But Where Have All The Game Ficcers Gone?
Sorry that I missed posting yesterday; between Exalted and a vicious attack of headbees, not much was going to happen in the way of useful thoughts. (Today almost fell by the wayside too; the incoming snowstorm means my sinuses are attempting to chew their way out of my face. Alas.) But I am here, and the topics meme proceeds apace! Today's topic is from 
samuraiter, who asked: "Why are there so few video game 'ficcers compared to ... almost every other kind of 'ficcer?"
Funny true story: I had been thinking of making a post vaguely in line with this very same topic specific to Yuletide, and I am pleased to have an opportunity to talk about it in more general terms!
So while I recognize that there are more divisions than this to fandom, I'm going to very broadly break down fandom bases to four groups: books, movies, TV/anime, and video games. (I recognize that Western live-action TV is a very different beast than anime and that obviously there are way more divisions to TV than this, but there's a reason I stuck those particular two together. Also, video games is a huge category, but BROAD STROKES.)
I posit that the reason video games have a smaller per-capita share of the fandom pie is relatively simple to explain but hard to overcome: Barriers to entry.
There are a lot of them, but I think that they break down into five major categories: time, money, accessibility, socialization, and assumed knowledge.
For purposes of this, I'm going to operate on the assumption (flawed and privileged though it is) that all of our possible pool of fannish participants are possessed of a high-speed internet connection and a reasonably recent computer (where "reasonably recent" means "capable of handling most Internet media.") Mostly because I'm assuming we're drawing from people who have the tools to interact with fandom as we understand it - art, 'fic, possibly vidding and podcasts, whatever.
So, let's break down the categories of barriers to entry.
Money
Book fandoms have the capacity to be completely free, if your local library is generous (or if you have friends prone to shoving books into your hands and going "READ!") All you need for book fandoms, besides the computer and internet connection assumed above, is access to the books and time to read them (more on that in a later point.) Even if you don't have a good library, a book is, what, $7 or $8 USD? Movie tickets around here are rapidly approaching $12 a seat, cable is $30 a month if you're on the cheapie intro plan* and a streaming TV service is, what, $15 these days?
* Yes okay you can have one of the digital antennae and get TV for free, so technically TV is probably the second cheapest fandom to be in.
Video games, though, have an extremely high investment barrier. Let's say you want to play computer games. That means you need a significantly better PC rig than the one assumed above. Paladin and I recently built a seriously badass tower to connect to our TV for reasons mostly involving Steam and videoconferencing for our tabletop games; we were aided in this by the fact that he knows how to slap all the parts together. It cost us $500, not counting monitor, operating system, or any of the games. Sure, you don't need bleeding-edge graphics to be a PC gamer, but you need a lot more than what will just get you by for casual internet use.
The cheapest dedicated video console....okay, Ouya is like $100, but I'm talking video games that are likely to spawn a fandom--nothing wrong with Angry Birds or Plants vs Zombies, but there's not a lot to fic about there--anyway. The cheapest console is a 3DS at $200. Console games are spendy; assuming you're thrifty and patient you can often hunt them down used for $10-20, but that will mean you're behind the curve of THRILLED DISCOVERY when everyone else is diving headlong into the fandom. (Some fandoms - SMT and FF come to mind - have a very long tail, but in general, new is shiny.) If you want your games new, we're talking $30 to $70 for the no-frills version. For one game. One fandom. I can pick up ten new book fandoms for that. I could pick up the first season of any three shows for that much on Amazon; less if I snag a sale at the right time. I can go see six movies. My point is that games have a way higher monetary cost-of-entry than any other broad category of fandom.
Time
Admittedly my reading speed is near as freakish as my typing speed, but I can whip through the average 400-page novel in 4 hours, give or take. (Less if a romance; more if Important Literature because in the latter case I'm likely to get bored.) A movie is an investment of 2-3 hours. TV can be a lot longer, and catching up is a sheer bastard, but it comes in conveniently divided chunks.
Most action games are about ten hours long; RPGs range from 15 hours to 150 or more (hi Skyrim.) Now, not everyone is like me and has to finish the entire game before writing for it, but in a lot of ways I feel that games, as closed canons (vs. an open/ongoing canon like a book series or TV show still airing), benefit from waiting until you've completed the whole thing. Okay, fine, but that's a lot of time to sink into something. And the media around which we center our fannish participation obviously has things to offer us besides BEING FANNISH, but there's a lot more potential, in my mind, for games to develop fatal flaws that keep us from finishing them. Books and TV series and movies all can have significant issues with craft, pacing, characterization, and plot, but games add the layers of user interaction and difficulty curve to that. There are more ways to fail.
Most of my f-list is composed of gamers, though some of us started later in our lives than others. But think about it: you're trying to coax a friend into a new fandom. Your friend doesn't have a lot of free time; maybe they have kids, or a really demanding job, or are caring for a parent, or it's finals week. What's going to be most appealing to them? Something they can read a chapter at a time in twenty-minute blocks on the bus, watch an episode during that one forty-minute break they get for dinner, or steal two precious hours out of a weekend for that movie? Or "well, this can go in chunks of half an hour to three hours and there's no way to know which until you're in the middle of it and also the whole thing is 40 hours long?" (Obviously, some things allow easier drop-and-pick-back-up than others and my perception is biased by my favourite genre of JRPG, but still.)
Accessibility
Let's talk about media interaction. Games perforce require three types of ability: visual processing, auditory processing, and physical movement as input. There are many games where you can get away with not having auditory processing, but not every game is designed that way, and auditory cues are often very important to gameplay (the guard sneaking up on you, the alert sound that notifies you there's a key in that dungeon room (shut up I'm playing a lot of Zelda right now), the change in music that tells you shit is about to go down, the puzzle that requires hitting the right notes (Chrono Cross I'm lookin' at you.) I cannot think of any games where you can get away without visual processing, except maybe Dear Esther if you've got someone willing to drive it for you. TV shows and movies can have descriptions for people who have difficulties with visual processing; audiobooks exist (though have a high cost barrier, admittedly - ask me about the time I checked out prices for an audiobook for a cross-country trip and almost fell over.) Assistive technology for this isn't perfect by any means, but it does exist. Closed-captioning exists in varying stages of competence (CBS's shows are much better captioned than ABC's, for example.) My impression from interacting with each of these types of media is that it's relatively easier to physically use the devices that power books, movies, and TV than it is game controllers. There are some great organizations out there devoted to making controllers and other input devices for people who can't use traditional controllers for one reason or another, so assistive technology does exist for games, but I think it's important to consider this aspect as well.
Socialization
Let's face it: not everyone loves video games. I'm not talking about your rabid frothing "video games caused Columbine!" people (well, I am talking about them, but they're not the main thrust of my point), but there's a lot of social disapprobation toward spending too much time focused on your pixel friends. I've known far more parents to blanket-ban video games than who blanket-banned TV, movies, or books (even though I myself have gotten far more dangerous ideas out of books than out of games). At least in the US, video games are frequently associated with being antisocial, a "loser," unable to cope with the real world, whatever. List your stereotype. I'm not going to retread the ancient and boring yarn about how video games aren't "real" art like books or movies (because sod that, those people are wrong), but they are certainly less well-received in general.
Then, too, gamers aren't the most welcoming people to new faces. We sneer about n00bs, we make fun of people who ask for help, we insult "casual" gamers for not being hardk0re enough, we have arbitrary rules about who can play the game well enough to be considered acceptable. Women get death and rape threats just for daring to be in online spaces gaming with men, and it gets worse if they're good at it. (I have myself received some really alarming email for my opinions on particular FF games.) We also have hierarchies of who's allowed to call themselves a gamer; someone who "only" plays iPhone games doesn't count as much as the guy sitting on top of the kill-medal pile in Call of Battlefield Splinter Cell.
(side note: I asked my fiancé if the preceding sentence adequately conveyed my contempt for this attitude. He burst out laughing and assured me it did.)
Assumed Knowledge
Games have a higher assumed level of knowledge than other forms of media, and that can also form a barrier to entry. We (okay, I) complain about endless tutorial levels because we know how games work. We understand the objectives and what's being asked of us. But let's say you're a new gamer; you have the physical capacity for gaming, and someone has cleared your schedule, provided you with the gaming device and the game, and assured you no one will think ill of you for this fancy new toy you've got. The title screen comes up. What do you do? We all know that if a menu doesn't auto-appear, we hit Start (or click the mouse) to get the menu to show up and we click New Game. But if you weren't given a manual, how do you know what to do when dizzying camera swoops in the window of your tree house and a fairy yells at you to wake up because we're going to go see the Great Deku Tree? Maybe you don't know what to do, so you push some buttons and manage to stagger out of the tree house and run around the field. But when you try to go out the obvious door, you get yelled at and told you can't do that. What now? As an experienced gamer, I know to look around for something I can climb. But if I've never played a game before, how would I infer that? How, in an RPG, would I know to go talk to all the NPCs until they tell me what I need to know?
Some games are designed for as little teaching as possible; Journey is a great example of something I would hand to anyone, regardless of their experience level, because it's designed to be accessible without being insulting. But I would not hand a new gamer an SMT game right out of the box. And I don't think there's really an equivalent to that in other forms of media; sure, some books are more difficult to read than others, but you don't need a whole different set of tools to do it the same way that you do with games.
Conclusion
Fiancé also contributed this: Books, movies, and TV are often telling stories about other people; often in a video game the player is in the driver's seat. This is especially true of shooters; not many characters survive the game and the main character is deliberately a blank slate. It's very disconcerting to people who aren't used to that. (This paragraph also summarizes the difference in his gaming style and mine; he plays shooters and WRPGs and action games. I play JRPGs, which he has been known to describe, not entirely in a complimentary manner, as novels with random battles stuck in the middle to break up (read: distract from) the story.)
Circling back to the beginning of this post: I think about this every year when I see people signing up for "any" Yuletide fandom. I always wonder what happens when those people get stuck with a request set like mine, which is always drawn purely from video games because that's where my fannish heart is; I wonder how many of those people are shocked to be faced with such a decision. I wonder how many defaults come from that. A song, a book, a movie; these things, one can easily consume in the space of Yuletide. A game is harder.
AND NOW THAT I HAVE RUN MY MOUTH FOR ALMOST 2500 WORDS, I AM SHUTTING UP.
I've posted this at http://lassarina.dreamwidth.org/1087569.html and you may comment there or here. On Dreamwidth, this entry has
comments.
samuraiter, who asked: "Why are there so few video game 'ficcers compared to ... almost every other kind of 'ficcer?"
Funny true story: I had been thinking of making a post vaguely in line with this very same topic specific to Yuletide, and I am pleased to have an opportunity to talk about it in more general terms!
So while I recognize that there are more divisions than this to fandom, I'm going to very broadly break down fandom bases to four groups: books, movies, TV/anime, and video games. (I recognize that Western live-action TV is a very different beast than anime and that obviously there are way more divisions to TV than this, but there's a reason I stuck those particular two together. Also, video games is a huge category, but BROAD STROKES.)
I posit that the reason video games have a smaller per-capita share of the fandom pie is relatively simple to explain but hard to overcome: Barriers to entry.
There are a lot of them, but I think that they break down into five major categories: time, money, accessibility, socialization, and assumed knowledge.
For purposes of this, I'm going to operate on the assumption (flawed and privileged though it is) that all of our possible pool of fannish participants are possessed of a high-speed internet connection and a reasonably recent computer (where "reasonably recent" means "capable of handling most Internet media.") Mostly because I'm assuming we're drawing from people who have the tools to interact with fandom as we understand it - art, 'fic, possibly vidding and podcasts, whatever.
So, let's break down the categories of barriers to entry.
Money
Book fandoms have the capacity to be completely free, if your local library is generous (or if you have friends prone to shoving books into your hands and going "READ!") All you need for book fandoms, besides the computer and internet connection assumed above, is access to the books and time to read them (more on that in a later point.) Even if you don't have a good library, a book is, what, $7 or $8 USD? Movie tickets around here are rapidly approaching $12 a seat, cable is $30 a month if you're on the cheapie intro plan* and a streaming TV service is, what, $15 these days?
* Yes okay you can have one of the digital antennae and get TV for free, so technically TV is probably the second cheapest fandom to be in.
Video games, though, have an extremely high investment barrier. Let's say you want to play computer games. That means you need a significantly better PC rig than the one assumed above. Paladin and I recently built a seriously badass tower to connect to our TV for reasons mostly involving Steam and videoconferencing for our tabletop games; we were aided in this by the fact that he knows how to slap all the parts together. It cost us $500, not counting monitor, operating system, or any of the games. Sure, you don't need bleeding-edge graphics to be a PC gamer, but you need a lot more than what will just get you by for casual internet use.
The cheapest dedicated video console....okay, Ouya is like $100, but I'm talking video games that are likely to spawn a fandom--nothing wrong with Angry Birds or Plants vs Zombies, but there's not a lot to fic about there--anyway. The cheapest console is a 3DS at $200. Console games are spendy; assuming you're thrifty and patient you can often hunt them down used for $10-20, but that will mean you're behind the curve of THRILLED DISCOVERY when everyone else is diving headlong into the fandom. (Some fandoms - SMT and FF come to mind - have a very long tail, but in general, new is shiny.) If you want your games new, we're talking $30 to $70 for the no-frills version. For one game. One fandom. I can pick up ten new book fandoms for that. I could pick up the first season of any three shows for that much on Amazon; less if I snag a sale at the right time. I can go see six movies. My point is that games have a way higher monetary cost-of-entry than any other broad category of fandom.
Time
Admittedly my reading speed is near as freakish as my typing speed, but I can whip through the average 400-page novel in 4 hours, give or take. (Less if a romance; more if Important Literature because in the latter case I'm likely to get bored.) A movie is an investment of 2-3 hours. TV can be a lot longer, and catching up is a sheer bastard, but it comes in conveniently divided chunks.
Most action games are about ten hours long; RPGs range from 15 hours to 150 or more (hi Skyrim.) Now, not everyone is like me and has to finish the entire game before writing for it, but in a lot of ways I feel that games, as closed canons (vs. an open/ongoing canon like a book series or TV show still airing), benefit from waiting until you've completed the whole thing. Okay, fine, but that's a lot of time to sink into something. And the media around which we center our fannish participation obviously has things to offer us besides BEING FANNISH, but there's a lot more potential, in my mind, for games to develop fatal flaws that keep us from finishing them. Books and TV series and movies all can have significant issues with craft, pacing, characterization, and plot, but games add the layers of user interaction and difficulty curve to that. There are more ways to fail.
Most of my f-list is composed of gamers, though some of us started later in our lives than others. But think about it: you're trying to coax a friend into a new fandom. Your friend doesn't have a lot of free time; maybe they have kids, or a really demanding job, or are caring for a parent, or it's finals week. What's going to be most appealing to them? Something they can read a chapter at a time in twenty-minute blocks on the bus, watch an episode during that one forty-minute break they get for dinner, or steal two precious hours out of a weekend for that movie? Or "well, this can go in chunks of half an hour to three hours and there's no way to know which until you're in the middle of it and also the whole thing is 40 hours long?" (Obviously, some things allow easier drop-and-pick-back-up than others and my perception is biased by my favourite genre of JRPG, but still.)
Accessibility
Let's talk about media interaction. Games perforce require three types of ability: visual processing, auditory processing, and physical movement as input. There are many games where you can get away with not having auditory processing, but not every game is designed that way, and auditory cues are often very important to gameplay (the guard sneaking up on you, the alert sound that notifies you there's a key in that dungeon room (shut up I'm playing a lot of Zelda right now), the change in music that tells you shit is about to go down, the puzzle that requires hitting the right notes (Chrono Cross I'm lookin' at you.) I cannot think of any games where you can get away without visual processing, except maybe Dear Esther if you've got someone willing to drive it for you. TV shows and movies can have descriptions for people who have difficulties with visual processing; audiobooks exist (though have a high cost barrier, admittedly - ask me about the time I checked out prices for an audiobook for a cross-country trip and almost fell over.) Assistive technology for this isn't perfect by any means, but it does exist. Closed-captioning exists in varying stages of competence (CBS's shows are much better captioned than ABC's, for example.) My impression from interacting with each of these types of media is that it's relatively easier to physically use the devices that power books, movies, and TV than it is game controllers. There are some great organizations out there devoted to making controllers and other input devices for people who can't use traditional controllers for one reason or another, so assistive technology does exist for games, but I think it's important to consider this aspect as well.
Socialization
Let's face it: not everyone loves video games. I'm not talking about your rabid frothing "video games caused Columbine!" people (well, I am talking about them, but they're not the main thrust of my point), but there's a lot of social disapprobation toward spending too much time focused on your pixel friends. I've known far more parents to blanket-ban video games than who blanket-banned TV, movies, or books (even though I myself have gotten far more dangerous ideas out of books than out of games). At least in the US, video games are frequently associated with being antisocial, a "loser," unable to cope with the real world, whatever. List your stereotype. I'm not going to retread the ancient and boring yarn about how video games aren't "real" art like books or movies (because sod that, those people are wrong), but they are certainly less well-received in general.
Then, too, gamers aren't the most welcoming people to new faces. We sneer about n00bs, we make fun of people who ask for help, we insult "casual" gamers for not being hardk0re enough, we have arbitrary rules about who can play the game well enough to be considered acceptable. Women get death and rape threats just for daring to be in online spaces gaming with men, and it gets worse if they're good at it. (I have myself received some really alarming email for my opinions on particular FF games.) We also have hierarchies of who's allowed to call themselves a gamer; someone who "only" plays iPhone games doesn't count as much as the guy sitting on top of the kill-medal pile in Call of Battlefield Splinter Cell.
(side note: I asked my fiancé if the preceding sentence adequately conveyed my contempt for this attitude. He burst out laughing and assured me it did.)
Assumed Knowledge
Games have a higher assumed level of knowledge than other forms of media, and that can also form a barrier to entry. We (okay, I) complain about endless tutorial levels because we know how games work. We understand the objectives and what's being asked of us. But let's say you're a new gamer; you have the physical capacity for gaming, and someone has cleared your schedule, provided you with the gaming device and the game, and assured you no one will think ill of you for this fancy new toy you've got. The title screen comes up. What do you do? We all know that if a menu doesn't auto-appear, we hit Start (or click the mouse) to get the menu to show up and we click New Game. But if you weren't given a manual, how do you know what to do when dizzying camera swoops in the window of your tree house and a fairy yells at you to wake up because we're going to go see the Great Deku Tree? Maybe you don't know what to do, so you push some buttons and manage to stagger out of the tree house and run around the field. But when you try to go out the obvious door, you get yelled at and told you can't do that. What now? As an experienced gamer, I know to look around for something I can climb. But if I've never played a game before, how would I infer that? How, in an RPG, would I know to go talk to all the NPCs until they tell me what I need to know?
Some games are designed for as little teaching as possible; Journey is a great example of something I would hand to anyone, regardless of their experience level, because it's designed to be accessible without being insulting. But I would not hand a new gamer an SMT game right out of the box. And I don't think there's really an equivalent to that in other forms of media; sure, some books are more difficult to read than others, but you don't need a whole different set of tools to do it the same way that you do with games.
Conclusion
Fiancé also contributed this: Books, movies, and TV are often telling stories about other people; often in a video game the player is in the driver's seat. This is especially true of shooters; not many characters survive the game and the main character is deliberately a blank slate. It's very disconcerting to people who aren't used to that. (This paragraph also summarizes the difference in his gaming style and mine; he plays shooters and WRPGs and action games. I play JRPGs, which he has been known to describe, not entirely in a complimentary manner, as novels with random battles stuck in the middle to break up (read: distract from) the story.)
Circling back to the beginning of this post: I think about this every year when I see people signing up for "any" Yuletide fandom. I always wonder what happens when those people get stuck with a request set like mine, which is always drawn purely from video games because that's where my fannish heart is; I wonder how many of those people are shocked to be faced with such a decision. I wonder how many defaults come from that. A song, a book, a movie; these things, one can easily consume in the space of Yuletide. A game is harder.
AND NOW THAT I HAVE RUN MY MOUTH FOR ALMOST 2500 WORDS, I AM SHUTTING UP.
I've posted this at http://lassarina.dreamwidth.org/1087569.html and you may comment there or here. On Dreamwidth, this entry has
comments.