{"id":54092,"date":"2022-03-29T06:00:48","date_gmt":"2022-03-29T10:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=54092"},"modified":"2022-03-28T15:32:38","modified_gmt":"2022-03-28T19:32:38","slug":"boomers-vs-videogames","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=54092","title":{"rendered":"Boomers vs. Videogames"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;t work in print: <em>Bits of footage, audio gags, jokes where my narration disagrees with the slides I&#8217;m showing<\/em>, and so on. This video is quite short &#8211; about 14 minutes &#8211; and it has a lot of these sorts of video-only shenanigans. If I cut them all out, then there wouldn&#8217;t be much left.<\/p>\n<p>So rather that clean up the script for print, I&#8217;m going to publish it as-is.<span class='snote' title='1'>Actually, I did get rid of one gag related to mispronouncing &#8220;Marcin Iwi?ski&#8221;.<\/span> I don&#8217;t know how well this will work, but I&#8217;m sure you&#8217;ll let me know in the comments. Anyway, here it is&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\nI&#8217;ve said before that I&#8217;m older than your typical YouTube videogame creator.\u00a0 I&#8217;m older than the Mortal Kombat franchise. (1992) I&#8217;m older than the original NES. (1985) Older than Pac-Man. (1980) Older than the original Atari. (1977) I&#8217;m even older than Pong. (1972) I&#8217;m fifty, which means I&#8217;m about a year older than commercial videogames.<\/p>\n<p>Because of this, I sometimes get comments where some kid will hit me with an &#8220;ok boomer&#8221; when they think I&#8217;m being out of touch. At first I didn&#8217;t think anything of it. I figured they were just using the &#8220;ok boomer&#8221; meme figuratively, not literally. Like saying &#8220;ok grampa&#8221;.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>And fine. It&#8217;s no big deal. This is YouTube. We&#8217;ve all been called worse.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/LF5IsWnNxd8\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=LF5IsWnNxd8'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>But then I noticed a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.urbandictionary.com\/define.php?term=Boomer%20Shooter\">trend<\/a> of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ggrecon.com\/articles\/we-are-in-a-boomer-shooter-revival-and-its-amazing\/\">people<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.inverse.com\/gaming\/boomer-shooter-definition-origin#:~:text=%E2%80%9CBoomer%20shooter%E2%80%9D%20is%20the%20latest,90s%20like%20Doom%20and%20Quake.\">calling<\/a> the original Doom a &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/retrounite.co.uk\/10-of-the-best-boomer-shooters\/\">boomer shooter<\/a>&#8221; and I realized that there&#8217;s an entire generation of kids out there who have no idea what &#8220;boomer&#8221; actually means or where the generational demarcation points are. &#8220;Boomer&#8221; just means &#8220;old person&#8221; now, and that makes it really confusing to discuss generational differences.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>So let&#8217;s talk about the boomers, and then we&#8217;re going to talk about who is <b>really <\/b>screwing up the videogame industry these days.\u00a0<\/p>\n<h3>Rise of the Boomers<\/h3>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/tdi_boomers_beatles.jpg' width=100% alt='While these guys are towering icons of boomer culture, the Fab Four aren&apos;t themselves boomers. Born in the early 1940s, all four of the Beatles fall into the &apos;silent generation&apos;. As the name suggests, people don&apos;t talk about the silent gen very much.' title='While these guys are towering icons of boomer culture, the Fab Four aren&apos;t themselves boomers. Born in the early 1940s, all four of the Beatles fall into the &apos;silent generation&apos;. As the name suggests, people don&apos;t talk about the silent gen very much.'\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'>While these guys are towering icons of boomer culture, the Fab Four aren&apos;t themselves boomers. Born in the early 1940s, all four of the Beatles fall into the &apos;silent generation&apos;. As the name suggests, people don&apos;t talk about the silent gen very much.<\/div><\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t their age, but their lifestyle.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Earlier generations were tightly connected to their extended families. It wasn&#8217;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, &#8220;family&#8221; just meant the &#8220;nuclear family&#8221; &#8211; mom and dad and the kids.<\/p>\n<p>Mass media &#8211; and television in particular &#8211; gave baby boomers a strong sense of cultural identity. Culture was homogenizing, making it possible for everyone to experience the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Andy_Griffith_Show\">same TV shows<\/a>, the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/West_Side_Story_(1961_film)\">same movies<\/a>, and the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Beatles\">same music<\/a>. When the boomers went off to college &#8211; something they were far more likely to do than their parents &#8211; they might travel a thousand miles away to a place they&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>This new phenomena was given a name&#8230; the &#8220;generation gap&#8221;. 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, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Gap_Inc.#History\">this is where the clothing chain The Gap got its name<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>To most of you, this should sound pretty familiar. Full K through 12 education? Nuclear family? Living in the &#8216;burbs? Distinct generational identity marked by particular mass media? That sounds like kids growing up today. And I think that&#8217;s what makes the boomers so interesting. They were the first modern generation. Their childhood experiences have more in common with today&#8217;s kids than with the generations that came before.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;d have a bunch of boomer kids who had boomer parents, and that&#8217;s not how generations work.<\/p>\n<p>People born between 1965 and 1980 are called Generation X. That&#8217;s me. I realize that we&#8217;re all just &#8220;old people&#8221; to the under-thirty crowd, but our generations are pretty distinct. Gen X has its own <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/MTV\">TV shows<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Breakfast_Club\">movies<\/a>, and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ\">music<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Okay, hopefully we&#8217;ve got the generations all sorted out. So let&#8217;s talk about what this has to do with videogames.<\/p>\n<h3>Dawn of Gaming<\/h3>\n<p>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 machines<span class='snote' title='2'>Atari founder Nolan Bushnell is <b>technically<\/b> 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.<\/span> while Gen-Xers like me were literally still in diapers. Boomers designed the first arcade cabinets and invented the first gen home gaming consoles.<\/p>\n<p>It wasn&#8217;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 &#8220;boomer shooter&#8221;.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Doom came out in 1993. Here is the team that made Doom:<\/p>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/tdi_boomers_id.jpg' width=100% alt='This picture perfectly captures the personality of everyone involved. It&apos;s remarkable.' title='This picture perfectly captures the personality of everyone involved. It&apos;s remarkable.'\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'>This picture perfectly captures the personality of everyone involved. It&apos;s remarkable.<\/div><\/p>\n<p>By 1993, Baby boomers were nearing 50. You&#8217;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&#8217;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 &#8220;boomer shooter&#8221; you&#8217;re off by about three decades. In fact, Doom was my generation&#8217;s first major contribution to the hobby, so seeing it called a &#8220;boomer shooter&#8221; really stings.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Some people try to justify the term by saying &#8220;It&#8217;s a boomer shooter because it goes &#8216;boom'&#8221; For one thing, <b>all<\/b> shooters go boom. That&#8217;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&#8217;s just confusing for no reason.<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8220;boomer shooter&#8221; has stuck and people are going to continue to use it regardless of how annoying or wrong it might be. I can&#8217;t change that, but that doesn&#8217;t mean it&#8217;s not worth complaining about.<\/p>\n<p>And speaking of complaining, let&#8217;s talk about the generation that&#8217;s ruining this hobby&#8230;<\/p>\n<h3>Blame it on Boomer<\/h3>\n<p>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&#8217;ve been referring to the industry leadership as &#8220;boomers&#8221;. But as I ran the numbers in researching this video, I realized that this isn&#8217;t really true anymore.<\/p>\n<p>So let&#8217;s do a quick CEO headcount and see who&#8217;s running things these days. And just to be clear, I&#8217;m just focusing on western developers here. The generational divide works differently in Japan and I&#8217;m not qualified to comment on that culture, so I&#8217;m not including them in this list.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s start off with the big one:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Phil_Spencer_(business_executive)\">Phil Spencer<\/a> is the CEO of Microsoft gaming, which means he&#8217;s in charge of Xbox and a sizable chunk of PC stuff. He was born in 1968, which means he&#8217;s Gen X.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tim_Sweeney_(game_developer)\">Tim Sweeney<\/a> is the CEO of Epic Games. He was born just a year before me, so he&#8217;s also Gen X.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Bethesda is owned by Zenimax Media. For years Zenimax was run by baby boomer <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Robert_A._Altman\">Robert A. Altman<\/a>. But Altman has since passed away and Zenimax is now owned by Microsoft. Which means Phil Spencer controls this one, too.<\/p>\n<p>Take-Two Interactive is run by <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Strauss_Zelnick\">Strauss Zelnick<\/a>. He <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/news\/general-news\/cbs-new-board-chief-is-60-has-8-percent-body-fat-1156294\/\">might not look it<\/a>, but he was born in 1957, which makes him the first baby boomer on our list.<\/p>\n<p>Cartoon villain <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bobby_Kotick\">Bobby Kotick<\/a> runs the slaughterhouse at Activision. He was born in 1963, which means he&#8217;s one of the youngest boomers out there. If he was any younger, he&#8217;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 <b>another<\/b> superconclomerate for Phil Spencer to run.<\/p>\n<p>Ubisoft is the house of microtransactions, DRM and NFTs, and that place is run by Yves Guillemot. Born in 1960, he&#8217;s a boomer.<\/p>\n<p>CD Projekt is run by Marcin Iwi?ski. He was born in 1974, which puts him on team Gen-X.<\/p>\n<p>Andrew Wilson is running the lootbox factory at EA. Like Iwi?ski, he was born in &#8217;74, so he&#8217;s another Gen Xer.<\/p>\n<p>2k Games is run by David Ismailer, who doesn&#8217;t have a Wikipedia page. We don&#8217;t know his exact age, and pictures of him are hard to come by. Still, he&#8217;s clearly not a baby boomer. Heck, is this guy even 40 yet? Is this our first millennial CEO? I don&#8217;t know. Maybe this is an old picture or maybe he&#8217;s another immortal like Strauss Zelnick. Whatever. Let&#8217;s just assume he&#8217;s Gen-X and move on.<\/p>\n<p>Just to be inclusive, let&#8217;s throw mobile \/ social games developer King.com into the list. King is run by&#8230;\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/investor.activision.com\/news-releases\/news-release-details\/activision-blizzard-completes-king-acquisition-becomes-largest\">Oh<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Ok, so King was bought by Activision, which was bought by Microsoft, which means this is another company that has fallen into Phil Spencer&#8217;s hands. Is anyone keeping an eye on this guy? It seems like he could do a lot of damage if he wanted to.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/tdi_boomers_companies.jpg' width=100% alt='' title=''\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'><\/div><\/p>\n<p>So there it is. That&#8217;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&#8217;ve ever been.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t show up until boomers were in their 30s, and the industry didn&#8217;t really take off until the generation was well into middle age. These people didn&#8217;t grow up playing games. The hobby isn&#8217;t personal to them, so I can see why they would look at games as just another disposable consumer product.<\/p>\n<p>But I can&#8217;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 <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Nintendo_Entertainment_System\">Famicom<\/a> 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&#8217;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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s nice that his team <a href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/star-wars-battlefront-2-ea-apologizes-for-loot-box-fiasco-2018-4\">apologized for the disaster of Battlefront 2<\/a>, but it&#8217;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&#8217;t some mysterious unapproachable alien group. They&#8217;re not strangers with a different language and cultural background. They&#8217;re not on the other side of some impossible generation gap. Your customers are the people you grew up with. It&#8217;s the culture you grew up <b>in<\/b>. You should know better. Being a Gen-Xer that doesn&#8217;t understand what gamers want is like being a millenial that doesn&#8217;t understand smartphones.<\/p>\n<p>And this is what I find really depressing about the state of things right now.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Today&#8217;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&#8217;s basically a bunch of morally and artistically bankrupt companies looking for the next grift. Okay, these companies aren&#8217;t ALL that bad, and I think a couple of them actually try to do right by their customers.\u00a0 But still, the overall state of the industry is horrendous and we mostly have Gen-X to blame for it. What a disappointment.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;t work in print: Bits of footage, audio gags, jokes where my narration disagrees with the slides I&#8217;m showing, and so on. This video is quite short &#8211; about [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54092"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54140,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54092\/revisions\/54140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}