gone awry.

                      At this point I got the feeling that every time you summarized my opinion to provide counterarguments, you did not actually summarize *my* opinion. In fact you yourself stated that you conflated my opinion with those of others. At this point I was throwing my hands up in the air. What is the point if I keep making arguments if they aren’t received properly on the other side?

                      For example:

                      –You counter that it’s unfair and unproductive to blame prior generations for problems that arise during their tenure, because course corrections take time.

                      This is not my point. My main point is that the past can’t be changed and that blaming previous generations is not going to affect any change. We need to act now, but that will take time to take effect. Also secondly, because policy changes take time to take effect, it is always impossible to oversee all the changes that they will affect. Therefore it is unfair to put excessive blame on the people who made these changes.

                      I do appreciate very much that you have taken the time to write an elaborate response despite my obvious bridge-burning ending note. That is very generous of you. As a result I feel that I owe you a more elaborate explanation of my viewpoints. In order to do this successfully, I will not contend with typing a response on my phone, but I got out the PC and keyboard. So let’s roll!

                      I do have to make the preamble that I am Dutch, from the Netherlands, and therefore English is not my native language. Also I cannot comment on exclusively USA affairs, because I don’t know nearly enough of those to form an informed opinion.

                      –I put forward the idea that we should hold previous generations responsible for things that got worse while they were the generation with the most collective power. I haven’t explicitly stated so, but a heavy focus of my grievances are for institutional problem s left to grow for so long they lead to a catastrophic failure on a national/global scale (e.g. the 2008 financial crisis, the January 6 riots).

                      I disagree with “we should hold previous generations responsible for things that got worse while they were the generation with the most collective power. “.

                      There is a huge divergence in power between people generally, also within generations. It is not fair to blaim 100% of the generation for the actions of 1%. This is my point about blaming past generations not being fair. I would phrase it as “we can hold certain people responsible for things that got worse while they were wielding power”.

                      Now there are also quite some limits to which we can hold people responsible. We have the benefit of hindsight. People back then didn’t knew the future. To take the 2008 financial crisis you mention as an example.

                      I am from the Netherlands. The crisis wasn’t caused here, but it certainly had its effects here, lots of government money had to be poured in the banks.
                      The primary cause for this was that banks were doing irresponsible things with money trough these dubious constructs. This happened because there was no regulation in place from preventing them from doing so. This regulation used to be in place! In fact it was put there after the financial crisis in the 1930s from prevent it happening again.
                      So now it gets interesting. Who to blame? The people at the banks? The people who abolished the regulation?
                      Interestingly, there certainly was a huge timegap between the abolishing of the regulation (I heard this started in the 70’s and 80’s but I am no expert on this, but in this case the time gap would be over 30-40 years), and all those 30 years or so, everything was fine. There were some people who thought it was a weird system, but most normal people including those in the Dutch government thought things were fine. Because banks were trusted. And rightfully so. There hadn’t been any major screwups since the 1930s. Can you blame people for not actively steering away from a disaster they hadn’t seen coming?

                      And then there is another thing. People back 30 years ago might have worried about entirely different things than what we worry about. They might have actually diverted tons of disasters. But we don’t know about that, because they never happened. Since we do not have the entire picture that makes it very hard to judge. You can’t pile blame on people for disaster A, without taking into account that they diverted disaster B and C. But since those did not happen, you would not know about them.

                      Now I also made a point about blaming *entire generations* being unproductive. We cannot change the past, only the future. Instead of blaming generic groups of people it is better to focus at the task at hand.

                      Okay, so that is my view. Let’s get to your view:

                      –I respond that I don’t think generational blaming is unproductive, because it motivates me within my own generation to try to make course corrections on my own with an eye toward minimizing my liability to future generations.

                      Well, if you happened to produce children, and since you talk about your son, I assume you did, you would know that without you, there would be no future generation. Without us as parents, they would have nothing to complain about because they wouldn’t exist.

                      But that’s a lazy excuse. Anyway as a parent I want the best for my children. Heck, I would *die* for them if necessary. Does that mean that I will never screw up? Of course not. But does that mean it is fair to heap blame on me for what my generation has done? I think not. We cannot foresee the future and always try to do what’s best for our children.

                      I also try bring up the fact that while institutional change takes time, there are off-ramps on the road that leads to catastrophic failures (like the housing market crash) that don’t take so much time to implement.

                      Well in that case I think it is completely fair to blame the people responsible to the degree of their involvement. If it was known beforehand that it was about to happen, everybody could see it happen, solutions were available and nothing was tried, well I think it is very hard to make a case that these people were acting responsibly. But still I think we can blame only them, and not their entire generation.

                      without actually addressing the fact that I believe catastrophic failures are avoidable.

                      I think that in some causes they are indeed unavoidable. Sometimes unforeseen things happen, sometimes there are is just one person who has a lot of power and is unfortunately, also crazy. History is riddled with those happenings.

                      I hope I was able to address your points in a satisfying manner. I do appreciate you taking the time to show me how you think about these issues.

              2. AdamS says:

                I don’t think anybody particularly likes hearing “we have it way worse than you did” because it feels like they’re trivializing everything hard you’ve gone through in your own life. Even if they’re right! It’s my understanding that it’s exactly that sort of sentiment that leads to people falling down white supremacist and MRA rabbit holes. “You’re telling me I’m privileged? How can that possibly be? My life has been really hard! You must be lying!”

        2. Shamus says:

          Nope. I can’t drop this yet. The more I think about the sheer audacity of this comment, the more enraging it is.

          “Meanwhile–with all due respect to Shamus and the rest of you Gen-Xers that suffered foreclosures–the whole reason the housing market crash happened to begin with is because Gen X-ers were buying houses without reading the fine-print close enough and lenders predatorially took you to the cleaners over it. ”

          Wow. You got it all figured out then? So you’ve figured out your problems, which are all my fault. And you’ve also taken the time to figure out MY problems, which are also my fault. It would seem you’re the only blameless one here, a lone pillar of virtue after a long string of selfish stupid generations. Evolution works so fast these days.

          The problem was less about “reading the fine print” and more about not having a clue how to manage finance. And we didn’t have a clue because it wasn’t taught. It wasn’t taught because it wasn’t a problem before now. Previously, we could solve housing problems by building more houses.

          But then we crossed a threshold: Lots of people need to work in the city, there isn’t room for more houses, and traffic is getting to be a nightmare. The important thing to note here, is that the market changed. If it hadn’t changed, then you would have behaved exactly like the generations that came before you, and the NEXT generation would have been the one to take the hit.

          Don’t you see the irony here? How is “You just didn’t read the fine print!” any less arrogant and dismissive than “You just need to get a job and pay for college!”?

          1. Abnaxis says:

            Don’t you see the irony here? How is “You just didn’t read the fine print!” any less arrogant and dismissive than “You just need to get a job and pay for college!”?

            It’s not, and I definitely should have given my post a second pass before I hit the button. Some of my frustration at “You just need to get a job and pay for college!” bled through.

            The problem was less about “reading the fine print” and more about not having a clue how to manage finance. And we didn’t have a clue because it wasn’t taught. It wasn’t taught because it wasn’t a problem before now. Previously, we could solve housing problems by building more houses.

            I apologize for my flippant tone. I was trying to toe the line between “people who took predatory loans were at fault for the housing crisis” and “banks that were swindling people into getting loans they couldn’t afford started the housing crisis,” because people like to argue about that and didn’t want to start a debate. What I settled on was “not reading the fine print close enough” because I had hoped that would imply that there WAS fine print in the loan agreement designed to trip people up.

            Everything I’m talking about is meant to be on a generational scale. The problem isn’t you in particular, it’s the sum effect of lots and lots of people making the same mistake.

            Wow. You got it all figured out then? So you’ve figured out your problems, which are all my fault. And you’ve also taken the time to figure out MY problems, which are also my fault. It would seem you’re the only blameless one here, a lone pillar of virtue after a long string of selfish stupid generations. Evolution works so fast these days.

            Frankly, I’m kinda dreading the day when I need to explain to my son the unholy mess that is the January 6 riot and the American death-tolls and economic damage from COVID. Zuckerberg was born the same year I was, after all.

            YOUR problems in particular I don’t have an answer to, but as a whole your generation help vote for politicians that broke the housing market, then participated in that broken market until the entire system collapsed. Similarly, MY generation has let disinformation and partisanship go so nuts we have armed insurgents storming our capital.

            Like, could you or I have personally prevented either of those things happening by ourselves? No, but we definitely could have at least contributed better to not let it happen otherwise what the hell are we doing here on Earth?

            And we sure as hell shouldn’t be blaming the generation that comes after if they struggle dealing with the heaping pile of crap they’re inheriting from us, which is the essence of “You just need to get a job and pay for college!”.

            1. Shufflecat says:

              I’m late gen-x, or I guess xennial. For people my age, the turning point was 9-11, rather than the 2008 crash.

              I was in college when 9-11 happened, and the economy tanked. Within half a year shops were closing hours earlier, if not closing entirely, and employment was drying up everywhere. This is when the “PHD working at McDonalds” meme really started.

              In my area cost of living rapidly outpaced wages and employment opportunity. By the time I left school, it was no longer possible to rent even a shitty apartment without 2 jobs and at least 1 roommate. The sort of jobs your college education was supposed to pave your way for had become around x3 more competitive, and employers were already so swamped with resumes that they were aggressively culling before even reading them based on things like “cover letter formatting slightly off”. They didn’t yet have the ability to do that stuff by AI, but the same kind of mechanical pettiness was already being modeled.

              By the early-mid 00s, real estate speculation was booming, and developers were already cuddling up to the mortgage-backed securities brokers. This is when the housing market started to become noticeably untenable for people my age. Old homes were being snapped up by “house flippers”, and new housing was being built for the relatively small upper-middle class and wealthy market to the exclusion of the huge lower and lower-middle class market, because those homes made for the most attractive mortgage securities, market be damned.

              You’re giving people crap for “not reading the fine print closely enough” as if these people were just stupid, but a lot people didn’t have the luxury of caring about the fine print. The economics that make home ownership (even if only supported by massive debt) more favorable than renting were as present then as ever, but affordable homes were becoming rarer and rarer. Because demand was high, negotiation was harder: sellers could just hold out for someone willing to accept their boilerplate conditions. For a lot of people home buying was a Faustian-yet-leonine bargain they couldn’t afford, but felt forced to stick their neck out on anyway. The entire economy in general ran on mechanisms of accepting debt today to get anywhere tomorrow, and the earlier you put yourself in debt, the better, because the math only got worse if you waited. For most people starting out it wasn’t possible to bootstrap based on what you could afford “today”. You had to cross your fingers and leap, hoping you’d be able to get and keep a career that would allow you eventually break even 20 years down the line.

              This was hell and everyone hated it. Except the people at the top who made money off it. When the 2008 crash came, the only surprise was the suddenness of it.

              The wave of defaults that came after wasn’t just people who’d stupidly overextended themselves, it was a lot of people who never wanted that kind of debt in the first place but were railroaded into it deciding they were done indulging a one-sided version of the social contract with a top-down system made of sociopathic finance institutions and their captive politicians. They had exactly the same opinion of it you do, the only difference is you’re approaching it with hindsight.

              Yes, there were people living beyond their means in actual stupid ways mixed in there (and even then, as Shamus says, people my generation didn’t get any kind of financial education, so this often wasn’t “stupid” in a neurological sense), but acting like that was a 50% primary factor in the crash is MASSIVELY inaccurate, and even attempting to phrase it like that is part of what’s getting you slammed. To people were there, it basically sounds like you’re parroting the propaganda the banking industry was trying to push in order to make themselves as innocent victims of those dastardly underhanded poor people in order to lube the congressional bailout money chute.

              Shit didn’t just just drop all at once on your generation. It’s been stacking up one generation after another for a long time. People my age look at the 00’s, and see the legacy of certain specific previous-gen administrations I can’t name because of the no politics rule. And a huge number of the younger generation is still voting for those same kinds of politicians and the institutions they represent, so blaming older generations for voting them into power isn’t on the level either.

              For that matter, a lot of people my generation and Shamus’s are having to deal with “millennial” problems on the same level as millennials. Home buying, job hunting, debt management, long term retirement planning, etc. in the modern economy is no easier after a decade or more of proverbial PHD burger flipping than it is straight out of college.

              1. Abnaxis says:

                You’re giving people crap for “not reading the fine print closely enough”

                Again, let me be 100% clear: it was not my intent to give people crap for “not reading the fine print.” Any time I’ve engaged in discussion with anyone about the 2008 crisis (which granted, it’s been a while so the discourse might have changed), there’s on of two reasons blamed for it depending on which colored team you align yourself with:

                –The crash happened because the government incentivized giving poor people loans. The poor people, being the ignorant irresponsible unwashed masses that they are, took out loans they couldn’t afford without thinking and cause the whole system to crash.
                –The crash happened because the bank owners, who are all mustache-twirling villains, figured out a way to deliberately fleece everyone, stealing from the poor to feed their bank accounts until the system finally collapsed.

                My actual words trying to summarize the causes were “Gen X-ers were buying houses without reading the fine-print close enough and lenders predatorially took you to the cleaners over it,” because I was vaguely trying to gesture at both party lines in the hopes of avoid EXACTLY this “no, the REAL reason the crash happened was…” discussion. It’s just that apparently adding the “predatorially” adverb to lenders’ actions wasn’t enough to mollify those holding second viewpoint. That, and my tone was too flippant, which came off as more hostile than I intended.

                The point I’m trying to make is, if you are a Gen X-er I don’t care what party line you want to adhere to, the crash happened on yours (and the boomers’) watch. The shifting of blame, the “well, greedy execs do what greedy execs do,” or “our public education institutions are shit,” or “the politicians kept enacting bills that made it worse,” is BS. Your generation (plus the boomers) voted the politicians into power. Your generation (plus the boomers) spent too many of your journalism airwaves panicking about whether DOOM causes mass shooting and not enough time paying attention to crap that actually mattered, like defunct mortgage-backed securities. Your generation (plus the boomers) shrugged and let the same execs off with a slap on the wrist after the smoke cleared. Is the public education system any better under your watch?

                Did you personally cause any of these things? Did you personally have the power to prevent any of them all by yourself? Of course not.

                But did you help prevent it? Did you help cause it? Did you shrug helplessly while everything happened? Those are fair questions, and ones I consider in my day-to-day life. I know for my part my own generation has fucked things up right and good, and when my son (or any 18-24 year old who gets stuck holding the mess my generation hands to them for that matter) asks me those questions I’ll have answers for him–some “well, I didn’t vote for that jackass,” and some “I tried and failed,” and some “yeah we had some really stupid ideas back then,” and some “it was a bad situation that would have been even worse if we didn’t do what we did.” You should too, because this whole “it’s hard to change things so we should just stick our heads in the sand and defer responsibility for the messes we could have had a hand in improving” is bullshit.

                1. Shamus says:

                  “I was vaguely trying to gesture at both party lines in the hopes of avoid EXACTLY this “no, the REAL reason the crash happened was…”

                  Oh man. You tried to do the diplomatic thing and ended up pissing off both sides. Damn. I’ve been there. I feel bad for getting riled up now.

                  I appreciate the attempt!

            2. Steve C says:

              Abnaxis you’ve focused on identifying the causes of the problem. The causes you’ve identified are uniquely American. Which is the rub. Because the problems are not uniquely American.

              Like you can point to the 2009 recession and housing collapse. Sure. Makes sense. Big deal in American and many other countries. Greece, Italy etc were hit even harder than the USA. The predatory loans thing did not happen in Canada. Canada was insulated from that. The real estate market in Canada was a mild downturn, not the popped bubble like in USA. Same thing with others pointing to 9-11 as the cause. We are talking about systemic world wide problems here. Pointing to events unique to certain countries cannot explain it. Most nations have this generational economic divide. But they don’t have the country specific smoking guns that you are pointing at as the cause. The cause of a world-wide phenomenon will be larger, more systemic issues.

              “The Lost Decades of Japan” is a unique case. Something specific to Japan is the cause of that. That’s what a country specific problem looks like. While the USA is not a unique case. Therefore it’s not something specific to the USA that caused this problem.

              1. Abnaxis says:

                Abnaxis you’ve focused on identifying the causes of the problem. The causes you’ve identified are uniquely American. Which is the rub. Because the problems are not uniquely American.

                I mean, the OP was about American generation trends, with an explicit statement that pretty much nobody here is qualified to discuss generational gaps outside the US…

                1. Steve C says:

                  ??? What?
                  First I don’t know where you got the idea that only Americans read this blog. It’s the internet. Lots of people from outside the US have the internet and read it too. I can think of a handful of regular posters off the top of my head who have stated they aren’t American. (Which includes me.) Pretty sure Shamus posted the statistical breakdown at one point too.
                  Second there was no “explicit statement” other than Shamus saying he isn’t qualified to speak about Japan. (Which makes sense to single out. Because Japan is the exception to this entire discussion.)
                  Third, I’d be surprised if there *isn’t* someone extremely qualified to speak on generational gaps outside of the US. The content of this blog tends towards a demographic who have higher education and/or self-taught to a very high degree. But anyone who lives outside the US is automatically qualified.

                  And finally nobody needs expertise to claim generational gaps exist like the ones this video are talking about outside the USA. That’s basic stuff. Practically everyone is going through the same thing. The ones that aren’t have unique circumstances in their country like their government collapsed etc.

    5. Ninety-Three says:

      It’s crazy how resenting your parents for having stuff you lack turned into a generic clapback at anyone older than you.

      1. Geebs says:

        It’s crazy how we all forgot that “retort” was a word. Grumble grumble.

        1. Shamus says:

          I’ve never said the phrase “clap back”. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say it in an in-person conversation. So I’m not an expert on the phrase. But here’s something I’ve noticed…

          1) When I hear “retort” I think of a witty comeback.
          2) When I hear “clap back” I think “Uncreative person blurting out the first insult that comes to mind.”

          I have no idea if this is consistent with how anyone else uses these words, but my view of “clap back” is colored by the context in which I’ve seen it used. (Slap fights between strangers on Twitter.)

          1. Gethsemani says:

            This is exactly why I used the word clapback and not retort. Clapback to me feels distinctly uncreative and reflexive, while a retort is witty and argument ending.

            1. Geebs says:

              I’ve only ever encountered it in the negative sense of “don’t clap back”, where someone makes a Twitticism and declares the matter thereby settled to their own satisfaction.

              1. Falling says:

                For me, I’ve only seen in it used positively where a third party comes in crowing that one side ‘Got’em’. It’s like those old articles that used to say Jon Stewart ‘eviscerated’ ‘demolished’ and ‘devastated’ this or that politician or newscaster. Now, when I see the actual exchange in question, yeah it looks like what Shamus describe with #2.
                However, the way the word seems to be used (unironically) is as a victory dance for the Looky Loos in some twitter spat.

                I mean, twitter used to literally clap back (do they still)? YoU * dO * nOt * geT * To * spEaK * on * thIS * TopIc
                Or some such.

                1. Daimbert says:

                  I find that in those cases the issue is, as Shamus has already discussed in the past, that they are evaluating the insult from inside their own mental bubbles. The insult is good if you agree with the person making the insult and disagree with the person the insult is leveled against, but if someone is even just neutral on the topic the insult does not seem to be at all clever. So the applause is more on the basis of “Hee, hee, they insulted someone I don’t like” as opposed to “Hee, hee, that’s actually pretty funny!”.

                  Sadly, arguments often work the same way, only appealing to those who already agree instead of to those who are at a minimum not certain, who are the ones that really, really need to find them appealing.

            2. Benjamin Paul Hilton says:

              A witty retort has nothing on a pithy rejoinder.

              1. Shamus says:

                How appropriate. You fight like a cow.

    6. vamphri says:

      I completely agree specific recommendations on how to be successful are out of date, out of touch and should be ignored. However, as a Millennial I remain unconvinced that the meta-advice from previous generations is not accurate. By meta-advice I mean platitudes like, “it’s not what you know it’s who you know” or “an education is always valuable”. When those platitudes are appropriately applied, I have seen them be true and beneficial.

      On a separate note, I have heard many times that nepotism is rife throughout many fields, but more accurate is that the bro system is rife, and family is just the most egregious example of the bro system in action. In the bro system, you make jobs for your bro even if they are not fit for the job. Then, on paper, this guy with no real experience or expertise has multiple years’ experience in a field they really know nothing about. They then fail upwards to a point of incompetence (the peter principle). The problem is that they will typically leave and go into another organization rather than stagnate in incompetence.

      1. Syal says:

        “an education is always valuable”.

        Going to chime in to say with the rise of the internet and free information sources, a formal education is rapidly losing value as anything other than a status symbol. Which still ties directly into “it’s not what you know it’s who you know,” but hopefully that will uncorrelate soon and people will stop they need to spend however much money college sucks out of people these days.

        1. Supah Ewok says:

          I’m gonna chime in to say that a formal education is losing value because universities became diploma mills as a standardized career step for a white collar work force.

          There are a few things you are supposed to get out of a formal education:

          1) The ability to think critically
          2) The ability to communicate complex ideas and spread/defend intellectual positions
          3) The practice of processing and absorbing knowledge from disciplines other than your own (“general education”)

          Any of these can be developed independent of university, but university education is supposed to be a place where a person is taught these things, in addition to just learning facts about things.

          The internet isn’t a replacement from that, as evident by the social crisis we’re having over the spread of misinformation and propaganda. The internet is amazing, YouTube is amazing, even TikTok is amazing. They don’t replace education.

          But education today is barely education. My university education consisted of going to classes where the professors read off of powerpoint slides and assigned homework. That is probably 95% of modern universities, at least in America, and it isn’t worth $12,000 a year, much less the $25,000 those saps from out-of-state pay. Because it’s really just a mediocre job training program to feed the gaping maw of American corporations.

          I’m gonna springboard away from Syal’s comment to my own comment on a related subject: I hate the train of thought that people should only go for education that relates to their chosen careers. That is treating humans as programmable robots rather than as naturally curious and engaging minds. It represents the mentality that a human’s productive value, directed by our corporate aristocracy, is our most meaningful and important aspect, and I detest it.

          1. PPX14 says:

            But education today is barely education. My university education consisted of going to classes where the professors read off of powerpoint slides and assigned homework. That is probably 95% of modern universities, at least in America, and it isn’t worth $12,000 a year, much less the $25,000 those saps from out-of-state pay. Because it’s really just a mediocre job training program to feed the gaping maw of American corporations.

            I have a feeling that the alleged bygone era of a university education teaching one to think critically might never have existed outside a few specific courses at a few elite establishments, or societal echelons in ancient times. My father had the same experience as I had and you described, doing engineering at a UK polytechnic in the 80s as did my school maths teacher doing maths at Oxford. Someone writes things on a board that you write down until you realise you’ve just transcribed a portion of a textbook from which you are being dictated.

            1. Syal says:

              I have a feeling that the alleged bygone era of a university education teaching one to think critically might never have existed

              I had the entirety of that experience in a single assignment during a college Writing 101 class. I got an assignment to explain why a movie was funny, I gave a couple of examples of the jokes they used, and the professor came back with “great, why are THOSE funny?”

              On a full tangent; I recently read The Decameron and learned the reason “Bologna” is an insult is because the city of Bologna was a 14th century diploma mill.

              1. PPX14 says:

                Ha! As in “that’s baloney”?

          2. PPX14 says:

            I’m gonna springboard away from Syal’s comment to my own comment on a related subject: I hate the train of thought that people should only go for education that relates to their chosen careers. That is treating humans as programmable robots rather than as naturally curious and engaging minds. It represents the mentality that a human’s productive value, directed by our corporate aristocracy, is our most meaningful and important aspect, and I detest it.

            I agree, but unless we have a very low wealth inequality and state-supported education up to and beyond university level, and a large portion of the populace participating, I’m not sure university is likely to be anything more than this, and not as dictated by anyone else or the system but by choice of those participating. As you pointed out, education need not come from a university – the only thing you can definitively get there is a degree. I agree though, it does seem misguided that companies rely on that as an admissions procedure. Yet if it were to be fully state funded it might seem prudent that it be focused on employment suitability.

  9. Lino says:

    I was so surprised when I saw this in my feed, at first I thought it was some kind of mistake! Really interesting video, too. Although, I don’t know if we can call the Polish CEO a Gen X-er, since generations work a bit different in Europe, especially Eastern Europe. E.g. I think the most formative part of Iwinski’s life would have been the fall of socialism and The Iron Curtain. Things that people in the US knew about, but which definitely had a different effect on the people in Eastern Europe (which are things that affect life here to this day).

    Other than that, really good video. And I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it, but the outro song is amazing! Is it available anywhere (along with the Diecast outro, which also slaps)?

    1. Lasius says:

      I was just about to comment on that. Being born in East Germany I don’t think these terms should be applied to Europe, let alone countries east of the Iron Curtain.

  10. Abnaxis says:

    So there it is. That’s the industry as it stands in early 2022. What a disappointment. I always hoped that the generational turnover would bring us a better class of leadership, but here we are. My generation is running the industry, and things are as bad as they’ve ever been.

    Um, didn’t you spend the first part of your video talking about how your generation was actually the first one to have the reins? There hasn’t been any generational turnover yet.

    Also, you have grossly over-estimated the speed at which gaming penetrated mainstream culture. Games were still considered children’s toys and nothing else when I was in school, and I’m a millennial. I still have to be careful when interacting with people older than me, and feel them out for whether they will look down on me for gaming as a hobby before I share that (though at least at this point it’s been, like, 6 years since I got the “oh my kid plays those” response).

    In short, I would be surprised if even half those CEOs actually interacted with/were friends with a gaming enthusiast growing up.

    1. Shamus says:

      “Um, didn’t you spend the first part of your video talking about how your generation was actually the first one to have the reins? There hasn’t been any generational turnover yet.”

      I specifically said that boomers (and also a few older folks, but I left them out of the video for simplicity) built the industry while my generation was literally still in diapers. We entered the workforce in the early 90s, but we didn’t really attain executive positions until the last 10 years or so.

      1. Abnaxis says:

        I went back and re-read it. I think my point still stands, but I need to actually hash it out, because the ideas in my head and the ones you put in the video kinda melded together. The essence of it is that none of the companies you have listed in you generation figure (as far as I know, maybe more research would reveal otherwise but I’m at work at the moment) actually passed from a boomer to a Gen X-er.

        There’s a difference between “building the first video game consoles,” and “running the media conglomerates that would eventually drive the AAA sphere” (what I meant by “holding the reins”). From that perspective, boomers never had the reins because pretty much every video game company still in business today came about after the big gaming crash of ’83, didn’t it? (I was born in ’84)

        I mean, I guess that’s “generational turnover,” since the entire industry burned down to the studs under the boomers and Gen X-ers were the ones to build it back up from the ashes, but I got the impression the “generational turnover” was supposed to mean we have “EA run by boomers versus run by Gen X-ers,” when it’s been Gen X-ers from the beginning.

        1. Shamus says:

          “From that perspective, boomers never had the reins because pretty much every video game company still in business today came about after the big gaming crash of ’83, didn’t it? (I was born in ’84):

          Those post-crash companies were still run by boomers. The oldest members of Gen-X were still in high school that year (I was 12) and not in a position to found any companies.

          Some examples:

          Xbox passed from Marc Whitten to Phil Spencer.
          EA passed from John Ricitello to Andrew Wilson.
          Zenimax went from Robert Altman, to (some guy whose age isn’t public) to Phil Spencer.

          Although Epic Games and CD Projekt both fit your assumptions: Both were founded by Gen-Xers.

          1. Abnaxis says:

            First, holy crap you’re right I stand corrected

            Second, this is weird. Ricitello is just permanently 40-50-ish in my mind because that’s his age when he left EA, but it’s been almost ten years since then so that means he’s actually 63 because that’s how time works. I literally had to Google him because I went “wait what?” before I realized where my mistake was coming from. Like, I thought all those different acquisitions were within-generation transfers because my brain just froze that moment in time in my head.

            Brains are weird.

    2. Joshua says:

      Games were still considered children’s toys and nothing else when I was in school, and I’m a millennial.

      I’m a Gen X, and my dad was born in 1956 (Boomer). He played arcade games at the Student Union in college, including things like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong and all that. Granted, they weren’t as ubiquitous among adults as in Gen X, but gaming was pretty common among all of my friends in my generation, and there was no indication that we were going to stop playing with them like they were childhood relics. Heck, my 40-something boss at work traded computer games with me in the mid-90s (Red Alert, Descent, WarCraft II, Stonekeep).

  11. ContribuTor says:

    I really like the thoughtful look at generations here.

    That said, I think there’s a factor Shamus is neglecting a bit that I think plays a huge role – the rise of the MBA‘s.

    While the oldest MBA programs date to just before 1900, similar to what Shamus references about college in general, the boomers were the first generation to attend in great numbers.

    And a lot of the bottom-line focused, revenue-maximizing, ignore-the-consumer logic we’ve seen from gaming companies comes out of that tradition, especially the 70’s and 80’s era MBA programs (think Gordon Gecko here…).

    The thinking was that “a good manager could manage anything.” GE and the other major conglomerates of the era were famous for this (and they’re the ones the next generation MBAs would study). And the “right” way to manage was focusing on inefficiencies and waste, growing new revenue sources, and building the bottom line. “Duty to the stockholders” is an article of faith.

    And, look, I’m not trying to get into politics here, or whether capitalism is a good idea. My point is that the boomer generation and especially their followers in GenX are much more likely to come from a business school focused perspective, and a lot of how that was taught has bled into how game companies (and all companies) are run. The CEO was expected to talk more with the finance and operations people than the product and marketing people.

    You can see the thinking pretty clearly. Focusing on exploiting existing IP over developing new IP reduces cost and risk. Pushing things out on a regular rhythm and focusing on making ship dates /operational efficiencies produce more predictable revenue streams. Loot boxes and other extras allow you to capture more value without spending a ton more money.

    The specifics of the lessons change, but the focus on maximizing the value of your assets doesn’t. 20 years ago nobody would have thought of a social graph as a valuable commodity. But focusing on “core assets” is consistent. Business. Business never changes.

    1. Shamus says:

      This is really interesting.

      Walt Disney is my go-to example for a CEO motivated by the business rather than the money. (Disclaimer: This doesn’t mean Disney was a good person. It just means he loved and understood the family resort business in a way that Kotick DOESN’T love and understand videogames.) But this would explain why we don’t see many Disney types these days.

      As a programmer, I’m pretty hostile to the idea that a good manager can run anything, because it makes no sense. I can’t just write software in a vacuum without understanding the domain I’m working in. You need to understand some accounting to make good accounting software, typography to make good font software. You can’t make a device driver without understanding the device in question. All of this should also hold true for running a company. You can’t just make a company “more profitable” in some generic, non-specific way. You have to understand what the company does.

      I think old-school Blizzard was pretty close to “The Disney of Videogames”. They had a pretty good run for 20 years or so before the dipshits took control.

      I thought that the generational turnover would give us more Disney and less dipshits, but your perspecive on MBA programs explains why that wasn’t the case. (I know almost nothing about how MBA education works, what the different schools of thought are, or what the culture is like or what the trends are over time.)

      1. Sabrdance says:

        I teach public administration -which is significantly different, but draws on many of the same sources as MBAs.

        1.) “A good manager can run anything.” We don’t really believe that, but it’s not a wildly inaccurate gloss. The more accurate version is that a good manager knows how to empower and rely on their subordinates to do their jobs. Managing is a particular skill -serving as the buffer between the people doing the work (who know all the detailed information, but may not understand the big picture) and the people making the decisions (who understand the macro-financial environment, but might not understand the details). You’ve apparently had at least one good manager -you related the story of your boss who took you aside to explain that the commercial applications of Active Worlds were what kept the lights on and paid for the experimental stuff you worked on -but also encouraged you to be experimental. *That* skill transfers. Everything else is domain specific.

        2.) Maybe the MBAs of the world are still stuck back on the conglomerates, but Public Admin (which does still deal with conglomerates -what is the US if not a conglomerations of states and agencies? Many nonprofits are diversified and federated, too) thinks in terms of organizational structure, not hedging. What is the agency designed to do? What do the people who work there think they do? Generational change doesn’t change the organization -the organization changes the members. The organization decides who to promote, what to reward, what to punish -and in turn the organizations are shaped by larger factors in their resource environment. The divide is between those who believe organizations *can* change, at least a little, to better fit their niche (called the environmental theory) and those who think they can’t, and when circumstances change the old organizations die and are replaced by new ones that better use the freed up resources (called the ecological theory).

        3.) A problem I teach about is that circumstances have changed since the 1970s. In the 1970s waste and inefficiency were huge problems in the governments and organizations of the US and UK, especially as Japan and Germany began to re-enter the global economy. Those problems persisted through the 70s and 80s, and in some cases, the legacy costs of bad decisions made in the 1960s are still being worked out (thinking specifically of GM’s bankruptcy in 2008). But the problems we are facing today are not the problems of 1970 or 1980 -and the solutions to those problems have already been implemented. You can’t pair down your legacy pension costs in bankruptcy twice. You can’t skimp on the quality of your cars twice. You can’t invent GMAC financing twice. And so on. The problem -in my view -is that far too many people have looked at the success of businesses in the 80s and 90s and forgotten entirely the environmental/ecological circumstances, and just adopted the tools of that time as a religion.

        I wouldn’t expect generational change to fix that -some company will eventually figure out new solutions to the current problems -I tend towards ecological theory, so I think it will be a completely new company -but the CEO of that company is only more likely to be Millennial or X because there are more them alive and in the right stages of their careers than of Boomers (dying) or Gen Z (too young). But there is no reason in principle why a retired boomer couldn’t have a great idea and put their retirement into developing that company. Same with a Gen Z person.

        1. Richard says:

          The trouble with “Ecological theory” is that it requires corporations to die.

          We’re now in a situation where there are a lot of corporations that genuinely can’t die, because they have such utterly insanely huge assets.

          If Apple suddenly stopped collecting any revenue at all tomorrow, they’ve got enough cash reserves to keep paying their suppliers, manufacturing products, keeping and staffing stores, paying all their employees to do nothing – for over 16 months.

          Their (unaudited) total cost of sales and operating expenses as of their 2021 year-end was $257 billion, and they’ve $351 billion in assets.

          These companies can afford to lose huge amounts of money, so can (and do) crush the agile new companies by the application of said cash.
          – The most common methods seem to be buying them out and replacing their culture or by suing and dragging out court actions forever, burning all the “upstart’s” cash in legal fees.

      2. Thomas says:

        It’s amazing how far the “You don’t need subject knowledge” mindset is embedded in corporate systems these days. For a UK civil service job you always interview on ‘core competencies’ which are generic skills like ‘planning’, ‘communicating’, and then perhaps some professional competencies if you have a recognised profession (i.e. accounting).

        But you’ll never be interviewed on knowledge of the specific job you’re applying for. You don’t need knowledge of agriculture to work in agriculture, you don’t need knowledge of education to work in education. And if you did have knowledge of the area _it wouldn’t even help you get the job_ because they won’t ask you about it in the interview.

        Often you’re not even applying for a specific job. You generically interview and they assign you a job out of a pile if you pass your generic interview.

        As well as the cult of generalism, I also think it comes from a desire for consistency and ‘fairness’. People aren’t consistent, so if you allow them to ask whatever they want at an interview all their hangups and biases are going to come in. You can’t control that. So you standardise the questions. But standardising the questions practically means you have to strip all the subject knowledge out.

        1. Rho says:

          There may be some validity to that assertion, but also, there’s a long-term vs. short-term consideration. In the short-term, you always want somebody who knows everything now. In the long-term, someone with good fundamentals and who can learn the domain knowledge may be strictly better. And frankly, often there really isn’t somebody with requisite domain knowledge outside a given sub-field.

          1. Thomas says:

            But you get teams where no-one can teach the domain knowledge because no-one ever had it to begin with. And despite the belief being that everyone can learn on the job, you’ve got no way of knowing if someone has aptitude or interest in that domain because you’re not testing for it on entry.

            I’m not saying don’t value generalist skills, but this idea that non-generalist skills shouldn’t be taken into account at all is crazy, and it leads to people making decisions on areas they don’t have knowledge about getting evaluated by people with no knowledge of that area. There’s nobody in the system to say “farmers don’t work like that”

            1. Richard says:

              Absolutely.

              For an effective team, you need multiple people with overlapping knowledge of the problem domain. Some shallow across it all, others deep in specific areas.
              It also needs to be almost the entire team, as if it’s just be one or two people then the project will fail if they leave.
              Perhaps worse, everyone else will ask the “expert” about everything, which leads to burnout and also means the holes in the “domain expert” own knowledge will not be found – until too late.

              Interest and enthusiasm is perhaps more important for a long-term team.

              Anyone who isn’t interested in the domain will eventually start to coast or even (accidentally) obstruct.
              Eg They’ll exactly meet the specification – ignoring all the holes – or do something tangential that they find more interesting.
              If you’re lucky they’ll leave the team or company, if you’re unlucky then they will stay

              Someone who is interested in the domain will start out with some domain knowledge and be hungry to learn more.
              Good management will make sure they learn from external experts and customers.
              Mediocre management will only let them learn “on the job” from the in-house “domain expert”.
              Bad management will ruin them, refusing them time to learn or move them elsewhere.

              1. Daimbert says:

                Personalities are important as well. Some people always like to do and learn new things, and so these are the people who will become your experts in the newest things, but then they’ll get bored and want to move on to another new thing, and if no one else knows anything about it then it’s a painful process to ramp people up to speed (I’ve personally had to do it on a number of occasions). Some people, on the other hand, don’t really care about learning new things and just want to do their job, and so are going to be the ones that stay and keep things going. You really need a bunch of the latter as well as a bunch of the former, as the former drive innovation while the latter do the grunt work and maintenance to keep things going. Good management recognizes that the latter are important and don’t just focus on the former, but what I’ve seen in my job is that the former tend to get more attention and political power and the latter are ignored, but if you let the former do what they want and don’t have a plan for maintaining what they do you end up with a product that no one understands or likes when they run off to the next project that interests them more or take their marketable skills to another company.

        2. PPX14 says:

          In my time working in the engineering industry it does seem that the technical details are the icing on the cake and the administrative processes are the main glue. To my chagrin.

      3. Steve C says:

        I can say that MBAs in the 90s were all about extracting value. Not providing value, but extracting it. Both for the company and yourself.

        For example: A company has a high quality product, great reputation and brand recognition. What is the correct way (circa late 90s MBA profs) for a CEO to capitalize on that? For both you and the company?

        You go the other way. You cheap out and go low quality. Extracting the value of that product from the market. The value that has been previously generated by that product’s reputation will then flow to the company and current shareholders. Increasing share price, personal stock options and personal compensation. Thereby extracting the dollar value of something that doesn’t have a straight dollar value. While creating space in the market for a brand new premium brand line to take its place in a few years as everyone catches on. Which your company has foreknowledge of and can exploit by creating a new brand, buying out a competitor etc. If you don’t personally benefit from it, you leverage the company gains at a new company with a new higher salary. Claiming credit for the windfall your previous company enjoyed. Thereby extracting value for yourself personally.

        Is this gross? Yes. But I cannot come up with any way to refute it. I think a lot of problems in the world are mired in this extraction mentality.

        Also something happened in 1971. What? No idea. But it was something.
        https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

        Then there’s the pay gap:
        https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

        What caused all those? I don’t know. However I am convinced we are seeing the consequences of it today.

        1. Daimbert says:

          Is this gross? Yes. But I cannot come up with any way to refute it.

          With both the obvious and by appealing to history: doing this kills both the reputation of the company and consumers’ trust that reputation matters. The only way to maximize value from this is to keep prices high or higher while reducing quality and so making the products more cheaply. But then people will notice that the products are of as high quality anymore, and so many of them will gravitate to the products that are cheapest. You might be able to get away with a “premium” line once, but ultimately what it will do is get people to consider that there isn’t really any difference in quality between the cheaper and more expensive products, and so they might as well buy the cheaper ones. This breeds the mindset that quality and reputation don’t matter all that much, but that only price matters. And so even the companies with good reputations get locked into price wars and are forced to reduce quality in order to hit the pricepoints. Yes, economies of scale mean that bigger companies might be better able to do that, but they also tend to have management overheads that mean that they aren’t necessarily as agile or reactive and so can’t always do that. Yes, forming an attitude that price is primarily what matters hurts consumers, too, since they end up with products that aren’t as high quality as they could be, but it’s a natural reaction to that attitude. So in the short term, you might win, but in the long run you lose.

          I saw the same thing with company loyalty through the tech industry. Desperate for workers, companies would offer great incentives for people to change companies. This meant that workers changed companies pretty frequently, which meant that employers learned that employees weren’t all that loyal and so focused on recruiting new ones instead of keeping old ones, since the expectation was that most of their employees would leave within five years anyway. But that only made employees less loyal and more willing to leave for other companies. So employers didn’t worry about retention and employees then planned to move on as soon as they could get a better deal. In the short term, it worked out for employers and employees, but the loss of loyalty ultimately hurt them both. You can see the same sort of mistake with cell phone/cable companies, with great deals for customers who switch but nothing for those who stay. All that does is encourage people to switch as soon as the great deals run out, so companies end up with cheaper contracts for customers that leave as soon as that deal runs out and they can get a better one. The same thing was true of the employees: they moved for higher pay and benefits that cost more than the loyal employees, and would leave as soon as they could get a better deal, so they had lots of turnover and training new employees for a higher cost than they would have if they had kept things the way they were.

          1. Steve C says:

            Ah, but you missed the part where all of what you have written is true, but also doesn’t matter. Because the long term becomes irrelevant. It is not a mistake because they aren’t paying the consequences for it. The current stockholders have been compensated. Senior management has been compensated. There is no longer a reason to care about any the points you raised. Google “the CEO and the three envelopes.”

            A large company with a parent company makes widgets. They do what I described. They tank their rep. They use the money they made to buy a much smaller competitor that makes premium widgets. Rinse and repeat. Because consumers will generally not notice the changeover. Especially if the ‘large company’ is a subsidiary of a capital firm that owns both as a merger is much more palatable than a buyout. Even though they are the same.

          2. Sabrdance says:

            The argument goes that short term prospects are all that matter -thinking 2 quarters ahead, not 2 years ahead. There is certainly something to that (and a lot of our laws and regulations are written with that as the understanding). The actual behavior of the companies is more reasonable, though. GM didn’t go bankrupt because it was trying to extract value from its reputation -it went bankrupt because it’s legacy costs were so high that the only way they could pay their debts was to cut corners on operations. Which they did. Repeatedly. Until the reputational effects caught up with them and the company collapsed.

            There are also decent arguments that companies are increasingly reliant on financial investments rather than capital investments -that is, their profits are coming from financing rather than actual production. GM made its money from GMAC. Delta makes its money from its rewards program. Which pulls the organizational focus away from the core task and towards the financing tasks. I wonder what, for a video game company, the equivalent of GMAC is -and I wonder if isn’t something like loot boxes.

    2. Paulo Marques says:

      The generation that coined “sellout” turned around and decided it was a good and responsible thing, actually, being born and raised in the age of There Is No Alternative indoctrination.
      As far as simplistic pop generalizations go, there’s mine.

    3. Joshua says:

      I have an MBA, and I tend to consider it a lesser degree (at least compared to other Master’s. I think saying “focusing on core assets” and always minimizing risk is incorrect. There’s always a balance between diversifying too much and being too inflexible/conservative to branch out into any new industries and risking stagnation. I think you can safely discount that latter argument based upon the past 40 or so years of companies constantly branching out into looking for new revenue streams, driven by all of these 70s/80s MBAs you talked about.

    4. Clareo Nex says:

      I’ll do the capitalism thing though.

      You’ll find MBAs are anticapitalist.

      E.g. you hire an MBA for liability reasons, not because you think they’re the best fit for the job. It makes HR happy, which makes the lawyers happy. It’s a near constant of business that the best managers look vaguely unqualified, like hiring a patent clerk to run your R&D division. “Oh hey, this truck driver is perfect for our restaurant.” If it makes sense you should look again, because that’s weird. It’s not like good managers never make sense, but it pays to bet against it.

      E.g. you’ll find the “duty to stockholders” thing is due to an absolutely loco law which lets you sue a publicly-traded company if they don’t maximize profits on a 3-month cycle. “Long term thinking? What’s that? Is it tasty?” It’s not impossible to get away with long-term investments, but since you have to really work at it, most of the time it’s easier to go with the flow and sacrifice long-term viability for short-term gain. Nobody minds if you pilot a company into the side of a mountain, as long as the nose was pointed up at the time. You can always blame “market forces” or what have you if you need to find a new job.

      Nobody thinks doing these things is a good idea, it’s just functionally illegal not to.

  12. Chris says:

    Boomer came from a forced meme first pushed on 4chan. People would post things like “the 34 year old boomer that [insert whatever generates the most replies here]”. Initially people would call them out that boomers are older, but eventually the spam made it stick. Then it migrated to other websites (since, again, the misuse of the word boomer would generate a lot of replies). The old boomer meme was a guy sitting on his lawnmower drinking Budweiser early in the morning. But now that’s replaced with them drinking monster energy drinks. From this came the term boomer shooter.

    I think the term boomer works in two ways. One, it generates a lot of buzz from people complaining your abusing the term. Thus people spam it to get more replies and feel good about themselves (same reason people troll, they just want a response and will do anything to get it). Two, it neatly slips into the “okay boomer” retort. You liked it when a game didn’t have microtransactions, when you could carry more than 2 guns and moved at lightning speeds? You hate Fortnite and call of duty? Well you’re just a boomer.

    1. Steve C says:

      Yeah I’m convinced the vast majority of the “Boomer” thing is exactly like the “Why is called the X-Box 360? Because you turn 360 degrees and walk away” meme.

      IE Deliberately wrong in order to infuriate some. While others just accept it at face value. Either way it is a deliberate troll. That’s the point- the troll. Why it works so well is because there is a kernel of truth to it.

  13. Sabrdance says:

    I dislike using birth years to delineate the generations. I prefer thinking in terms of the generations themselves. I was born after 1980, but think of myself as Gen X because my older brothers are Gen X, my parents are boomers, one grandfather fought in WWII and the other enlisted for WWI, but the war ended before he could get there.

    I had a very different childhood than people born the same year, but whose parents were Gen X.

    1. Joshua says:

      That would make their parents sixteen years old at most.

    2. Kathryn says:

      Generation Oregon Trail. Older than millennials, younger than Gen X, don’t fit either stereotype.

      I personally don’t think generational labels are helpful at all. I can’t think of a single time when I’ve been able to nod sagely and say, “Yes, indeed, So-and-so belongs to That Generation, and I was able to use that information to predict their behavior.” Even the MTBI and DiSC have better predictive ability than generational labels.

    3. eldomtom2 says:

      Also, people don’t give birth in the cycles that talking of generations implies. The rate stays constant throughout the years, only gradually going up or down.

      1. Paul Spooner says:

        Generally true. However, there was a baby boom in the USA during the years following WWII, which contributes to the eponymous title.

        1. eldomtom2 says:

          Still not in the “cycles” sense that speaking of “generations” implies. It was just a time of increased births.

          1. Steve C says:

            No man. It’s a real thing studied by academia.

    4. Joshua says:

      A good portion of Gen X (if you’re American) also came of age in the different political environment that was between 1989 and 2001 (Shamus was just graduating high school?), where the United States was the definitive Superpower of the world and we just didn’t have the same sense of safety concerns that existed during the cold war or after 9/11. Most of our concerns were economic uncertainty and social change. So, I think there is some cultural similarity there that can line up some Gen X people.

  14. Adam says:

    No Fallout New Vegas reference :(

    1. BlueHorus says:

      You know, those explosive-obsessed tribals were alright, in the end.
      They were definitely Ok Boomers.

      (There you go)

  15. Sniffnoy says:

    Wait, isn’t 2K owned by Take-Two? So those could also be combined.

    1. ElementalAlchemist says:

      Yes, 2K is just a publishing label of Take-Two. Not sure why Shamus treated it like it was a separate entity. It was created after Take-Two bought the 2K sports IP, so it’s not even like it warrants a mention because it was former standalone company that was bought out (like ZeniMax/Bethesda, Activision, etc.).

      1. Shamus says:

        I totally forgot that 2k is part of T2. In my mind, “The sports people” are so distinct from “The people who publish Grand Theft Auto V” that I forgot they’re under the same roof.

        It will get easier to keep track of this stuff as the industry gradually consolidates into two or three megaconglomerates. So we have that to look forward to!

  16. Rho says:

    [It takes me a few paragraphs to get to the generation issue.]

    I am not going to complain that the companies want to make money from their games, even a *lot* of money. I am, however, going to complain that they do so in such an utterly deplorably bad, unsustainable way. The big problem with EA (as an example) wasn’t even adding lootboxes. I don’t *like* the damn things, but I can concede in the abstract that they make sense in some situations. (I engage with a FtP title that uses them extensively. That’s the price of admission.)

    Now, here is the problem: it’s treating the game like a strip-mine that must be exploited as fast and thoroughly as possible, with no consideration to the “And then what?” question. Many very successful game series have basically been consumed entirely, when they could have delivered long-term value, by trying to extract too much. Too many games forget that they have to give the player value for their money, as though this isn’t a competitive industry.

    20-Sided mostly reflect AAA games. Yes, I know Shamus loves Kerbal, but the fact is that this is mostly a AAA-blog. Most of the games broadly discussed here are “Name” titles. (And that’s OK, I am not complaining, but stating as fact.) However, the market is more competitive every year. Steam drops thousands of games annually, and while most of those are tiny little projects, there are more than enough AA or even A games to pressure the likes of EA. Customers have choices now, and especially on PC, old titles often have extremely long lifespans. There is, in short, more options than ever before even if some genres still fall short.

    This means titles have to deliver value to compete. And big AAA titles need to deliver big value. However, I suppose one question we might ask is, why should the executives care? If people are going to buy, buy, buy… well, why not let them? because it’s bad for the hobby? Well, it’s not bad for their individual wallets. Because it makes for bad games? Well, who cares except the players? Because it’s morally wrong? Ha, who decided *that* anymore? Or even cares?

    The Boomers were not exactly well-known for the love of social responsibility and long-term planning. I have some very strong feelings about this, but let’s avoid too much controversy by letting me simply state: It’s not exactly a new observation that the Boomer Generation often preached freedom and counter-culture, but undermined actual alternatives to powerful institutions. Gen X and Millennials, often disaffected and dealing with a more isolating, less connected home and community, don’t seem to have a clear way back if they even wanted to do so.

    1. Richard says:

      KSP2 has ended up in AAA hell, with a very high probability of being a commercial failure, entirely because it’s had most of the value eaten away during development – the same fate as so many other series, albeit for slightly different reasons.

      Worse, when a game is a commercial failure most execs appear to assume it was the genre that was the problem, not the specifics around the failure.
      And that tends to mean everyone else avoids the genre for a decade, and the fans of said genre have no new games to play – until some indie makes something good on a tiny budget, and around we go again.

      You see the same thing in TV and movies, though those do have the excuse of being far higher financial risk.
      – A TV series can cost more per episode than an entire AAA game development, while not offering the “long tail” of purchases over a few years that games do.

  17. Zekiel says:

    This is the first time I’ve clicked on a Rickroll link in ages, and the YouTube ad preceding the video now totally ruins the joke… presumably this must have been the case for ages and I I’ve o lay just realised?

  18. Vladius says:

    You don’t have to apologize for “language prescriptivism,” it’s a dumb concept used to justify twisting language to mean something that it doesn’t.
    You nailed it right on the head. It’s always bothered me when people use the word boomer that way. It often gets used against any kind of authority or socially conservative idea when the boomers were literally the rebel hippies. It’s similar to how people use the word “incel” now.

    1. Warclam says:

      So-called “descriptivism” can have legitimate uses, but when encountered in the wild, is usually someone whining that no, they’re not using the wrong word because there’s no such thing as the right word!

      It’s a real philosophical concept that has mostly been adopted by lazy thinkers.

      1. RFS-81 says:

        I think I agree with linguistic descriptivism: Telling people how to talk isn’t a science. But people who complain about language drift aren’t trying to do linguistics, so why should they care?

        It’s like saying “Why are you trying to do things? Don’t you know that history is about discussing things that happened, not about making things happen?”

  19. Infinitron says:

    Classic boomers are the folks born in the years directly after World War 2. These early 1960s guys are just borderline Xers.

  20. tmtvl says:

    “Zenimax, oh that’s actually owned by Microsoft now. Activision, oh that’s being acquired by MS now…”

    So this is how the industry dies, not with a bang, but with a whimper.

    1. Philadelphus says:

      Is anyone keeping an eye on this guy? It seems like he could do a lot of damage if he wanted to.

      See also: why Valve’s overaching plan, for over a decade now, has been to wean as many players off of Windows as possible to ensure that all their eggs are not in one giant basket with the initials “MS” painted on it. (I think there’s room for a broad range of opinions as to whether Microsoft would ever pull an Apple like Valve fear, but they clearly do still fear it as a possibility.)

      1. Philadelphus says:

        “overarching”, whoops.

      2. Simplex says:

        For the first time they have a chance to succeed with Steam Deck and Proton.

    2. Sleeping Dragon says:

      I think that’s deeply fatalistic. So far, while definitely consolidating power, MS doesn’t show the signs of being a studio killer like EA. What I’d be worried about would be balkanization of the video game scene into multiple subscriptions, akin to what we’re seeing with video streaming. On the other hand that might still be more financially viable compared to my individual purchases the better half of which languishes in my backlog for years at a time so eh…

  21. SidheKnight says:

    Hey Shamus, I already posted this in the YT comment section, but just in case you don’t see it:

    I didn’t mean to criticize you for your pronunciation of Marcin Iwi?ski’s name. It was just a friendly correction, although I can see how it failed to come across that way on the flat tone of internet written comments. I’m sorry.

    1. Shamus says:

      No, it’s cool. The only one that was annoying was the one who had some sort of axe to grind with Anglo-saxons. The rest of the comments were just there to justify revisiting his name, and all of that was in service of the joke where I butchered Geoff Keighly’s name. And that was my favorite part of the whole video.

      So really, you helped set up my joke. :)

      1. SidheKnight says:

        Thanks man! Glad I could help.

      2. Lino says:

        And that was my favorite part of the whole video.

        My favourite part was “I can’t change that, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth complaining about!”

  22. Rho says:

    At the risk of also being somewhat pedantic, I also want to challenge some of Shamus’s assertions in the article. Not because I think anyone will care, but because I am a massive history nerd and there’s a sizable gap between his assumptions about the world and the reality. Some of these are even important.

    First, the idea that families were all big extended things is historically inaccurate. It’s not that “nobody” was raised in a big multi-generational household, but in reality that wasn’t necessarily the norm case since… before the Revolution War. Frankly, American birthrates and expansion made that functionally impossible. In fact, until the advent of mass transportation it was often extremely difficult to travel with young children or to have the grandparents come over for a spell. Until the dawn of the highway & airplane, travel might literally mean taking a horse to get to the train to get to the boat. (OK, cars got introduced to the public over the 20’s and they were in practice much cheaper than horses, and cities had streetcars.)

    It was reasonably common for elderly parents to live with their adult children, but remember that they often had larger families and their full family might be scattered all over the nation.

    Similarly, college education was not exactly invented after WW2, and there was nothing new about the value placed upon it by Americans. However, it rapidly became *much* more common to go to a formal four-year degree-granting university following the GI Bill, and it was normalized in a way not present before. The BB generation definitely saw a substantial increase, but the explosive growth even in high-school attainment didn’t stop until *1990*. Less than a third of Boomers got college, which was a big shift over time.

    The most significant impact on the increase in education happened before the Boomers were even born: the High School movement. Secondary education in the 19th Century was much more informal and individually-driven. This actually had many benefits: students were much more flexible about arrangements and often focused much more on deep topics rather than being trapped by formalized education structures. They also often studied in multiple institutions or environments. The downside was that, well, there was relatively little mass education and for most it stopped in primary school, itself often of a very uneven character. Boomers weren’t the cause of the shift, in short – they were the beneficiaries of a shift that already took place, and the first generation in a situation where it wasn’t disrupted by Depression and War.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_school_movement

    …Feel free to criticize me for being a pedantic history nerd and/or mis-interpreting your video.

  23. John V says:

    You’re overthinking the “Boomer Shooter” genre name. It came into being as an extension of the “30 year old boomer” meme which actually mocks millennials. It stuck around mainly due to catchiness instead of accuracy.

    1. John says:

      More specifically, it mocks the kind of Millennial who falls into the same trap as Boomers: rather than wanting something because they like it, they want something because “that’s how it was in the old days, it’s tradition”. It’s about being out of touch not because you’ve found what you genuinely like and you’re sticking to it, but because you’re not even paying attention to new stuff at all. “30 year old Boomer” is intentional: it’s to identify that this person is a Millennial by birthdate only, and a Boomer in spirit.

      My personal favorite is the 6500 year old Soomer

  24. skulgun says:

    Boomer is the opposite of Zoomer (Gen Z). Millennials (and older) are Boomers. Boomer shooters are games millennials played. It’s a 4chanism and any resemblance to baby boomers is strictly coincidental.

  25. Mephane says:

    I happened to watch the video (usually I read the written blog post) and as it went on I was always expecting for Shamus to drop the real point, but it never happened:

    “Boomer” when used dismissively, for example as in “OK, boomer” does not refer to any specific generation or the age of the addressee.

    Sure, it might have started that way, but it has long since evolved into a comment about someone’s attitude, in particular with regards to being out of touch with the socio-economic reality of lower and middle class people today. See for example those news articles where the author complains that “millenials destroy X industry, why are they not buying its products” ignoring primary reason being that many people realized they don’t really need it and, more often than not, simply cannot afford it. That author might even be, by age, a millenial themselves, but a boomer in mind.

    The whole exercise of checking who is born when and whether they are therefore of the boomer generation looks like an exercise in futility, which is exacerbated by the problem that most of the various people you listed are CEOs and managers above all else, who generally care more about money than the quality of their product, which is a problem in every industry and across all ages. They are disconnected from us not because of when they are born, but because of how rich they are and what goals they pursue (e.g. shareholder value).

    1. Scerro says:

      I also expected more acknowledgement that “OK Boomer” is an insult, and considered to embody outdated ways of thinking. Instead of reading like a humorous intro, it takes it a bit too seriously and feels more like a defense of “no execs are gen-x”, which is EXACTLY how you get OK boomer’ed. It’s missing the point, at least in text form. Either that, or I fail at reading comprehension, which is quite possible.

  26. Ziusudra says:

    2nd paragraph, in “So rather that clean up the script”, ‘that’ should be ‘than’.

    You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

  27. Steve C says:

    The new release “Common’hood” is an example of an generational divide in games. It’s basically The Sims. Except instead of being set a suburban neighborhood, it is set in a collapsed factory that everyone is squatting in.

    I cannot imagine something like that being made 22 yrs ago. But today? Yeah, yeah I do.

  28. PPX14 says:

    The fact that people think and speak in terms of “your generation did this” or “this generation did that” rather than “people in that generation did that” or “this happened in this time period” is a bit of a shame and usually sounds a bit silly. And it’s hilarious that boomer is used as a term for an old fogey when it was they who created or at least first experienced modern western youth culture and libertarianism. It’s also telling of western culture that being old and having views apparently at odds with the young is considered being out of touch, rather than being the wisdom of an elder with more experience. Makes our culture seem so childish. Or our typical education seem so poor if we don’t trust people over 50 to be capable en-masse of reasoned thought despite being the ones who fostered the creation of those things with which they are allegedly out of touch. Especially when the grizzled old being angry at the impudent young dates back to ancient times :D

    1. Philadelphus says:

      It’s also telling of western culture that being old and having views apparently at odds with the young is considered being out of touch, rather than being the wisdom of an elder with more experience.

      I think it’s useful to keep in mind that experience is domain specific, not a universal currency; my years of experience programming in Python hardly qualify me to provide advice to a someone programming in C (goodness no). And we’re also living in a period of accelerating change (technological, social, ecological, scientific, etc.), which means experience from a few decades ago might no longer be applicable today. Like advising a teenager who needs a job that the best way to get one is to go around to stores (or call them up), ask to see the manager, and put yourself out there. That might’ve worked 50 years ago (or so I hear, I wasn’t around then), but any store you go to today will just point you at their online application system (and good luck seeing the manager!). I, at 32, absolutely have respect for the wisdom of my elders (I’ve got a number of friends over 50), but part of wisdom is recognizing one’s own limitations and inadequacies before offering advice (and to be fair, age is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for wisdom, and there are…let’s call them “less than wise” people in every generation). I agree that ad hominem (ad…generationem?) attacks against other generations aren’t useful, but there are some older people out there who genuinely seem to be out of touch with the realities of life for younger people these days*. While that by no means justifies tarring others of their generation with the same brush (and there are plenty of older people who’ve kept up with the changing times), it also isn’t the case that everyone drawing Social Security is a font of unmitigated wisdom who could solve all those young ‘uns problems if they’d only just listen (and stop buying that avocado toast!). I’m sure when I’m twice my age I’ll no doubt be chock full of terrible advice for 20-somethings that worked for me but won’t be applicable to their situation anymore.

      *I’m definitely not saying that young people nowadays are somehow uniquely burdened—every generation has had its troubles, and ours haven’t (yet) involved a world war—but by pretty much every financial measure millennials are the first generation to be objectively worse off, collectively, than previous generations over the past century, so it’s not just youngsters being whiny either.

      1. tmtvl says:

        programming in Python hardly qualify me to provide advice to a someone programming in C

        Oh, so I guess you can’t give me any pointers?

        1. Shamus says:

          *nods approvingly*

        2. pseudonym says:

          :-D that is a good one.

          In fact, all ‘things’ (variables, functions, classes etc.) in Python are implemented as pointers. “PyObject *”, to be exact. PyObject is a struct. The struct has at least two members, a pointer to a PyTypeObject struct and the reference count. The PyTypeObject struct contains information about the type of the object and whast can be done with it. This also informs the Python interpreter of any other struct members that might be there.

          For example a PyObject * with a type pointer to PyBytes_Type can be cast to a PyBytesObject * that has some additional members. This is what happens internally when calling the C-API functions from C.

          Is that enough pointers? If you’d prefer to stay in Python there is the weakref library: https://docs.python.org/3/library/weakref.html . This allows you to reference a python object without increasing the reference count,so the garbage collector can free the object at any time and you are left with a dangling pointer.

      2. PPX14 says:

        I, at 32, absolutely have respect for the wisdom of my elders (I’ve got a number of friends over 50), but part of wisdom is recognizing one’s own limitations and inadequacies before offering advice (and to be fair, age is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for wisdom, and there are…let’s call them “less than wise” people in every generation). I agree that ad hominem (ad…generationem?) attacks against other generations aren’t useful, but there are some older people out there who genuinely seem to be out of touch with the realities of life for younger people these days*. While that by no means justifies tarring others of their generation with the same brush (and there are plenty of older people who’ve kept up with the changing times), it also isn’t the case that everyone drawing Social Security is a font of unmitigated wisdom who could solve all those young ‘uns problems if they’d only just listen (and stop buying that avocado toast!).

        Quite :) Pretty much an articulation of my first point. I likewise wasn’t advocating for mindless genuflection to the elderly or existing dogma :D But it still does feel telling of the culture and its views on age, and social relationships across the age continuum, and/or indeed the lack of comprehensive cumulative knowledge with age due to how vast the array of elements to society nowadays (vs the agricultural era).

        Although (while I obviously know nothing about your life and don’t mean this in a judgemental way at all, and am taking this out of context etc.) your mentioning friends over 50 rather than just parents or relatives does makes me think that whole “gosh, this fractured Western culture” thing again where people often have such stark differences from their older relatives or don’t find them to be sources of knowledge and experience. (Actually that’s really good to hear to be honest, it so often feels like we end up pigeonholed into very tight age groups socially which then self-perpetuates. I’m a very similar age to you and every one of my friends and peers goes on about getting old, and has been doing so since reaching 20, I even seem to try to instinctively assess what age people on the street are and how old I look to others.)

        Yes it’s a peculiar situation isn’t it, the rapid turnover of culture and societal norms, I completely understand that. I imagine it’s the cause of a lot of people’s anxieties and societal ills. It’s quite odd in fact that it apparently happens to some degree generationally with some sort of cut-off after which one decreases in absorbing the new and becomes set with the old, rather that the new becoming part of the experience set of the older, or at least that being the assumption – but I suppose that is very situational. That assumption seems to be the source of a lot of the conflict – that the older one is, the less one actually knows about the present, rather than the assumption being that for a significant portion of people it is continuous, so the older people have the experience of both old and new, whereas younger people have experience only of the new. Clearly in certain job fields like surgery or law this is typically not considered to be the case due to the constant keeping up-to-date required. There are the ones who never learned anything new in various technical professions but I believe they are typically “that one who refuses to change”.

        But it does end up with silly stereotypes of older people not knowing how to use computers when they were often the ones buying and building them back in the day. I certainly never had to learn Fortran to be able to run engineering simulations at university like my father did, I just pressed a button. In fact it’s startling how little a lot of younger people know about using computers due to the levels of user friendliness in tablets etc today.

        Like advising a teenager who needs a job that the best way to get one is to go around to stores (or call them up), ask to see the manager, and put yourself out there.

        My girlfriend’s father made her do just this!! Marched her around an outlet shopping park to hand out her CV a few years ago! And he’s a professional scientist / lecturer and karate teacher, not some shut-in. Though some of his views seem straight out of the Victorian era. I never really considered that to be a product of his age, just his personality.

  29. Dragmire says:

    And here I thought that Boomer Shooter just meant an old fps game because tech ages quickly…

  30. Clareo Nex says:

    Millennials will be awful video game publishers.

    For fellow millennial gamers: if you recall going to school, the last thing you would do is admit to anyone you played videogames. Most in fact didn’t, or at most dabbled slightly. Only super nerds – the kind of person who doesn’t get to own a company if they’re not named Bill Gates – played videogames. That general disdain for the hobby is the culture they grew up with. Boomers view games as basically a scam they happen to make money from, like selling cigarettes, and millennial businessmen will leak their contempt all over the finished products.

    Maybe when Zoomers run companies you’ll have a shot? More likely it will approximately all be mobile game nostalgia. No lootboxes though, probably.

    1. RFS-81 says:

      I don’t believe Triple-Ayyy games could make as much money as they do if millennials universally despised games.

      But I also don’t believe that the generation in charge matters much.

      1. Clareo Nex says:

        All entertainment products are niche products.

        Movie tickets in America totalled 1.3 billion dollars in 2018. This sounds like a lot until you compare it to the total economy, 21 trillion. It’s 0.006%.

        99.994% of Americans could despise going to the cinema and it could still be a thriving industry.

        Minecraft, easily the best-selling game of all time, hasn’t even sold enough for every American to own one. 238 million…there are 2 billion English-speakers alone. And for some puzzling reason folk buy multiple copies quite often. A product that reaches 5% of the population can safely be said to be immensely popular and have insane market penetration.

    2. Supah Ewok says:

      I think that millennials were the generation that actually changed that, but there’s a before and after. I stake that the release of Pokemon in 1996 was a watershed moment in public acceptance of gaming among children, who carried that acceptance through their teenage years into adulthood. ’96 is about when Gen Z is supposed to start but there’s not many 0-1 year olds playing Game Boys at the school yard.

    3. PPX14 says:

      Do you mean “gamers” rather than people who play games? Because my experience going to primary school was that it was very normal for boys to have Dreamcast, PS1, N64, and played Tekken, Fifa, Crash Bandicoot, GTA, Syphon Filter, Pokemon etc. And then secondary school again everyone played Fifa, PES, GTA, The Getaway, Ratchet and Clank etc etc. It was weird not to have a console, PS2, PS3, 360. Yes MMOs and the like, the nerdier side of gaming, that would be a niche just like Magic cards, but gaming was by no means a faux-pas, it was the norm. And that’s across the socio-economic and working/middle class spectrum.

      Edit: this is specifically boys I mean.

  31. Supah Ewok says:

    Shamus, I appreciate getting bugged and needing to get the bug out of your system. I do challenge your assertion that “there’s an entire generation of kids out there who have no idea what “boomer” actually means or where the generational demarcation points are. “Boomer” just means “old person” now, and that makes it really confusing to discuss generational differences.”

    Those kids may know or they may not know. But they certainly don’t care. Its the Lulz generation. They don’t believe they’re making inciteful commentary, they’re smacking the shit out of whatever low hanging fruit they can find to make a mess and “get ‘im”.

    The discussion here is nice, anyhow. Learned some things about 70’s to 90’s business education and practices.

  32. PPX14 says:

    When we talk about modern youth/popular culture and its roots in the 50s and 60s, do we possibly forget about the youth/popular culture of the roaring 20s? Or was that mainly upper middle class people?

    1. tmtvl says:

      Are you thinking of flappers and petting parties? I mean, “kids nowadays” is as old as Aristotle.

      1. PPX14 says:

        Yes exactly, looks like there was a big youth party and fashion scene. Maybe it was all-ages though? Rather than being defined by some sort of “generational difference of youth”.

  33. snarflarf says:

    The little kids who throw around the term boomer these days use it for anyone at least in their mid twenties, so they’re not really people we should take seriously at this point. I mean they think games from the 2000s are “retro”.

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