The term "gamer" and its cultural rise over a century

    I found this blog post by Jesper Juul, video game researcher and professor at the NYU Game Center, the same day as our first class, and, interestingly, the questions it raises are a lot like the ones we tackled during our discussion of "gaming" v. "play." Basically, Juul charted the rise of the word "gamer" through the corpus of English-language books archived by Google Books from 1900 to the present, and this graph is the result.

    It's obviously not an incredibly scientific study, but it's interesting nonetheless. While we can easily understand the spike in its use around 1990 (the term was "rarely used in relation to arcade games or early home computer games," he elaborates), what isn't so clear is why it levels off around 2005. While Juul isn't able to provide a definitive answer, both he and some commenters have suggested that it's due to the rise of casual gaming.

     Even in the context of analyzing published works on Google Books, I can see this as being true. To me, "gaming" has traditionally been associated with subculture, and, as everyone knows, the word "subculture" is like crack to academics and cutting-edge fiction writers. But, with the rise of casual gaming – and not just Wii, FarmVille, etc., but with the ostensibly "gamer’s games" first-person shooters as well – there's been a huge push of gaming into mainstream culture. According to a study released last year by the ESA, 72% of American households play computer or video games. And the lines between what are traditionally considered the subcultural aspects of gaming and what are considered mainstream are being increasingly blurred. Hell, I know kids who have that fancy Turtle Beach headset to play Call of Duty (and Call of Duty exclusively), while I could never fathom investing so much money on any game accessory - and my interest in games goes beyond blowing shit up and screaming at 12-year-olds on online multiplayer (but not too much beyond that). So, maybe this leveling we're seeing in the graph is because - now that everyone is gaming - it is trickier to study what differentiates the subculture from the norm, and gaming's subversive qualities are no longer as fascinating.

     But then again, even though those same kids buy top-of-the-line headsets and pay for Xbox Live and DLCs, I can say with some confidence that they would rather be publicly tarred and feathered than refer to themselves as gamers. Which I guess is now where identity (like what we were talking about last Thursday) comes to play. Unfortunately, I think a single word search over Google Books is perhaps not suited to begin an inquiry into that. I’ll stop now before this becomes a full blown dissertation. Feel free to shut me down on any of this (if you got this far, haha).

(The Ludologist via Kotaku)