The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games

The Toxic Meritocracy

of Video Games
Why Gaming Culture Is the Worst

Christopher A. Paul

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis
London
Copyright 2018 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

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mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
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23 22 21 20 19 18 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Paul, Christopher A., author.
Title: The toxic meritocracy of video games : why gaming culture is the worst /
Christopher A. Paul.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2018. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017018695 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0040-3 (hc) |
ISBN 978-1-5179-0041-0 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Video games—Social aspects. | Merit (Ethics)—Social aspects. |
Video gamers—Psychology.
Classification: LCC GV1469.34.S52 P38 2018 (print) | DDC 794.8—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017018695
For Erin, Piper, and Ingrid
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Contents

Introduction: Growing Up Gamer  1

1. Leveling Up in Life: How Meritocracy Works in Society  29
2. A Toxic Culture: Studying Gaming’s Jerks  63
3. Coding Meritocracy:
Norms of Game Design and Narrative  91
4. Judging Skill: From World of Warcraft
to Kim Kardashian: Hollywood 111
5. Learning from Others  141
Conclusion: An Obligation to Do Better  163
Acknowledgments 181
Notes 183
Gameography 227
Index 235
This page deliberately left blank
Introduction
Growing Up Gamer

Games, video games in particular, are special to me. I am the

grown-­up version of one of those kids who went to the arcade on a
regular basis, who graduated from Atari to Nintendo to PCs, Play-
Station, and Xbox. I have spent my life bouncing back and forth among
computers, consoles, and mobile devices. There were points where I
didn’t have time to play much, like college, prompting an evolution
in what I could play and fit into my daily life. I have transitioned from
the massive time investment of World of Warcraft to choppier, more
flexible games that can be better compartmentalized, like FIFA and
Clash of Clans. However, through almost all of my life, video games
have been primary elements of my recreational experience and a base
for my social interactions, both offline and on­.
I have often had to defend video games from concerns about what
they would do to me or worries about how I could be better spend-
ing my time. When I was young, teachers told me that video games
were a waste of time; when I was older, other scholars told me that
video games were trivial and need not be studied. Fortunately, I had
parents who enabled, or at least allowed, a fair chunk of my play, and
supportive colleagues who helped me advance my work. I understand
that there was a time when video games were marginalized, relegated
to arcades you weren’t supposed to go to, and subject to scorn and
concerns about your brain rotting, how much time you were wasting,
or the violence they might inspire in the susceptible. However, while

1
Introduction 2
those complaints can still be seen on occasion, we are no longer in
the same kind of cultural moment.1 Video games are now a part of
everyday life, serving as both touchstones for how we construct who
we are as a people and as an economic engine that generates billions
of dollars (more than the music or movie industries) and attracts the
investment of millions of hours of time by people around the world.2
Despite this move from marginalized activity to accepted part of
mainstream culture, my shame about what video games are and what
game culture has become is far deeper than ever before. Maybe it is a
part of getting older, but there are parts of the culture around video
games I simply cannot defend.3 My interest in and commitment to
video games is far more conflicted because I see what has happened
in and around the games I have enjoyed so much. From the limited
depictions of women and people of color in games to ongoing cam-
paigns of harassment, like GamerGate, the current state of culture
around video games is dark, and I think those of us who recognize
problems have an obligation to address them.
A huge part of the problem with video games exists in the in-
teractions between how they are designed and how we think about
what they are. Video games, like all technologies and media forms,
express ideologies. The games that are made and played are impor-
tant artifacts that shape the culture around games, yet many of their
ideological implications are not openly discussed. Both the narratives
within video games and the way most AAA games are designed cele-
brate merit, which leads to significant problems. Videogame design is
predicated on an extreme focus on rewarding skill and effort. Merit
is a key part of the code within games, effectively becoming a central
ideology that shapes what games get made and how they are played.
Leveling systems within games sort characters into clear hierarchies
of power while providing a set of objectives for players to follow in
cases ranging from World of Warcraft to NBA 2K to Kim Kardashian:
Hollywood. Game design is praised when it achieves proper balance,
which leads to a fetish for situations where players are free to choose
multiple paths through a game, secure in the knowledge that games
from Street Fighter to BioShock to FIFA are structured so that differ-
ent choices still lead to equitable experiences for players. Those of us
playing video games all too frequently believe that one of the good
things about games is that, as one journalist celebrates, “online games
 3 Introduction
remove our physical identity, and all the traumas and inhibitions that
come with it; everybody starts equal, everyone is judged on their con-
tribution.”4 However, believing that kind of positive spin on games re-
quires ignoring all the structural inequalities that ensure players never
start from the same place.
The clearest ancestor for contemporary online games is MUD1,
Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw’s 1978 game that is described as
being created by “two angry young men, feeling oppressed,” who de-
signed “an escape with their own two hands; a place where the laws
were fairer, where the experience was not so unkind.”5 Elements of
MUD1’s lineage can be seen in almost every online game, particu-
larly in fantasy role-­playing games like EverQuest, Ultima Online,
and World of Warcraft. MUD1 was explicitly designed as “a place in
which players were able to succeed according to their actions and in-
telligence rather than an accident of birth into a certain social class
or fortune.”6 Bartle contends that he and Trubshaw “were creating a
true meritocracy. Not because I thought a meritocracy was the one
true way, but that if we were going to have a system in which people
ranked themselves, then a meritocracy was the least-­worst approach.”7
MUD1 gives contemporary games a complex inheritance, one where
video games have long been designed around principles of ranking
players based on skill and effort, seemingly replacing the importance
of birthright, but ignoring the structures around this approach that
advantage some and disadvantage others.
Pursuing merit as the paramount system of ranking players has
spread beyond online games. Most competitive multiplayer games
are designed to enable the best players to win, on the assumption that
a video game should be an assessment and adjudication of a player’s
skill, which is a core tenet of eSports and tournament play. Skill is a
vital part of discussions about video games, which can be seen as in-
tegrated into discussions surrounding them. In one small example
in July 2016, about six months after the public launch of Supercell’s
Clash Royale, players sought to assess the state of the game. The cen-
tral thesis of Chief Pat, a prominent YouTuber with over two million
subscribers, was that Clash Royale would be different from other mo-
bile games, that it would be the place where true skill had a chance to
shine through in play. Clash Royale features elements of deck building,
battle arenas, and competitive play, but for the purposes of this argu-
Introduction 4
ment the game is far less important than the kinds of appeals that are
made about it. Contextualizing his story to his first experience with
the game, Chief Pat notes that within five minutes of playing he saw
a game that would be 100 percent fair because the play would be all
about skill.8 Similar arguments are easy to find throughout the com-
munity of Clash Royale players, as they lament the evolution of the
game, design decisions, and what they see as a general devolution of
play toward a preference for luck or legacy, rather than a promotion
of player ability.9 The dominant presumption of notable and outspo-
ken players is that competition in video games is supposed to be an
evenly matched battle, with the most talented player winning. This
kind of argument dominated that particular discussion about Clash
Royale, but the general appeal is common in many different kinds of
videogame genres. This is a particularly notable instance as players are
making clear appeals justifying, rationalizing, and advancing a meri-
tocratic approach to videogame play and design.
Issues with game design also reach into the industry itself, which
tends to be far whiter and male dominated than society at large. In
2005 the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) released
a thorough report on the demographics of those who make games,
finding that over 83 percent of developers identify as white and 88.5
percent identify as male.10 The IGDA now collects demographic data
as part of its annual “Developer Satisfaction Survey”; in 2015 it found
that 75 percent of developers identify as male and 76 percent identify
as white, and described the “prototypical game industry worker/devel-
oper as being a 32 year old white male with a university degree who
lives in North America and has no children.”11 Age is more accurately
reported in more recent data, where 67 percent of the respondents in
2015 fell between the ages of twenty-­five and thirty-­nine. The devel-
oper and academic Robin Potanin puts the lack of diversity in stark
terms based on her experience, recounting that “at one stage in my
game production career I was the only female on the production floor
in a development team of 60.”12 A lack of diversity in people and back-
ground portends to a lack of diversity in new ideas, as those who grew
up with games make the games they would most enjoy playing. The
journalist Matthew Handrahan sums up this position from an industry
point of view in reporting an interview with the creative director of
Ubisoft: “Be it League of Legends, Destiny, The Division or Overwatch,
 5 Introduction
the majority of gamers are actively seeking out experiences that will be
consistent and—­to varying degrees—­predictable over long stretches
of time.”13 Even as the industry has diversified somewhat over time,
large game developers and publishers are structured to encourage a
conservative approach to game development, one that replicates the
meritocratic dependency and audiences of past successes rather than
striking out on new paths. The growth in development costs creates
a situation where companies betting $100 million or more on a game
focus more on what has worked than on what could be.
Focus on meritocracy reaches beyond the design of games and
into the narrative stories they typically tell. Most major game sto-
rylines, from Grand Theft Auto III to Uncharted to Restaurant Story,
enable players to grow from a relative weakling into a strong, powerful
demigod. In Grand Theft Auto games players start out at the bottom
of a criminal organization or ostracized from the people they used to
work with; Uncharted features Nathan Drake, an orphan seeking to
prove his familial connection to famed explorer Sir Francis Drake;
and Restaurant Story is predicated on an avatar who sets out to build
a restaurant and starts without an oven to call her own. In all these
games, if the player keeps playing (with at least a modest amount of
skill) he or she will become a criminal mastermind, a famed treasure
hunter, or the operator of an exceptionally successful restaurant.
Grand Theft Auto III epitomizes this kind of development, as
the story begins with the protagonist, later discovered to be named
Claude, left shot and betrayed by his girlfriend while robbing a bank
together. Claude manages to survive but is captured, placing players in
a position where they are alone and on their way to a ten-­year prison
sentence for bank robbery. The game’s narrative unfolds from rock
bottom for Claude, who transforms into a leader of the underworld
who successfully outfoxes the mafia, a Columbian drug cartel, and
the Yakuza in the space of a few hours of player-­led intervention and
exploration. By the end of the game, Claude has eviscerated the car-
tel and exacted his revenge on both the mafia don who sought to kill
him and the girlfriend who initially betrayed him. Claude lets players
experience being a strong, silent killer, and the narrative of the game
lets them take credit for Claude’s ascension from the bottom of the
underworld to kingpin. It is notable that this version of Grand Theft
Auto, the one with the clearest development of a meritocratic narrative
Introduction 6
arc, changed the face of video games and, in the words of one game
journalist, makes Claude and his leather jacket “as important to a gen-
eration of gaming as 8-­bit Mario and his blue overalls.”14
Frequently complemented by the designed progress of leveling,
games tell tales where the character starts at the bottom, often worse
off than the player, until the player propels the character’s rise to the
top. The narrative growth of the character may be interrupted and
stalled in a dramatic second act, but the thrust of the story told in
most large-­scale games omits problems with structural imbalance or
differential access to resources, and focuses instead on how the per-
son behind the controller facilitates the character’s success. In Grand
Theft Auto III Claude is a one-­man wrecking crew, routinely besting
everyone around him and thriving against all odds. However, all of
Claude’s success is due to the intervention of the player, as someone
must successfully complete missions and move the narrative along.
The story many games tell players is that if you work hard enough, if
you are good enough, you can follow a straightforward path to power,
wealth, and resources. As Arthur Chu writes, video games have often
been seen as a refuge, “a magical world where, despite the violence and
horror, winning was always possible. Where enemies could always be
slain. Where gaming experience always led to leveling up, as opposed
to a real world where trying seemed to get you nowhere. Where the
capricious unfairness of real human beings was erased and your prin-
cess was always waiting at the end of World 8-­4.”15 Video games de-
pend on these meritocratic tales, like Mario’s obsessive quest to clear
levels and save the princess, and although other media may appeal
to similar tropes, the reliance on player valor and individual talent
in video games is striking and clearly linked to the role of the player.
Video games are a place where a particular ideology—­meritocracy—­
runs rampant and largely unchecked.
Video games are a key point of insight into what is happening in the
world and a potential site to realize substantial change. Video games
are a harbinger of things to come, a model of the world we inhabit,
and an extreme where certain behaviors and practices were honed
before being integrated into contemporary political movements in
the United States and the United Kingdom.16 Video games offer a
unique space of insight into the interests and practices of white men
of means. They are a place where meritocracy is made real through
 7 Introduction
consistent interaction and reinforcement. However, they are also an
excellent place to explore low-­risk, high-­impact experiences where
players can see, explore, and feel a different subject position. Video
games are a platform for experimentation and a place for interven-
tion. Video games give space for new perspectives and a chance for
reflection while offering a way to intervene in modern life. They are
a location where what they have made can also be unmade—­but to
do that it is necessary to understand what exactly is going on with, in,
and around them.
This project contends that the dependence on meritocracy within
videogame narrative and design is a substantial problem. Meritocratic
norms limit the potential audience for video games and structure how
players and designers interact. The meritocratic focus of games is self-­
insulating and self-­replicating. Those who are successful believe they
have attained their status through the quality of their effort, a com-
pelling ground on which to build the impression that they are sim-
ply better than others are. The prevalence of meritocratic myths in
games also encourages players to want more meritocratic games and
deride video games that do not fit that template as lesser, bad games,
and sometimes even to contest whether non-­meritocratic efforts are
even proper games at all.
In her study of online trolls, Whitney Phillips makes a clear case
for how systems and structures matter in any attempt to address online
culture. She argues that the reason we can’t have nice things is because
“trolls are born of and embedded within dominant institutions and
tropes, which are every bit as damaging as the troll’s most disruptive
behaviors.”17 In detailing the reason for problematic behavior, a huge
part of Phillips’s argument is that it is not just the people that are a
problem, but also the systems, structures, and norms that support and
enable their behavior.
Any step to address larger issues in video games and game culture
requires subverting meritocratic norms and expectations; falling back
on meritocratic practices ensures a limit on how much videogame
culture can change. Fixing game culture would also help develop the
norms, systems, and structures to create a more positive environment
that can spread beyond the limited space of games. Addressing the is-
sues in video games would provide a road map for how to deal with
similar behaviors in other realms and perhaps get us on a path build-
Introduction 8
ing our own new, nice things. Reconstructing videogame culture re-
quires recontextualizing how we think about games in the first place.
However, a first step in this process is accounting for the obligations
of those who are privileged enough to play, write and think about, and
make video games by pointing to some of the structural inequalities
that ensure we are not all starting from the same place.
I am an incredibly lucky person. I was born straight, white, and
male into a two-­parent household in a rich country, which is pretty
much winning the genetic lottery. I had the opportunity to go to col-
lege and graduate school and now get to teach, think, and write for
a job. I quite literally play video games for research purposes. That
doesn’t suck, but it also offers me a platform to create change. More
pointedly, all those benefits leave me with an obligation to leverage
my advantages to help make the world a better place.
Although my position and obligations are specific to me, if you
are reading this book I expect there is also a context for the obliga-
tions you carry as well. One of the ways of framing where we fit and
how fortunate we are is to think about the world as a village of one
hundred people, with the same distributive ratios that we have for the
seven billion people who inhabit the world at large.18 Over the past
decade the number of people with a college degree in that hypothet-
ical village has grown from one to seven (at the time of this writing),
but if you are one of those people with such a degree you still have
ninety-­three fellow villagers who have not had the same opportuni-
ties. If you have access to a computer, you would be one of twenty-­two
that do, numbers that are largely matched by the seventeen who are
unable to read and write, the twenty-­three with no shelter from wind
and rain, and the thirteen who do not have safe water to drink. At the
point that you are fortunate enough to be in a position where you can
have the ability, the time, and the resources to read a book about video
games, you are one of a very small group of people in the world with
that opportunity. To me, this is one way of thinking about how we all
carry an obligation to make the world a better place and of reflecting
on how imbalanced access to resources subverts any attempt to mea-
sure merit. Video games are not everything, but they are important;
therefore, committing to improving the culture around video games
is one place to start fulfilling some of our obligations.
One of the key problems with meritocratic ideology is that it self-­
 9 Introduction
replicates in a way that discourages critical reflection about the privi-
lege a person possesses. A key piece of the meritocratic myth is that it
seduces the successful to believe they earned their position in society.
It is far more comfortable to think that your skills and effort account
for your accomplishments than to think it was gifted to you through
a cornucopia of accidents or elements of good fortune. Success in a
meritocratic system creates a cocoon that encourages a lack of crit-
ical reflection about the breaks and luck that lead to a variety of ad-
vantages enabling a person to ascend to the heights he or she reaches.
From gender, race, and class to national origin and ability, all the inter-
sections of our identities circumscribe where we start in meritocratic
systems. Those who succeed under meritocracy are often talented,
smart, and thoughtful—­I would surely like to think that I am—­but
the successful typically benefit from a series of structural head starts
that help them climb the social hierarchy. Thinking you are talented,
gifted, or better than others is certainly more comfortable than real-
izing you are simply luckier. Self-­insulating meritocratic norms are a
key part of what has made the culture around video games so nega-
tive, so isolated, and so problematic, because many of the games we
have teach players that they are special and have earned their success.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway of my career is that those of us who
have benefited from the current system have an obligation to do more
than simply sit back and observe. Those fortunate enough to be in a
position to speak out have a job to do just that. There are not always
good platforms on which to critique contemporary society; there-
fore, when a person stands on one, he or she should use it to make
the world a better place. As a person who benefits from a system that
largely gives me a job for as long as I would like one, as a previous
author who has contacts with publishers, as a player who has spent a
lifetime playing video games, and as a person who has benefited from
structural privilege throughout my life, this project comes directly
out of my obligation to try to make a difference. Although your story
may not line up perfectly with mine, I encourage you to do your own
accounting of how you ended up where you are and how accidents
of birth and inherited advantages may have moved you forward on
your path. I believe the culture surrounding video games has gotten
too bad to simply sit back and watch any longer; the status quo must
change, and the concept of meritocracy is a formative part of the
Introduction 10
toxicity found in the culture around video games. We need to spend
more time thinking about the ideological implications of video games,
enough to match the effort put into our obsessions over frame rates,
hours played, and drama about downloadable content. The beginning
of this change requires briefly explaining the concept of meritocracy,
going on a shallow dive into the current state of the culture around
video games, and then providing an overview of the book as a whole.

Meritocracy, in Brief
Perhaps the most prominent meritocratic narrative is the American
Dream, according to which people, especially those new to the United
States, can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and succeed based
on hard work and perseverance.19 By convincing immigrants to come
to the United States and persuading those who struggle that if they
work hard enough their fate will improve, bootstrapping narratives
individualize responsibility, erase structural barriers, and advance a
meritocratic story that is typical in contemporary Western society
and actualized in video games. Meritocratic game narratives partner
perfectly with elements of meritocratic game design to make video
games one of the purest spaces of meritocratic rhetoric. Video games
are a place where the abstract ideology of meritocracy is actualized
and solidified. In a broader context, meritocratic narratives cover up
structural inequality and personalize responsibility to make each in-
dividual appear to be responsible for his or her own success or failure,
resulting in recognition by critics that meritocracy functions more like
a myth than as a coherent ideology.20 However, as meritocracy has
become more widely accepted it is increasingly difficult to recognize
where it came from and how inherited position is often more mean-
ingful than any individual talent.
Meritocracy makes it seem like people are responsible for their
own success or failure, even when the wealth of someone like U.S.
president Donald Trump is far more likely to be the result of inher-
itance than individual investment savvy.21 Trump is a case study in
how we do not actually live in a meritocracy. Substantial parts of his
success were based on being a connected white man. He is able to say
things that a woman or person of color simply would not be allowed
to, while showing little awareness that the body he inhabits gives him
 11 Introduction
a much wider latitude than that given to others.22 He appeals to his
talent and attempts to promulgate it through his books and his brief
attempt at a “university.” He minimizes the resources gifted to him by
birth as a “small loan” to help bolster an argument that he achieved
his status based on his own merit, when the reality is that he grew up
in one of the richest families in the United States.23 Instead of devel-
oping real estate and creating some of the most amazing buildings
in the world, the Trump Organization is mostly a rent-­seeking en-
deavor, making its money based on leasing out the name “Trump.”24
Donald Trump certainly has talents and puts in work, but his merit
is magnified and facilitated by being born into a rich family that was
already prominent in New York real estate. His advantages are mag-
nified by his status as a straight, white man who uses his performance
of masculinity as a way to appeal to voters. He has since passed many
of those advantages to his children, who continue to perpetuate a sys-
tem where their jobs are part of a familial inheritance, rather than an
achievement based on their talent and hard work. The Trump family
success demonstrates how meritocracies break down as parents pass
privilege to their children, lessening the amount of skill or effort they
need to have in order to be successful.
Systems, ideologies, and cultures that seem natural are produced
through regular social interactions, and neither meritocracy nor video
games are exceptions to those dynamics. We are in a moment when
we have to look critically at meritocracy and take it apart. The increas-
ing inequality in which we are living undercuts, subverts, and prevents
meritocracy from working, while appeals to meritocratic ideology
give moral justification to the winners.25 Meritocracy eliminates any
focus on structural problems and systems, focusing us on individu-
als instead. The hallmarks of meritocracy and its effects can be seen
in areas ranging from the Brexit vote, to criticism of the Black Lives
Matter movement, to the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. Mer-
itocracy depends on an equal starting position for all, and the world
around us features constant reminders that equal opportunity is not
available for everyone. In this light, it is relevant to briefly examine
where the idea came from and how it came to be so widely accepted
in many parts of the world.
Popularized by its use in a satirical novel by Michael Young in
1958, “meritocracy” refers to a society where people rise and fall based
Introduction 12
on their personal skills and effort. Prominent supporters of meritoc-
racy, like Daniel Bell, see it “as an emphasis on individual achievement
and earned status as confirmed by one’s peers.”26 In the 1990s, as the
term was becoming more widely used, Peter Saunders expounded
that a meritocracy is a system “based upon a competition in which the
achieved rather than ascribed characteristics of individuals determine
the outcome. It is a system which depends upon genuine equality of
opportunity but which generates unequal outcomes.”27 In specific ap-
plication to his native Great Britain, Saunders writes that “the princi-
ple of meritocracy is widely understood as a ‘fair’ and ‘just’ principle,
and for most people (even if not most sociologists), evidence that abil-
ity and effort are increasingly being recognised and rewarded in this
country would be positively welcomed.”28 In the most basic sense, “a
meritocracy is a social system where individual talent and effort, rather
than ascriptive traits, determine individuals’ placements in a social hi-
erarchy.”29 Jo Littler, a prominent critic of the ideology, states that “a
meritocracy is nowadays understood as ‘a social system which allows
people to achieve success proportionate to their talents and abilities,
as opposed to one in which social class or wealth is the controlling
factor.’”30 The idea of a meritocracy generally concerns social order
and how to allocate resources. Backers of meritocratic norms typically
believe that skill should be measured, that effort should be tracked,
and that those who demonstrate the best combinations of talent and
hard work should rise to the top of the social ladder. By assessing these
individual traits, meritocracies aspire to cut out considerations of so-
cial class, race, family background, or other characteristics in order to
dole out rewards to those judged to be the most deserving, allowing
them to ascend the social hierarchy.31
Saunders is correct is his belief that meritocratic norms have be-
come widely accepted in many contemporary societies, but there are
fundamental structural problems inherent to a meritocratic system of
organization. The most basic implication of sorting people based on
a combination of talent and drive is that meritocracies are predicated
on “unspecified levels of inequality, but with equal opportunities to
compete for advantageous positions within it”; yet, as Ruth Levitas
notes, “you cannot, in fact, have equality of opportunity when there
are large substantive inequalities.”32 Jo Littler lists three key problems
of a meritocratic order: one must consider “‘talent’ or ‘intelligence’”
 13 Introduction
to be something that “is inborn from birth”; “that it endorses a com-
petitive, linear, hierarchical system in which by definition people must
be left behind”; and that it requires a “hierarchical ranking of pro-
fessions and status.”33 Meritocracies require sorting people into cat-
egories where some are adjudged more worthy than others based on
effects of their life circumstances, not their skill and effort. It is a sys-
tem predicated on inequality, where those who are less successful are
supposedly struggling because they either are not talented enough or
are too lazy to improve their lot in life. Meritocracy isolates, individ-
ualizes, and strips out context. In the contemporary world there has
also been a lack of attention paid to equality of opportunity, as those
at the top pass their inheritance to those like them, while yanking the
ladder away that helped them up in the first place.
As an ideology, meritocracy affects people in many different ways.
Embracing meritocracy makes allocating resources seem straightfor-
ward: as soon as a system for judging merit is established, it becomes
easy to assess who finished at the top and is most deserving of the
greatest rewards. In addition to its utility in economics, supporters of
meritocracy argue that it “is considered by many to be an ideal jus-
tice principle, because only relevant inputs (e.g., abilities) should be
considered and irrelevant factors (e.g., ethnicity, gender) should be ig-
nored when distributing outcomes. Thus, meritocracy is bias free and
can be seen as creating social mobility; this is the American dream.”34
Meritocracy is about making clear, self-­rationalizing decisions. For
those who buy into the principle that merit can be properly assessed,
meritocracy functions brilliantly. Meritocracy makes decisions clear,
as it offers up a straightforward rationale while ensuring decisions ap-
pear fair and proper. These twin dynamics make a meritocratic ideol-
ogy self-­reinforcing for those who believe in it.
As an “ideally” just way to make decisions, meritocracy folds nicely
into decisions about how to best design reward systems in games,
as systems relying on evaluations of merit are generally interpreted
by players as fair. This can translate as the simple lesson that video
games teach: that killing the boss proves a player’s skill, which means
the princess is a proper reward for demonstrating merit in play and
evidence of a player’s superiority over others. However, in practice
meritocracies are plagued with problems, as any structural biases that
create inequality of opportunities short-­circuits the ability to properly
Introduction 14
judge merit. Meritocracy is a kind of social organization that seems
sound in a design document; however, as soon as it moves into prac-
tice it becomes impossible to isolate merit from other factors in the
process of evaluating people. Meritocracy works as a magnifier for any
sort of structural inequality stemming from differences in things like
sex, gender, race, class, sexual orientation, age, or many other factors.
A common critique of standardized exams, like IQ tests, the SAT, and
the ACT, is that they carry cultural biases. I contend that much of the
same baggage applies to the skill-­and effort-­based challenges found
throughout video games, as both kinds of exams set the terms for en-
gagement, whether the interaction is about getting into college or de-
voting hours to successfully completing a newly released video game.
Properly judging merit requires starting at the same place, so any ex-
isting barriers hinder certain people, and those shortcomings are then
blamed on the individual affected, rather than on the society around
them. By individualizing people, meritocracy has the impact of making
people judgmental and rude, while making individuals more likely to
attribute their status in life to their own efforts or lack thereof, which
makes us less sensitive to others. These cultural dynamics are both a
natural outgrowth of meritocratic systems and are regularly displayed
in the culture around video games.

The State of Game Culture

There are problematic parts of any culture, and there are ways in
which technology enables troublesome behavior.35 Anonymity and
norms of online communication have led to a situation where being
outspoken and a woman, or sometimes just being a woman, on the
internet will lead to death threats and persistent harassment.36 Other
media, like television, use rape and harassment of nameless women
as a way to show that characters are complicated or that the show is
edgy.37 The connections between meritocracy and problematic cul-
ture aren’t just present in the realm of games either: they can be found
throughout tech culture, where a meritocratic ideology often limits
diversity in hiring and retention throughout the careers of those who
are not white and male.38 Sexism is prevalent in college computer
science programs, online harassment has led to women retiring from
writing careers because public attention sets the stage for harassment,
 15 Introduction
women are fleeing jobs in technology because of a generally “hostile
and unwelcoming environment for women,” and research on GitHub
has found that code written by women is considered lesser as soon as
a woman’s name is attached to it.39 The dynamics lead to a clear ar-
gument that women are not welcome on the internet, but harassers
are. It is impossible to extricate the problems in video games from
broader cultural issues with sexism and racism, but these are precisely
the kinds of obstacles that undercut a meritocratic order. Instead of
starting from the same place with a relative equality of opportunity,
those from marginalized groups typically face substantial obstacles
simply to catch up to the starting line of those born with advantages
tied to their sex, gender, race, and/or economic and social status. All
of these elements and so many more set the stage for a culture where
what matters is not just merit, but also all the structural advantages
or disadvantages one faces. Despite this, there are some promising,
positive steps within sectors of game culture to take on problem-
atic norms, from industry-­led conferences on diversity to academics
seeking to change conversations and cultural norms around games to
major gaming news outlets that recognize how important it is to cover
the dark side of the game industry, even though any progressive move
faces criticism from some readers.40 However, looking more closely at
the state of the culture around video games shows just how bleak the
situation is and why more must be done to address existing problems.
Ranking hate speech or trying to assess which oppression is worse
is a regressive activity that does not fix problems, but analysis of vir-
ulent sexism is perhaps the easiest starting point for a discussion of
toxicity in games. The use of the term “rape” is omnipresent through-
out the discussion around games, popping up almost any time certain
players either win or lose in spectacular, or sometimes even ordinary,
fashion. Those who lose to computer-­controlled opponents may talk
about how the game raped them, while victors in battle might mention
how they raped their opponent. The prevalence of the term, especially
in conjunction with racist and homophobic speech, can counter efforts
to make games more inclusive and welcoming to a broad population
of potential players. Specific examples of misogynistic language that
has become a hallmark of online games are documented on websites
like Fat, Ugly, or Slutty and Not in the Kitchen Anymore, with the for-
mer starting in response to the widespread belief among a certain
Introduction 16
type of player that all women who play games online must fall into
one of those three categories and the latter documenting audio clips
from online games to “raise awareness and educate others about the
issue of harassment in online gaming, as well as provide a safe place
through various social media outlets for people to vent about their
own experiences.”41
Game culture’s issues with women can be clearly seen in the case
of Anita Sarkeesian and her efforts to develop a Kickstarter-­funded
video series called Tropes vs. Women in Video Games. The positive
lesson to take from the campaign was that it raised almost $160,000,
well more than its $6,000 goal. However, part of the reason for the
massive amount of fund-­raising was a widespread campaign of mi-
sogynist abuse where, according to one journalist, “every access point
they [online critics] could exploit was used to get at her.”42 A game
was created where the objective was to punch Sarkeesian in the face
and, when attempts were made to shut down hate speech by locking
down comments on particular messages or videos, the speech simply
moved to other articles and venues.43 The example of Anita Sarkeesian
is sometimes chalked up to issues with online misogyny as a whole,
but it is more specific than that. As Leigh Alexander astutely notes,
the discourse around games is different from other media and, when
it comes to sexism, “games have it bad. Anita Sarkeesian has done a
number of video series about gender stereotypes. Only when she tried
her hand at games did the monsters come.”44 Games are similar to,
but different from, other media and technology in general. Arthur
Chu writes, “I’ve spent time in a lot of places that draw the opinion-
ated and the zealous. I hang out with artsy theater people, with angry
political activists, and with nerds of all stripes. And never have I met
a group of people as doggedly convinced that their opinion is ‘ob-
jectively’ correct as gamers.”45 A similar sentiment is shared by the
media critic who writes under the pen name “Film Crit Hulk,” who
observes, “hulk can tell you with confidence that the culture of
video games has a much, much, much, much higher rate of all
the ‘bad stuff’ than everything else (save politics).”46 GamerGate
has become the epitome of this culture, the dynamic that prohibits
critical analysis and assessment of the structural issues surrounding ac-
cess to video games. Research into online harassment by the Pew Re-
search Center has found that “while most online environments were
 17 Introduction
viewed as equally welcoming to both genders, the starkest results were
for online gaming. Some 44% of respondents felt the platform was
more welcoming toward men.”47 Although 44 percent is a minority
of respondents, only 51 percent of respondents felt online gaming is
equally welcoming to both men and women. Other online activities
had a minimum of 66 percent of those polled who viewed the activity
as balanced. Although hate speech and exclusion are suffused through-
out society, some places are worse than others, and if you have ever
played an online game or spent time reading news about games you
likely experienced enough of the “bad stuff” to know it.
Beyond actions and discussion in the culture surrounding games,
the representation of women within games is frequently disappoint-
ing, from the visual representation of individual characters to the way
avatars of women are used as props within games. One commentary
contends that “gaming’s obsession with breasts is part of a juvenile me-
dium’s awkward process of floundering towards mature themes,” but
concluded with an analysis of how “public calls for realistic propor-
tions are sometimes at odds with consumer demands.”48 Effectively,
public lobbying or designer desire to check unrealistic portrayals in
games are rapidly shut down because of ambiguous appeals to play-
ers’ interests in ridiculous representations of bodies. When questions
are asked, notable designers often attribute the issue to “cultural dif-
ferences” in an attempt to find a get-­out-­of-­jail-free card to evade
criticism.49 Beyond how women are bodily represented, women face
grave limitations in the roles they are given in games, frequently re-
ceding into the background. A widespread belief throughout the game
industry is that games with female protagonists don’t sell as well as
those with men on the cover, despite a lack of data to back up the pre-
sumption.50 Developers play an interesting role in this process, both
advocating for putting female characters in prominent positions on
game box art and contending that it would be too much work to add
women as playable characters or arguing that masculinity is so crucial
to the story being told that women need to fade into roles as back-
ground, non-­playable characters.51 The eventual inclusion of women
characters into the popular soccer title FIFA 16 is a particularly in-
structive example of the role of women in games. Noting that adding
women to FIFA took years and demonstrates how a system explicitly
designed to house men “struggles to accommodate women even when
Introduction 18
it makes efforts to,” the game journalist Nathan Ditum concludes that
“our industry is one in which it’s possible to conceive of women being
something that might appear on a checklist of stuff we’d ideally like
to include. Women, an optional extra dropped from this particular
reality due to a lack of resources.”52 Women are frequently left out of
games or included as an afterthought, which substantially limits the
amount of diversity in video games and creates a baseline condition
that ensures inequality of opportunity for many, instead of a perfectly
balanced platform from which to judge merit.
Troubles with racial depictions of characters in video games also
run throughout the medium. As Evan Narcisse puts it in the intro-
duction to an e-­mail conversation with a number of black critics and
game developers, “Video games have a blackness problem. . . . When
they appear at all, black characters are often reduced to outdated, em-
barrassing stereotypes.”53 Narcisse and those with whom he e-­mailed
go on to discuss that there is no single answer to solve these prob-
lems; instead, it will take a number of conversations and smaller steps
to move the industry and the audience for games forward. As evidence
of Narcisse’s premise, one 2015 release encapsulates many of the is-
sues around racial depictions in games. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was
highly praised in reviews, with the critic Tauriq Moosa contending
that “it’s one of the greatest games I’ve ever played,” yet also noting
that “not a single human in the game is a person of color.”54 Moosa
argues that the dominance of white men in positions as both game de-
velopers and game critics leads to a situation where “we got a hundred
articles confronting the Witcher 3 devs about less pretty grass phys-
ics, but not a single article asking them about no people of color.”55
The crucial point of Moosa’s essay focuses on responding to the de-
fense made by backers of the game that a narrative based on Slavic
mythology requires using white characters. First, Moosa argues that
with so many stories about white men in games, it is crucial to note
these moments when women and people of color are written out of
the stories told within them. Second, for games set in a fantasy world,
players are often asked to believe in dragons, wraiths, and magic. Why
are racial depictions the mythical step that goes too far? In the after-
math of Moosa’s essay many in the game community quickly spoke out
in criticism, to the point where a piece in defense of his article began
by positing, “Are non-­white characters in fantasy games less ‘realistic’
 19 Introduction
than dragons? Plenty of video game fans seem to think so.”56 Even-
tually, sustained harassment led Moosa to delete his Twitter account,
although several prominent game developers and critics voiced sup-
port for his position under the hashtag #IStandWithTauriq.57 Moosa
did an excellent job of pointing out the blind spot video games have
with regard to race, and the reaction to his essay emphasizes just how
limited consideration of race in games is.
Game culture and game design often work in a circular, self-­
reinforcing loop on issues of inclusion. Games that do not attract a
diverse audience lead to the creation of more games that will not at-
tract a diverse audience. Robin Potanin argues that “publishers are
predominantly concerned about what will sell best in large family re-
tail chains” and that the economics of the industry “does not encour-
age diversity” because publishers are largely interested in games “that
promise to be strong sellers.”58 In addition to the economic structures
of the industry, Potanin argues that there is a correlation between the
“predominance of young white males represented in games and young
white males making games,” creating an environment where “video-
games are unique in their extreme gender disparity. No other media
under-­represents the female population to such a degree as games.”59
Construction of video games as a space for white males of means has
a long history, as Carly Kocurek writes; nostalgia about videogame
arcades is “populated almost exclusively by young white men with
both the time and the money to play video games as much as they
wanted.”60 And though issues about representation of women are be-
ginning to be discussed within the industry, there is far less focus on
race, class, and other intersectional issues that similarly ensure un-
equal starting points.
Looking at representation in games, Kishonna Gray argues that
many games “illustrate race and gender in stereotypical terms,” which
has the impact of devaluing those who are not white and male, con-
firming their marginalized status when it comes to video games.61 De-
tailing the role of voice in online gaming, Gray argues that the need to
talk and the speed at which nonwhite players are identified and called
out for not conforming to dominant expectations places them in a po-
sition to be harassed and marginalized throughout their play.62 This
bias reaches beyond casual play and into highly visible contexts like eS-
ports tournaments, where prominent black players are subject to racist
Introduction 20
harassment at least in part because their presence is judged by a vocal
segment of the community as abnormal and unwelcomed.63 Building
games around repetitive tropes and narratives limits the community
of people likely to play games, both online and off­, putting players in a
position where troublesome speech is more readily normalized. Nor-
malizing hate speech limits the audience for video games and repels
people who would diversify the audience for games and change com-
munity norms. Changing the culture of games requires taking a step
back and asking a critical set of questions about what video games are
and how they could look, work, and tell stories differently.
Working from the premise that video games are a significant cul-
tural object, it is important to ask two key categories of questions
about them. The first type of question is about what counts as a video
game: Are video games limited to the realm of consoles and PCs?
What about mobile devices, web browsers, or Facebook? Perhaps
more important, are these games placed in a hierarchy where some
kinds are deemed more valuable or worthy than others? Pressed hard
enough, many players will express a preference for one type of plat-
form over another, and many reading this can think of examples of
what they don’t consider a proper video game but that could fit as
a “real” game for others.64 Genre also intersects with this question
in interesting ways as different regions of the world have different
values, but World of Warcraft, League of Legends, and Destiny often
count differently than Madden NFL, Candy Crush Saga, and Farm-
Ville. Further, how do we consider board games, role-­playing games,
computerized versions of games like solitaire, and interactive experi-
ences like Gone Home?
The second group of questions is about who counts as a gamer or
player. The term “gamer” itself is contested, as many people who play
video games do not identify with the term, but this is a crucial ques-
tion when it comes to thinking about game culture, meritocracy, and
changing the existing order of games.65 In the course of this project,
the word player is used when talking about the broad, heterogeneous
group of people who play games. Gamer is used to convey a subset of
that group, a person whose core identity is often defined around video
games and who tends to be deeply invested in contemporary videog-
ame culture. Who gets privileged and is given a voice shapes what gets
counted as a game, as some votes are rendered valid and others are
 21 Introduction
not considered at all. In a world where large publishers and marketing
teams play an outsized role in how games are presented, the question
of who counts as a target audience is tremendously important. When
considering these issues, it is crucial to think about how they intersect
with one another: How frequently are the kinds of games least likely to
be considered proper video games played by the kinds of people least
likely to identify as gamers? How likely are the borderline games to
resist meritocratic norms in game design and narrative? Do they show
us a different path? What kinds of spaces can be explored if merito-
cratic game design is resisted in favor of something else?
Games in general and video games in particular offer the oppor-
tunity to explore new and different possibility spaces. They give play-
ers the chance to enact roles that they are not likely to experience in
ordinary life, from ruler of a great empire (Civilization; Populous) to
streetwise criminal or outlaw (Grand Theft Auto; Red Dead Redemp-
tion) to professional athlete (FIFA; Madden NFL; NBA 2K). They also
open space to explore experiences typically rendered outside of core
games, like fashion model or boutique owner (Kim Kardashian: Hol-
lywood; Fashion Story), service-industry employee (Sally’s Spa; Cook,
Serve, Delicious), or student (Persona 4 Golden; Bully). Video games
give players a chance to actualize subject positions, to become a new
kind of person, which could make games a perfect place for exper-
imentation. Video games could give us a chance to explore almost
anything, yet cultural constraints limit what ends up actually being
made and marketed. What counts as a game and who counts as a po-
tential player set the bounds for what kinds of experiences are likely
to be available. Meritocratic norms limit what kinds of stories are told
and, by extension, who will become part of videogame culture. Video
games offer the promise of resisting dominant social narratives, but
they can also easily fall into the trap of reinforcing a narrow set of
perspectives. Rethinking what counts in videogame culture offers a
platform on which to challenge troublesome elements of video games
and key issues in society at large, particularly when one considers the
surging, rapidly diversifying audience of people who play video games
and the widening number of platforms on which games are played.66
The fragmentation of media in contemporary society has created
a situation where mass culture experiences are relatively rare. Audi-
ences can seek out individually matched content that suits their inter-
Introduction 22
ests, at the cost of dividing groups of people into smaller and smaller
pools. Audiences for hit television shows have shrunk considerably,
and movies, when adjusted for inflation, tend to gross less money
today than they did historically. Video games offer an opportunity to
contact an influential audience, often one that can be better reached
in games than in other media. The limited number of experiences in
mainstream games also offers a perfect opportunity to challenge what
has existed thus far. Video games are a relatively new medium and,
while other media have had a chance to tell a range of stories, video
games tend to repeat the same tropes over and over. The dependence
on meritocratic expectations likely stems from a range of causes, but
other media, like books, music, and board games, have had the time
and the back catalog to depict a variety of tales. This existing limitation
in the kinds of experiences within games, combined with the simul-
taneous rise of video games and meritocratic norms in society more
broadly, makes those who play games a key audience for destabiliz-
ing meritocratic norms. A key, requisite element of detoxifying game
culture is encouraging reflection about the structural inequities that
exist within videogame culture and society at large.

Dear Game Designers

Escaping a meritocratic thought process is terribly difficult. It is quite
likely that everyone reading this book has benefited from a number of
structural advantages and also faced notable challenges in their life. It
is also more comfortable to think about how our successes are tied to
our merit than to advantages we were gifted. However, the challenge
I am seeking to lay out in this book is to encourage critical thought
about the assumptions we regularly make and the implications of those
assumptions in practice.
Think for a moment about the beginning of Bethesda’s The Elder
Scrolls V: Skyrim. Often cited as one of the best games ever made,
Skyrim can readily consume over a hundred hours of game play. The
opening minutes of the game are largely cinematic, as the player re-
gains consciousness and begins to learn of his or her situation.67 En-
gaging from a first-­person perspective, players slowly learn clues of
where they are and who they are perceived to be. The player is a con-
vict being led to the headsman to be executed along with the leader
 23 Introduction
of the rebellion, a rebel, and a horse thief. Players can look around to
the other four white men in the horse-­drawn cart with them, one of
whom is driving the prisoners somewhere. Upon arrival, names are
read off of those who are to be executed. The horse thief seeks to run
and is shot down by archers. The player is then mysteriously missing
from the list of prisoners to be executed and is thrown into a character-­
selection process with a dizzying array of options. It is notable that
the first choice for race in the game is for “Nord,” which features an
in-­game description reading, “Citizens of Skyrim, they are a tall and
fair-­haired people. Strong and hardy, Nords are famous for their re-
sistance to cold and their talent as warriors. They can use a battle cry
to make opponents flee.” After personalizing their character, players
are led by the Captain, the first woman depicted in the game, into a
lineup to be executed. One non-­player character is led to the heads-
man and executed. Then the player is called out, but shortly after
his or her head is placed on the block a dragon shows up and wreaks
havoc. Players are able to escape with the help of the rebel on their
original prison cart and make their way through the early section of
the game, learning the basics of play, picking up equipment, and bat-
tling the Imperials, largely in hand-­to-­hand combat. As players seek
to escape from the Imperial soldiers, they learn through background
discussion that the dragon is a harbinger of the end times. As players
progress throughout the game they become more powerful, discover-
ing they have special abilities and a key role in the future of the world.
The assumptions and game-­design choices made in the early part
of the game are notable and important. Players start out as disempow-
ered, about to be executed, but over the course of the game the avatar
grows increasingly powerful and, with the help of the player, becomes
crucial to saving the world and averting disaster. As the game unfolds,
the player’s effort means that his or her avatar moves forward, almost
on rails, in an effort to defeat the dragons and reach his or her poten-
tial. This straightforward progress in character development stands in
stark contrast to the narrative design of the game, which is hailed for
the number of options and possibilities present. It is notable that all
the early characters are light ­skinned, coded as Nordic, and that they
are overwhelmingly male. This likely speaks to the established audi-
ence for the game, but it also limits the potential audience for what
the game could be. Granted, with three and a half years of develop-
Introduction 24
ment time and $85 million in development costs, Skyrim needed to
reach an established audience, but the game takes few risks in how it
chooses to represent those early non-­player characters.68
The point of considering Skyrim critically is to think more deeply
about the assumptions the game makes about its audience. The game
effectively assumes a white, male player. The game assumes a person
who can relate to a modified Nordic mythology. The game assumes
the player is someone who wants a story that mixes violence, rebellion,
dragons, magic, and the ability to save the world. All these things can
be compelling, but they are telling a particular story for a particular
audience. Additionally, the game is designed in a manner to celebrate
the player’s intervention in the world. Without the player the world
would be destroyed, but based on the player’s skills and effort he or
she is able to avert catastrophe. It is vital to work through the impli-
cations of the assumptions games make.
The game normalizes whiteness and maleness through the choice
of early non-­player characters and the centrality of the Nord. The
number of races and key women characters can disrupt this over the
run of the game, but the introductory moments are meaningful. One
of the most substantial lessons of the game, however, is that hard work
and skill pay off in substantial rewards. As long as the player plays hard
enough and well enough, they will save the world because of their
merit. The game need not address structural barriers or inequity, as
the player has ascended from a convict about to be executed into the
only person who can avert apocalypse.
A single game designed in this manner would be one thing, but
Skyrim is both an exceptional game based on its critical reviews and a
typical one based on its focus on merit, men, and whiteness. Repeti-
tion of a single approach makes it real and concrete, which also offers
promise and potential for games that seek to structure things differ-
ently. The point of this book is to help you think through the impli-
cations of the choices made in game design. Video games matter, and
the decisions made about what to represent and how to do it are im-
pactful. It is possible to disrupt and change what has been, and hope-
fully this book will demonstrate why things need to be different and
how that can happen. Skyrim is a great game, but it is a symptom of
the meritocratic traps that are found all too commonly in video games.
 25 Introduction

What’s to Come
Beyond accounting for the background information for what inspired
this project, it is important to work through the foundational steps in
my argument. The first key piece to this work is a deeper analysis of
where the term “meritocracy” came from and how, in contemporary
society, it has been stripped of its context and twisted to seem normal
and natural. Understanding the context for meritocracy is vital be-
cause it sets up space for reflection about how games both are and are
not special. Games are different from other media in some important
ways, but the dominance of meritocracy as an ideology was something
they inherited. Backstory and context for that complicated relation-
ship helps illustrate how video games actualize meritocracy and why
that matters, and suggests ways to find an alternative path forward.
Critically examining meritocracy requires detailing how Western so-
ciety has gotten to a place where merit is something to be celebrated
and also finding the spaces in which meritocratic expectations clearly
do not work. Recent cultural analysis provides excellent examples of
where basing a culture on merit simply breaks down, cases in which
skill and talent serve as a pleasant-­looking veil to obscure what lies
underneath. Meritocracies lead to bad outcomes and perverse incen-
tives that privilege the few over the many. When it comes to video
games, widespread meritocratic norms lead the successful to believe
their victories are solely accountable to their skill and effort, which
can preempt efforts to help other people. The impact of a meritocratic
ideology is a consistent thread throughout this project. Chapter 1 pro-
vides an extended background on meritocracy, including its history,
its impacts, and several implications for video games.
A second key piece to my argument is recognizing how various
parts of video games and game culture can be seen as rhetorical con-
structions. Working from the premise that words and concepts are
both arbitrary and based on actual interactions, rhetorical analysis
helps critically examine symbol systems, with a focus on what they
mean and how they affect our worldview. Quite simply, the words we
choose and the symbols we select matter. They tell us something about
what we value, how we think, the environment in which we exist, and
who we aspire to be. In this case, concepts like “video game,” “gamer,”
“player,” and “videogame culture” all shape the terrain in which games
Introduction 26
are developed and on whom they do their work. Recognizing these
concepts as social constructions, while also thinking through how
they affect game development, is a key step in unraveling meritocratic
norms in gaming.69
The final element that underscores this argument is acknowledg-
ing the special role that video games play when it comes to meri-
tocratic norms. There are two steps to this process. First, chapter 2
features a discussion of relevant research in game studies, as well as a
deeper discussion of contemporary videogame culture. Second, it is
important to examine the two crucial ways meritocracy comes into
play in video games, in both meritocratic videogame design and nar-
ratives. I contend that most games, especially most big-­budget, AAA
titles, are predicated on what I call meritocratic game design. Merito-
cratic game design can be seen in almost any instance where a person
might respond to a problem or a lack of skill with the response that
he or she “learn to play.” This approach to design applies in situations
where video games are perceived as battles of skill in which the best
player should win. Two key premises that support meritocratic game
design are the belief that games should be properly balanced to ben-
efit the most skilled players and that success in video games is some-
thing that is properly earned by players through their effort and labor.
In addition to design, meritocratic game narratives are also infused in
many mainstream games, as players set out to rise from being a relative
no one to an all-­powerful being. Achieving success is not exclusively a
hallmark of meritocracy, but when that success is all but assured within
the context of video games—­where you can often restart as much as
necessary, when that success seems determined by skill, and when
there isn’t room for reflection about what made a player successful—­
video games advance meritocratic norms within their narratives.
Games are filled with rags-­to-­riches stories—­they form the center
of everything from Kim Kardashian: Hollywood to the Final Fantasy
games; even sports video games typically contain a “My Player” mode
where players progress from a minor role to eventually become a star.
In Kim Kardashian: Hollywood players are discovered by the socialite
in the opening moments, and the narrative of the game is based on
moving up from a retail employee to a leader of the celebrity A-­list.
The Final Fantasy games are typically based around stories where a
central character is ostracized from society at large only to become
 27 Introduction
the savior by the end of the game. The “My Player” option in almost
all major sports releases allows players to create their own avatar, an
athlete who typically begins his or her career pinned to the bench, but
through the ongoing intervention of the player behind the controller
the avatar can become a superstar.
The overarching narrative in the career mode of sports games is
all about rising from a lowly beginning, a trend that is being actual-
ized more completely in recent entries to the series. FIFA 17 added a
mode called “The Journey,” where players play as the seventeen-­year-­
old Alex Hunter, aiding his development from a children’s league to
the professional ranks. The path is predetermined to feature adver-
sity, as players must succeed at exit trials to be picked up by a team,
will invariably get loaned out when their chosen team favors a high-­
priced signing, and face a former best friend as a rival, yet Alex will
almost always overcome those challenges to become a highly success-
ful, decorated player. Alex’s path is set up for him to outperform the
efforts of his grandfather and father, both professional soccer players
in their own right, and the narrative is specifically designed to help
Alex achieve things his family never did—­because of the interventions
of the person with the controller. The narrative pinnacle of the game
is the FA Cup Championship, the one trophy that Alex’s grandfather
never won; to the best of my knowledge and reporting about the
mode, Alex never gets injured for an extended period of time, which
was his father’s downfall. Narratively, “The Journey” is a tidy arc,
where the game player begins creating soccer stars from the moment
they are pushed out of the professional ranks into a rapid, one-­season
ascension that typically ends with trophies and a call-­up to England’s
national team. Even though there are off-­ramps in the game, places
where Alex can be stymied, the mode is built on the premise that hard
work and skill are sufficient to overcome any structural barriers or ob-
stacles, including the persistent injuries that can end the most prom-
ising athletic careers.70
There are also tropes in games where meritocratic design and nar-
rative elements intersect. Leveling is a typical videogame convention,
where players grow from a powerless level one into a much more
powerful, more skilled, and more able level more than one. Level-
ing in video games is a clear process of progress, as players typically
know what they need to do and how much they need to do it to move
Introduction 28
forward. Working as both a design and narrative element, leveling is
often constructed in a manner that encourages players to buy into a
meritocratic world, where those with more levels are more deserving
than those who have not yet progressed as far in the game—­because,
after all, the powerful have displayed more skill and invested more ef-
fort. Meritocratic game design and narrative will feature throughout
the project, as the concepts are developed in chapter 3 and case stud-
ies detailing how they appear are provided in chapter 4.
One of the possible paths out of the dependence on meritocracy
in video games requires looking outside of games to other fields. In
chapter 5, I use examples from sports and higher education in the
United States to give a different perspective on how meritocracies
can work and how they can be disrupted. The potential for new kinds
of video games is more fully explored in the conclusion, which offers
examples of games that break with the standard expectations of con-
temporary games and begin to chart a path out of where games have
been stuck for years.
The central, animating premise of this book is that people in posi-
tions where they can do something about problematic situations have
an obligation to do something. One of the core problems in game cul-
ture is the dependence on meritocratic norms, which have the terrible
impact of magnifying and excusing any structural inequalities among
those playing video games. I hope this book helps fulfill my obliga-
tion to make things better by focusing attention on current problems
and how they can be addressed. I hope it helps you recognize what
your own obligations are and helps point you toward a path of mak-
ing good on them.
1
Leveling Up in Life
How Meritocracy Works in Society

The idea of meritocracy has been so completely woven into con-

temporary Western society that it seems ahistorical, like this is how
things have always been, but it is actually a far more recent phenom-
enon. Blending analysis of the history of the concept with contempo-
rary examples of how meritocratic ideals inevitably evolve to be based
on things that have little to do with merit demonstrates how the over-
dependence of meritocratic norms in video games creates a warped,
twisted, and negative culture.
A starting place for grounding an analysis of meritocracy is to look
to ancient China, where attempts at “meritocracy” were tried even
though they predate the term itself. More recently, Michael Young’s
book popularized the term, so discussing it provides a framework for
understanding the more contemporary debates about the use of the
ideology and how a focus on merit has produced the society many of
us live in today. An earnest look at the perspective of defenders of the
term offers a chance to make the case for merit and better demon-
strate why the ideas behind meritocracy are so seductive, particularly
in the countries that most closely aspire to meritocracy as a system
of social order: the United States and the United Kingdom. Given
a more complete understanding of meritocracy, it is possible to turn
to the effects of meritocracy and what kind of implications a merito-
cratic system of order has for videogame design, narrative, and culture.
Understanding meritocracy is crucially important to comprehend
29
Leveling Up in Life 30
contemporary society, especially how some things are working well
and how others are broken. We are living through the widespread
application of a meritocratic approach to distributing resources and
allocating positions without much sensitivity to or awareness of its fail-
ures. An underlying part of an appeal to recapture the past, with man-
ufacturing jobs and an American dream, is the belief that we have lost
our meritocratic way and need to recapture it. The reality of things
is quite different, though, as growing inequality leads to a situation
where meritocracy cannot work, where it is structurally broken and
undermined. Meritocracy is blind to context, a feature that contem-
porary identity politics movements like Black Lives Matter and some
pro-­immigrant groups attempt to put in the foreground. As the polit-
ical scientist Henry Farrell observes, “Meritocracy is blind to the fact
that some people face structural disadvantages and others do not.”1
Meritocracy shelters us, individualizes us, and strips out the larger
context in which we exist. For people who have been lucky enough
to overcome structural disadvantages or those who were gifted head
starts, meritocracy instructs us that we have earned our place and de-
serve to have more than those lesser people who are unable to reach
our heights. Meritocracy is deeply integrated into contemporary cul-
ture, and although video games are special and can offer an escape to
a different world, they are part and parcel of the culture in which they
are made. Knowing why meritocracy is important sets the stage for
better understanding how we got here and how meritocracy is inte-
grated into contemporary video games.

An Old Yet Rising Meritocracy

Although popularized throughout the twentieth century in the United
Kingdom and the United States, the concept of meritocracy can be
found in a variety of historical societies and texts. Plato’s case for phi-
losopher kings is effectively an argument for the best, most talented
people to run society in a meritocratic order. However, I find China’s
experience with meritocracy to be more instructive for our contempo-
rary experience with the ideology. Chinese references to meritocratic
principles were first seen in the Guodian Chu Slips, which are dated
to approximately 300 BCE.2 The primary mentions of merit and skill
in the texts are in reference to the moral balance between humanity
 31 Leveling Up in Life
and righteousness. According to the historian Kenneth Holloway, con-
siderations of humanity were linked to the family “and when expanded
to a government perspective emphasizes the aristocratic inheritance
of bureaucratic positions. In contrast, righteousness is the promoting
of the most skilled individual and can be seen as government by meri-
tocracy.” The invocation of the actual term “meritocracy” is a modern
translation of an ancient text, but the principle is quite similar to con-
temporary assertions of meritocratic rule given the importance of con-
sidering skill and effort in the decision-­making process. Writing about
the original Guodian texts, Holloway holds that “the fascinating con-
tribution of the text is that it does not really see a difference between
aristocracy and meritocracy, since both similarly contain strengths and
weaknesses that must be balanced to create unity. In that the text is
specific, it focuses on the application and not the cultivation of har-
mony.” In this case, Chinese philosophy was focused on balancing
considerations of birthright and skill in moral decisions. This is the
fundamental problem meritocracy seeks to solve. Awarding privilege
and power based on merit certainly makes for good appearances, but
aristocracy ensures your own family’s success. Merit is considered
righteous, but it also may cause a person to make a decision in con-
flict with his or her own family. Eventually governance changed, and
Holloway notes that “meritocracy in early China was quickly replaced
by a system where the right to rule was passed from father to son.”
Considerations of family eventually trumped moral guidance based on
righteousness; meritocracy was made unworkable by familial concerns
and the inequality of opportunity they brought with them. In the end,
Holloway observes, “there was no monumental shift from meritocracy
to aristocracy from the perspective of Guodian, since both sides were
simply focused on the same goal, harmonizing the state and family.”3
Meritocracy and aristocracy are two different ways to make decisions
about how to allocate resources and who to put in leadership positions,
yet aristocracies quickly sprout out of hierarchical meritocratic orders
before people are forced to demote those they know because of their
lack of skill or effort. In the case of China, meritocracy begets aris-
tocracy and vice versa. Meritocratic norms become more prominent
in a rebellion against the aristocracy, but those meritocratic practices
eventually end up producing their own aristocracy.
Well after the era detailed in the Guodian Chu Slips, China re-
Leveling Up in Life 32
visited the process of decision making based on merit. Late imperial
China focused on education and examinations for its civil service,
which the historian Benjamin Elman describes as “approximating the
world’s first political meritocracy in political, social, and intellectual
life.”4 First reappearing in a systemized manner during the T’ang dy-
nasty, the recruiting of bureaucrats through civil service exams was a
focal part of Chinese governments during multiple eras.5 Elman found
that during the Ming and Qing dynasties, Chinese citizens traveled
throughout the empire to take civil service exams with “the hope that
they might move from the bottom up to share political power with
the ruler as civil servants. The dynasty legitimated those who suc-
cessfully passed the examinations to hold office and wield political,
cultural and legal power. Once holding office, they became merito-
cratically appointed authorities.”6 Somewhat different from the case
with the Guodian Chu Slips, meritocracy in late imperial China was
focused on levels well below the ruling class. However, by integrating
extensive exams that were widely taken by the citizenry, the masses of
Chinese were offered the opportunity to demonstrate skill and join
the dynasty as government officials. Without disrupting imperial rule,
civil servants became co-­opted into the system, and many of the most
able (at least according to the test) became far more powerful than
they would have been had they stayed where they were born. In this
case, the imprimatur of the ruling class in combination with a national
exam established meritocratic consideration in governance. Eventu-
ally these exams ended, as those promoted into administrative posi-
tions via exams began to use the jobs for patronage rather than the
promotion of meritocracy.
China’s background with meritocracy offers two key lessons for
video games. First, meritocratic systems fall apart when they stop
measuring merit and focus on elements tied to inheritance. For video
games, this can be seen in limited game offerings and a desire to pro-
duce more of the same, rather than games that are new and different,
as success is determined by prior experience rather than the results
of a fresh examination. As Robin Potanin argues about the practices
of game developers, games are made for preexisting audiences, not
wholly new ones.7 This rewards those currently part of game culture
and raises barriers for outsiders. Inheritance of a place at the table is
a huge issue that limits the ability to accurately assess merit. Second,
 33 Leveling Up in Life
meritocracy is a powerfully attractive idea that quickly co-­opts those
who are successful into defending the status quo; finding a position
from which to critique the system is exceptionally difficult. Even for
those who see deep-­seated problems in game culture’s current state,
tracing the cause to the design of games is difficult because it impli-
cates everyone involved in the production and consumption of video
games. Players who find success at games are more likely to keep
playing, and the developers and publishers catering to that audience
are more likely to find funding for their next title. China shows how
a putative meritocracy quickly becomes an aristocracy where success
hinges on initial access and status, rather than skill or effort. China’s
use of meritocracy also provides a blueprint for where the application
of meritocracy may be headed. Although it may seem that meritoc-
racy is an unavoidable, singular approach to society, how it is applied
now is a relatively new occurrence; the historical context in China
can help show that there are ways out of where we may find ourselves
now. Tracing the contemporary context for meritocracy in the West
requires assessing Michael Young’s book, as the text is a crucial part
of how we got to where we are.
The popular mythology surrounding the term “meritocracy” orig-
inated with Michael Young’s 1958 book The Rise of the Meritocracy.8
Young argues that judging people solely based on their ability plus
their effort will lead to a society that falls apart in a bloody revolution.
His book is a satirical novel written as a PhD thesis from the future.
The narrator reflects on how much society has changed for the better,
but that ends abruptly as the masses rise up, kill the author, and over-
throw the meritocratic elite. The primary takeaway is that meritocra-
cies beget broken systems when structural advantages compound over
time. The effect of meritocracy is to make the inequality among peo-
ple seem fair and just. The argument that the most talented, hardest-­
working people deserve the greatest rewards is much easier to make in
contemporary, industrial society than it is to claim that people deserve
their power solely through the social class into which they are born.
Meritocracy seems like the answer to aristocracy, until the inequal-
ity inherent to the system inevitably creates a new aristocratic order.
In Young’s book meritocracy is a bad thing, a system so riddled
with conflicts and inherent limitations that no one should ever choose
to pursue it. However, meritocracies are exceptionally well suited for
Leveling Up in Life 34
technological systems, because, as Young notes, a meritocracy can
“only exist in any full form if there were such a narrowing down of
values that people could be put into rank order of worth.”9 Computers
make these kinds of rankings easy, and with innovations ranging from
a high-­score list to achievements to Gamerscores or gear scores, video
games are almost perfectly designed to provide a seemingly objective
rank ordering of the worth of players. Borrowing from the tendency
for meritocracy as outlined in MUD1 and executed on computers,
video games are uniquely placed to make a meritocratic approach
seem natural and normal.
Beyond the broad strokes of high scores, Blizzard’s first-­person
shooter Overwatch is an example of how an ideology celebrating merit
is consistently reinforced in video games. Each match of Overwatch
consists of two teams of six players battling it out, and after each round
the game “spends a couple of minutes handing out kudos to star play-
ers.”10 Patricia Hernandez breaks the process down in her review of
the game, noting that, upon launch, Overwatch first awards a “play of
the game” and displays the player who executed the maneuver along
with a video clip; then it shows a bunch of statistics from the match
and highlights four of the twelve players in the match for their con-
tributions; players are then prompted “to ‘like’ their favorite match
contributors, and everyone gets to see who got voted the most.”11 This
is an incredibly meritocratic approach to assessing what happened in
the game, ultimately terminating in a popularity contest.
The feature that received substantial scorn upon Overwatch’s re-
lease was the play of the game, largely because it takes one moment
out of context and then chooses to only celebrate one of twelve play-
ers when the efforts of the other members of the team often made
the moment possible.12 For several reviewers of the game, the effec-
tive result of the focus on showy moves and the overarching design
of Overwatch is that praise and attention is more regularly focused
on frontline fighters, rather than the sustained, less flashy support
players who often play an outsized role in determining who wins and
loses the match.13 This leads to a small group of characters routinely
showing up as player-of-the-game winners, while others languish in
crucial but uncelebrated support work.14 Articles reviewing the game
frequently suggest alternatives yet note that a more dynamic, holistic
system would likely be harder to judge and code, which is a problem at
 35 Leveling Up in Life
the heart of meritocracy. Actually judging skill or effort is ridiculously
difficult to do, as it necessarily also assesses relative starting points
and social advantages. The algorithm built into selecting what is the
play of the game and which statistics will be highlighted rewards only
what it can count and judge, stripping out situation and context, lead-
ing to a decision biased by what it cannot or does not choose to mea-
sure; however, meritocratic norms obscure the final judgment under
a shroud of skill, effort, and talented execution. Even as Blizzard seeks
to change the feature to adjust the weighting of contribution or to in-
clude multiple players, the key flaw of play of the game remains unad-
dressed. Selecting a play of the game is a fundamentally meritocratic
act, as it boils the game down to a single moment and isolates what
happened from the larger, holistic context of play. The whole point of
the Overwatch postgame is to enact Young’s fear of a system that puts
players in a rank order of worth, but the lack of context makes those
rankings both celebrated for their assessment of merit and partial for
their lack of context.
Both players and developers drive the focus on skill in Overwatch.
In an interview with the gaming site Kotaku, the game’s director, Jeff
Kaplan, notes that an early version of the game prioritized effort over
skill. Although both elements are components of meritocracy, skill is
a more traditionally praised metric within games. Instead of a sys-
tem that enabled players to grind to a high rank and then have things
sorted out based on skill, Kaplan states that he heard players telling
the developers that “we just want this to be skill based and I want to
be able to compare my skill against one other person,” adding that
one-­on-­one skill comparisons are a “very tricky problem to solve in a
team based game. It’s really, really hard.”15 Emphasizing the focus on
skill in games, later in the interview, in response to a question about
the hit boxes for shooting in the game, Kaplan argues that “our in-
tention was never to make the game feel low skill. I think skill means
a tremendous amount in Overwatch, but we’re trying to make a game
that feels great to play.”16 Video games are often manically focused on
the role of skill and how it sorts out the better from the best, so that
the most talented can ascend to their proper, meritocratic heights.
The role of skill leapt to the forefront a few months after launch
when Overwatch debuted its competitive mode. In the words of the
developer, Blizzard, this new mode was “designed for those who truly
Leveling Up in Life 36
want to put their skills to the test, and offers a more serious experi-
ence than our Quick Play or Weekly Brawl! Modes.”17 Kotaku intro-
duced the mode by telling readers, “If you’re too dang skilled for the
mortal riffraff in Overwatch’s regular modes, you’ll be excited to hear
that the PC version just got a competitive alternative (it’s coming to
console next week). It’s got rankings, golden guns, golden balls—­all
that good stuff.”18 The mode was largely hyped as a place for players
to show off their ability and prove their worth to others. Unlike the
other modes of the game, where anyone could join games, competitive
mode was designed to assess the true talent level of players, dividing
players by rating and offering rewards for success that made an indi-
vidual player’s accomplishments apparent to everyone around them in
the form of unique icons and markers. Shortly after the release of the
mode the game’s forums and subreddit lit up with complaints, many of
which focused on flaws with the game design in the mode, but several
of which pointed to the way the mode changed how players interacted
with one another. Patricia Hernandez wrote, “More than other mul-
tiplayer games out there, the Overwatch community is so sweet, that
the recent addition of a competitive mode almost feels out of place.”19
Nathan Grayson further explored how competitive mode was chang-
ing the community in an essay for Kotaku:

Similarly, high-­stakes competition and toxicity tend to go hand-­in-­

hand, and Overwatch’s competitive mode already has an ugly toxic
stain. Don’t get me wrong: Overwatch is absolutely not bereft of
toxic players even in quick play, but it’s a game whose developer
and community have at least tried to avoid the pitfalls of other on-
line gaming communities. It’s a game about having fun and being a
team player, one that thrives when players feel unafraid to experi-
ment with heroes and strategies. That spirit pervades much of the
game, and it shows in the way tense situations unfold.20

Grayson goes on to argue that when players act poorly in other modes,
they are dismissed because of the lack of importance of any one match,
but in competitive mode losses and mistakes are “a big deal, and I’ve
already watched/listened to some players absolutely go for the throat
after matches gone awry. Insults, threats, slurs—­you name it.”21 An-
other player announced in a post that he or she was “stopping com-
 37 Leveling Up in Life
petitive play from now on, since 50% of the matches have at least one
or two toxic guys who refuse to play tank or heal,” and that the over-
whelming toxicity of the mode makes it something to avoid.22 After
competitive play had been out for two weeks, Grayson revisited the
issue, writing that competitive play drives toxicity and that “even with
some pretty high highs, the lows were so very, very low.”23 Recount-
ing an interview with Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan, Grayson notes
that Blizzard flags toxicity as a substantial problem and something that
must be addressed, but concludes by wondering, “With toxicity levels
rising, though, can they [Blizzard] keep pace and stem the tide?”24 In
the language of meritocracy, competitive mode is absolutely designed
in a manner that ensures toxicity as an inevitable by-­product because it
is based on a system where players are boiled down to their net worth
through the creation of a set of numbers that are supposed to represent
their true skill. Skill is seductive and enticing. The mode will likely
draw players to the game, but the attempt to clearly convey the merit
of a player puts people in a situation where they are going to lash out
and engage in antisocial behavior. Studying critiques of meritocratic
systems shows why fixing these problems is an issue of design and in-
tent, rather than one of management of a community headed off the
rails. Much like Whitney Phillips argues that the systems and struc-
tures are at least as big of a problem as people trolling, meritocracies
encourage norms and behaviors that lead to a toxic environment for
their subjects and have to be addressed at the level of design.25
Beyond Overwatch, meritocracy is also tightly integrated into mod-
ern Western business culture, where “stack ranking” employees be-
came all the rage at General Electric and then spread throughout the
business world. Although the practice is waning in popularity, it still
has advocates, including prominent technology companies like Ama-
zon.26 The logic of ranking employees is predicated on the belief that
businesses can readily identify their best and worst workers and that
keeping the worst workers inhibits the productivity and creativity of
the best, a system that would seem familiar to many high-­level raiding
guilds. Ranking systems, from games to businesses, tend to obscure the
logic of their judgments and become self-­insulating under the premise
that those at the top are the best and most talented, and have earned
their rewards, including both the knowledge that they are better than
others and, often, the ability to pass judgment on their lessers.
Leveling Up in Life 38
For Young, the result of ranking systems is to assign value such that
we reach a point where “the eminent know that success is just reward
for their own capacity, for their own efforts, and for their own unde-
niable achievement. They deserve to belong to a superior class.”27 In
the wake of British prime minister Tony Blair openly embracing the
term and the concept, Young updated his warning in 2001 to observe
that “if meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encour-
aged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they
can feel they deserve whatever they can get . . . the newcomers can
actually believe they have morality on their side.”28 Meritocracies are
beautifully self-­reinforcing, self-­sustaining systems until they fall apart
in crisis because they tell successful people that they earned their re-
wards, and the people at the bottom of the rankings are instructed
that they must do more, do better in order to succeed. This is clearly
seen in Overwatch, where a player seeking to get the lowest possible
skill rating in the competitive mode of the game noticed something
interesting: the most toxic environment for play was found among
lower-­rated players who thought they should be doing better at the
game.29 Instead of focusing on enjoying the game, the meritocratic
system in which competitive Overwatch players are placed changes the
context of play; according to a profile of the player seeking a 0 rat-
ing, at the lower reaches of the ratings “players shared precisely two
qualities: they were astonishingly bad, and—­because they were play-
ing competitive—­they were astonishingly serious about it,” which led
to plenty of cursing and yelling.30 The system strips out systemic cri-
tique as a possibility because the whole point is evaluating the individ-
ual; when you are assessed as an individual, it is hard to engage with
feedback when meritocratic ranking systems consistently remind you
of your failures. Even in this player profile, much more attention is
placed on individual players and their relative skill and effort than on
an overarching critique of the meritocratic system structuring these
reactions. The end of the article mentions that players should focus on
enjoying their play, rather than winning or losing, but the framework
of a rating system and competitive play makes that outcome highly
unlikely. In a world where the noted game scholar Jesper Juul con-
tends that skill-­based video games can be described as “a meritocracy
that rewards according to skill and accepts the subsequent inequalities
among players,” there is plenty of room for rot to set in and for play-
 39 Leveling Up in Life
ers to forget about the structural advantages that help them succeed.31
Juul starts his book about failure and video games by discussing how
his personal failure at a game is something to talk about with trepida-
tion and chooses to immediately contextualize his shortcoming with
an example where he beat a game on the first try.32 Under the logic of
a meritocracy, the individualization of play personalizes failure. In this
case, pairing failure and success adds a positive chaser to a negative
story, and the combination retains emphasis on what Jesper Juul, as a
game player, is capable of doing. Readers are encouraged to empathize
with his loss, content in the knowledge that Juul is skillful enough to
beat a game in a single try. When people finally stop thinking about
individuals and start thinking about how the scales are tilted on a
structural level is the point where the façade of being judged solely
based on skill and effort is revealed as an illusion and meritocracy is
acknowledged as a system that simply cannot work.
The move toward meritocracy is driven by social dynamics rang-
ing from neoliberalism to technology and was developed in contrast
to previous modes of social order based on birth and lineage.33 These
kinds of changes can be read as opening opportunity, but they also
drive a critique against meritocracy, as Michael Young puts it: “Under-
pinning my argument [against meritocracy] was a non-­controversial
historical analysis of what had been happening to society for more
than a century before 1958, and most emphatically since the 1870s,
when schooling was made compulsory and competitive entry to the
civil service became the rule. Until that time status was generally as-
cribed by birth.” However, under meritocracy, birth matters less than
skill, and “status has gradually become more achievable.” Skill is cer-
tainly a good reason to select people for various positions; however,
meritocracies tend to solidify into systems, Young notes, where “those
who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new
social class without room in it for others.”34 Put differently by Chris-
topher Hayes, “Where the Establishment emphasized humility, pru-
dence, and lineage, the meritocracy celebrates ambition, achievement,
brains, and self-­betterment.”35 Meritocracy is a system that rejects the
birthrights that previously regulated social interaction; however, it
creates new problems when society calcifies into social structures just
as rigid as ones based on birth, while teaching those at the top of the
social hierarchy that their ascent is based on skill and ability, rather
Leveling Up in Life 40
than the luck of being born to a specific family at a certain point in
history and in a place that facilitates their success. Aristocracy may
seem like an odd fit for games, largely because one is not really born
a player. However, when considering the traits necessary to play video
games, certain learned behaviors can be passed from game to game,
enabling frequent players to benefit from their inherited advantages.
Those who were lucky enough to be hailed into games early are the
nobility of video games, as their inherited position makes them more
likely to succeed in each game they pick up.
Similar logic easily extends into free-­to-­play games, where players
with means can often buy their way into persistent advantages over
those who do not spend. There are plenty of examples of what is ca-
sually derided as pay-­to-­win, but particularly interesting are the prison
servers of Minecraft. Detailed in a lengthy article by Robert Guthrie,
prison servers are described as a “dystopian experience unlike any-
thing I’ve ever experienced in a video game.”36 Prison servers, which
are run outside the bounds and rules of the primary version of Mine-
craft, work differently than most other instantiations of the game. In-
stead of jumping into an open world, on a prison server players start
out with just a pick and perhaps some basic gear and must then set
out to do hard labor, repeatedly working in stone mines to ascend to
greater status on the server. Working hard enough eventually awards
players with special titles, privileges, resources, and maybe even a place
on the leaderboard. These servers are funded by donations, so a way
to move up more quickly is to spend money to skip out on the grind,
which offers an aristocratic approach for players with means. Guth-
rie was surprised to find that players did not object to other players
being able to buy their way ahead; instead, they stuck around, “hop-
ing for handouts or an opportunity down the road to make their way
into the upper echelons. Occasional generosity from wealthy players
and lottery-­style games seems to be what keeps these players engaged,
but there really isn’t a path to the highest ranks without paying real
money.”37 Structural advantages matter, as they shape how we engage
life. In the case of prison servers those advantages are laid bare, but
that is not necessarily a bad thing for the game design, as it is at least
clear what is needed to get ahead at the game and rise up the hierar-
chy, a process that is obscured in many other video games.
Young understood just how important luck and circumstance are, a
 41 Leveling Up in Life
theme emphasized by how his book came to be published and the idea
of a meritocracy subsequently entered the public vernacular. Young
writes that “for some years I thought the book was doomed never to
appear. I hawked it around from one publisher to another—­eleven of
them—­and was always turned down.”38 The only reason the book was
finally published was because Young “happened to meet an old friend,
Walter Neurath, on a beach in North Wales,” and Neurath eventually
released the book “out of friendship.”39 Subsequently picked up by
Penguin, the book ended up selling hundreds of thousands of copies
and was translated into several languages. The foundational tome on
meritocracy only came to light after a chance encounter on a beach
vacation, something that tells less about Young’s ability and effort,
and far more about his social connections and means. The popular-
ization of the idea of meritocracy began with one friend doing a favor
for another.

Meritocracy: Its Defense and Evolution

Young’s book was a satirical critique in which the author is eventually
murdered in the uprising against meritocracy, but in subsequent de-
cades the ideology he presented was twisted and altered; a handful of
scholars, among them Daniel Bell, R. J. Herrnstein, and Peter Saun-
ders, emerged as leading cheerleaders for the meritocratic cause. A
central theme in defense of meritocracy is that post-­industrial society
necessitates inequality and that pursuing a merit-­based allocation of
resources is the fairest way to make decisions about who should be at
the top of the social order. Bell welcomes this change, stating that “the
post-­industrial society, in its logic, is a meritocracy. Differential status
and differential income are based on technical skills and higher edu-
cation, and few high places are open to those without such qualifica-
tions.”40 Herrnstein argues that “the biological stratification of society
looms whether we have tests to gauge it or not, but with them a more
humane and tolerant grasp of human differences is possible.”41 This
relative comfort with inequality as a basic fact of contemporary life
is an ongoing theme in early defenses of meritocracy, Bell writes: “In
social fact, the meritocracy is thus the displacement of one principle of
stratification by another, of achievement for ascription. In the past—­
and this was the progressive meaning of liberalism—­this new princi-
Leveling Up in Life 42
ple was considered just. Men were to be judged—­and rewarded—­not
by attributes of birth or primordial ties but on individual merit.”42
For Bell and the men about whom he writes, meritocracy is some-
thing people yearned for, as it is grounded in a historical appreciation
of individual production instead of birthright.43 Achievement is cel-
ebrated, and those talented enough to get rewards in a meritocracy
earned them. Through testing and examination, IQ research propo-
nents like Herrnstein held that intelligence measurement was a key
part of establishing a meritocratic order by facilitating people freely
taking “their natural level in society.”44 Saunders stresses that “a mer-
itocracy does not reward individuals simply for being born bright. As
in the parable of the three talents, ability is only rewarded when it is
put to good social use. . . . Occupational positions are earned. They
are not allocated like sweets as rewards for doing well in IQ tests.”45
For Bell, the allocation of rewards among those who are both bright
and producing social good is something to be celebrated, since under
“the logic of a meritocracy, these high-­scoring individuals, no matter
where they are in the society, should be brought to the top in order
to make the best use of their talents.”46 Meritocracy is about both re-
source allocation in considerations of who gets what rewards and the
social maximization of talent. Video games make the process of assess-
ing merit straightforward while heaping rewards and achievements on
those who prove themselves worthy. If you can actually identify the
most talented people, why would you resist putting them in the most
crucial positions?
Beyond a general focus on skill and effort, there are two key con-
siderations for backers of meritocracy: equality and open movement.
Questions of equality focus on what society should try to equalize: op-
portunities or results? Bell focuses extensively on this question, com-
ing down firmly on the side of equality of opportunity and expressing
disdain for those who think otherwise. Bell sees meritocracy as the
culmination of a positive social movement and feels that “what is at
stake today is the redefinition of equality. A principle which was the
weapon for changing a vast social system, the principle of equality of
opportunity, is now seen as leading to a new hierarchy, and the current
demand” is for “the creation of equality of results.” Instead of pursuing
what he believed to be folly, Bell emphasizes the status of individuals
“as the basic unit of society” with the understanding that “individuals
 43 Leveling Up in Life
will differ—­in their natural endowments, in their energy, drive, and
motivation, in their conception of what is desirable—­and that the in-
stitutions of society should establish procedures for regulating fairly
the competition and exchanges necessary to fulfill these diverse desires
and competences.”47 Believing in a meritocracy requires that one focus
on the role of the individual in ensuring his or her own success. When
a person struggles or fails it is his or her individual responsibility to do
better. The government’s role is limited, constrained to rule keeping
and regulating with the intent of establishing and maintaining a level
playing field. Not every player will finish or win a game; if they do,
developers can simply unleash more difficult modes to ensure both
an inequality of results and a proper challenge. Video games osten-
sibly ascribe to a commitment to equality of opportunity, as players
typically start a game from the same relative level of status. Within
the game these core design trends are almost perfectly structured to
produce the kind of meritocracy proponents seek.
Given this competition for unequal rewards, proponents of meri-
tocracy were quick to note that there must be open movement among
the social classes. As Bell puts it, “The principles of merit, achieve-
ment, and universalism are, it seems to me, the necessary foundations
for a productive—­and cultivated—­society. What is important is that
the society, to the fullest extent possible, be a genuinely open one.”48
Openness is crucial to ensure the proper assessment of merit. For
each structural barrier, like racism, sexism, classism, or any other sort
of institutionalized bias, it becomes less possible to actually measure
merit. Should a test be culturally biased, it ceases to measure skill and
ability and begins to assess other inputs, inhibiting the establishment
of the equality of opportunity that meritocracy’s proponents typi-
cally find so critical. Writing decades after Bell, in an attempt to de-
fend meritocracy as a concept, Peter Saunders admits that the system
is not perfect, as “of course, some bright and hardworking children
from lower-­class origins still do not achieve as high a position as they
‘should,’ but the main ‘problem’ with meritocracy today appears to
be the continuing success of the ‘undeserving’ children of the mid-
dle classes.”49 This becomes an obvious problem for video games as
sequels and franchises dominate sales, but it also shows up in genre
standards where common norms, like health systems and inventory
management, are found in title after title. Skill transfer ensures that
Leveling Up in Life 44
certain players will have advantages they do not have to think about as
they move from one game to the next. Developers also have a vested
interest in including features that keep players buying new versions of
games, like a leveling system in the FIFA series that allows players of
the previous edition to start the new one with perks that a new player
does not get. As meritocratic norms have been further integrated into
society since Bell and Herrnstein were writing largely in the 1970s,
one of the biggest problems a contemporary defender of a merito-
cratic order can see is the fact that parents of means are not willing
to let their children fail, even if, by the logic of merit, they should. At
the point that parents can prop up future generations, skill and effort
become less relevant than birthright and inherited position, subvert-
ing the meritocracy with the very aristocratic dynamics that skill plus
effort was designed to reject and continuing the cycle seen through-
out China’s history with meritocracy.
In sum, the defense of meritocracy is based on the idea that “the
meritocracy, in the best meaning of that word, is made up of those
worthy of praise. They are the men who are the best in their fields, as
judged by their fellows.”50 The focus on men and fellows is especially
notable in Daniel Bell’s words here. Writing in 1973, he focuses on a
world where the best men reap the greatest rewards, yet he does not
consider the impacts of key issues like structural sexism and racism
in his writing about meritocracy, which is a trait he shares with many
of the most vocal proponents of GamerGate. These omissions are
focal points for those who have written about the problems of mer-
itocracy, even as they chronicle the ideology’s rise to widespread so-
cial acceptance.
The idea underpinning meritocracy, rewarding the most able, has
been around for an exceptionally long time, but the word itself is rel-
atively new, which increases the importance of its shifts in meaning.
The term has changed largely in step with those who choose to use it
for their own ends. Societies have long had to justify inequality. Hi-
erarchy can be rationalized for all kinds of reasons—­from divine right
to innate superiority of one group of people over another to how re-
incarnation worked in Indian caste societies to legitimize one’s place
based on performance in past lives.51 According to Stephen McNamee
and Robert Miller, meritocracy is accepted by its subjects because it
“is predicated not on what ‘is’ but on the belief that the system of in-
 45 Leveling Up in Life
equality is ‘fair’ and it ‘works.’ . . . The most virtuous get and should get
the most rewards.”52 Meritocracy has become understood as a great
liberator, freeing citizens from an aristocratic past based on inheri-
tance and lineage.53
Daniel Bell’s intervention changed the trajectory of meritocracy’s
meaning. As referenced liberally in the defense of meritocracy, Bell’s
writing “neutralise[d] and erase[d] those more problematic (or ‘dys-
topian’) aspects of the term present in Young’s work.”54 Meritocracy’s
meaning continued to shift after Bell’s writing, but it was his work
that portrayed meritocracy as a clear social good.55 Meritocracy runs
from China to Young to Bell and beyond, developing from a system
that collapses on itself to a term of insult to a path that should not be
taken to a prime way to celebrate the individual and resist the dual
tyrannies of hereditary aristocracy and creeping socialism.56 In the
most constructive case, meritocracy enables individuals to be judged
based on the quality of their contributions to society. However, that
case is overly optimistic and deliberately ignores the structural con-
straints that ensure the inequality of opportunity routinely faced by
marginalized groups.

The Effects of Meritocracy

Defenders of meritocracy argue that it is the optimal way to make
decisions about how to organize society. Perfected, it puts the best
people in the best position to have the greatest impact. However,
that dream relies on an idealized meritocracy with no leakage for ad-
vantages based on social class, family connections, or other consid-
erations that confuse calculations of skill and effort. Christopher L.
Hayes produced perhaps the most excoriating recent evaluation of
meritocracy, contending that “meritocracy offered liberation from the
unjust hierarchies of race, gender, and sexual orientation, but swapped
in their place a new hierarchy based on the notion that people are
deeply unequal in ability and drive.”57 Meritocracy focuses on the in-
dividual, as Shannon McCoy and Brenda Major contend that “locat-
ing the responsibility for social status within the efforts and abilities
of individuals, the belief in meritocracy legitimizes existing status dif-
ferences among individuals and groups and helps to justify the status
quo”—­after all, if the system is working, “those who have higher status
Leveling Up in Life 46
must also be more talented, valuable, hardworking, or in other ways
more meritorious than those who have lower status.”58 Meritocracy
creates a situation, John Beck argues, where “those at the top seem
to feel increasingly entitled to the rewards and privileges they enjoy.
Some can even, apparently, feel resentful that their true worth is still
not sufficiently recognized,” a phenomenon Beck calls “‘because I’m
worth it’ syndrome.”59 Meritocracy places focus on what a person has
done or perceptions about what they are able to do, even to the ex-
tent that meritocratic systems are linked to causing poor health out-
comes for those at the bottom.60 Furthermore, Richard Breen and
John Goldthorpe argue that “the rewards that accrue to merit them-
selves vary depending on the class origins of those who possess it,”
which enables those already at the top to reap greater rewards than
those at the bottom, even with similar levels of performance.61 Instead
of paying attention to systems and structures, meritocracy emphasizes
each person and what they have done or not, which leaves the priv-
ileged left to enjoy their earned status and the unfortunate to blame
themselves for what they lack.
A clear place to see this dynamic in video games is to explore the
case of Geguri and her skills at Blizzard’s first-­person shooter Over-
watch. Rapidly ascending into the top ten players in the world, Geguri
was extraordinarily successful in tournament play but was accused of
cheating because other players thought her aiming was too good to
be done without some sort of assistance.62 Part of the reason for ques-
tioning her skill may be tied to the fact that she was not established
as a premier player in a game before Overwatch, but as Aja Romano
notes, “As a predominant female gamer in a culture traditionally dom-
inated by men, Geguri’s success is both impressive and inspirational.
Naturally, it’s also the reason some of her rivals have accused her of
cheating.”63 Two of her opponents in a high-­profile match accused
her of cheating, one of whom threatened to visit her house with a
knife were the allegations proven.64 As Romano summarizes, the two
players “were so absolutely, totally, without-­a-­doubt sure that Geguri
couldn’t attain stats as high as she did, they bet their entire careers on
their assertion that she must be cheating, agreeing to quit their jobs
if they turned out to be wrong.”65 Geguri was cleared by Blizzard and
engaged in a public display that validated her skills. However, when
prominent male players were accused of cheating, they did not need
 47 Leveling Up in Life
to put on a similar exhibition to evidence their ability.66 Geguri did
not get the same benefit of the doubt as other players because, based
on her point of origin as a woman, she was considered to be lesser be-
fore she ever sat down in front of her mouse and keyboard. Players, in
their pursuit of hierarchy, excuse those they expect or can believe to
be exceptional, while those on the margins must do more than oth-
ers, thereby placing barriers in front of nontraditional communities
in games, most notably women and people of color.67 Further, those
players do not have the same social encouragement to play, making
Geguri’s version of Overwatch harder than those of her opponents.
She has to fight both the players in the game and the perceptions they
hold coming into it, since she is presumed to be lesser before she even
begins and her exceptional talent has to be proven to a level that far
exceeds that of any man playing the same game. In emphasizing the
individual, Geguri’s performance is taken out of the context in which
it occurs and she has to both display her talent in the game and justify
that she is not cheating outside of it.
Contending that “the most fundamental problem with meritocracy
is how difficult it is to maintain in its pure and noble form,” Hayes ar-
gues that “our near-­religious fidelity to the meritocratic model comes
with huge costs. We overestimate the advantages of meritocracy and
underappreciate its costs, because we don’t think hard enough about
the consequences of the inequality it produces,” as “those at the top
can use their relative power to alter and manipulate existing institu-
tions so as to further consolidate their gains and press their advan-
tage.”68 These problems are compounded by the fact that inequality
also makes people terrible judges of their own relative social status.
People routinely underestimate their own place in the social ranking,
which inhibits their desire to develop policies to help the less fortu-
nate.69 The structures of meritocracy are fundamentally flawed, as
the process of calculating merit is tremendously important yet fre-
quently obscured. Meritocracy is the product, a system of decisions
where Craig Haney and Aida Hurtado observe that “what we define
as performance, how we go about measuring it, what social value we
attach to which specific measures, and our organized response as a so-
ciety (or as an employer) to apparent differences in performance are
all part of a socially constructed belief system. Yet, the mythology of
meritocracy masks these contingencies and obscures the ways in which
Leveling Up in Life 48
the assumptions of this system are ‘built into’ the workplace.”70 From
Robin Potanin’s observation that an overwhelmingly white and male
game development community makes games that they want to play
and that feature characters that look like them, to the frank statement
by developer Ready at Dawn’s Ru Weerasuriya that he develops games
because he’s a gamer and wants to “see cool things on the platforms
I play.” Video games are constructed by people who are already part
of the community and are invested in making games for the people
who already play video games.71 Instead of developers branching out
in new directions, a risk-­averse approach to game development and
a lack of diversity in the community of people making games cre-
ates an echo chamber where recycling content and ideas ensures that
those who are part of the community already are rewarded and their
success is justified under the guise of merit. Weerasuriya’s position
that as a gamer he is interested in making “cool things” is not neces-
sarily wrong, but it does elide key dynamics of videogame consump-
tion and production. Producing the kinds of games he wants to play
means that he is increasingly speaking to an audience of people like
him, which undercuts any idea of a true meritocracy by building key
assumptions into the “workplace” of games. In her history of videog-
ame arcades, Carly Kocurek states the issue quite directly: “An indus-
try of men imagines a consumer base that is like them and so makes
games that reflect their own interests and experiences; with games
serving as a point of entry into the industry, this production cycle
helps maintain the status quo.”72 The CEO of Lockwood Publishing,
a company targeting young women interested in 3-­D virtual worlds,
argues that underserved users are key to success; however, he holds
that standard industry practice gave him the idea to develop for un-
derserved groups because “predominantly male teams at games stu-
dios, free to build the game they always wanted to play, were in fact
releasing games that would attract and monetize an audience of their
peers. Young males over the age of 18 were making games for—­you
guessed it—­young males over the age of 18.”73 From schools to expe-
riences, many different kinds of resources can be brought to bear to tip
the scales toward obscuring a pure calculation of merit. The process
of producing meritocracy confounds inborn skill with the effects of
structural inequity, which then continues in a circular, self-­reinforcing
pattern. These inequalities permeate discussions about video games,
 49 Leveling Up in Life
as traces of sexism, racism, homophobia, ageism, or any other barrier
ensures that some players benefit from advantages while others must
overcome obstacles.74
The point of the meritocratic critique is that the system seems
like it is properly balanced and only enforcing values that are readily
understandable and defensible. However, meritocracy imbues ongo-
ing structural advantages in those lucky enough to reach positions of
power. In a graduation speech at Princeton University, former United
States Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke presents a positive review
of meritocracy, but one that encourages listeners to acknowledge the
crucial importance of luck:

A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luck-

iest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of
family support, encouragement, and, probably, income; luckiest in
their educational and career opportunities; and luckiest in so many
other ways difficult to enumerate—­these are the folks who reap the
largest rewards. The only way for even a putative meritocracy to
hope to pass ethical muster, to be considered fair, is if those who
are the luckiest in all those respects also have the greatest respon-
sibility to work hard, to contribute to the world, and to share their
luck with others.75

Bernanke is receptive to a meritocracy, but his words also undercut its

foundational premise. Instead of simply measuring skill, meritocracies
also inherently assess a person’s good fortune and relative success in
the genetic lottery. Fellow economist Robert H. Frank stresses the
role of luck in meritocratic systems throughout a book-­length explo-
ration of meritocracy, arguing that even when luck is only a minor fac-
tor in an outcome, it is often the determining one. Frank argues that
as modern economic trends ensure a greater number of participants
in most contests, and in an atmosphere where those competitions are
more frequently winner-­take-­all, “even when luck has only a minor
influence on performance, the most talented and hardworking of all
contestants will usually be outdone by a rival who is almost as talented
and hardworking but also considerably luckier.”76 Frank specifically
applies his analysis to the music industry and book publishing, where
success hinges on getting the first few good reviews to generate buzz
Leveling Up in Life 50
for your work. The chance event of the first reviewer liking a spe-
cific song or book is tremendously important to its future—­were it
assigned to a less friendly reviewer the same output could be far less
successful.
For Frank, the role of meritocracy is to camouflage “the extent to
which success and failure often hinge decisively on events completely
beyond any individual’s control.”77 Where you are born, to whom you
are born, and so many other factors frame the success you are most
likely to achieve. When considering personal economics on a global
scale, studies have found that how much you will earn in your life is
set by where you happen to be born, a fact that has nothing to do with
your individual skill or effort. Recent economic analysis in the United
States shows that “even poor kids who do everything right don’t do
much better than rich kids who do everything wrong.”78 As a different
critique observes, “The truth is that the meritocracy was never more
than partial,” and it goes on to argue that selective admissions systems
at elite colleges ensure some kinds of diversity, but rarely in terms of
economic class or parental occupation.79 Colleges in the United States
also fail at social status equalization, as getting into and succeeding
in college still leads to lesser life outcomes for graduates who happen
to be black, Hispanic, or raised poor compared to their classmates.80
For Jo Littler, meritocracy “functions as an ideological myth to ob-
scure economic and social inequalities and the role it plays in curtailing
social equality.”81 Skill, talent, and ability become means by which to
mask the value judgments, norms, and exclusions that are happening
under the auspices of decisions made solely based on objective mea-
sures. The myth that meritocracy is based on skill and talent is excep-
tionally important, because the myth of merit presumes that the good
and bad are sorted properly, but McNamee and Miller argue that in
practice the ideology “provides an incomplete explanation for success
and failure, mistakenly exalting the rich and unjustly condemning the
poor. We may always have the rich and poor among us, but we need
neither exalt the former nor condemn the latter.”82 The process of
producing a meritocracy has substantial side effects. Meritocracy ex-
alts and punishes individuals based on where they end up, which is
heavily influenced by where they started. Meritocracy negatively af-
fects physical health for those at the bottom and teaches those at the
top that they have earned their plaudits. The myth of meritocracy is
 51 Leveling Up in Life
stultifying, as people throughout the spectrum are led to believe that
they deserve where they end up and ignore structural explanations
for the inequality inherent to a meritocratic ideology. Although these
concerns may not initially seem to apply to the study of video games,
echoes of Richard Bartle’s statements about MUD1 and the lack of
diversity found in many aspects of videogame design linger alongside
meritocratic norms that produce similar kinds of problems and assure
a game culture that is rotting from the inside out.

Game Design and Meritocracy

Those studying game design and play do not always think through
the consequences of having a system where some are put into a po-
sition to be far superior to others, and one where barriers to entry
are routinely and consistently raised over time. We do not often talk
about how being good at one game promises a skill transfer likely to
carry over to other, similar games. There is rarely an investigation or
mention of how players can arrive at the starting line of learning to
play a game with vastly different competencies, giving some players a
potentially massive advantage over others.83 Certain players sit down
and know how to move in 3-­D spaces, how to hold a controller, how
to manage an inventory, where to find save points, how to find and
navigate a mini-­map, where the default action button is likely located,
and how to dive into a game menu. Some players know that checking
all the crates in a room will yield treasure, while others will follow the
path that is clearly offered by a game. Some players know to look on-
line for optimal build guides for a character or where they can search
for advice when they get stuck; without that knowledge, other players
are left struggling and may give up when they cannot solve a puzzle or
do not realize that the choices they made in character customization
are making the game much harder, as these things are generally only
discussed in reviews about or forums for a game. All this knowledge
gives some players a head start compared to those who know little
about games and their attendant systems, making success more tied
to inheritance than to skill or effort.
One way to reflect on how meritocracy affects games is to look
at key writing from a pair of game designers with different career
paths and perspectives. Anna Anthropy is an independent game de-
Leveling Up in Life 52
signer and writer who champions easy-­to-­use tools to create a world
where everyone can make games. Raph Koster, lead designer on Ul-
tima Online and creative director of Star Wars Galaxies, has written
extensively about the role of fun in games. Where these two designers
agree provides a fertile area for reflecting on trouble spots in game
design and culture. Both have written about the effects of limited di-
versity of design in mainstream video games and how that interrelates
with a heavy dependence on skill transfer. Anna Anthropy notes that
“most games are copies of existing successful games. They play like
other games, resemble their contemporaries in shape and structure,
have the same buttons that interact with the world in the same way
(mouse to aim, left click to shoot), and have the same shortcomings.”84
Raph Koster adds that “the historical trend in games has shown that
when a new genre of game is invented, it follows a trajectory where
increasing complexity is added to it, until eventually the games on
the market are so complex and advanced that newcomers can’t get
into them—­the barrier to entry is too high.”85 As games build on one
another, the tower of knowledge needed for access into video games
keeps getting higher and in a way that frequent players may not even
notice. However, skill transfer is far from the only obstacle circum-
scribing the gaming audience.
Beyond general issues in game design, we rarely think through
how the interrelationships among designers, players, journalists, and
academics mean that games are often targeted to an insular com-
munity with relatively consistent expectations and standards. As the
balance of resources tilts, expertise and success in video games is
based less on merit and more on the inheritance of structures that
let certain players circumvent examinations of ability or skill. Play-
ing a video game is far from a straightforward test of skill. Game
tutorials, which are increasingly integrated into the first few min-
utes of game play, only exacerbate these issues, as they typically re-
quire a player to have a basic level of competency in moving around
virtual space and knowing where buttons on the controller or key-
board are located in order to navigate a set of tasks that are rudimen-
tary for veteran players yet may be completely foreign to new ones.
Merit in video games is assessed by the time a person has been able
to invest in learning this game and all the similar games a player has
played before. Being successful in a game depends on the economic
 53 Leveling Up in Life
ability to pay for games and systems, the cultural permission or en-
couragement to play games, and the good fortune to find game nar-
ratives, characters, and genres that are at least somewhat relatable or
interesting. As Adrienne Shaw established, the representations cho-
sen in media matter, as what is selected for representation “provides
evidence of what could be and who can be possible.”86 Much like
Bernanke concludes that the broader culture measures luck in ad-
dition to skill, meritocratic norms in games are influenced by all the
social factors that affect the ability to actually assess skill and effort
in game play. In the end, those most able to rally against the pre-
vailing order are cognitively captured by it, as they gather benefits
from a system that render them less interested in fighting against
inherent imbalances that work in their favor. Much like a standard-
ized test can be hard to see as a problem if you score well on it,
video games that cater to one’s own skills, abilities, and habits can
be hard to see as a systemic problem. Hardcore gamers can often
be seen calling for more video games that suit them, rather than for
diverse games that draw in more players or test new kinds of skills.
The creative director at Ubisoft argues that this predictability and
consistency in video games is “less about familiarity than it’s just en-
joying the content. That’s the misunderstanding. I think players hon-
estly like it, because if they didn’t it’s still $60 or $70. It’s still a lot of
money.”87 To Ubisoft, the reuse of common tropes and the promi-
nence of sequels is a player-­driven development. This recycling of
known intellectual property and design practices is driven by indus-
try dynamics and a general aversion to risk taking, which caters to
established players over attempts to reach new ones.88 When play-
ers pick up video games, having played the same games or genres for
years, the video games measure not just their natural abilities but also
all the inherited advantages that let certain players start well ahead of
others. Meritocracies are designed to seem balanced and fair, even as
structural inequality stifles any semblance of a level playing field. As
we think through our roles as critics, designers, players, or whatever
else we may be, we must guard against a tendency to become com-
promised by what we study/make/play, especially when many of us
are often getting a head start on the possible competition.
In considering the broader cultural factors surrounding meritoc-
racy, Hayes observes that “the playing field may be level, but certain
Leveling Up in Life 54
kids get to spend nights and weekends practicing on it in advance of
the competition.”89 Although he is talking about standardized testing
and the role of external coaching and studying, similar concerns re-
late to video games. Time and money are huge factors in shaping how
good someone can be and how likely they are to realize their maxi-
mum skill at any given game. As Carly Kocurek found in her analy-
sis of videogame arcades, the population of people currently playing
games is shaped by the early discussion around video games, putting
young men in a position where they are far more likely to be encour-
aged to play games and find games related to their interests.90 Con-
sidering additional factors, from speed of internet access to social
support, the external factors that shape play cannot be forgotten in
considerations of merit and who deserves the advantages they “earn.”
Supposed skill at games is also heavily dependent on the distribution
and kind of luck from which a player has also benefited. Merit is not
something that is simply out there to be found and discovered; it is
produced through a system largely developed and chosen by those al-
ready in positions of power.
Even seemingly unbiased arbiters of merit carry judgments about
what is best, further replicating the status quo. In a social system like
video games with the regular intermixing of game players with devel-
opers, the culture is routinely developed and designed to reward those
already there. As Anna Anthropy puts it, “The problem with video-
games is that they’re created by a small, insular group of people. Dig-
ital games largely come from within a single culture.”91 Raph Koster
takes a slightly milder tack to the issue, observing, “By making gam-
ing their hobby, game designers are making an echo chamber of their
own work.”92 Being invested in games for longer and learning how
systems are likely to work enables frequent players to reap rewards
from all kinds of external factors that can benefit them, and then de-
signers, who are also players, make more of the same.93 From being
readily accepted into a community because you share social traits to
having the time and money in the first place to invest in games, the
meritocracy produced by games considers many factors that have little
to do with skill. The perceived level playing field is further subverted
by access to video games in the first place. Anna Anthropy lists several
core issues with access in her critique of console games:
 55 Leveling Up in Life
The amount of both manual dexterity and game-­playing experi-
ence required to operate a game designed for the Xbox 360 makes
play inaccessible to those who aren’t already grounded in the tech-
nique of playing games. And to attain that level of familiarity with
games requires a huge and continuous investment of time (and
money—­keeping up with new games costs bucks). This means that
older people—­people with families and obligations, people trying
to raise kids, or any people with a lack of free time to invest—­have
a harder time gaining access to games.94

Some of the obstacles Anthropy lists are related to skill or arguably to

effort, but many are also structural; as these barriers rise, the supposed
meritocracy of games evaluates far more in its players than just merit.
When subject to meritocracy, part of the function of the ideology is
to obscure that it is a practice and a series of choices that deliberately
rewards some things and not others. This has huge implications for
games, and it is absolutely necessary to think critically about how the
meritocracy within video games is built, what traits and factors are re-
warded alongside skill and effort, and which are punished.
Another area for thinking about how video games intersect with
meritocratic norms is to take a step back and examine how merito-
cratic systems are supposed to work and how they end up affecting the
subjects within them. A first key tenet of meritocracy is that it depends
on downward mobility. Because there is a limited amount of room at
the top of the meritocratic pyramid, the less able in the upper classes
must fall to make room for the more able in the lower classes.95 For
thinking about games, this means that all players must have a risk of
falling backward or otherwise losing the advantages they have spent a
playing career building. It is often the subtle parts of playing games—­
the knowledge that comes with playing game after game and learning
which buttons to press when and how to navigate the various systems
that have become genre standards—­that simply will not let frequent
players drop to the bottom when they move to a new game. Although
it seems like this would only apply to multiplayer games with a sin-
gle spot at the top of the ladder to award, aspects of it also sneak into
single-­player games. Such games cannot be so easy that anyone can
beat them, and yet the skill transfer veteran players take with them
ensures a head start.
Leveling Up in Life 56
Video games often feature iterative design that is used to tune the
difficulty so that players feel challenged, engaged, and mad at them-
selves instead of the game when they fail. Popularized by Shigeru
Miyamoto and Nintendo, such design is predicated on taking the
knowledge learned in one game and deploying it in the next game,
but with a twist.96 Many people can win single-­player games, but
badges, achievements, leaderboards, and speed runs all push single-­
player games into meritocratic contexts. Athletes face issues with age
or injury to force them downward, but outside the top end of eS-
ports, players of video games tend to get more sophisticated over
time, rather than less. Instead of an inheritance of resources passed
down through generations, games feature skill and knowledge trans-
fers that, combined with limited genres and plentiful sequels, ensure
that frequent players never slip too far down the social hierarchy. As
players rarely, if ever, truly fall downward in the avatar and social cap-
ital they have acquired, an actual meritocracy in games is subverted as
those at the top reap outsized rewards, which means the distribution
of awards and places is even less likely to be based on skill and effort,
and more likely to judge the less noticeable traits players bring with
them into games.
A common issue in actually addressing problems within a meri-
tocracy is the paradox that attempts to reduce discrimination in mer-
itocratic systems actually end up in a loop where, according to Emilio
Castilla and Stephen Benard, “bias can be triggered by attempts to re-
duce it, particularly in organizational contexts that emphasize meri-
tocratic values.”97 This type of prompting is similar to research about
addressing discrimination, as both accusations of racism or the mere
presence of more people of color lead to white people demonstrating
higher levels of racial resentment.98 I contend that games are pred-
icated on a generally meritocratic organizational structure, which
makes them particularly resistant to efforts to reduce discrimination
because of the cues presented in the course of video games. Prim-
ing for meritocracy through playing games is likely to make players
less prone to be critically reflective about structural bias and more
likely to uncritically accept the ideology of meritocracy. One expla-
nation for why this happens is the concept of psychological cues and
prompting. Shannon K. McCoy and Brenda Major argue that “subtle
meritocratic cues in the immediate environment can induce system
justifying responses among individuals who are aware of this world-
 57 Leveling Up in Life
view, irrespective of personal endorsement.”99 By being prompted
about meritocracy a person’s individual beliefs matter less than the
cue, and even the people who are aware of the arguments against the
ideology are more prone to defend it as proper and just. McCoy and
Major conclude with the argument that “subtle cues to meritocracy
in the cultural environment may encourage members of low status
groups to construe personal and group disadvantage as deserved and
to minimize the perception that such disadvantage is due to discrimi-
nation. These system justifying responses to meritocracy cues may be
most likely precisely when individuals would least like them to occur:
in the presence of clear, meritocracy-­violating inequality.”100 This dy-
namic encourages and propagates meritocratic systems, as those who
have the best case to demonstrate how the system is broken end up
defending the system as fair and just. I believe games readily work as
a meritocratic cue and, based on McCoy and Major’s research, the
prompting of playing games that contain meritocratic elements leads
players to be more accepting and defensive of meritocracy. The econ-
omist Robert H. Frank has found similar results in his experiments
concerning sharing. When participants believe they are more skilled
than others, they divide resources less fairly, keeping more for them-
selves. Participants’ false beliefs about their skills “apparently induced
a powerful sense of entitlement to claim the lion’s share, while falsely
believing themselves to be less skillful had much less of an effect.”101
Getting out of a meritocratic loop is incredibly difficult, and if games
function as a meritocratic prompt, dismantling the dominant ideol-
ogy within game culture will require great effort and reflection. This
may be a key reason why certain people opt out of games in general,
as players are quickly trained to individualize their failure instead of
critiquing the system that is stifling their chance at success.
An additional harm of meritocracy within games is that the ideol-
ogy brings discrimination with it. In a legal context, appeals to merit
have actually made it harder to address claims of discrimination in the
workplace.102 In attempts to remedy discrimination claims meritoc-
racy is deployed to support the powerful and ends up ensuring that
organizations maintain an ability to discriminate on the basis of fac-
tors like race and gender.103 Meritocracy is all about judging people,
and it works on those at the top and the bottom, quickly teaching the
less successful that their failures are their own.104 Meritocracy causes
discrimination and encourages people operating under the ideology
Leveling Up in Life 58
to justify the exclusion or marginalization of those who are less suc-
cessful because they are considered naturally lesser. Meritocratic sys-
tems are exclusionary and marginalizing, which offers a fine corollary
to arguments about the relative lack of diversity among players of core
games and in game design more broadly. By appropriating the logic of
merit, video games limit their audience, as those who are not initially
advantaged are pushed away by those who judge them as poorer play-
ers, and by their own adherence to a skill-­based ideology that teaches
them that they simply are not as good as others. Reflecting on this
trend in U.S. society more broadly, McNamee and Miller write, “If
merit were the sole cause of achievement, one would wonder why the
vast amount of raw talent is found in white males, who clearly domi-
nate leadership positions in key institutions in society.”105 Games cre-
ate the perception that we can find the most qualified quite easily, as
that can be determined by playing the games themselves. However,
the lack of diversity among players should prompt questions about
whether games are actually meritocratic.
Beyond the broad understanding that core games are often a heavily
white male space, another area to see structural privilege within the
world of video games is eSports. The dominance of Korean players in
games like Starcraft and League of Legends is due in part to the large
systems of support to back them, from state-­run organizations like the
Korean eSports Association (KeSPA), the large infrastructure and re-
wards enabling players to improve, wide broadcasts and support for
tournaments, and financial rewards that enable players to focus on
play.106 All of these elements produce a system where some are led to
believe they are better than others and those who struggle are led to
the conclusion that it is their own personal failing, rather than poten-
tial systematic issues that ensure the deck is stacked. Structural fac-
tors are occasionally acknowledged—­Todd Harper finds that some
fighting game players justify certain players’ performance based on
their “Asian hands”—­but these elements are tied to creating an envi-
ronment where a particular kind of skill is praised.107 It may be easier
to see these dynamics at work in a clear case like eSports, but the ho-
mogeneity of game designers and core players should prompt deep
questions about how video games are designed. The pool of players
in video games is limited, and part of the reason why is likely the in-
herent inequality and discrimination that comes with following a mer-
itocratic ideology.
 59 Leveling Up in Life
A huge part of the reason for the inability to reach out and diversify
a group under conditions of meritocracy is the focus on individuals and
what is seen as their proper behavior. As Jo Littler writes, under meri-
tocracy “the act of addressing inequality becomes ‘responsibilised’ as
an individual’s moral meritocratic task. This process devolves onto the
individual personal responsibility not just for their success in the mer-
itocratic competition, but for the very will to compete and expectation
of victory which are now figured as moral imperatives in themselves.
Not investing in aspiration, in expectation, is aggressively positioned
as an abdication of responsibility which condemns yourself—­and even
worse, your child—­to the social scrapheap.”108 Subjects under meritoc-
racy are expected to get better, to drive themselves to attain a higher
position. Even if the competition may be rigged, participants are asked
to jump on the treadmill and work themselves forward for fear that
if they opt out they are not only failing themselves, but all those they
support. The context of games carries less immediate or lasting stakes
than meritocracy does as a government program, but the expectation
that players should get better is woven throughout the dominant cul-
ture around games.
From particular kinds of games players are supposed to like to a
skill they are expected to demonstrate, players of video games expect
things of one another, and showing vulnerability or demonstrating a
lack of merit is a huge risk. This individualized personal drive expected
of meritocratic subjects is succinctly displayed in the gaming phrase
“lrn2play n00b.” It is an individual responsibility to learn, not a com-
munal expectation to teach. Players compare what they have done,
what they can do, and are expected to work to continue to climb the
ladder of skill, without regard for social circumstances and structural
barriers, many of which are clear choices made by game developers
and game companies, rather than objective standards. There are occa-
sions where players help one another out, like EVE University, which
is a group dedicated to helping new players assimilate into the notori-
ously difficult game EVE Online.109 However, individual skill is a key
concern for many. In an article for Gameranx, Nick Monroe distills
this position, beginning by stating plainly, “Most games require some
skill. Without that requirement, they are not really games.” Monroe
goes on to note that games are special and valuable because “the in-
stinct of wanting to be the best like no one ever was is a healthy pur-
suit. . . . Gamers with proficiency will naturally have more educated
Leveling Up in Life 60
opinions than those without, by sheer virtue of having actual experi-
ence and familiarity with the subject.” Monroe contends that games
are played to be beaten, “and the only way to do that is to get good,
and that’s what gaming is all about.”110 Norms celebrating skill and
effort are encouraged by meritocratic design and narrative, which
limits the population of people likely to play games, continuing the
circle of limited options and a limited audience for games. Monroe’s
perspective is typical of many, but distilling games into examinations
that assess skill strictly limits what video games can be and who they
are likely to attract as potential players.
There are games, interactions, and studies that have explicitly
sought to assess concepts like meritocracy or social inequality in ac-
tion. StarPower, an educational game designed in the 1960s to encour-
age reflection on social status in a classroom setting, is typically used to
address racial and social inequality.111 The game starts with players on
a relatively equal playing field, but they are quickly divided into three
groups, where the most powerful get to make the rules for the game
going forward and the least powerful quickly find themselves disaf-
fected and removed from the process of playing the game. Those in
positions of power are given the option to consult others on new rules,
but they rarely do and proceed to rig the game to favor their group.112
In the typical debrief conducted after the game, the most powerful
players also tend to insist that the game was fair and fail to observe the
systematic oppression they orchestrated. More recently, the psychol-
ogist Paul Piff has conducted research on a modified Monopoly game
where one player is given substantial advantages over the other as de-
termined by a coin flip at the beginning of the game.113 This experi-
ment, in conjunction with other experimental research, leads Piff to
an argument that being wealthy affects behavior in profound ways.114
Across multiple measures, his research has found that being in a pow-
erful position leads a person to be less empathetic, less supportive of
others, and more likely to ignore structural inequality. This dovetails
nicely with the research on meritocracy, as the work overwhelmingly
holds that people in a position to make rules will set out to create sit-
uations that benefit them, ignoring those who are less fortunate and
have less influence. This structural inequality is routinely part of video
games, where the already invested and talented seek out more of the
same, which systematically disenfranchises those who start with less.
 61 Leveling Up in Life
These are clear points at which metrics that seemed to be measures of
skill or ability are actually indicators of previous structural positions.
However, games can help both diagnose and challenge these problems
when designed accordingly.
The final key piece of how meritocracy works is to look at how
it shapes the terms of interaction in game culture. As detailed more
thoroughly in the following chapters, video games are rife with ex-
amples of meritocratic game design and narratives. Players are rou-
tinely taught, through both the things they do in play and the stories
in which they participate, that they earn their success because they
started from the bottom and have risen to the top through the qual-
ity of their efforts, effectively making this a question of ideology and
orientation.115 Players are consistently given the message that if they
try hard enough, work more, and push the buttons better, they will
succeed. These experiences are at the heart of many of the games we
play. They also have a noxious effect, as they foreclose critical thought
about the problems with this kind of approach or about whom games
may leave behind. They limit the audience for games. They teach the
skilled at games to revile those who are not as good as they are, and
instruct the less talented that it is their own fault they are struggling.
Meritocracy in games teaches players that the only way to succeed is
based on their own talent and effort, eliminating concerns about the
structural issues surrounding access. The lack of ability to empathize
or think beyond one’s circumstance is a hallmark of the problems with
meritocratic discourse and a key driver of the toxicity of game culture.
Better understanding the status quo is a key step in breaking the toxic
culture in and around games, which requires examining relevant work
in game studies and analyzing the culture around video games, partic-
ularly its most virulent aspects.
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2
A Toxic Culture
Studying Gaming’s Jerks

One way to start to see additional connections between meritocracy

and video games is to look at how games have been studied and how
they are being talked about. Within the field of game studies, scholars
have examined topics like game culture and gamers, and advocated
for changes in how video games need to be developed and consid-
ered, occasionally while employing the tools of rhetorical analysis.1
Also, in light of the deeper discussion of meritocracy, rhetoric, and
how to study games, it is relevant to circle back and examine the cul-
ture around video games, making a more thorough examination of the
current state of game culture a crucial part of raising awareness about
how important it is to change. A deeper investigation of game culture
also ties into how meritocratic norms are feeding problematic behav-
ior through a dependence on appeals to balance, player skill, and the
notion that players earn their victories on a level playing field. I begin
with a brief explanation of rhetoric as a critical tool.
A key to rhetorical criticism is understanding the relationship be-
tween the reality we perceive and the symbol systems we use to de-
scribe it.2 The words and expressions we have shape how we see the
world, and how we see the world constructs the words and expressions
we have. As a small example of this, by introducing the idea that peo-
ple have an obligation to help make the world a better place early in
this book, I am framing how readers engage with what is written and
laying out a framework for how I sought to write the book. Past vid-
63
A Toxic Culture 64
eogame conventions and norms set expectations for future games, as
successful formulas are regurgitated time and again; the symbol sys-
tems create a reality of what video games can and should be, as well
as who should be playing them. Particular words, like “terrorism” or
“freedom,” can help foreclose debate and discussion or enable them.
The way we see colors in the world, and which colors we can see (or
not), are likely tied to the words we have available to us, as research
has indicated that lacking a word for a color or shade makes it more
difficult to discern.3 As we think about how games work, it is impor-
tant to remember that the existing symbol systems of games set the
terms on which people engage. A limited, meritocratic culture will
provoke a certain kind of response, and changing that symbol system
will require the development of new, different modes of interaction.
However, the job of a rhetorician is to examine the various influences
we face in society in an effort to help people better understand how
symbols do work on us.4 There are many different ways to understand
any given set of symbols, and rhetorical analysis articulates how we
are influenced and how symbols frame how we think. Rhetorical crit-
ics can explore how video games work as symbols through the words
within and around them, the design of games, the community of peo-
ple who play games, and the modes in which we play games. Rhetorical
analysis, when done well, helps people understand the subtle factors
that influence them. In the case of video games and meritocracy, rhe-
torical analysis can explore how a series of seemingly small advances
over time can create a situation where norms and expectations around
skill and effort shaped the culture that grew up out of those systems,
and how that affects contemporary games.
Meritocracy is a complicated symbol system that includes pre-
ferred appeals and lines of argument. Thinking about meritocracy as
a set of symbols, rather than an all-­enveloping culture, helps achieve
the critical distance to assess how the ideology forecloses debate and
reflection. Rhetoric can help articulate the links between meritocratic
norms in games and game design and how they overlap with the cul-
ture created in and around games. Of particular interest in the course
of analyzing how meritocracy relates to games are the symbol systems
surrounding the mechanics and design of key games and the narratives
that regularly set players on a path to value power, overcoming ob-
stacles, and victory over one’s opponents. Rhetorical analysis explores
 65 A Toxic Culture
how decisions repeated in game after game normalize certain belief
systems, while others are neglected. Audiences who are routinely sub-
jected to certain kinds of appeals are more likely to internalize them,
but perhaps even more important, the kinds of symbol systems de-
ployed set the terms for engagement with video games. The consistent
use of one kind of appeal connected to meritocracy sets the terms of
the vocabulary and imagination that all those who play video games
are subject to and limited by.
Part of the impact of any discourse is to frame the boundaries for
what kinds of ideas and imagination are possible. Symbols help shape
how we live and interact with other people. The rhetoric of meritoc-
racy consistently advances certain ideas as natural and normal while
dissuading people from thinking about other ways of structuring cul-
tures. Meritocracy encourages thought about how people earn their
success, how if they work hard enough and are talented enough they,
too, can make it to the top. Meritocracy leads to rewards being heaped
on the most talented people and requires rigorous testing systems to
determine exactly who is worthy of those rewards. In tandem with
these principles encouraging judgment about the worth of individ-
uals, meritocracy also leads to a lack of thought about structural in-
equality and situations where not all people start from the same point.
Further, an overarching principle that the successful “earn” their re-
wards leads to a lack of critical analysis about how initial success in a
meritocracy compounds in value and makes additional rewards even
more likely. Rhetorical analysis provides a subject position to reflect
critically on the situation in which we find ourselves. Reappropriating
the classic line from Marshall McLuhan that “I don’t know who dis-
covered water, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a fish,” rhetorical analysis
separates us from the meritocratic soup and enables a critical look at
how discourse does work on us.
As a dominant and important media form, games have been sub-
ject to increasing analysis in an effort to better understand how they
work and what they can do. Game studies, a rapidly expanding field,
comprises researchers from almost every discipline, and that wealth
of perspectives adds a heterogeneity to the research perspectives one
can find about games. Summarizing the whole field is not necessary
for this book, but three areas deserve extended mention: rhetoric and
games, assemblage and co-­creativity, and game culture and gamers.
A Toxic Culture 66
Rhetorical analysis has been a primary mode of analysis for games.
Ian Bogost developed the concept of procedural rhetoric to analyze
how games work as a practice of “using processes persuasively.” Todd
Harper and Gerald Voorhees have used rhetoric to analyze charac-
ter representations and game genres. Ken McAllister broadens the
application of rhetoric, analyzing games, players, and the industry
surrounding them in an effort to understand the meaning-­making
processes at stake in and around video games.5 Rhetoric’s flexibility
and focus on analyzing symbol systems makes it a good fit for ana-
lyzing media, a theme that can be seen throughout the work that has
already been done in game studies. There is one piece of rhetorical
analysis that deserves extended mention in this project, however: a
deconstruction of the notion of “real games.”
A key rhetorical construction in video games is that some games
and “gamers” are more “real” than others.6 Concerns along these lines
are almost always implicit comparisons between an idealized vision
of what video games should look like and what particular instantia-
tions of video games actually are. Real games are typically played by
real gamers in a circular discourse that marginalizes new and differ-
ent approaches. In so doing, a broad, diverse discussion is shut down
in favor of an insular, narrow one. A general belief among some that
games with meritocratic norms are more authentic than others sets the
framework for toxicity in games; it normalizes meritocratic discourse
and implicitly contends that non-­meritocratic games are necessarily
lesser and should be marginalized.
A second crucial idea that can be borrowed from game studies is
the understanding that games are a product of assemblage and co-­
creativity. The central idea of the assemblage is that everything needs
to be analyzed when it comes to games, from the environment of play
to the means of play to the person playing.7 Assessing and understand-
ing games requires looking well beyond any individual piece of video
games and often benefits from analyzing how multiple elements work
in tandem to create specific situations for play and interaction. Part of
the reason why games cannot be isolated into neatly compartmental-
ized parts is that the co-­creative relationship of players and producers
of games is crucial to their production. Co-­creativity is the belief that
media products are constructed in the interactions between producers
and consumers of content.8 The concept of co-­creativity has substan-
 67 A Toxic Culture
tial effects on games, from situations where prominent members of
fan communities get hired as designers to active solicitation of play-
ers’ opinions through beta testing. However, combining the notions of
assemblage and co-­creativity facilitates an understanding that there is
a clear feedback loop in game design. A key part of what video games
are and what they can be depends on the active participation of and
feedback from players. This interdependent relationship facilitates a
conservative game-­design process that gives those who are already in
the community an upper hand in determining what comes next, what
is acceptable, and what should be designed. The meritocratic norms
of games are a key part of the production of games, and they comprise
a worldview that is advanced and furthered through the co-­creative
process where players advocate for systems that further their own in-
terests, routinely giving themselves a head start.
The final relevant piece of game studies to this project is the re-
search that has been conducted on game culture and “gamers.” Adri-
enne Shaw argues that the foundational idea of videogame culture
is problematic, as it defines a culture around the study of a particu-
lar kind of media and makes it more difficult to obtain the distance
necessary for critique.9 This dominant approach, of seeing a culture
defined entirely by the play and consumption of games, encourages
those within it to focus solely on games, largely from a noncritical
perspective. Placing games at the center of a subject position leads to
attempts to understand everything through games, rather than seek-
ing multiple, diverse perspectives or looking at other fields, cultures,
and activities for inspiration and context. This places those within the
culture in a limited position, where it becomes difficult to think of
things outside the frame of games and defines all things in terms of
how they fit games—­like protests in Ferguson, Missouri, or the death
of a United States Supreme Court Justice—­regardless of how tenu-
ous or relevant the connections may be.10 This is an important lesson
to keep in mind, as the culture around video games has a history and
is a subset of a much larger whole that has little to do with games. In
this case, the dominance of meritocracy in countries that are crucial
to the development of games affects the ideology those games are
likely to advance. In others cases, the deep history of games and how
they are produced is crucially important, as Carly Kocurek evidences
in her analysis of videogame arcades.11 Beyond a critical assessment
A Toxic Culture 68
of game culture, Shaw also critiques the notion of “gamer” and con-
tends that the term itself is laden with assumptions; blithely using the
term strips the context out of many people’s play experiences. The so-
cial construction of a category called “gamers” puts certain people in
a position where their role is to consume a particular kind of media,
and only analyzing “gamers” means that we leave out large sections
of game players.12 “Gamer” is a term that focuses on consumption,
and part of thinking critically about how games work requires reas-
sessing the baseline assumptions frequently made about games and
those who play them.
Finally, it is also necessary to consider how elements of labor are
intertwined with game play. A key aspect of many games, particularly
role-­playing games, is ongoing and incessant small tasks that must
be repeated over and over again to reach a goal. Often referred to as
“the grind,” this repetitive play can be soothing and relaxing, but it is
also inextricably linked to considerations of effort in games.13 Video
games tend to depend on and reward repetitive “hard” work. Players
are frequently cast in a position where clicking, tapping, or pressing
similar buttons time and again will help them transcend their initial
paltry state on a journey to become powerful and/or wealthy within
the game. Player efforts are generally also rewarded with the ability to
perform more, and different, moves and skills. This effectively become
a means by which to continue the labor in a new way or in a different
situation. Although games are often described with words like “play”
and “fun,” they are also integrated into larger structures of work and
productivity on which the relative merits of player effort and skill are
judged. This idea of celebrating effort and skill makes contemporary
games well suited for meritocratic norms, as success is typically judged
by a player’s effort plus skill.
Rhetoric and the use of rhetorical analysis to study games offer a
way to look at and think about games differently in order to obtain
the critical distance Shaw seeks. It is crucial to remember that design-
ing and playing video games is the product of a co-­creative relation-
ship between players and designers, and that interaction with games
is tied to a complex assemblage of many different factors that con-
struct play in specific, situated contexts. Finally, all the questions we
ask are subject to understanding the larger context of who is playing
games and how they play. Concepts like “gamer” and contexts like
 69 A Toxic Culture
“labor” help shape how we think about who plays and why. The next
step is more completely addressing discussions about games, gamers,
and game culture.

Toxicity and Games

Appropriating the title of an article written by Adrienne Shaw, one
reason why video games are full of jerks is because the world is full of
jerks.14 Games are certainly not an exception to the problems found
elsewhere in the world, but, as Leigh Alexander argues, games seem
somehow, somewhat different, even worse than other elements of so-
ciety, media, or the internet. Part of the problem of toxicity in games
can certainly be explained by the fact that there are elements of any
culture that are troubling, antagonistic, or repugnant. Understanding
what accounts for the specific situation in video games and discussion
about them can be partially accomplished by examining some of the
problems that have crept up in and around games.
Popularization of the blanket term “toxicity” largely comes from
the work of the League of Legends developer Riot Games, which has
worked for years in an effort to stamp out particularly offensive be-
havior. League of Legends (or LoL) may be the most played PC game
in history, debuting in 2009 and featuring billions of cumulative hours
played.15 The game is a multiplayer online battle arena (or MOBA)
where two teams, typically of five players, try to destroy an object pro-
tected by defensive structures in the other team’s base. Games gen-
erally last from about twenty minutes to an hour, and players need to
both cooperate with their teammates and compete against the other
team. Early stages of the game focus on leveling up your team’s char-
acters and gaining resources while stopping the other team from doing
the same, all in an effort to eventually overpower the other team and
their defenses. When players kill opponents on the other team they
benefit from substantial experience and resource gains, so if your team
is particularly good (or bad) at killing the other team it will likely shift
the game’s balance.
In MOBAs, one team leveling up substantially faster than the other
often leads to a situation where it is clear which team is going to win
and the losing team cannot do much but wait several minutes to lose,
often while being repeatedly slaughtered. The waiting, combined with
A Toxic Culture 70
the advantages gained by the other team for killing other players,
means there is plenty of time for blaming other people for what went
wrong in a losing game of LoL. Relatively early in the game’s life cycle,
the developers identified that their “vicious player community” had
the effect of “hurting the game’s reputation and hemming in its po-
tential to grow,” as “toxic players are among the top 2 reasons play-
ers quit the game and never come back.”16 Riot Games established a
Player Behavior team that created a tribunal system to mete out pun-
ishments, including temporary or permanent bans and full posting of
relevant chat logs on appeal.17 The developer also started a policy of
telling players they were acting in a problematic manner, which led
to some players self-­policing and reducing their own troublesome be-
havior. As of this writing, the efforts of the team were reported to have
decreased toxic behavior in the game as a whole, but the LoL envi-
ronment remains toxic enough that the company is still experiment-
ing with new efforts, including instant bans and bans of professional
players.18 Each round of new policies receives substantial attention
in videogame media, but I contend that the continued need to in-
crease policing and punishment of behavior points to deeper prob-
lems. A squad of people reprimanding players for offensive language
or disruptive play is addressing symptoms, not the root causes of the
problem that lead people to behave in troublesome ways in the first
place. Riot’s attempts are also clearly linked to a desire to attract and
retain players for their game, rather than addressing the structure of
videogame culture as a whole. They are a starting point for thinking
about toxicity in a particular game, but a problem with behavior in any
single game is a symptom of deeper problems in the culture around
video games as a whole.
Taking a broad look at videogame culture requires taking a step
backward and thinking about how the design of particular games crafts
the interaction of player communities within them.19 The terms on
which a game is played and the tasks players are seeking to accom-
plish have a tremendous impact on the culture found within any given
title. With this in mind, it is crucial to look at individual instances in
a given game and also at the design choices made in specific games,
with an eye to the broad culture around games as a whole. The in-
teractions among design elements of given games and the biases of
those making and playing games are at the core of why videogame
 71 A Toxic Culture
culture is the worst. As cultural problems, these issues must be ad-
dressed by better understanding the issues that are widely apparent
in and around games.
Critiques of the culture surrounding video games are abundant,
and many of them make the argument that the culture of games is
different, worse than the culture around other media. Although the
world is full of jerks and the internet is full of jerks, one can certainly
make a strong argument that some of the jerkiest are found circulat-
ing around video games. As the gaming editor of Badass Digest An-
drew Todd observes:

The Video Gaming Internet can be a horrible place. Hiding behind

infinite fake Twitter accounts and message-­board anonymity are
some of the worst examples of humanity. The abuse gushes forth
in such torrents that reporting tweets becomes almost useless. You
block or report one anonymous, anime-­avatared account, and then
fifteen more take its place: fifteen more slackly flapping mouth-
pieces for cowardly, whining crybaby manchildren. (Because they
are always, always men.) It’s so bad that hacker groups like Lizard
Square have gone so far as to commit real, actual acts of terror-
ism, like calling in bomb threats to a plane carrying Sony Online
Entertainment chief John Smedly. The internet lit up with shock
that gamers had sunk to the level of real, actual terrorism, but the
sad truth of the matter is that terrorism had been going on for
far longer. Terrorism is terrorism regardless of whether the target
is a nation, an institution, a vehicle or an individual. . . . This is a
problem endemic to gaming, and everyone is part of that problem.
There is a culture of harassment, abuse, and bigotry in the rotten
core of multiplayer gaming; it has been allowed or even encour-
aged to fester by developers, and it has created some of the most
toxic individuals on the internet.20

This quote is excerpted at length because it does a sound job of illus-

trating the breadth and depth of activity that characterizes online dis-
cussions about video games. From bomb threats inspired by feelings
about video games to a culture that makes multiplayer gaming inhos-
pitable, the author voices some of the harassment he faces because he
writes about video games online. Todd presents a case for how bad
A Toxic Culture 72
things have become, and he points out that this is a long-­standing
issue specific to video games aided and abetted by those who play and
develop them. There are many things that both enable and prop up
hateful behavior, and there are plenty of blameworthy actors, but the
common discourse and actions that have become a normal, routine
part of the environment around video games is troubling.
A way to measure the depth of the problem is simply to look at the
women who have been harassed for simply inhabiting a space within
video games. Shortly after Anita Sarkeesian published an episode of
the video series Tropes vs. Women in Games, she was forced out of her
house because of specific, detailed threats against her and her family.21
The game designer Zoë Quinn was the target of harassment after her
ex published details about her personal life online because he could
count “on the most reviled hubs of our community to live up to their
sordid reputations.”22 Based on what she experienced firsthand, Quinn
wrote that she was motivated “to continue trying to break down bar-
riers and disrupt the culture that enabled the abuse I’ve endured for
the last two weeks from ever happening to anyone ever again.”23 The
award-­winning game journalist Jenn Frank suffered such harassment
after writing an article for The Guardian that she quit game journal-
ism.24 The game developer Brianna Wu spoke out against harassment
in game culture and promptly received a number of terrifying threats,
which caused her to flee her home and also precipitated her withdraw-
ing her company’s exhibition at a major industry conference.25 Beyond
these highly visible cases, Wu argues that “if you are a woman working
in the games industry, especially in a public way, you’re going to expe-
rience harassment,” and that women in games are subject to an “emo-
tional and even physical minefield they’re signing themselves up for”
simply by being a part of a community surrounding video games.26
Putting the blame on women and contending that they should simply
toughen up is not a remotely viable answer; as one aspiring woman
in the game industry puts it, “Having a thick skin beneath such mag-
nified attacks—­not criticism—­is nearly impossible when your entire
being is being mangled.”27
One place to start detailing the culture surrounding video games is
to examine game conventions as well as presentations by large game
companies. One would think these would be places where people
would be on their best behavior, as they know they are being watched
 73 A Toxic Culture
and documented by the various reporters and bloggers present. How-
ever, examining what has actually happened at recent events is just one
more way to recognize how bad things are. The single biggest videog-
ame industry event is the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), which
takes place in late spring and is a showcase for new developments in
the industry and specific, notable games. E3 news routinely reaches
outside the videogame community and into mainstream coverage of
culture, which makes it a great place to locate disconnections between
videogame culture and the broader society. At an E3 presentation for
Microsoft’s Xbox One a man (a producer on the game) and a woman
(a community manager) were brought out to demonstrate a fighting
game called Killer Instinct. Unsurprisingly, the person who worked
on building the game was more skilled at it than the person who did
not.28 Choosing stereotypically coded gender roles was a problem,
but it went further, as the producer said, “Just let it happen. It will
be over soon,” to which a journalist added the unspoken conclusion:
“You know, like a rape.”29 Since the presentation was at a major event,
the press coverage reached well beyond game-­focused journalists and
into the mainstream media. The NBC News account of the comment
included the poignant statement, “We’re talking about a press con-
ference for a company that’s directly involved in the production of a
sizeable portion of video games worldwide. The representations they
incorporate into their advertising suggest the types of customers they
think are worth seeking out.”30 E3 is far from the only conference
with a troubled track record. In 2013, at the International Game De-
velopers Association party at the Game Developers Conference, one
of the largest industry events for those who make games, was marked
by what one journalist described as a mixed group of attendees, in-
cluding “industry leaders, industry hopefuls . . . and scantily clad fe-
male dancers,” that made “IGDA look more like a frat house than the
voice of an industry. How very disappointing, IGDA.”31 The party
occurred a day after the widely praised #1ReasonToBe panel, where
women listed their reasons for being part of the industry and made
suggestions about how to fix gender imbalances and increase diversity
in video games.32 The good news of the panel was rapidly undercut
by the party, which led to several IGDA officials resigning from their
positions with the organization.33
The Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) presents more troubling cases for
A Toxic Culture 74
video games. Penny Arcade is one of the largest consumer-­driven web-
sites dedicated to video games, with a web comic and commentary that
has positioned its two creators as leading tastemakers for discussing is-
sues from a gamer perspective. Unhappy with the conference options
for game consumers, particularly E3, and its lack of focus on players,
Penny Arcade launched its own conference in 2004; it has grown from
the initial event in Seattle to add PAX East, PAX Dev, PAX Australia,
and PAX South to the list of annual conferences. Penny Arcade is a key
rallying point for gamers, offering a chance for ideologically similar
people to gather both online and off. The first major issue surrounding
Penny Arcade was the criticism its creators faced for releasing a comic
strip that featured a rape joke. They then released additional comics
making fun of their critics, eventually selling merchandise to cele-
brate their initial strip, which centered on a fictional character called
a Dickwolf.34 In a self-­accounting of why one former PAX regular no
longer considers attending, Rachel Edidin explains that when asked in
a PAX question-­and-­answer session about what they learned from the
incident, the cartoonist for the site, Mike Krahulik, contended that his
regret three years after the Dickwolves comic was “pulling the Dick-
wolves merchandise from the Penny Arcade store—­merchandise that
he had created as a ‘screw you’ to rape survivors who had the temer-
ity to complain about a comic strip. When the audience burst into
applause, [Robert] Khoo nodded sagely and said that now they knew
better; now they would just leave it [the Dickwolves merchandise in
their online store] and not engage.”35 PAX has also seen trouble in its
ranks of volunteers, called Enforcers; in a critique of PAX, Elizabeth
Sampat writes that one Enforcer “was accused of sexually assaulting a
woman using the Enforcer network as a way to get closer to her, and
Penny Arcade covered it up and did not address it publicly. When
asked, [cofounder] Mike [Krahulik] said he would not have done any-
thing differently, and that not releasing the name of the assaulter or
the fact that the assault took place was the right call.”36 Conventions
are a public face for the game industry. They are a place where prod-
ucts are promoted and networking connections are made. They are
also a space in which there is constant policing of who “belongs,” as
dominant norms are reinscribed to make women feel less welcome.
This shapes game culture and becomes the terrain from which judg-
ments about merit will be made. These events are illustrations of the
 75 A Toxic Culture
ground on which gaming’s meritocracy is based and offer a perspec-
tive on just how hard some categories of people have to fight just to
reach other people’s starting line.
Culture also reaches directly into the play and design of games.
High-­level eSports, from Counter-­Strike to fighting games, demon-
strate how players actively participate in policing game culture. eS-
ports come in a variety of forms and are typically tied to playing a
video game as a competitive activity. A number of scholars have in-
vestigated competitive gaming from a variety of different perspec-
tives, with particularly good work being done by T. L. Taylor, Emma
Witkowski, and Nicholas T. Taylor.37 eSports often appropriate tropes
from other sporting competitions—­for instance, the use of trash talk
suffuses much of the culture. Although different games typically have
norms that are specific to their competition—­real-­time strategy and
fighting games draw from different communities of players, much
like soccer and baseball do—­eSports typically present themselves as
meritocratic spaces open to the best players on the basis of their skill.
However, competitions and the discourse surrounding them are often
noxious places to those who are not male and white. In an analysis
of the fighting game community, Todd Harper found that, to his dis-
may, “players who object to this treatment [harassing speech] aren’t
really true players, and that if they were true players they would un-
derstand that these are ‘just jokes’ that are inherently and inseparably
part of the game.”38 Harper extends his analysis to address the com-
munity’s perception that the women who play are often lesser players
than men and benefit from a different kind of standard, which often
includes hedges like “she’s good for a girl.” Similar instances of ha-
rassment often occur to prominent black eSports players as well, with
racist sentiment expressed when they compete in prominent games or
win tournaments.39 Visible players who do not fit the norms of what a
frequently sexist and racist audience expects are subjected to harass-
ment they must overcome in order to participate on the same terms
as those gifted a far less hostile starting position. One of the clearest
places in which to see toxicity at the root of competitive games is the
case of Cross Assault.
Cross Assault was a promotional vehicle for a new Capcom fight-
ing game, Street Fighter X Tekken, which combined characters from
two leading fighting game series, Street Fighter and Tekken. Pulling
A Toxic Culture 76
top fighting gamers into teams and placing them into a tournament,
the event featured prizes, promotion by IGN, and broadcasting by
Twitch.tv. Set up as a reality show produced by Capcom, IGN billed
the event as “a social experiment with fighting game players as much as
it was a fighting game competition[;] Cross Assault mixed up the stan-
dard competitive format and put players in new and unique situations,
with unprecedented amounts of stress.”40 The competition’s context
was shaped largely by the fact that the game was new, so players were
learning strategies and approaches on the fly, rather than using well-­
practiced techniques developed over years. Uniting the teams were
experts who served in roles akin to coaches; each roster comprised
four men and one woman who were particularly well-­known in the
fighting game community.41 The official IGN recap states that “it was
the responsibility of the coaches to strategize on their team’s behalf,
and each took a drastically different approach on how to manage their
team.”42 By day 5 of the competition, the leader of Team Tekken, Aris
Bakhtanians, had engaged in sustained harassment of the female player
on his team, Miranda Pakozdi. From asking her bra size to directing
the webcam to parts of her anatomy to smelling her as part of a dis-
play of dominance on camera, Bakhtanians harassed Pakozdi to the
point that she refused to actively fight in her final matches, effectively
throwing the games to her opponents. When asked about the harass-
ing behavior by Twitch.tv community manager Jared Rea, Bakhtani-
ans contended that sexual harassment was a fundamental part of the
fighting game community, that “they’re one and the same thing. This
is a community that’s, you know, 15 or 20 years old, and the sexual
harassment is part of a culture, and if you remove that [sexual harass-
ment] from the fighting game community, it’s not the fighting game
community.”43 Bakhtanians then continued into an analogy where he
argued that taking the sexual harassment out of fighting games would
be like trying to get the National Basketball Association to play with
an American football rather than a basketball; in Bakhtanians’s mind,
advocating to remove sexual harassment from fighting games is “ethi-
cally wrong.”44 Additional reporting indicated that the “team leader sat
at the center of a number of comments made during livestreams that
made her [Pakozdi] feel uncomfortable, and he had refused to show
any concern when the issue was brought up.”45 Months after the inci-
dent, the story of harassment at Cross Assault led to a New York Times
article about harassment of women in videogame culture.46
 77 A Toxic Culture
The events of Cross Assault are a single case that is years old at
the time of this writing. However, they are a near perfect distillation
of many of the problems with game culture and representative of the
experience and harassment that many of those playing games have
to face. As a small example of this, Todd Harper’s book transitions
from a discussion of Cross Assault into Maddy Myers’s experience
with harassment while playing video games in her local community.47
This event and other cases of harassment often are about policing the
boundaries of an imagined community, fueled by a strong desire to re-
tain what already exists. Typically, the cases are carefully swaddled in
appeals to skill, to being good enough, and to working hard enough
to make it. All these tropes are at the center of any sort of merito-
cratic appeal. If the harassed were tough enough to take it, then they
would be able to reap the rewards of success. Systemic harassment sets
the terms on which players engage, giving stark advantage to those
who are not targeted and retaining power for those who have already
climbed the ladder. This level of harassment also short-­circuits any
appeal to skill, as an initial test for some is putting up with jerks, not
playing video games. These problems are carefully rooted in the mer-
itocratic discourse of video games and illustrate how meritocracy in
games is a sham because it cannot account for context. Another case
can clearly show how this way of conceiving of video games as skill-­
based enterprises reaches deeply into game design.
Cooperative play is often a tricky thing for video games to master,
as players who are differentially skilled are often frustrated by their
partner’s lack of or excess of ability. As many people have difficulty
finding a person perfectly matched for them, some games, particularly
those made by Nintendo, come with settings or adjustments that help
to make the partnership or competition between players more pleasur-
able. Gearbox Software sought to do this by adding a fifth character,
the Mechromancer, to its game Borderlands 2. One of the skill trees
for the character was a set of abilities that softened the learning curve
for the game, giving poor shots a better chance to hit enemies and
otherwise improving the play of people who were learning the game.
Officially dubbed “Best Friends Forever” as a skill tree, the feature was
referred to as “girlfriend mode” in an interview by the lead designer
of the game, John Hemingway.48 Quickly denounced as a personal
anecdote by the president of Gearbox, the original story included the
rationale behind the feature, where the lead designer states, “The de-
A Toxic Culture 78
sign team was looking at the concept art and thought, you know what,
this is actually the cutest character we’ve ever had. I want to make, for
the lack of a better term, the girlfriend skill tree. This is, I love Bor-
derlands and I want to share it with someone, but they suck at first-­
person shooters. Can we make a skill tree that actually allows them to
understand the game and to play the game?”49 Commentary about the
feature quickly sprang up after the story, with sharp analysis focusing
on the flip use of the term “girlfriend mode” and the casual sexism it
conveyed. A feature that was designed to get more new people play-
ing a game ran the risk of alienating them through the sexism lurk-
ing behind it. As one essay argued, “Their use of the term [girlfriend
mode] should be treated as a symptom and not a cause—­and a reason
for us to ask bigger questions and tackle sexism on a larger scale.”50
For another, the core contention was about the fact that “girlfriend
mode” rolled off the tongue quite easily, which would not likely be the
case for “boyfriend mode,” and that “people simply don’t think about
women that much in the triple-­A game industry, and when they do,
it’s often as an afterthought, as we see here.”51 There was also a side
of the discussion that contended that attacking a designer for uttering
the phrase “girlfriend mode” was political correctness run amuck and
stood to create a chilling effect whereby developers would feel less
free to talk with the press.52 After about a month of reflection Leigh
Alexander wrote that she delayed her essay about the issue for two
reasons: she doesn’t like that “as a woman writer on games, . . . I am
conscripted to act as an authority on every gender-­oriented debate,”
and “because I privately felt it was a case of some problematic wording
of an otherwise-­good idea.”53 The additional time also gave Alexan-
der a chance to cite a marketing survey that showed how calling the
feature “girlfriend mode” actually may increase sales and attention.
For my purposes, there are two key issues at stake in this contro-
versy. First, the whole intent of the design feature was to upset the tra-
ditional meritocratic design of games and give newer players a chance
to play with their more practiced compatriots. For several of the writ-
ers covering this game, this innovation was the key, exciting takeaway:
a company structuring a game in a manner that subverts the tradi-
tional meritocratic order. Second, women are assumed to be of lesser
skill by default. Although many claims were made about tremendously
talented women game players, the informal title of the feature makes
 79 A Toxic Culture
a certain set of assumptions about how men and women play games.
The inferential leap about the feature is that those who are going to
need it are more likely to be interested in the game’s cutest character,
as the Mechromancer was clearly designed to be, and that women are
far more likely than men to be in a position to need to learn how to
play a first-­person shooter. A feature like Best Friends Forever mode
has the potential to change meritocratic norms in games by altering
the terms on which players interact, but its presentation with such po-
larizing terms offers a vantage point to see the bias threaded through-
out game culture.
Although issues of sexual harassment and sex-­based discrimination
have been covered to some degree in the gaming press and academic
literature, issues surrounding assumptions about race are present, but
far less attention has been paid to them. However, what is there pro-
vides a complementary perspective on the problems inherent within
game culture. Gamers against Bigotry, founded in 2012, asks game
players to sign a pledge acknowledging that they “contribute to an in-
credibly diverse social network of gamers around the world, and that
[their] actions have the ability to impact others,” and requests they
not use bigoted language, including slurs “based on race, ethnicity,
gender, religion, sexual orientation, and disability.”54 Within a week
of launch the site was defaced with racial slurs and eventually brought
down entirely; shortly thereafter, the site’s database of pledges was
erased.55 Even a basic, nonbinding effort like signing a pledge against
hate speech is a target for those who seek to retain a toxic videogame
community. Organizing for a more harmonious, less spiteful environ-
ment is likely to incur the wrath of those who benefit from the current
order or at least do not see a problem with it.
Academic analyses about race and ethnicity in video games have
also found a deep set of problems.56 Playable avatars of color are found
almost exclusively in sports games (which have the veneer of repre-
senting real life) and fighting games.57 The handful of representations
of minority characters in games like Grand Theft Auto are likely to
rationalize fears about people of color and how they live and/or ex-
oticize the characters as others in an effort to rationalize and excuse
the graphic narrative of the game, which is likely quite foreign to the
average player’s life.58 In online, interactive play, Kishonna Gray has
found that minority gamers face substantial amounts of hate speech
A Toxic Culture 80
based on the way they sound, much like women are harassed based
on the simple act of speaking aloud in an online game.59 Being found
out as something other than a straight, white male in a videogame
community is likely an invitation to harassment and derision, a situa-
tion for which a meritocratic order cannot account. These processes
are inextricably tied to masculinity and, as Derek Burrill argues, link
to how video games have expanded boyhood, offering a safe space
“to engage in violent and aggressive play without the threat of real
bodily injury found in sports and other real-­world activities and con-
flicts.”60 Technology and class have altered what masculinity means
over time, and R. W. Connell argues that masculinity is a social pro-
cess with historical and cultural contexts. This process can be seen in
computing and gaming, as working with a keyboard has been trans-
formed from secretarial work that should be done by women into a
techno-­cultural geek masculinity dominated by middle-­and upper-­
class white men.61 For spaces of play to be safe, one must fit proper
expectations of the digital boy, which are tied to being white, male,
and of means. Perhaps the most poignant recent example of the per-
ils of being something other than a white male in game culture is the
movement dubbed GamerGate.

GamerGate
There are many essays written about the beginnings of GamerGate
and how it originated, but the earliest moments of the movement can
be traced to the initial reaction to Anita Sarkeesian’s efforts to Kick-
start her video series.62 With toxic energy waxing and waning over
the two years since Sarkeesian’s public funding request, Zoë Quinn’s
release of Depression Quest led to a brief spark of venom as a por-
tion of the game community sought to get the game removed from
cloud-gaming platform Steam’s Greenlight program.63 The game, a
text-­based adventure about what it is like to live with depression, was
distributed for free, with any donations going to the National Suicide
Prevention Lifeline. The game was pulled from and then put back on
Greenlight and eventually made it onto the Steam platform, which
ensured wide availability, after which it seemed as if the ire was dying
down. But then Eron Gjoni, an ex-­boyfriend of Quinn’s, posted a nine-­
thousand-­word screed about their relationship and how it ended, and
 81 A Toxic Culture
accused her of sleeping with a game journalist to get positive cover-
age for her game.
Gjoni’s post had been deleted from forums like Something Awful
and Penny Arcade but found traction on 4Chan, which adapted the
message into a story about “an indie game developer who used sex to
get ahead professionally.”64 Quinn responded that personal matters
were personal and should not be discussed as news, the Kotaku editor-­
in-­chief investigated and cleared the journalist of any wrongdoing, and
things seemed like they might die down.65 However, when Sarkee-
sian posted her latest episode of Tropes vs. Women everything fired up
again, and Sarkeesian was driven out of her home because of death
threats. Two days later, the actor Adam Baldwin coined #GamerGate
and the hashtag took off. Eventually, three women fled their homes be-
cause of death threats and several others, including the award-­winning
freelance journalist Jenn Frank, pledged to quit writing about games
because of unyielding harassment. Twitter analysis showed how per-
nicious the commentary was, and Quinn infiltrated the 4Chan mes-
sage board that was organizing the harassment and posted the chat
logs.66 Quinn eventually wrote a piece titled “5 Things I Learned as
the Internet’s Most Hated Person” for Cracked, who “were bombarded
with demands we cover something called the ‘GamerGate Scandal’”
and deemed it “an Internet harassment campaign against a random
indie game developer who, like many such targets, was a female and
feminist.”67 Far more people not mentioned in this brief recap were
attacked and harassed as part of GamerGate, including academics like
Katherine Cross, Adrienne Shaw, and Mia Consalvo. The movement is
interesting for a number of reasons, but perhaps most notable for this
work is how much it shows the blind spots of segments of videogame
culture and how the events represent video games in broader society.
One crucial element of GamerGate is that it is a decentralized,
largely unorganized movement. Surely there were pockets of people
working together with similar interests, but one of the notable points
of criticism was the lack of a clear agenda. Each individual seemed to
have his or her own personal mission of change, which enabled all
participants to disavow whatever they found displeasing and made
discussing issues with proponents of the movement frustrating, as
talking with one person had no bearing on the next. Ostensibly, the
most charitable read of the movement was that it was about concerns
A Toxic Culture 82
surrounding journalistic ethics and corruption. However, for those on
the outside, Frank Lantz’s experience was common: “I have not been
able to find a single explanation of a coherent GamerGate position. It
remains completely unclear what is being called for or denounced. As
far as I can tell there are no useful ideas with which to engage here—­
only an inarticulate mess of confused feelings, uninformed opinions,
and second- a­ nd third-­order meta-­arguments.”68 Or, more simply, in
the words of Film Crit Hulk, “the end result is that you can’t even
get to the nugget of disagreement on the world view. there is no
world view. there is only the attack and the response.”69 Find-
ing common ground among GamerGaters ceased to be practical, but
there were a couple of themes in the discourse that are largely indic-
ative of what was going on: concerns about a lack of control and the
harassment of women.
The most frequently cited touch point for GamerGaters was the
insistence that a key part of their movement was about journalism
ethics.70 The most constructive read of the group is as a consumer
boycott of people concerned about journalistic coverage that insulted
their target audience instead of providing objective coverage of rele-
vant news.71 The most common flashpoint in this regard was a flurry of
articles that appeared shortly after the #GamerGate hashtag was born
that decried the death of the gamer. The two most widely circulated
and referenced essays were those by Leigh Alexander and Dan Gold-
ing.72 The argument about the end of gamers had three key claims.
First, video games were reaching a broader audience than ever before
and, as such, game publishers need not focus on the classic gamer ste-
reotypes as their primary audience. This argument largely followed in
a tradition of cultural criticism that proclaimed the death of the author
or a variety of other subject positions, and was backed up by data that
clearly indicate the audience of videogame players is far more diverse a
group than the white males of means who match the typical stereotype
of a group of gamers.73 Second, the term “gamer” was at one point a
key reclamation of space that reframed people away from being a nerd
or some other insulting label into something more positive. However
useful “gamer” had been, all progress was now being compromised by
fractures in the community that led to some subsets of people advo-
cating against and silencing others. This line of thought is akin to lov-
ing an idea so much that you smother it, promoting a gamer-­above-­all
 83 A Toxic Culture
identity so vigorously that the very idea of a “gamer” is conflated with
“jerk.”74 Finally, Casey Johnston, among others, argued that the hostil-
ity shown toward women engaging in cultural criticism demonstrated
that the label “gamer” was becoming irretrievable, as each silenced and
harassed woman “advances the goals of the most poisonous ‘gamers,’
while regressing everything else.”75 For those who self-­identified as
gamers these articles were likely hard to read, as they questioned a
thing that was core to who gamers were and wanted to be. That this
tumult happens around video games is one element that makes them
a different kind of media form, as there are people who care about
identifying as a gamer so deeply that they can get lost in something
like GamerGate. It is hard to imagine something happening on such a
wide, sustained scale in many other communities of media enthusiasts
(e.g., those passionate about literature, film, or music).76
In the wake of these articles and as the number of posts behind
GamerGate grew, supporters of the movement launched Operation
Disrespectful Nod, which targeted advertisers and outlets that pub-
lished what they deemed anti-­gamer articles. There were rallying cries
for journalists to be fired and for companies to cease their affiliation
with certain publications. Intel was the first to cave, prematurely ter-
minating an advertising campaign with Gamasutra, the publisher of
Alexander’s article.77 Intel later released a statement explaining that
it was not seeking to take sides in the matter and that it valued diver-
sity as a company; later it established a $300 million fund to advance
diversity in the tech industry.78 Adobe was targeted after a flurry of
tweets by a Gawker writer, and the company asked that its logo be re-
moved from a page on the site.79 Adobe later clarified that it wished to
take a stance against bullying and that it was “not and [has] never been
aligned with Gamergate.”80 GamerGate claimed victory in both cases,
but these were also points where additional attention was brought to
the movement and how its members were choosing to conduct their
business. Max Read of Gawker chose to sum up the events of Disre-
spectful Nod as a story about how the blog got “rolled by the dishon-
est fascists of Gamergate.”81
Beyond focusing on those in the videogame industry, Gamer-
Gate also targeted academics, largely tied to a session at the Digital
Games Research Association (DiGRA) conference in 2014. In a fish-
bowl panel titled “The Playful Is Political,” game researchers were
A Toxic Culture 84
brought into conversation about issues surrounding diversity, repre-
sentation, and video games. Notes were communally taken on a Goo-
gle Doc set up by the organizers, Shira Chess and Adrienne Shaw.82
As GamerGate was roiling through the internet, GamerGaters found
a link Shaw had posted on Twitter to the Google Doc, which would
subsequently be defaced and used as the origin point of a campaign
to attempt to discredit an academic organization and its members.83
Ranging from theories of a covert connection to the United States de-
fense-department agency DARPA to decrying members of the board
as feminists, GamerGaters rallied against academics who allegedly set
out to censor their favorite games. Primarily focusing on women ac-
ademics, DiGRA president Mia Consalvo, organizer Adrienne Shaw,
and scholars Katherine Cross and Torill Mortensen, among others,
were harassed and/or doxxed.84 Members of GamerGate set out on
Operation Digging DiGRA in an effort to “fact-­check” academic es-
says in the DiGRA Online Library, which led conference organizer
Jose Zagal to note that this was one of the first times a substantial por-
tion of academic research had “come under [broad public] question,
scrutiny, and comment.”85 Chess and Shaw argued that a key point
of divergence in having non­academics review structures that are part
of academe is that “academia simply does not make sense from the
outside. More than that it is perceived as threatening.”86 Like many
cultural products, academia comes with titles and rituals, obscure prac-
tices and judgments that may seem invisible for those in the system
yet are inscrutable for those outside it. Within academia, those who
choose to focus on issues of diversity, difference, and issues affecting
marginalized groups have always had to walk a harder road than those
who study less radical topics.87 GamerGate’s move to address academia
is a chance to see the connections that run throughout the whole of
the culture surrounding video games, as well as a notable point that
women were overwhelmingly more likely to be harassed than men
and that the communities and cultures surrounding games reach far
beyond their initial platforms.88
Gamers rallying under the banner of GamerGate were effectively
a conservative force within games. As Adrienne Shaw argues, the label
“gamer” is fundamentally consumerist, as it is defining a group of peo-
ple by their media consumption habits.89 In seeking to limit the kinds
of games that should be published and how those games should be
 85 A Toxic Culture
discussed, the movement sought to reframe video games and those
who played them in a particular way. The impact on videogame cul-
ture and its relationship to meritocracy can be best seen in the dif-
ferential treatment of women and in the reception of GamerGate in
the mainstream media.
Plenty of disturbing things happened within the context of the
movement, which had the result of scaring every woman in the game
industry, and any of a number of different situations could be isolated
and analyzed.90 However, I think there are two particularly illustrative
moments that show how deeply the problems in game culture run. It
would be easy to pick the instances of people being run out of their
homes or opting out of the industry in response to harassment, but
I would hope anyone reading this book would reject those things as
obviously terrible. Looking more deeply at what could initially seem
to be small issues makes it possible to see just how slanted and insidi-
ous the bias in harassment can be. First, one of the cofounders of the
gaming site Kongregate, Emily Greer, posted about the harassment
she has received for her participation in the game industry. Prompted
by GamerGate to reflect on the difference between messages sent to
her and her brother, she wrote that she had assumed the harassment
she received was “normal for a co-­founder of a game site” and was
surprised to hear that her brother and fellow cofounder did not have
the same experience. Counting up their messages, she found that she
receives about four times as much harassment as her male sibling.91
Greer viewed her experience as normal, typical, just the way things
were. However, that kind of belief is precisely what ensures differen-
tial access to games and subverts any hope for an actual meritocratic
order within them, as it guarantees structural inequality for some.
Greer’s experience is different from her brother’s—­it is harder, which
is not an unusual position for many people who are not white, male,
and straight in videogame culture, as they are judged by the inter-
sections of many different factors that have nothing to do with their
skill plus their effort. Greer has been successful and achieved status
as a cofounder, but the sexism she faced made her journey more diffi-
cult than her brother’s. In a meritocracy, structural obstacles like this
should not exist, as they interfere with proper assessments of merit by
denying equal opportunity of starting positions. Unfortunately, situa-
tions like this are all too common.
A Toxic Culture 86
A second test of difference in a similar circumstance directly re-
lated to GamerGate is the response to Chris Kluwe and Felicia Day.
Kluwe, a self-­proclaimed gamer and former punter in the National
Football League, wrote a scathing piece about GamerGate with fas-
cinating use of profanity and name-­calling, and then conducted an
“Ask Me Anything” on reddit targeted at proponents of GamerGate.92
Felicia Day, an actor and frequent media personality within the vid-
eogame community, wrote a piece about how GamerGate scared her
and how she had remained silent on the issue due to concerns about
“self-­protection and fear.”93 Day’s piece was far more sympathetic
and worlds less offensive than Kluwe’s. Nonetheless, Day was imme-
diately doxxed in the comments, as “Gaimer8” published her address
and e-­mail, yet nothing of a similar magnitude happened to Kluwe.94
Kluwe subsequently noted that the reason no one had come after him
was evidence of a societal misogyny, and that “until we get to the root
causes of it, similar things are just going to happen over and over in
different arenas.”95 Day and Kluwe received different treatment be-
cause one conforms to certain aspects of what is expected and one does
not. Although sexism is not unique to gaming, the way external media
covered GamerGate further illustrates what videogame culture is like.
The mainstream media reception of GamerGate only occurred
after events had been roiling in the videogame community for weeks.
There are two key elements to consider in the reaction: the tone of
the pieces and whom the media targeted as experts to either quote
or to have write editorials. The New York Times came out against
GamerGate, arguing that the movement “made it impossible to over-
look an ugly truth about the culture that surrounds” video games, and
subsequently turned to Anita Sarkeesian for an editorial that argued
“the term ‘gamer’ is no longer useful as an identity because games
are for everyone.”96 Vox noted that “#GamerGate’s most prominent
targets are all women,” Newsweek analyzed the discussion to argue
that women were harassed more than men, Time had Leigh Alexan-
der write an essay, CNN and the Washington Post went to Brianna
Wu, and Zoë Quinn was the subject of an extended interview for the
BBC.97 Perhaps the harshest reception for GamerGaters was from
Stephen Colbert, who used an episode of his late-­night talk show The
Colbert Report to criticize GamerGate and then turned to Anita Sar-
keesian for an interview.98 In the wake of the Colbert interview, one
 87 A Toxic Culture
journalist summed up the situation as follows: “Gamergate died ironi-
cally from what it wanted most: mainstream exposure.”99 Attention to
GamerGate may have reached its mass-media peak with the airing of
an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit that dramatized “a
virtual carbon copy of [GamerGate’s] darker fantasies.”100 By gaining
attention, the ideas and actions of GamerGate were exposed to a dif-
ferent kind of audience, and people less intimately tied to the videog-
ame community had a difficult time understanding what was going
on. I know I found the events hard to explain to anyone who was not
immersed in it; however, in addition to widespread social problems
with misogyny and sexism, one of the best explanations for what was
happening was a desperate effort to hold on to meritocratic norms in
video games.
The worst part was that the additional exposure did not kill
GamerGate: the movement just became more concentrated and, in
many ways, more extreme. GamerGate “is not over, and some of the
wounds it opened . . . are as fresh as ever.”101 Reflecting on what will
come out of GamerGate, Natalie Zina Walschots contends that it will
“take years to sort out the impact on the industry, on the commu-
nity, on the way games are made and played. Years before we figure
out what game journalism can possibly look like in a post-­Gamergate
world. Years before we can even begin to get a grip on the personal
trauma suffered by so many after such a massive campaign of ha-
rassment and violence. And before any of that work can be done,
Gamergate has to end first. It’s an inevitable victory, perhaps, but one
that’s going to leave deep, presently unfathomable scars.”102 Summa-
ries of the GamerGate movement dominated end-­of-­year reflections
in 2014; as an example, Ben Kuchera wrote that “GamerGate’s lasting
legacy will likely be the fact that they’ve made harassment of women
in the video game industry impossible to ignore,” and that “it’s be-
come a completely insular network of paranoid, reactionary gamers
who just want things to go back to the way things were, before they
had to exist in a world where women played games and outlets wrote
about more than just ‘fun factor.’”103 GamerGate also managed to be-
come NeoGAF’s Fail of the Year and The Vine’s biggest nerd story of
2014, and was named in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s state-
ment about the challenge of online harassment.104 Legal implications
also began to surface, with women harassed by GamerGate speaking
A Toxic Culture 88
in front of Congress, members of Congress calling for prosecution
in cases of online harassment, the United States Department of Jus-
tice announcing an intent to pursue cases of online harassment, and
frequent GamerGate target Brianna Wu publishing essays calling for
involvement by the FBI and prosecutors representing districts from
which she has received death threats.105 GamerGate is unlikely to end
quietly, and while it still simmers its targets will continue to feel the
brunt of the harassment and rage, which ends up silencing many and,
at the very least, guaranteeing unequal access to video games.
Contemporary society is riddled with sexism, and this is certainly
part of the problem in GamerGate. However, videogame culture is
particularly impacted because of the desperate effort of some to cling
to the ideals of a meritocracy. Meritocracy in video games tells play-
ers that they are special, that they are uniquely gifted; if you were a
gamer who defined a large part of yourself around video games, why
wouldn’t you fight tooth and nail to hold on to that feeling? Meritoc-
racies generally function to insulate those who get ahead, a dynamic
that occurs throughout society. Meritocracy amplifies the real-­world
effects and harms of social biases. To enact the ideology in practice
requires equal opportunity. Structural inequality undercuts its func-
tioning by confounding attempts to assess merit, while the preva-
lence of the ideology reassures the most successful that they earned
their position because they are the most skilled and hardest working.
Video games actualize meritocracy, as they teach players judging peo-
ple based on their relative merit is right, normal, and something that
should be encouraged. As one Twitter user put it in the wake of Intel’s
decision to pull advertising from Gamasutra, “I support meritocracy, I
support equality, I support #gamergate, I support @intel.”106
GamerGate is about many things, but one crucial lesson it can
teach concerns how meritocracies fall apart. In his disassembling of
meritocracy, Christopher L. Hayes argues that one of the first casu-
alties of the ideology’s failings is a growing lack of faith in our insti-
tutions, “since people cannot bring themselves to disbelieve in the
central premise of the American dream, they focus their ire and skep-
ticism instead on the broken institutions it has formed.”107 Game jour-
nalism is far from perfect, but it is arguably one of the most prominent
institutions in video games. Short of critiquing the people who pro-
 89 A Toxic Culture
duce the games that gamers love, game journalism is the structure that
shapes what gamers want, how they think, and what should be hap-
pening in the industry. Game journalism is a key component of game
culture, and the academic study of games, targeted through attacks
on DiGRA, is tied to prominent universities and key elements of in-
stitutional power. If Hayes is right, it is also reasonable to expect that
these are the elements of videogame culture that will be vilified well
before players question their skills or the overall role of meritocracy
in videogame design.
Within the general critique of game journalism, a specific request
of many GamerGaters was that reviews should be objective evalua-
tions of a game.108 Cultural criticism holds that an objective review is
impossible, as merely describing features is imposing ideological val-
ues on a game review, but it is striking that to strive for objectivity in
game reviews is consistent with a meritocratic position. A different way
of describing this position would be to say that it is about evaluating
games based on their merits and what they offer to players. An objec-
tive review would strip out context and subjective claims, building a
foundation for equality of opportunity in reviewing, where all games
are judged based on externally verifiable elements like their frame
rates and length. In large part, the problem is not just that videogame
culture, like our culture more broadly, is a white, straight, wealthy,
male space, but that it is an especially meritocratic space. GamerGate
is a preview of the kind of thing that happens when meritocracies fall
apart, as those in relative positions of power scramble to hold on to
what they have. GamerGate was also a forerunner of what happened
in politics throughout the United States and United Kingdom in 2016,
as Matt Lees wrote for The Guardian: “This hashtag was the canary
in the coalmine, and we [broader society and the media] ignored it.”109
We must stop ignoring moments like this, and deconstructing the
meritocratic appeals in video games is a key part of disassembling
a movement like GamerGate. Video games offer a particular route
into understanding broader culture and, right now, that requires fo-
cusing on the underanalyzed aspects of those games and the culture
surrounding them. Defining games and gamers in a specific manner
rewards the investment that a certain subgroup of players has made
over years. Seeing that cultural capital eroded is hard, making the
A Toxic Culture 90
status quo something worth desperately fighting for. Unfortunately,
certain aspects of game design and production are a base from which
these problems arise in the first place.

Moving Forward
Video games and game culture are symbol systems rife with implica-
tions and assumptions. Meaning swirls within games, the way they are
played, and the discussion around them. Game culture is currently a
toxic place that excludes and ridicules those who are presumed to not
fit. Critique of what exists is not welcome, and dissent is frequently
shut down in comments or campaigns to harass those who dare to
speak out. Rhetorical analysis and critical thought about meritocracy
offer a chance to examine what works, how it works, what it does, and
what can be learned from it.
In the case of video games, the meritocratic order is borrowed
from broad technological culture and most thoroughly applied in the
case of digital games, where it forecloses reflection about how bro-
ken that assumed meritocracy is. Rather than acting as a test of skills,
being good at games is about a complex assembly of sociotechnical
factors that benefit certain people more than others. Being encouraged
to play games, growing up with them, having the money and time to
play them, and being born with the physical capabilities to excel all
help give certain people structural advantages that outweigh individual
skills or effort. Understanding how meritocracy pairs up with video
games requires a deeper dive into meritocratic game design and mer-
itocratic game narratives, with a particular focus on how prominent
both are and why that matters.
3
Coding Meritocracy
Norms of Game Design and Narrative

Video games can represent anything, a trait that can be used to

put players into unfamiliar and challenging subject positions. Video
games can also be seen as glorified rule systems, where fictional worlds
are laid over obscure axioms and algorithms governed by a computer.1
Much like any mode of communication, video games are part of a
larger culture and rely on certain tropes that get recycled time and
again in a way that makes them seem normal, natural, like doing things
in a particular manner is simply “the way things are.” Though far from
the only realm in which meritocratic appeals are used, in videogame
culture meritocratic norms dominate communication and permeate
both game design and game narratives.
Video games came into prominence alongside the coining and
proliferation of the concept of a meritocracy. As Michael Young’s idea
transformed from the basis for a satirical novel into a dominant phi-
losophy about structuring society, video games were invented and
transformed into a primary pillar of contemporary entertainment and
media consumption. In video games, meritocracy becomes an actual-
ized practice, and they are one of the few places where the ideology
runs rampant, unchecked and celebrated while slipping into the back-
ground and becoming part of the perceived natural order.
Within video games, meritocratic norms appear in both game de-
sign and game narratives. Game mechanics and approaches are de-
signed to offload computational processes onto a computer, which
91
Coding Meritocracy 92
becomes a seemingly perfect, objective arbiter of skills in play. Vid-
eogame design typically revolves around providing a platform where
luck is limited and talent is praised. This is a historically situated set
of practices that are highly influenced by the technologies and com-
munities of people playing. However, from the arcade to the console
to personal computers, video games have often focused on providing
frameworks for players to develop and showcase their skills. In the
arcade, players needed to keep winning to hold the machine, while
contemporary console and PC games challenge players to battle oth-
ers online in a test of ability or to overcome challenging puzzles and
boss fights in both single-­and multiplayer games. Mobile games, es-
pecially those produced for iOS and Android, are a possible excep-
tion with the prominence of luck-­influenced card and casino games,
but there are also of skill-­and effort-­driven games released for mobile
devices. Games are often balanced with an eye toward creating a level
playing field—­one where multiple approaches are possible and, when
we win, we praise our skill, but when we lose we blame poor game
design or inferior teammates. Contemporary game design revolves
around limiting risk and giving players what they already know they
like, which means limiting the role of luck and building out ways for
them to prove their merit.2 Beyond the way games work in game play,
meritocracy is also furthered through game narratives. The story lines
of many video games teach players that if they work hard enough, if
they try long enough, if they are good enough, they will be victorious.
These preconceptions—­central tenets of meritocracies—­are included
in game after game after game. In addition, there are spaces in which
design and narrative come together, like the nearly ubiquitous levels
players can gain, as they give a quick view on where a player stands in
a hierarchy and teach players to strive to be just a bit better. Beyond
helping players quickly identify who merits the most, or least, atten-
tion, levels also craft a narrative structure in which we all start from
the same place and we can all make it to the top. The systematic in-
tegration of leveling systems throughout games helps leveling as a
process recede into the background, thereby making it hard to notice
that leveling up is part of a widespread message that meritocracy is a
default mode of the social organization in and around video games.
Understanding the history of meritocracy and rhetoric facilitates
analysis of meritocratic design and narrative in two key areas. First,
 93 Coding Meritocracy
rhetorical analysis is a way of seeing the impact of symbol systems
and how they work to structure interactions among people. By re-
peating meritocratic elements over and over, video games normalize
those kinds of appeals and make them seem natural. Thinking deeply
about the structures of games, both how they are built and the sto-
ries they tell, articulates the terms on which players play games. The
symbols we use structure the ways we think and how we play. Bet-
ter understanding those symbols can help us develop something new
and different by disrupting what has been there. Second, by relying
on meritocratic appeals, video games fall into the same traps widely
discussed in analyses of meritocratic systems. Meritocratic systems
ossify and become aristocratic, measuring inherited advantage rather
than merit, while justifying their existence by teaching those at the
top that they have earned their spot and those at the bottom that they
deserve their lower status.3 Meritocracies quickly become mythical, as
they seem like they are judging skill and effort, but they actually judge
social situation, circumstance, good fortune, and starting points.4 Vid-
eogame culture has developed with merit placed as a key, praiseworthy
element of play. Meritocracies cognitively capture those within them
and stymie attempts to break away and build something new. Systems
that reward those at the top are hard to disrupt precisely because the
successful are getting seductive messages confirming the quality of
their abilities and character. Splitting away from a reliance on mer-
itocracy and averting the crumbling demise that Young predicts for
meritocratic systems requires explaining meritocratic game design and
meritocratic game narratives.

Meritocratic Game Design

Games are artificial systems that could be designed in any of a broad
number of ways, but most video games are designed around a con-
sistent set of expectations and approaches. Designing contemporary
video games for consoles or PCs typically means focusing on balance,
fairness, skill, and rewarding a talent or time investment over spending
money to advance. Many of these things may seem innocuous at first
thought or like a genuinely praiseworthy aspect of design, but further
exploration demonstrates how they work in tandem to create a certain,
specific way of thinking about symbol systems in games.
Coding Meritocracy 94
In his book The Art of Failure Jesper Juul articulates that there
are three different approaches to success or distributive fairness in
games: skill, chance, and labor. Games of skill are meritocratic, where
talent is clearly rewarded and the resulting distribution of players is
rife with inequality because of differential levels of ability. For Juul,
skill is “the least controversial of the three paths.” Chance, which is
primarily about luck, “is the most controversial, mostly for its associa-
tion with gambling.”5 Finally, games of labor are relatively newer and
generally tied to sustained effort over time. Often actions within these
games are trivial, with a cost for failure; Juul cites FarmVille and World
of Warcraft as examples to demonstrate how games of labor revolve
around the ongoing effort, or grind, made by players. Two of these
models of game design—­skill and labor—­port quite clearly onto mer-
itocratic systems. They are also the most common design approaches
for video games. None of the games of chance listed by Juul are video
games; instead, they are traditional gambling games, like roulette, or
card and dice games, like solitaire and Yahtzee. All games are designed
around some kind of fairness in approach, and mass-­market, nonmo-
bile video games have typically chosen to adhere to choices that most
clearly represent a meritocratic balance in game design based on skill,
effort, or a combination of the two.
“Balance” is a seemingly neutral term. All games and activities are
balanced; it is simply a question of how. In most Western video games
the kind of balance sought is actually one of equality in approach and
potential outcome for similarly talented players, which ports directly
on to the equality of opportunity expected in meritocratic systems.
Western video games are typically designed in a manner where mul-
tiple factions or characters can fight things out and should be able
to count on various approaches being relatively similar in potential
power. Although there are occasionally rock, paper, scissors elements,
where an approach is highly successful against one potential opponent
yet highly vulnerable to another, multiplayer games are typically de-
signed to minimize variability among in-­game choices. Formal and
informal rules are often developed and enforced to limit the role of
certain outside agents, like a computer program that optimized play
in Blizzard’s card game Hearthstone, which ceased development after
the company asked the programmer to stop the project because of
the threat to game play and balance.6 The program, which automated
 95 Coding Meritocracy
and systematized decisions about which cards to play, eliminated the
human element of choice, which Blizzard decided violated expecta-
tions of fair play. Competitive matchmaking typically works to pair
up similarly skilled players—­and in the case of a game like FIFA, sim-
ilarly matched teams—­in a battle that should tend toward the most
even playing field within the bounds of the game itself. Unlike con-
tests between older and younger siblings or between sports teams with
radically different talent levels, videogame balance is an appeal to mer-
itocratic ideals. In trying to set the terms of engagement as balanced,
these video games seek to create a framework within which skill is par-
amount and prior status or luck is minimized. Players and developers
often work together to further norms around balanced play by devel-
oping phases in tournaments where particular characters (League of
Legends, Street Fighter), teams (Madden NFL), or maps/stages (Super
Smash Bros.) are banned or restricted from play. Meritocratic game
design is predicated on creating environments that focus on skill (i.e.,
merit) to ensure that the most talented are most likely to win, which
further advances the ability to ignore structural inequalities.
Balance in video games rarely stops with the initial release of a
game, however. The advent of online play and the relative ease of up-
dating games means that most video games are in a constant state of
flux, in which designers release a game, players play it, and then de-
signers rebalance the game to account for trends in the player base.
Players and designers now frequently refer to “the meta” in video
games ranging from card games like Hearthstone to character-­driven
match-­three games like Marvel Puzzle Quest. Although not unique
to video games, metagaming is a process of working out the rules
of the game to find the optimal approach at any given time. Where
video games differ from other types of games is in how quickly the
game designers can adjust and adapt the rules of play to account for
how players behave in practice. Supercell’s Clash Royale is a textbook
example of this process. A mobile game that blends elements of col-
lectible card games and multiplayer online battle arenas, set in the
universe originally developed for the smash hit game Clash of Clans,
Clash Royale built regular game-play balancing into both the plan
for the game and its business model. In Clash Royale players develop
decks of eight cards and then use the characters, spells, and buildings
on the cards in an effort to defeat their opponent by destroying op-
Coding Meritocracy 96
position towers and defending their own. Cards can be leveled up to
be more powerful and, like in a collectible card game, a better deck
makes it easier to win. However, building on the balancing norms in-
herent to contemporary video games, Supercell regularly adjusts the
power of each card based on player behavior. Cards that are not being
used are made stronger and cards that are being used most often are
made weaker. This then incentivizes players to continue to develop
new cards to take advantage of the current state of the game, driving
spending and attention across the entire group of cards, rather than
just the subset of eight each player can use at a time. In my experience
from playing the game and reading the forums, players rarely object to
the process of balancing and even make suggestions about how cards
should be adjusted in the next round of balancing. By appealing to a
core norm of balance, Supercell has built a free-­to-­play model that
fits nicely into broadly accepted practices in video games. Processes
of rebalancing and the requisite agonizing over “nerfs,” which make
something weaker, and “buffs,” which make something stronger, are
further testament to a widespread dependence on balance in video
games. Balance is not something that is inherent to video games; it
is an iterative practice constantly reinscribed into them. The circular
process of game balance is widely accepted, and players routinely ap-
peal to balance in order to get changes made in the games they play.
Although this practice is far more common in multiplayer games than
in single-­player ones, even single-­player games are occasionally rebal-
anced to either help players overcome particularly difficult moments
or present a greater challenge if things are too easy.
This notion of balancing and rebalancing video games and the
hyperfocus on sustaining and advancing a balanced mode of play
is particular to video games, particularly competitive play in video
games. Other games and sports may advance discussions about com-
petitive balance or means by which to match up players of similar skill,
but balance is rarely as central to discussion as it is within videogame
design. Video games without proper balance are criticized for being
broken, for being less than games where skill wins out. This is often
summed up in objections to free-­to-­play games that are monetized in a
way that leads to complaints about how the game is pay-­to-­win, where
success is determined more by the size of one’s wallet than one’s skill
and effort at the game. It can also be seen in objections to cheap tac-
 97 Coding Meritocracy
tics, where players use a technically possible maneuver that the com-
munity finds objectionable. From the Clash Royale player building his
or her deck around the mortar to the fighting game player who relies
on characters that are commonly banned in tournament play to the
sports gamer who insists on only using the most powerful teams, the
online community of players typically expects others to behave in a
manner that fits norms of fair play.7 Even cheating in video games is
socially negotiated, with many players arguing that cheating is abhor-
rent in multiplayer games even if it may be acceptable in single-­player
titles.8 Although this may seem like a basic, sensible kind of appeal
to many of the people who play video games, it is a meaningful one
and a key bias in videogame design and play. This particular notion
of balance is also a perfect starting point for advancing a meritocratic
agenda within video games, as balance is deployed to ensure that skill
and effort win out.
There is a substantial hedge to the routine focus on balance in
video games. Although many games, designed in many different coun-
tries, appeal to a meritocratic kind of balance, there are occasional ex-
ceptions. Two of the most prominent are the Mario Kart and Mario
Party series of games. Both are designed and published by Nintendo
for a variety of its game systems, targeted at wide audiences. Both
games also have a decidedly different approach to balance, as they
typically punish the most successful person and reward those who are
struggling. The “best” player can often win these games, but to do so
he or she will have to overcome substantial additional obstacles not
presented to other players. Mario Kart is quite contentious among
hardcore gamers, largely because of item boxes that generally reward
players with an item of a quality inversely proportionate to their place
in the race. Perhaps the most infamous is the “blue shell,” also known
as the “spiny shell.” First appearing in Mario Kart 64, this targets the
leader of the race to rapidly stop his or her progress and drop back in
the pack. However, the blue shell is only given to those who are losing
at the time they reach the box. Writing for Wired, Chris Kohler distills
the meritocratic stance on the blue shell: “It is widely known that the
worst, stupidest item in the Mario Kart series is the Blue Shell. When
you launch it, it flies above the course, homing in on the racer in first
place, then lands directly on top of them, causing them to explode
and be slowed down considerably. This is no help to the person who
Coding Meritocracy 98
threw the shell since they are still in last place. This is a great help to
the person in second place, as it allows them to get into first.”9 Much
of Kohler’s objection centers on the idea that items like the blue shell
enable players who are not the most skilled to punish those at the
front of the race. One list of complaints about Mario Kart highlights
the blue shell as the single most objectionable part of the game, ref-
erencing it as “socialism in action,” “evil,” and “what made Mario Kart
Wii luck based.”10 However, Mario Kart is designed with a different
approach to skill and merit. A prominent designer on the Mario Kart
series, Hideki Konno, notes that he is routinely asked about a version
of the game without items, but contends that the game is defined by
them and the blue shell functions to keep everyone in the race until
the end.11 Konno appeals to a different kind of balance, one based on
keeping the game competitive and interesting for all, rather than on
ensuring that the most meritorious player wins. Mario Party 8 has a
similar feature, where Chump Charity is awarded to the player in last
place as the game nears its end; the board is then filled with coins to
maximize the importance of the end of the game, rather than what
came before. Although the games have been quite successful, players
complain with comments like the series relies too much “on luck, it
sucks all the fun out of the experience,” and request a skill-­based mode
where luck is minimized and the most talented player would win the
game.12 In both cases, the typical meritocratic underpinnings of vid-
eogame balance are challenged, which is likely why Konno gets so
many requests to produce a game mode without items. Similar dynam-
ics can be seen in Super Smash Bros., where the stages with the most
variance and opportunity for luck to play a role are typically banned
in competitive play.13 The negative reaction to Nintendo’s different
form of balance is simply more evidence of how deeply meritocratic
game design is woven into contemporary Western videogame culture.
The maniacal focus on balance feeds into several other norms of
meritocratic videogame design. The first is that games are generally
expected to be fair and that players will quickly decry those that are not
fair as “cheap” or “abusive.” The fairness of games is typically judged
against something akin to a reasonable person—­perhaps a reasonable
gamer—­standard where the player making the argument judges rea-
sonableness based on his or her own abilities. These contentions of
fairness rarely consider infrequent or lesser-­trained players, as fairness
 99 Coding Meritocracy
needs only to be ensured for the game’s perceived target audience. Ef-
fectively, fairness is a subset of balance; balance is a prerequisite for a
game to be fair. Fairness as a game-design trope feeds into the idea of
meritocracy by setting a baseline expectation that the game does not
discriminate against potential players. In fact, if the game is adjudged
as fair, then failure is the responsibility of the player rather than the
game. Fairness, when combined with balance, works to isolate and in-
dividualize gaming, placing the player in a position of responsibility
to perform at a certain level. If players fail in a fair, balanced game,
then it was because they have not demonstrated sufficient merit to
warrant success.
Video games are often expected to reward skill. Unlike activities
like reading or watching television or film to decode additional mean-
ings or story lines, meritocratic game design advances the idea that
games should be tests of skill. Unlike in games that can be conquered
through a sheer investment of time or repetitive tapping, players in
“real” games have to show off their talents. Questionable games, like
FarmVille, are ridiculed in efforts like Cow Clicker, where repeated
simple actions are the only necessary and sufficient conditions for
success. Skill in “proper” video games requires more than simple but-
ton mashing, as meritocratic game design encourages games to be
built around timing, careful judgment, strategic decision making, and
other techniques that can be put to the test against the computer or
other players. Social and mobile games can often require skill or ef-
fort, but the kind of skills and effort in social and mobile games re-
ward traits that are not incentivized by contemporary console and PC
games.14 Patience and planning are far more common on platforms
other than consoles and PCs, and the balance between effort and skill
typically places more focus on effort, while console and PC games
emphasize fast-­twitch reflexes, hand–­eye coordination, and mastery
of spatial geography. When it comes to consideration of merit, core
video games not only require players to show merit but also to show
socially approved kinds of merit, which often runs counter to what is
found in mobile and social games. This kind of appeal anchors neatly
into the notion that videogame players earn their successes, that vic-
tory in a game is proof of talent and skill, rather than a gift of pres-
ence or an inheritance of birthright. The idea that players earn their
victories is a seductive appropriation of meritocratic norms, since it
Coding Meritocracy 100
valorizes players and gives them reason to savor their successes. Earn-
ing rewards through skilled play is at the center of game design, as
players claim to seek proper challenges to overcome and designers
advance a meritocratic conception of games through the repeated
use of these tropes.
Finally, Western PC and console video games are expected to re-
ward talent and time investment—­or in meritocracy’s terms, effort—­
instead of money spent on the game. Somewhat different than design
predicated on skill, designing in favor of talent and time further fo-
cuses game play on the individual and his or her relative abilities. It
also creates a situation where it seems like anyone could be successful
at video games if they were good enough and simply chose to invest
enough time. These notions are central to meritocratic norms, as they
focus on individuals and their efforts, not the larger system around
them. This may feel like a good, reassuring thing, but it ignores how
prior time, skill, and cultural investment helped put a player in a po-
sition to be successful. Previous time spent playing one video game
rolls into the next one, as part of a knowledge scaffolding of everything
from how to move in a 3-­D environment to how to use a controller
or mouse–­keyboard setup to the intricacies of inventory management.
All that work is easily erased and rapidly forgotten as it fades into the
background for experienced players while building additional barri-
ers for anyone new to video games. By also adding in the expectation
that players should not be able to pay their way forward, hurdles are
erected for those who could pay to skip steps while meritocratic ex-
pectations are maintained. Free-­to-­play games only get a pass from
these concerns when the advantages are largely cosmetic, as in League
of Legends, rather than central to the game, as in games with energy
timers or purchasable weapons. The fear of a player being able to buy
progress is substantial enough that the monetization structure for Halo
Online led one commenter to write, “So far this is like Halo from hell,
where combat is just abysmally skewed towards players who are will-
ing to shell out cash for victory.”15 A system where players could buy
their way ahead could be quickly dominated by those with deeper
pockets, which is the central criticism of free-­to-­play games deemed
pay-­to-­win. In the case of meritocratic game design, investing money
is taboo, as it represents an external structural inequity; however, in-
vesting time to develop, hone, and deploy talent is expected, showing
 101 Coding Meritocracy
how much work a player did to earn the accolades he or she accrues,
even if those elements also carry structural biases with them.
Specific applications of meritocratic game design will be unpacked
in the next chapter’s case studies, but two examples provide context
for how video games are more dependent on meritocratic norms than
the category of games more broadly is. In reflecting on playing a live-­
action game called StreetWars—­where players are given a dossier and
tasked with shooting a target with a water gun while avoiding some-
one trying to do the same to them—­the noted videogames journalist
Leigh Alexander writes, “That’s the thing about games. When luck is a
factor, it’s just one within a generally-­predictable ecosystem. In a video
game there are only so many things that your enemy can do. You can
learn what those are. You can, through practice and repetition, gain
complete control over an environment where there is only so much
that can go wrong.”16 Video games typically exist in a space that is dif-
ferent from life outside them. Unlike the luck required to have things
go right when people can act in unpredictable ways, video games are
subject to a rule set that can be exhausted and memorized. The boss
will always move in a certain pattern; opposing players are limited to
a certain set of choices. The focus on this kind of predictability is spe-
cific to, and possibly unique to, video games. In an article about his
frustration with the distance tracking in the augmented reality mobile
game Pokémon Go, Stephen Totilo argues that video games comprise
systems that can be understood, and that the point of playing them
is to learn those rules and how to exploit flaws in them. He sums up
his argument with the contention that “the logic of a well-­structured
game promises the predictability that regular life doesn’t have. If we
understand how a game works and input something into its system,
we assume we’ll get a fair output. Players of Diablo know this as they
kill enemies and pick up loot. Players of Candy Crush know this as
they plot their moves. Players of Super Mario Bros. know this as they
time their jumps. Know the system, then take advantage of it.”17 To-
tilo claims to address the general category of games, but he is really
only addressing how many video games currently work. Designing
video games in this manner is a choice reinforced by the community
of designers and players that continue making and playing titles built
around the general premise of a fair, predictable game. Systems with
greater human interaction are subject to much more social interac-
Coding Meritocracy 102
tion and can be far more unfair in their design, especially if they are
based on the unpredictability of people, like Alexander’s example of
StreetWars. Although culture binds us in other interactions, we could
act radically differently than expected. The eventual lack of options
in video games puts a particular focus on skill and practice while lim-
iting the role of luck as a design consideration, which feeds directly
into meritocratic norms. Alexander continues, “The beauty in video
games, in all designed interaction, is that they offer you the delusion
of grandeur, the intoxicating misconception that all challenge in life
is simply a matter of systems thinking . . . Video games will always
protect us from the truth: how smart we are not.”18 Video games are
typically designed to make players feel like they earned their victories,
that it is to their own credit that they won. Video games are made to
be conquered and, outside of competitive forms of video games where
players are directly pitted against one another, players are generally
supposed to win. Meritocratic game design creates a situation where
players are led to believe they are attributable for their successes and
discouraged from thinking about how the game is set up for them to
win. Although these are comforting thoughts, they also set up terms
and expectations that quickly turn sour when players do not encoun-
ter the success they have been taught to expect.
A second example of how the broader category of games parts ways
from video games is in the case of collectible card games (CCGs) like
Magic: The Gathering. In a collectible card game, the options and
resources available to a player are dependent on the cards a player
has available. In many cases, the cards one has are directly related to
the amount of money a person has spent buying cards with which to
play the game.19 As one player notes, “Typically, in the CCG world
new cards are released as an entire set that you need to chase down
by opening up packs of cards. In the world of Magic, this makes for
an awkward couple of weeks as people without the time, money, and
desire to track down all the new best cards are at a significant disad-
vantage.”20 In effect, the balance in the typical collectible card game
runs counter to the balance in video games. Instead of focusing only
on time investment or skill, these games add financial resources to the
equation, as a lesser player with a better deck will more readily beat the
most skilled player. Money may not be the best way to subvert mer-
itocracy, but the reliance on amassing a card collection makes CCGs
 103 Coding Meritocracy
lean toward an aristocratic mode of order. Skill and time investment
still factor in, but they are far less pure concerns, and it is widely un-
derstood that investing in the game increases one’s chances at success.
Players who buy the occasional pack without focusing on trading or
purchasing specific cards are effectively playing a more difficult, lim-
ited game than those who invest more money, time, and energy into
the game.21 There are game types and specific tournaments that limit
a player’s prior investment, from restricted modes to drafts that limit
access to a certain set of cards, and games like Ascension and Domin-
ion are based around a common set of cards. However, the addition
of financial resources into consideration upsets any sort of appeal to
pure meritocratic expectation and changes the terms on which cer-
tain games are played, potentially opening the door for one example
of how to subvert a consistent reliance on one approach to design-
ing games.
Meritocratic game design is a key thread throughout many con-
temporary video games that frames the culture that develops around
them. The tropes advanced by this mode of approaching and design-
ing games leads to a reciprocal relationship between designers and
players that continually reinforces the importance of merit in games.
This process limits and constrains the kinds of appeals players and
designers make while shaping our expectations about what makes
something a good video game. Buying into the notion of meritocracy
also sets the terms for our interaction with one another. We think
about video games as a proper test of skill and effort, rather than as
something more contingent. Meritocracy is even more thoroughly
integrated into video games, however, as it is repeatedly used as a key
narrative trope.

Meritocratic Game Narratives

It is easy to find meritocratic narrative elements in games. One of the
most consistent examples is how games typically begin from a position
where the central character is a weak, relatively powerless individual
who then transforms over the course of the game into something quite
different. The most recent version of the Tomb Raider franchise set out
to tell Lara Croft’s origin story, putting her on an island, which gives
a narrative setting for a series of events that, according to one reflec-
Coding Meritocracy 104
tion on the game, takes “her from player surrogate to toughened sur-
vivor in a believable manner” in which “the player relationship with
Lara shifts dynamically from start to end.”22 Part of the point of re-
booting the game was to alter perceptions about Lara Croft and to
change her from a rich kid of great means into a vulnerable character
with whom players were likely to identify. Effectively, this recast the
Tomb Raider series from being centered around a person of privilege
to a person who suffered and worked her way through great obstacles
to become successful. According to one critic, rebooting Lara Croft
and Tomb Raider was about “making Lara into a survivor, both inside
the game and out on real-­world store shelves.”23 This redescription of
Lara Croft fits clearly within a meritocratic narrative, where the player
is given a chance to grow and develop alongside the character that
represents them within the game. As the player becomes more pow-
erful, the character is also, reflecting processes carefully wrapped in a
narrative where those who are talented and who work hard become
powerful and successful through their own, individualized actions.
Meritocratic game narratives can be found in other, similar se-
ries, like Uncharted, in which Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception tells of
protagonist Nathan Drake’s origin. Although allegedly related to the
famed explorer Francis Drake in the lore of the game, care is taken to
highlight all the obstacles Nathan Drake overcame to get to a place of
fame, fortune, and adventure. Released into the custody of the state
after his mother committed suicide and his father gave him up, Drake
is clearly cast as someone who overcame substantial obstacles through
his craftiness and hard work. Nathan Drake started with nothing, but
through the player’s efforts and the character’s canny repartee Drake
ascends to capture relics all over the world and overcome both natural
and supernatural enemies. His mentor, Victor “Sully” Sullivan, selects
Drake because of his skills rather than because of his birthright, pres-
ently a true meritocratic tale. The tie to Francis Drake is even more in-
teresting considered in light of meritocracy and player identification.
The clear implication of the narrative arc in the series is that if Nathan
had easily proven his lineage under any sort of aristocratic norms he
likely would not have become a highly capable explorer and adven-
turer, because he would have been gifted status instead of earning it
through the player’s efforts. Nathan’s fight to prove his identity also
gives him a much easier route to identification with players. Instead
 105 Coding Meritocracy
of being a clear heir to an explorer’s legacy, Nathan is someone the
world has aligned against, giving the player far more agency to help
him establish his merit and reason to work on his behalf.24
There are also plenty of spaces in which to find tales of merit out-
side the realm of action games. The casual game sector also relies on
meritocratic tropes, as players are cast as settlers of the wild west in
Zynga’s The Pioneer Trail, while Glu Mobile’s pair of Stardom games
and Kim Kardashian: Hollywood (KKH) are all about ascending to the
status of superstar from nothing. These three games are based on a
similar game engine and all possess the same basic narrative struc-
ture: players are tasked with becoming famous by climbing the celeb-
rity ladder from E-­list to A-­list and, ideally, holding the number-­one
spot as the most famous person in their version of the game. Dif-
ferent editions of the games start the player in different positions:
Stardom: Hollywood sets the player out as a “Starbeans” barista, and
players in Kim Kardashian: Hollywood are working in clothing retail
when they have a chance encounter with Kim Kardashian while clos-
ing the store. Seemingly chance encounters and substantial effort at
tapping dots are wrapped in a narrative of straightforward success, as
long as the player keeps showing up, working hard, and making good
choices. Backsliding is all too easy if the game is ignored, as players
are required to labor attentively to accrue four or five stars on mis-
sions to gain fans and climb the social ladder. Further, if players fail to
check in daily, they will quickly find that many of their in-­game fans
have left them, pushing them down the A-­list and back toward being
forgotten. Stardom and KKH offer worlds where the path to fortune
and fame are clear because there are no structural barriers to success.
Anyone can make it, but one must prove oneself appropriately mer-
itorious to get there.
Building narratives around meritocratic character arcs gives play-
ers an easy access point by which to identify with the avatar that em-
bodies them in the game. Basing the story around skill and success is
also a way of seducing the player, as we are shown just how much we
matter. These story choices pair well with meritocratic game design,
helping to solidify a position where video games can frequently be
seen as empowerment fantasies, where players are allowed to do and
become things we simply cannot imagine trying outside the frame-
work of a game. These narrative choices also establish worlds where
Coding Meritocracy 106
all players are asked to play by the same rules, which sorts the skilled
from the unskilled. Rarely encouraging reflection about access issues
or structural impediments, a focus on meritocracy in the narrative of
the game partners with meritocratic game design to focus on the in-
dividuals playing games, on their skill, and on their responsibility to
work harder and get better. The story is something all players experi-
ence, putting everyone in a similar position and on common ground so
that we can be sorted out based on our relative ability in a seemingly
sensible, balanced, and fair way. We must work to overcome the ob-
stacles in front of us in order to reach the end of the game or the top
of the ladder, but that journey requests that we prove our merit. The
story reassures us that if we work hard enough, if we are persistent
enough, if we are skilled enough, we will meet with success. As we may
find less and less of that in our real lives, the seductiveness of games
with stories predicated on being able to make it big will likely become
more irresistible. Beyond points where there are clear game-­design or
narrative elements that advance meritocratic norms in games, how-
ever, there are also parts of games that have both design and narra-
tive function. One of the most interesting features to consider is the
ubiquitous integration of leveling into games.

Leveling: You Just Keep Getting Better

Originating in role-­playing games, player levels have become a widely
used mechanic across almost all types of games. On its face, leveling
appears to be a design concern, as it relates to how players interact in
the world of the game and to what options and abilities they are likely
to have access. However, leveling also drives an underlying narrative
of forward progress in games, as player effort is quantified into experi-
ence points and character growth. Leveling has been integrated across
a variety of genres, including first-­person shooter games like Border-
lands and Destiny, sports games released by both Electronic Arts and
2K Sports, and throughout the casual gaming sector. Borderlands was
praised for the integration of role-­playing elements, like leveling and
loot, in a genre where players typically only became more powerful
by getting new weapons. Leveling allows the integration of different
skills, abilities, and options over time, which allows players the oppor-
tunity to further specialize into the kind of roles they wish to play and
 107 Coding Meritocracy
better show off their talent and ability. Leveling in sports games en-
ables EA Sports to create incentives to play repeatedly under a given
account by earning experience and gaining access to the various perks
that are locked behind level barriers, thereby transforming the pro-
cess of playing sports games into an ongoing, potentially endless ex-
perience with plenty of rewards along the way. Leveling systems also
offer players a visible marker of their merit and a compelling reason
to keep upgrading to the newest version of a series (i.e., to avoid losing
their progress). Leveling and other role-­playing and CCG-­like ele-
ments in various versions of EA’s “Ultimate Team” features are pow-
erful enough that prominent online power-­leveling sites, like IGXE,
offer FIFA and Madden NFL coins alongside World of Warcraft gold.
In casual games, levels can work as paywalls or as a means by which to
encourage continued play and attention. In contemporary game play
and design, player leveling is a big deal.
One of the first books in the most recent wave of game criticism,
Edward Castronova’s Synthetic Worlds, focused largely on his experi-
ence playing games like EverQuest and an early incarnation of World
of Warcraft. Speaking directly about status gains and player differen-
tiation in online games, he wrote:

Humans seem to prefer the challenge that inequality represents

rather than the security that equality affords—­with one very im-
portant proviso: everyone’s status at the start of the game must be
equal. If (and only if) everyone starts with the same opportuni-
ties, the same amount of money (usually none), the same ability to
choose roles and character types, then the resulting inequality is
not taken to be unfair. Rather, status inequality happens because of
the choices people make, and so long as everyone starts out with
the same opportunities, the inequalities that choices create acquire
the character of a fun game rather than a crushing of the spirit.25

This brief manifesto for game design, echoing Daniel Bell’s calls for a
meritocracy based on equality of opportunity, is integrated through-
out contemporary video games. Leveling in video games provides the
kind of design and narrative function of inequality that Castronova
praises here. Leveling gives a quick and easy way for players to com-
pare themselves to others. Leveling provides a clear goal for players
Coding Meritocracy 108
to strive for, motivating them to keep playing for the next perk that
will make them stronger. Leveling promises a transparent kind of in-
equality that makes abstract effort at a game concrete and intelligi-
ble. Leveling is the kind of game mechanic that drives commentary
like the following from Simon Parkin: “There are many reasons that
video games are a potent draw to the human mind, but perhaps none
more so than the fact that they are endlessly fair and just. They re-
ward you for your efforts with empirical, unflinching fairness. Work
hard in a game and you level up. Take the path that’s opened to you
and persevere with it and you can save the world. Every player is given
an equal chance to succeed.”26 These ideas are foundational to the es-
tablishment and advancement of meritocratic norms in games. When
considered in isolation, video games certainly seem fair (e.g., they are
consistent from player to player), but there is enough difference and
challenge to them to create inequality among players (and certainly
in comparison to those who do not play games). As Parkin continues,
this sort of appeal is alluring, “especially to people whose experiences
in life have been of injustice and arch unfairness,” but the particular
notion of fairness embedded in systems like leveling drives the devel-
opment and adoption of meritocratic norms.27
Meritocracy is predicated on inequality of character and effort.
The ideological drive behind it is to sort people based on their abil-
ity and talents. However, the clear, obvious issue with meritocracy is
that it can be hard to measure a person’s skills and drive. Certainly, as-
sessments can be developed, interviews can be done, and conclusions
can be reached about a person’s relative merit; it is attempted all the
time. However, the design conceit of leveling in contemporary games
is that it makes those judgments automatic, fluid, and so easy that they
recede into the background. Leveling ensures the appearance that we
all start from the same place and then allows us to see how we stack
up against other players, as we know they are going through the same
things we are. The status inequality Castronova believes we seek is
translated into a number that grows slowly over time and broadcasts
our efforts and skill to everyone we encounter. However, the notion
that we all start from the same place requires deliberate inattention
to the resources players bring to a game in the first place. From skill
transfer to economic resources to free time, players rarely start at the
 109 Coding Meritocracy
same place, much like standardized exams in schools assess far more
than just talent and effort.
Leveling is perhaps the single most powerful meritocratic trope
in contemporary games, a design and narrative device that is rapidly
approaching omnipresence in video games. Fed by the prominence
of leveling in such a wide variety of games, levels teach players that
there is a preferred approach to play. Engagement is driven by accru-
ing the next level, the next piece of gear, the next win. Effort in the
game is readily translated into clear demarcations of skill and ability
that fundamentally affect how players interact with one another. It was
generally understood at the launch of World of Warcraft that hitting
the maximum level in a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG)
was just the pretext to begin a new game based on the continuous ac-
quisition of newer, better gear. In games like Destiny, levels are inte-
grated as a way to gate progress and require players to grind to get to
the appropriate spot of progression and then be tested in some new
way, all of which is just a fancy way of quantifying player effort and
ability. Leveling is a clear game-­design element, but it is also tightly
anchored into a narrative of progress, advancement, and winning. By
integrating leveling into games, designers set up a certain kind of ex-
pectation about how the game will work and how players will interact
with it. Beyond the primary story of whatever is happening in Azeroth
or the NFL, game players are encouraged to think about games in
particular kinds of ways, ones where the allegedly central story often
recedes and the compulsion to get just one more level or a bit more
progress becomes the driving narrative experience. Leveling is often
the key way players interact with the game, as it is the feature that lets
us believe we are all starting from the same place and establishing our
power and status through our own skill and effort.
There are a few examples of games where players could actually
lose levels, most notably in MMOGs like EverQuest and Final Fan-
tasy XI Online. In these games, if players died they faced harsh con-
sequences, from losing experience points to accruing experience debt
that would have to be paid off before they could level freely again.
Should a character lose enough experience points they would actually
drop levels, becoming less powerful and requiring them to earn their
way back up to reach the same level of status. In my experience this
Coding Meritocracy 110
led to a very risk-­averse style of play for most of the game, as players
sought to limit their chances of dying in ordinary play and focused
on engaging in battles they knew they were likely to win so as not to
risk penalties accrued upon death. These design features certainly fit
norms of meritocracy, as players who could not prove themselves wor-
thy were the ones being punished, but they have largely faded away—­
for instance, a successor to these titles, World of Warcraft, was hailed
for getting rid of harsh penalties for death and facilitating more dy-
namic, risky play.28
The ubiquity of leveling in games shapes the terms on which we
interact with them and crafts the environment of what we expect and
how things work. Leveling is a key part of the symbol system of video
games that translates the abstract efforts of button pushing into a
framework of progression, advancement, and skill. Status inequalities
become clear, and leveling helps us figure out both who we should
be looking up to and who should be looking up to us, based on what
players have displayed in the game. Effectively, leveling works to facil-
itate and adjudicate decisions made based on merit. By infusing both
design and narrative, leveling is a primary ordering premise of con-
temporary video games that frames how we think video games should
work while requiring us to operate under the auspices of a meritocratic
system, with all its flaws.
Leveling is a starting point for seeing how thoroughly meritocratic
elements are integrated into games, one that is particularly powerful
because of its prevalence. Perhaps a single example of the merito-
cratic norms in games is enough for some, but a deeper dive into spe-
cific cases of games, game elements, and how they work together to
advance a meritocratic ideology demonstrates just how much video
games celebrate and depend on a presumed social order based on skill
and ability, even though initial access points to video games are rid-
dled with inequality.
4
Judging Skill
From World of Warcraft to Kim Kardashian: Hollywood

I believe the reason meritocratic elements have become so central

to video games is closely linked to what the target audience of video
games expects from them. The chance to develop, prove, and show
off skill is precisely what draws a certain kind of person to a specific
kind of game, which frames the culture, expectations, and terms of
engagement surrounding video games. This chapter presents a tour
through a variety of examples showing just how integral meritocracy
is to the core of video games.
In the early days of modern videogame studies, by far the most
frequently studied genre of games was massively multiplayer online
games (MMOGs). From EverQuest to World of Warcraft (WoW) with
an occasional Final Fantasy or Star Wars game in between, these on-
line role-­playing games dominated journal publications and confer-
ence proceedings. They also proved quite popular with the larger
population of people playing video games, as EverQuest and World
of Warcraft were both huge, high-­water-mark games. WoW specif-
ically, and MMOGs more generally, are easy places in which to see
meritocratic elements dominating game design and play. Beyond the
dependence on levels as an ordering principle for the game, players
at the highest level quickly encounter a gear treadmill, where they
are enticed into a system by which they play largely to acquire bet-
ter equipment that will surely be made obsolete at some point in the
not-­too-­distant future. As Jesper Juul explains, MMOGs are games
111
Judging Skill 112
of labor that, in meritocratic terms, are largely about testing the ef-
fort and personal drive of players.1 Effectively, the game of almost any
MMOG boils down to leveling as high as possible in order to collect
better gear, then collect even better gear, and on and on. This does
not necessarily make for a meritocracy, but the way things are read
and interpreted by the community is clearly meritocratic.
As my play in World of Warcraft moved from launch to the first few
expansions, I saw players go from judging others based on whether
they were of an appropriate level to assessing them based on other,
more nuanced factors. Elements like required achievements and gear
score, which is a rough calculation of the quality of a player’s equip-
ment, evolved to become key parts of how players interacted with one
another due to designer decisions and player choice.2 New measures
for sorting and assessing the capabilities of strangers were developed
shortly after designers introduced new modes of grouping players.
As developers released group-­and raid-­finding systems, players were
placed in situations where they were judging whether they wanted
to play with others they may not have previously met. Players were
being asked to risk their time and potential repair costs for the chance
to play with people they did not know. Judgments of strangers were
based exclusively on perceived ability, and the easiest skill-­based deci-
sions were made based on what a character had accomplished before.
This was a particular interpretation of skill, as it was entirely backward
looking, and it drove evaluation based on a snap assessment without
any room to judge the context in which those accomplishments were
achieved. Meritocratic decisions can be quick and straightforward,
but they strip out nuance. When trying to pull a raid group together,
the speed at which one fills out a group often takes precedence over
judiciousness in the selection process. In the case of WoW it is nota-
ble that the primary objections to things like gear score were not that
they were based only on skill, but that they did not judge skill appro-
priately since they only looked at what a player had once done and
not what a player was likely to do now. In my experience, objections
to judging people based on their skill were muted; rather, the central
question was about which system was the best at assessing the likely
talent, capability, and relative merit of players.
Meritocracy in World of Warcraft spreads well beyond putting a
group together and assessing which strangers with whom to group
 113 Judging Skill
up. WoW, like many MMOGs, is riddled with multiple ladders and
sorting systems for players to show off their accomplishments. Media
coverage of players is dominated by reports about highlights and ac-
complishments, from completing all the achievements at any given
point in the game to accomplishing world-­firsts in raiding and the far
more common realm-­firsts.3 The design and interpretation of WoW
was fundamentally based on assessing which players and groups of
players were the most skilled relative to others at any given point in
time. Players who were not on the bleeding edge could still sort them-
selves against what they perceived to be their peer group to bench-
mark where they were and where they wanted to be. Focused on
skill and effort, WoW and other MMOGs tend to be based on design
elements that further meritocratic expectations among players; this
builds a community where the default expectation is that all will be
judged based on their perceived talents and systems will be developed
to make judgments quick and automated.
One point where merit is most openly assessed in MMOGs is in
competitive raiding, which is typically only engaged in by high-­level,
frequent players. In the course of raiding, games like WoW arguably
shift from games of labor into games of skill, as players are required
to learn elaborate strategies in order to defeat computer-­controlled
bosses and acquire new equipment.4 Because new gear is prized, the
groups of people engaging in raiding need a way to distribute re-
wards. The most commonly accepted method has become the use of
dragon kill points (DKP).5 As detailed by Mark Silverman and Bart
Simon, the original form of DKP gave players points for each dragon
kill they attended, which could then be converted into opportuni-
ties to roll a die to try and win a desired item when it became avail-
able, effectively an effort-­plus-­chance system. However, as Silverman
and Simon note, DKP has shifted over time, as the system became
more complicated and the allocation of loot changed from being de-
termined by the game of chance inherent to dice rolls to being re-
placed with “a kind of symbolic currency through which play could
be exchanged for DKP, which then could be exchanged for in-­game
goods.”6 The process turned participation in desired activities into
points that could then be spent on rewards. Silverman and Simon dis-
cuss how some of the best guilds in the world rejected DKP because
it focuses players on rewards, rather than on group accomplishments,
Judging Skill 114
and can encourage players to hoard points in order to get a highly
prized item, rather than pursuing a handful of incremental upgrades
that are in the best interest of the group as a whole. The broad adop-
tion of DKP, along with the process of developing and enforcing it,
disciplines players, thereby incentivizing certain kinds of choices, like
acting in self-­interest on one’s individual desire, and discouraging oth-
ers, like pursuing collaboration and a utilitarian focus on the group,
through the development of a personal currency in a group context.
In so doing, guilds end up using DKP to enforce standards of meritoc-
racy on players. DKP tracks effort through presence at activities, and
rewards skill by awarding points when the group is successful. Silver-
man and Simon argue that DKP is a form of disciplinary power that
“associates a quantifiable measure to the value of each guild member
in terms of their level of contribution.”7 As a system wholly developed
by players and generally tracked and maintained outside the games
themselves, DKP is an artifact of how players can intervene in play
and further meritocratic norms by codifying what counts as merit in
their own allocation of scarce resources beyond what game develop-
ers originally intended.
A second genre of game also relies on meritocratic norms in both
design and narrative. Sports games, like the NBA 2K and FIFA series,
integrate single-­player modes where the player can engage in a “My
Player” or “My Career” mode. The specifics of each experience de-
pend on the particular game, but the basic outline is that the player can
create a personal avatar that then tries to make it in the professional
sports world the game represents. In setup, the player will typically
name his or her avatar and make some key selections, from appear-
ance and measurables like height and weight to position in the game
and favorite team. In some games the player can pick the team with
whom they are affiliated; in others they are subject to a draft or other
sort of team-­selection mechanism. In some of the newest versions of
sports games, like NBA 2K16 and FIFA 17, the create-­a-­player mode
features an extended scripted component to increase immersion and
integrate a meritocratic narrative within the game. Overall, though,
the player is placed in a position where his or her avatar starts out rel-
atively unskilled and develops over the course of repeated play. Games
like the NBA 2K series let the player choose where to spend points
to make his or her on-­court avatar better. In others, like the FIFA se-
 115 Judging Skill
ries, points are earned and distributed based on achievements accom-
plished in various games played. The player starts out as a relatively
weak, fringe member of the team, but with enough effort, with enough
playing time and enough personal success, he or she will rise to be-
come one of the best players in the game. Before the end of my first
season of NBA 2K13, my much taller version of NBA star Chris Paul
had become a beast, leading the league in both points and rebounds,
and was clearly established as one of the most dominant players. On
the other hand, my FIFA 14 avatar took more work and was constantly
loaned out to lesser teams by my parent club, Juventus. In both worlds,
I was a top prospect whose progress was constantly moving forward
and who would become a star if I were good enough and played often
enough to get my avatar there.
The one thing that might set meritocracy in sports games adrift
would be injury. However, after playing many seasons in multiple
games I rarely found my player getting injured for any substantial
length of time. My experience could certainly be the benefit of short-­
run luck, but it also would make some sense that the developers de-
crease the risk of injuries to allow players to enjoy the game more.
In any case, the game modes are largely based on the player’s ability
to elevate his or her avatar’s level of play. In so doing they lay out a
meritocratic framework where players who work hard enough and
play frequently will progress forward in their virtual career. Instead
of being derailed by all the kinds of things that can happen to pro-
fessional athletes, the virtual avatars we create in games will progress
as long as we are there to play as them and make them better. This
straight path celebrates merit and ignores any structural barriers to
life as a professional athlete, as players can achieve far more than most
real people ever will. Career modes celebrate skill and achievement,
depicting success in virtual life as simply a matter of showing up and
playing. The videogame version of a professional sports superstar is
never a “could have been” or “never was,” because of the skill and ef-
fort displayed by the person behind the controller.
Quite different from MMOGs and almost a genre of its own, the
Grand Theft Auto series shows a different side of meritocracy in games.
As a single-­player game for most of its existing run, the game is predi-
cated on telling repeated meritocratic narratives. After the game intro-
duced an overarching narrative with Grand Theft Auto III, the story is
Judging Skill 116
almost always based on a criminal who starts at the bottom and rises
to the top of the criminal underworld through the player’s deftness
at making choices and pushing buttons in a manner that moves the
game along. Grand Theft Auto III starts with the player being left for
dead by his girlfriend, Vice City starts one as a hit man who was re-
cently released from prison and who almost immediately falls into a
drug deal gone wrong, San Andreas tracks a character who returns to
his old neighborhood after his mother is murdered, GTA IV tracks a
survivor of an Eastern European war, and Chinatown Wars is based
around a character whose father is killed and who himself is then as-
saulted, kidnapped, and left for dead. GTA V deviates from the frame-
work somewhat by introducing three characters as protagonists, but
all have their own bottom from which to start the game. Michael is
in witness protection after a botched robbery, Franklin bonds with
Michael by rebelling against his oppressive boss and getting fired, and
Trevor is at war with everyone from motorcycle clubs to the Triads,
an Asian crime syndicate. Grand Theft Auto games mix up the location
and certain elements of the game play, but they invariably start with a
character who has fallen from grace and who, through the interven-
tion of the player, will rise to the top.
Grand Theft Auto IV is a high point in the narrative development
of the series, and the tale the game chooses to tell is intensely meri-
tocratic. The protagonist in the game, Niko Bellic, is introduced to
players in the opening moments of the game as a recent immigrant
to Liberty City, which is based on New York City, from Eastern Eu-
rope. Niko is a war veteran who was betrayed in a pivotal battle and
is setting out to start a new life in Liberty City and to find out more
about what happened in the war. His only established connection in
this new life is his cousin Roman, who promised to let Niko in on his
massively successful business ventures, but Niko quickly learns that
Roman is prone to hyperbole and that to be successful Niko will have
to make it on his own. Early in the game, Niko starts out by doing
grunt work for other people. He delivers packages, metes out justice
for those his bosses send him out after, and scrabbles together re-
sources to try to upgrade his clothes and housing. As the game pro-
gresses, players unlock new areas of Liberty City, places with more to
do and higher-­value housing and cars. Through successful play, Niko
rises through the underworld, transitioning from doing things for oth-
 117 Judging Skill
ers to accomplishing his own goals. Players see real, tangible benefits,
from comedy shows and other features they can access when deeper
into the game to a greater variety of romantic partners to seduce and
the wider selection of guns available for those who have proved their
merit. Niko’s arc is incessantly upward, as players move through the
story line and Niko establishes himself as a kingpin in Liberty City.
Any setback is temporary, as a failed mission can easily be restarted and
tried again. Niko’s arc is a violent version of the American dream: by
the end of the game, in both material wealth and accomplishment of
life goals, Niko is far more successful than he was when he arrived in
Liberty City. The meritorious intervention of the player behind the
controller is what drives his story forward, and the player completes
chapters in a meritocratic tale.
Similar to the way MMOGs demonstrate meritocratic norms
through their design and game play, Grand Theft Auto games integrate
a focus on success and the ability to overcome the worst of situations
through hard work and the player’s ability. Casting the character at the
lowest point in his life gives the narrative a clear place from which to
rise and also gives players an opportunity to buy in and bond with the
character they are going to be controlling. The writers get a straight-
forward, appealing story to tell, while players get a chance to start at
a place that is clearly below their station in life and then make it to a
place far above where they likely reside. GTA, like WoW, is an actu-
alization of a meritocracy, but in a fundamentally different way. In-
stead of being based on game-­play elements that privilege and reward
skill, GTA games tell a tidy yet bloody story about how one can rise
through the world. As low as the characters start in the game, if played
in any way resembling what the designers intended, they will rise up
and become rich, powerful, and elite. Although players are unlikely to
ever follow the life path of the protagonists, the GTA series reinscribes
a meritocratic world where hard work and skill always win the day.
A fourth genre of game that relies on meritocratic norms are mul-
tiplayer online battle arenas (MOBAs), most prominently represented
by League of Legends (LoL), which was first discussed in chapter 2.
MOBA games are typically based on dividing players into two teams
and having them engage in play with the ultimate goal of destroying
something in the opposing team’s base. The games typically move
in stages, with early time being spent on gaining experience and re-
Judging Skill 118
sources so that players become powerful enough to attack the oppo-
nent’s base. Players typically level up by either battling non-­player
characters or trying to surprise or overwhelm opponents, as there
are substantial rewards for killing members of the other team. As one
team gets more powerful than the other it is easier for them to kill
their opponents, compounding their advantage as they press forward
to win. Defenders have an advantage because of defensive structures
within their own base, but being out-­leveled and out-­resourced can
quickly make a more powerful team’s victory inevitable. LoL typically
revolves around teams of five players, which can either be premade
groups or assembled by the game. Matches typically run from twenty
to sixty minutes, which means that when one team gains a seemingly
insurmountable advantage players may be playing for a fair amount of
time simply to see the game out. The most played title in the world at
the time of this writing, LoL has probably done more outright work
to battle problems in gamer culture than any other game. Riot Games
has gone on a multiyear campaign in LoL to try to “cure toxic behav-
ior.”8 With the premise that negative behavior would never go away
on its own, Riot developed “Team Player Behavior” with the intent of
trying to solve issues of griefing, trolling, and harassment.9 The whole
point has been to encourage good sportspersonship, and progress has
clearly been made through occasionally restricting the chat options of
players and nudging them toward good behavior.10 Developing game
structures like “The Tribunal,” which lets players review complaints
about bad behavior, and being willing to ban professional players for
abuse and harassment puts Riot in a position to make strides in com-
batting negative behavior, but I contend the fight will never be over
because of the game’s reliance on extreme meritocratic expectations.11
Much of the trouble surrounding LoL comes from one particular
form of play: ranked games. Players in ranked games need to have
achieved level 30 and have at least sixteen different champions from
which to choose to play the mode. Specifics of ranked games have
changed over time, but the general framing dynamic is that players
are placed within a ladder system and their wins and losses move them
up and down in accordance with an Elo system, like the one used for
chess.12 Elo systems are designed to group players of similar skill to-
gether in order to facilitate the most competitive games. Winning and
losing changes a player’s Elo rating, which moves them up and down
 119 Judging Skill
the rankings and matches them against somewhat different people. As
players win, their Elo ratings go up in an amount determined by the
system’s prediction of whether they are expected to win. In their next
match they will likely be paired with a better opponent, as the system
tries to divine their “true” talent. The converse happens in the case of
a loss, as a player’s rating will be lowered and he or she will likely face
an opponent the system sees as weaker. LoL’s system, like many other
appropriations of Elo, is divided into levels, and players can move be-
tween labels like Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master,
and Challenger, along with five different tiers within each category.
Being promoted from one tier to the next requires both consistent
success and regular activity, as the higher levels have a built-­in decay
where players lose points if they are not playing frequently enough.
These formulas effectively require players to demonstrate both skill
and effort, boiling the relative merit of players down to a number and
a place in the rankings.
Pitting players against one another in this framework has multiple
notable effects. First, matching players of ostensibly similar skill means
that players are going to lose roughly as often as they win when they
find their appropriate level. Second, ratings like Elo get more accu-
rate as more games are played. The ranking system cannot immedi-
ately judge your skill; it needs you to play game after game to finally
calibrate and assess where you should be. Third, Elo was originally
developed for a single-­player game, chess, and porting the concept to
multiplayer games means that your rating is dependent in part on the
performance of other players. A loss in any Elo system reduces your
rating, which is not fun, but in a multiplayer game the quality of the
performance offered by other players affects the likelihood of your
ability to increase your rating. In a single-­player game, save a distrac-
tion or other circumstantial obstacle, you are largely accountable and
responsible for your own play. However, in a multiplayer game with
an Elo system you are accountable for both your play and that of your
teammates. A player could be the most skilled yet be paired with part-
ners who opt not to engage, and such a player will be hard-­pressed to
do anything other than lose. Your teammate’s actions have an outsized
impact on your individual rating. Individualizing the rating means that
Elo marks are personal and the actions of others can negatively affect
your score. Although you are losing together, the impact is personal-
Judging Skill 120
ized as the outcome of the game on each player is different and has
little to do with how he or she played as an individual. Unless players
are playing with a premade group, this kind of relationship has little
in common with raiding groups in an MMOG or with pickup sports
teams. In those contexts winners and losers are banded together and
there is far less focus on the individual in the outcome of a game. The
individual impact on your rating within LoL fosters the perception
among some of an “Elo hell” that is “populated by griefers/trolls and
‘bad’ players that prevent them from moving up the ranks.”13 A guide
to ranked games in LoL contends that Elo hell is a figment of players’
imaginations, since “a large misconception is that it is always team-
mates that is bringing you down [sic],” and the answer is that “ratings
become more accurate the more games are played [sic]. Think ‘big pic-
ture.’ It can take hundreds or thousands of games to be consistently
matched with similarly skilled players.”14 Although incredibly rational
and likely true, this kind of thinking is much harder to remember in
the moment when you believe some other player has cost you some-
thing through his or her inactivity or poor performance. At the same
time, reports from other games with similar systems, like the com-
petitive mode of Overwatch, indicate that there may be sections of
the ratings that are more hellish than others, largely based on the gap
between players’ expectations of their ability and their actual skills.15
Elo is an attempt to develop a meritocratic system that sorts players
into groups or rankings predicated solely on their skill and effort. Elo
aims to provide a framework in which skill is the sole determinant of
where you are placed and how you encounter the game. In porting that
ideology to LoL, Riot inherited a straightforward way to figure out
how to put players into matches, but the rankings also inject inequality
and toxicity into the system by individualizing group results. Layer on
a healthy dose of needing to depend on others in a multiplayer game
and it should be no surprise that toxicity in the community is a primary
outcome of ranked play. As one commentator notes, Riot is fighting
a never-­ending war on toxic behavior, where “it often feels that when
you aren’t playing with four other friends, chances are you’re going
to run into the scum of the earth. Sure, you can just mute them, but
once someone starts to act this way, it’s immediately reflected in their
play.”16 Ratings decay is an ideal meritocratic companion for Elo’s
measurement of skill, as LoL asks players to both demonstrate ability
 121 Judging Skill
and do so often or let their hard work slip away. Elo’s need for hun-
dreds of matches for proper calibration, in conjunction with the re-
quirement to grind to level 30 to enter ranked play, ensures that LoL
players must demonstrate plenty of effort in addition to skill.
Riot has pursued a variety of efforts to improve community in-
teraction and the quality of player conduct in games. At one point
“Ranked Restrictions” were introduced, which meant negative players
faced chat restrictions and were prevented from engaging in ranked
play until completing a requisite number of games.17 Players quickly
pointed out that this program essentially “turn[d] draft play [where
offenders had to play to lift their restrictions] into a ‘prison island’
for folks with mile-­long mean streaks. That seems like it could hurt
non-­offenders over time, fill their matches with bad eggs. Meanwhile,
reporting tools can be abused, and innocent players could find them-
selves in the clink because somebody—­somewhat ironically—­got mad
at the game and threw a temper tantrum.”18 Riot contended that the
game has seen a precipitous decline in bad behavior, which is now lim-
ited to about 2 percent of the player population. However, that expla-
nation does not line up with the experience of players, one of whom
writes, “At least half of my matches are overwhelmingly negative, at
least in my memory. Perhaps some of this is due to the gruelingly long
nature of League of Legends matches. Regardless of whether it’s a win
or a loss, most matches take a decent amount of mental fortitude. It
seems rougher when I venture into the Ranked Queue alone, only
hoping that all four others on my team won’t jump down my throat
the first chance they get.”19 Although Riot chalks up matters like this
to negativity bias (our tendency to remember bad experiences more
vividly than good ones), there’s also the matter that when players re-
port about their games with Riot employees “you better believe that
everyone is on their best behavior. It’s not like that when they’re not
around.”20 Riot employees are likely to always see a different version
of the game, one that is generally less toxic. A frequent player argues
that one of the key design elements of MOBAs in general and LoL in
particular is that “they’re a lot less fun when you’re not on the winning
team. Uniquely so, I mean.”21 Games can last for about an hour, and in
many matches the advantages accrued by the winning team make that
victory highly probable long before the match actually ends. Much
like the endgame of Monopoly and Risk can be arduous as the winner
Judging Skill 122
marches to his or her almost assured victory, playing from a perceived
losing position is not enjoyable, which leads to the perception that LoL
can be especially brutal to lose. It is certainly reasonable to concede
that Riot has made improvements in the behavior of players playing
it game; however, the foundation of the game is built on design un-
derpinnings that weave toxicity into its very fabric.
Beyond the implicit integration of meritocratic norms into the
structure of ranked play, Riot’s preference for meritocracy can also be
seen in how it is developing League of Legends as an eSport. Featuring
World Championships that have massively grown in size and scope,
aided by streaming viewership numbers that rival the totals traditional
sports draw on television, LoL is one of the most popular competitive
games in existence. In Riot’s fostering the development of competitive
tournaments, however, women have largely been absent. When asked
questions about the lack of women in competitive LoL in advance of
the 2014 World Championships, Riot’s spokesperson responded that
“it’s just a matter of time before there’s either all-­female teams or very
successful female pros,” leading an analyst to note that “the company
isn’t looking at ways to actively facilitate anything on that front, which
implies that they want to treat eSports as purely a meritocracy. They’re
relying on expanding the game’s general audience and playerbase to
add more women to the pool of potential professional players.”22 The
reliance on meritocracy in the competitive version of LoL is certainly
consistent with the overall design of the game, but in trying to treat
everyone the same Riot is overlooking the structural obstacles that
certain communities of players face. Getting more people to play
LoL is likely to add more diversity to the player base, but it is unlikely
to prompt a substantial change in the overall trends in player demo-
graphics, especially when the game is deliberately designed for the best
players, rather than new players or the masses.23 A lack of diversity in
the player community already demonstrates the fact that the game is
not a perfect meritocracy and, therefore, simply adding more players
to a structurally imbalanced system will not fix the problem. When
the platforms and games already require arcane knowledge and play-
ers benefit from structural advantages, equality of opportunity is illu-
sory at best and the system that remains assesses far more than merit.
The entire structure of LoL is predicated on putting people into
competition with one another for status, yet the lead designer of so-
 123 Judging Skill
cial systems at Riot holds that “every standard in #LeagueofLegends
is defined by the community. We (the devs) haven’t influenced or con-
tributed at all to the standards.”24 This willful blindness to the impact
developers have on the game is notable, particularly coming from
the person at the head of battling toxicity. It points to the structural
inattention to addressing how design and development issues are a
key part of toxicity in LoL, not just what is said in a particular game.
Although Riot has achieved a landmark in lowering the proportion
of games with abuse to 2 percent, that approach overlooks two key
points noted by LoL players. First, a “toxic culture is more than just
using slurs; the machine may be getting very good at preventing play-
ers from calling each other offensive names, but is it teaching them
not to be massive jerks in other ways?”25 Second, even if one accepts
the 2 percent number as a meaningful metric, “two percent of 67 mil-
lion League of Legends players is still 1.4 million people. Which isn’t
a small number, let’s face it.”26 Structurally, the design of LoL ensures
that players meet in a meritocratic framework that is most likely to
activate any toxic feelings they may be prone to exhibit.
Any individual’s efforts are dependent on the actions of others,
often people they do not know. Simmering in this cauldron, it should
not be a surprise that people act out and push the limits of whatever
boundaries are put into place. The critiques of meritocracy hold that
systems based on merit get perverted and become corrupt. Further,
by setting up a system on which players are assessed based on their
perceived skill, a community of people is put in a position to question
the decisions being made by their teammates, their opponents, the
game logic, and the developer’s intent. LoL is an enormously success-
ful game that is clearly doing a number of things right, but thinking
deeply about how the game is built demonstrates how the toxicity in
it can be read as a feature, not a bug. There is sufficient toxicity after
years of work that player behavior is still a key focus of the game. Riot
has numbers that are trending in a positive direction, but personnel
at the company are also insulated from the worst of things, as they do
not play the game under the same terms as others and they are only
looking at a particular kind of toxicity. Their mere presence in a game
as elites warps everything around them, and gathering data from ag-
gregate game logs cannot give a complete picture of the experience
for more typical players. Further, by recruiting active gamers and LoL
Judging Skill 124
players as employees, Riot comprises a homogenous group that does
not necessarily have the ideological diversity to address problems with
groupthink. Building a game based on perceptions of skill and getting
players to buy into the myth of meritocracy is a driving force behind
the toxicity in LoL. Fixing player behavior in the game will take far
more than restricting or banning certain players; the system itself is
broken because it is predicated on teaching those at the top that they
have earned both their place and the ability to judge others. By fo-
cusing on individual players and their relative merit, it should not be
a surprise that a team game based on merit and individual rankings
has problems with bad behavior.
Dependence on merit in game design also stretches into mobile
gaming, with Marvel Mighty Heroes representing one of the purest
distillations of an attempt to build the appearance of a meritocratic
system onto a monetization scheme predicated on inequality. Free-­
to-­play games like Marvel Mighty Heroes are an interesting consider-
ation for meritocratic game design, as their monetization structures
are typically built in a manner to enable players to spend vast, poten-
tially unlimited, amounts of money in order to buy their way ahead
in the game. This necessarily imbues a structural advantage for those
players who have more offline resources to invest. Should a game fol-
low the path of monetization too far, it is frequently derided as pay-­
to-­win, so many games in the genre try to design their game play in
a manner that lets players progress through their skill and effort, not
just their pocketbook.
Marvel Mighty Heroes offers a story mode in which players can
send their heroes into battle alongside a computer-­controlled partner,
and also a mode called “Fury’s Files” in which players send their un-
used heroes out to complete missions for Nick Fury (a major character
in the Marvel universe). The main function of these two modes is to
incentivize players to keep a larger roster of characters and to develop
all of them, which offers more opportunities to spend money on the
game. The primary game mode is a multiplayer arena in which play-
ers are sent into battle with three other players on a variety of mission
types, including defeating bosses, defending supplies, and surviving
against waves of computer-­controlled opponents. Players pick three
of their characters, who are placed into battle with similarly matched
 125 Judging Skill
teammates based on the level of their characters, with higher-­level
teams eligible for greater rewards. For a period ranging up to a few
minutes, players try to accomplish whatever task they were given by
moving around and rotating between basic attacks and special moves.
Players can alternate among the three characters they selected, either
as they lose health or as one choice might cause more damage than
another. Upon successful completion of the event, players are ranked
based on the amount of damage they have done and given rewards
consummate with their ranking. Those rewards, called event points,
then correspond to a player’s position on the various leaderboards in
the game. All players are sorted into brackets of one hundred based
on five tiers ranging from bronze to vibranium (a fictional metal that
appears in the Marvel universe). Several times a week the top-­ranked
group of players in each bracket is promoted to the next tier; at the
end of a weeklong event, players are awarded prizes based on their
tier and ranking within it. The primary goal of this mode is to col-
lect event points, which means that the ability to do more damage is
highly valued and generously rewarded.
On its face, this system appears highly meritocratic. Marvel Mighty
Heroes rewards skill based on the amount of damage done in each
battle. The game rewards effort based on consistent play and place-
ment in the brackets and rankings. Paying one’s way forward can be
mitigated by earning characters through both skill and effort. How-
ever, the game’s design and the immense value of inherited position
ensure considerable structural inequalities that shape how the game
plays out in practice. The first major element of the game that com-
promises any attempt at meritocracy is the sorting of characters into
tiers of value. Characters are rated from one to five stars, with higher-­
star characters typically being much more powerful than lower-­star
characters. Players procure additional abilities as they collect multiple
copies of a character, so players who spend to buy many characters or
get exceptionally lucky are given a huge advantage in battle.27 Almost
without exception players with higher-­star characters will dominate
those with lower-­star characters, which enables those with greater re-
sources to readily earn more event points without demonstrating ad-
ditional skill or effort.
A second major inequality is guaranteed through the damage mul-
Judging Skill 126
tiplier system. Three heroes are selected for each event and given a
damage boost. Players who choose to play with one of the selected
heroes get a multiplier of three, two heroes grants a multiplier of
seven, and if someone plays with all three his or her damage is mul-
tiplied by ten. This means that a player can go into battle with an
order-of-magnitude advantage against his or her teammates/compet-
itors. Perhaps the most aristocratic part of the arrangement is that the
required characters for the upcoming week are typically the awarded
characters from the previous week. This locks in a potentially hefty ad-
vantage for the winners, as they both get to bolster their team and gain
a huge advantage in the upcoming competition, making it far easier
to retain their position. It has the effect of holding back new partici-
pants who may be highly skilled, as they are unlikely to be successful
competing against people who have substantial inherited advantages.
These dynamics shape how players engage in play. In my experi-
ence, both at play and from reading the accounts of other players, the
vast majority of players are solely focused on increasing their damage
output and limiting the damage of others. The play becomes far less
about cooperating with others or working as a team and more about
trying to boost one’s own score as much as possible. Alternately, in a
match with superpowered players with built-­in damage multipliers,
the contest becomes about collecting the meager rewards for finishing
at the bottom and hoping for a better shot at competing next time.
Loading screens in the game talk about rewarding the “most effective
player,” but effectiveness is almost entirely circumscribed by the struc-
tural advantages brought into a fight, rather than the skill that may be
displayed within it. Highly limited chat options and battles that last
ninety seconds or less limit the magnitude of toxicity in Marvel Mighty
Heroes, but for a game that seems on its face to aspire to meritocratic
norms it actually has little to do with skill and only nominal links to
effort. By dressing aristocratic behaviors up as a putative meritocracy,
the game boils down to getting what little you can manage or simply
accepting your fate (i.e., lesser rewards) if you don’t have a head start
in battle. The appeal to merit and effectiveness is likely designed to
appeal to a broad category of players, but the trouble the game has in
execution points to issues in game design based on a nobility of wallet
and inheritance of status. However, there are titles trying to thread the
 127 Judging Skill
needle between creating a game based on skill and retaining free-­to-­
play mechanics, most notably Supercell’s Clash Royale.
Based in the fictional world established in Supercell’s game Clash
of Clans, Clash Royale is a highly successful hybrid game that blends
various genres to attract players. The core of the game is battling
against other players in a battle arena reminiscent of MOBAs, all in
an effort to destroy more of your opponent’s tower than he or she de-
stroys of yours. Combat is simplified, though, in a style reminiscent
of Clash of Clans, where the primary control players have concerns
about what to place on the battlefield and where to put it; once the
item is played the game takes over control of the outcome. Players
battle with decks of eight cards they have chosen from dozens of op-
tions. Cards are divided into three primary categories: creatures, like
giants and Valkyries; buildings, like cannons and mortars; and spells
that can do things like damage opponents or freeze them in place for
a period of time. Games take three minutes, but if players are tied
they go to a one-­minute overtime. If neither player destroys an op-
position tower during the overtime the game ends in a tie. Players’
success is defined by a combination of their own skill and the cards
they bring to a match. Possessing both a rock, paper, scissors element,
where certain decks are highly likely to beat others, and an inheritance
of privilege through both the rarity and level of cards, Clash Royale
is far from purely meritocratic. Influence for the card system comes
from collectible card games, where spending more money gets a per-
son rarer and more powerful cards. Clash Royale magnifies that dy-
namic by allowing players to level cards up, with each level making
the card about 10 percent more powerful, but the cost of leveling up
is exponentially more expensive. The main part of Clash Royale is an
open battle system where players have a ranking like in League of Leg-
ends and move up and down in rating based on their success or lack
thereof. Higher-­rated players get access to more exclusive battle are-
nas, which can result in obtaining a wider variety of cards. There is
also a tournament mode, where players enter a time-­limited contest
and are subject to restrictions in an effort to level the playing field. In
a tournament, all players start at a zero rating and must win to move
up the ladder. The rating system is similar to the primary game, but
the limited time frame magnifies the importance of effort, as a player
Judging Skill 128
who loses often can obtain a higher rating than can a player who never
loses but plays far fewer matches.
The hybridized influences for Clash Royale place it in an interest-
ing position with regard to meritocracy and toxicity. The elements,
from battle arenas to rating systems, are lifted from the meritocratic
world of MOBAs, while the card system and free-­to-­play elements
mean that the game has advantages for the aristocrats who choose to
spend on the game. Luck also plays a role, as which cards a player gets
in a pack can help determine his or her success regardless of whether
they are paying for the game.
There are two key pieces of Clash Royale that warrant longer dis-
cussion: the paywall and the chat function. Clash Royale is a free-­
to-­play game where players can pay almost an unlimited amount of
money to progress. Although there is no clear way players can buy
wins, there are three primary ways to spend money in the game: buy-
ing special chests; speeding up the unlocking of chests won in battle;
and buying cards that are released in the store. Getting additional
copies of a card enables players to pay a steadily escalating fee to up-
grade them, with thousands of copies needed to upgrade some cards
to the highest level. The monetization system was set up such that a
top player spent $12,000 on the game within months of its launch.28
Play in the primary mode of the game is based on attempting to earn
trophies to move from the first arena to the last, with rewards and
cards available upon successfully climbing the ladder. Wins earn tro-
phies and losses lose them, which means that a losing streak can drop
players down the ladder as quickly as a winning streak can help them
climb it. The game is set up so that players accrue trophies until they
hit the point where their combination of cards and skills is quickly
beaten down by other players, which according to one reviewer can
feel “like a pay wall, and maybe it is, as for a lot of people the only
way to progress further is to keep plugging away at getting free cards
or just spend some money until you get better cards or level up the
ones you have.”29 Patience and steady effort can help a player sub-
vert the payment mechanisms in the game, but having lesser cards
means a player needs much more skill to ascend the ladder and pos-
sible payment always lingers as a way to climb more quickly.30 This
design blends meritocracy and aristocracy, as skill can trump better
cards, but better cards magnify the importance of greater skill and
 129 Judging Skill
effort for those with lesser decks. The lack of traditional videogame
balance in the primary mode of the game is constrained somewhat in
tournament mode, where players are limited in how powerful their
cards can become, which caused one player to argue that tournaments
were more fun than ranked mode because players in tournaments do
not play at as much of a disadvantage, making the game more merito-
cratic.31 Players seek out both inequity and chances to play on a level
playing field, making efforts to subvert meritocracy difficult. Clash
Royale attempts to deal with toxicity in an interesting way, however,
by limiting interaction among competing players.
In addition to the short games, which typically are completed in
fewer than three minutes, chat options in the game are limited to ten
choices with six words or phrases and four emotes. As Eli Hodapp
sums it up for Touch Arcade: “Communication in the game has been
distilled down to ten buttons, and through the miracle that is human
nature on the internet, people have figured out how to be total sh*t
heads with only these ten emotes at their disposal.”32 Typically, play-
ers seeking to harass others spam choices like “Wow!” and a crying
emote while winning, leading players to request an option to mute
the emotes and play without them. As player calls for a mute button
grew, the game’s developer, Supercell, released a statement claiming
that the core design principle of the game was building cards that
players either loved or hated, and that “the same principle—­evoking
strong emotions—­is at the heart of why we’re not planning to imple-
ment a mute option. Emotes are loved by some and hated by others—­
even within the Clash Royale team! We believe these strong emotions
are integral to the core of the game.”33 The ability for players to ha-
rass one another shines through even with limited options, largely
because the stakes of the game are both so high and so low. Moving
forward is fun, but moving backward is not, and being harassed with
emotes makes it all less enjoyable. As Eli Hodapp concludes his re-
sponse to the decision by Supercell, “Emote spam is one of the many
reasons I don’t play Clash Royale anywhere near as much as I used to. I
play games to have fun, not be frustrated, which I guess puts me in the
minority when it comes to Clash Royale? This all seems real strange
to me.”34 By placing players in zero-­sum combat, even a limited num-
ber of choices leads some to try to rattle others, leaving the game less
fun for many. Supercell eventually reversed the decision and added a
Judging Skill 130
mute option to Clash Royale; however, the communication between
players is shaped by the system, and bad behavior does not go away
when you have the option to silence opponents.35 Meritocratic sys-
tems, combined with competition and the ability for players to in-
teract, leads to toxic cultures, especially when developers are focused
on unleashing strong emotions among their players. In the wake of
examining several game genres in general, the celebration of skill in
videogame design deserves specific attention.

Achievement Culture: Proving Your Skill

The dominance of skill and merit in video games reaches well be-
yond individual games and into the larger framework of video games
and how they are perceived. The design of game culture celebrates
achievement, and the roots of that commitment to skill date back at
least to the Atari systems and the patches that Activision sent out to
laud certain achievements in games. Now morphed into things like
leaderboards, Gamerscores, and trophies, the effect of these mechan-
ics becoming so solidly integrated into videogame culture is that their
gravitational pull changes how games are played and interpreted. Lea-
derboards are a clear place where players are compared with one an-
other. A former highly competitive Madden NFL player writes that
leaderboards are “a devilish feature,” as they transform “Madden from
an escapist pastime into another stage on which to prove your self-­
worth.”36 Gamerscore is a measure that turns abstract effort in a game
into concrete results that are intelligible to others at a mere glimpse.
Gamerscore bends how games are played, as playing for these meta-­
points becomes a play style to which some adhere and others push be-
yond any reasonable bounds or limits and are then celebrated for their
exceptional proof of merit. My paltry Gamerscore pales in compari-
son to Raymond Cox’s million-­plus points and ten-­thousand-­person
audience on Twitch, but the inclusion and search for points layers a
different kind of game over the top of everything else we play. For
Cox, having the highest Gamerscore has meant that his efforts are
tracked and celebrated by Microsoft, are recorded as Guinness World
Records, and have earned him a modest degree of income through
his fame.37 Perhaps first and foremost, though, the quest to acquire
impressive amounts of Gamerscore twists play, as Cox plays as many
 131 Judging Skill
games as possible and with the primary intent of leeching as many
points from them as he can.38 By adding ranking elements like Activ-
ision’s patches, leaderboards, Gamerscore, and trophies to play, video
games are altered as players are encouraged to think about them as
part of a larger, meritocratic system. Motives shift, intent changes,
and our ability to judge others negatively is magnified; the rhetori-
cal framework in which video games are produced and played shifts
to accommodate a specific kind of instrumental play. As Joel Good-
win sums up the balance of achievement versus art in video games, “If
you’re still looking for the Citizen Kane of Game, you’re not going
to find it on a leaderboard.”39 Although Cox’s single-­minded focus on
Gamerscore likely seems quite foreign to many game players, it is an
edge case of what quantifiable systems can do to how we think about
and play games. Players can opt out of Gamerscore or simply choose
not to think about it, but Microsoft regularly advertises its premium
service, Xbox Live Gold; the games players get for subscribing by
mentioning the achievements available and highlighting how many
points players can get by paying for the service and playing the games.
By opting out, players can ignore this metric, but the inclusion of lea-
derboards and achievements means that play is made instrumental. In
the e-­mail missives that encourage me to subscribe to Xbox Live, Mi-
crosoft spends less space telling me about the game and more space
talking about the achievements I could get from playing it. That ad-
vertising decision helps construct the means by which players will
engage a game, encouraging them to focus on the shiny points, de-
fining what makes that particular game compelling, and establishing
an instrumental relationship with the game. A clear example of how
skill is a key part of contemporary games can be seen by looking at
advocacy for a different conception of how games should work: the
balance between requiring players to read the story in a game and re-
quiring players to play through action sequences, best exemplified by
the controversy over the BioWare game Dragon Age II.
In 2011, BioWare released Dragon Age II, which was “produced
under a very tight time budget”; the game was not well received by
core fans, potentially because “it went a little lighter on the action
mode of playing, as opposed to a strategic, old-­school strategy style
playing.”40 Commenters on both the BioWare forums and on red-
dit went back and found a 2006 interview with one of the writers on
Judging Skill 132
the game, Jennifer Hepler, in which she said her least favorite part
of working in the industry was “playing the games” because she has
“awful hand–­eye coordination, I don’t like tactics, and I can’t read a
game map to save my life. This makes it very difficult for me to play
the myriad games I really should be keeping up on as our compe-
tition.”41 Hepler went on to hypothesize that one thing that would
make games more engaging for her would be to include a fast-­forward
that would let players skip through action sequences, just as they are
routinely able to skip through story-­driven cut scenes. She contends
that a feature like this would make games shorter but far more ac-
cessible to a wider audience of people, and that it would give players
“the same options that we have with books or DVDs—­to skim past
the parts we don’t like and savor the ones we do.”42 A version of story
mode actually ended up shipping in BioWare’s Mass Effect 3, but it
did so alongside an action mode as a pair of difficulty settings. In ac-
tion mode players’ dialogue choices were automated, while in story
mode combat sequences were quicker and easier.43 Action mode was
an expansion of the oft-­used ability to skip cut scenes, as it automated
choices for the player, but story mode just made combat easier, not
skippable. The centrality of combat and the acceptance for relegat-
ing narrative to the background is a prime statement on their relative
values in video games. Action and combat (where players prove their
merit) matter, while narrative is secondary at best. Something like a
story mode that Hepler proposes is a substantial change in what games
are and, potentially, what they should be, as it would disrupt some of
the skill-­based barriers to entry for new players.
A faction of BioWare’s audience reacted negatively to the sugges-
tion that games should be changed to be less reliant on player skill.
Hepler was called the “cancer that is killing BioWare”; a page ap-
peared on the Star Wars: The Old Republic wiki titled Jennifer “The
Hamburglar” Hepler; and an image of an alleged forum post made
by her laid out a mandatory homosexual story line for players in Mass
Effect 3, even though she did not work on the game.44 After Hepler
joined Twitter, the situation became offensive enough that she discon-
tinued her account and one of BioWare’s cofounders released a state-
ment of support for Hepler.45 While a verbal assault on a woman who
works in video games for voicing her opinion about how they could
be designed differently, the vitriol in the reaction points to a desire to
 133 Judging Skill
hold on to video games as separate from other forms of media, that a
special kind of place is expected to be reserved for those who are tal-
ented enough to prove their worth. This is precisely the kind of dy-
namic one would expect to find in a meritocracy, in which the skilled
elites believe they have earned their high status and then protect the
hierarchy against encroachment by the less-­worthy masses.
Hepler laid out a different way of thinking about video games that
was predicated on making games accessible. Instead of putting gates
and limitations based on skill in a video game, more people could ex-
perience the range of experiences in a game if titles were designed dif-
ferently. Instead of being an actualized meritocratic space where the
only ones involved in the subculture were those who “deserve” to be
there because they “earned” their place, video games would become a
different form of a book, movie, or television show that anyone could
play. Some people see this kind of approach as an existential threat
to games, a line of argument that often comes up around pieces of
interactive fiction, which some argue are not games because they do
not have sufficient challenge or particularly rich game-­play elements.
Hepler got attacked because she was a woman speaking out about
games and also because she dared to question the meritocratic con-
ceit of how games should be designed. The toxicity of the response
is notable because what Hepler was choosing to advocate was a way
of thinking about and designing games for everyone. Meritocracies
do not work like that; meritocracies need to exclude some to build
the inequality that gives value to status positions at the top. For video
games to be meritocratic there needs to be an overriding belief that
players earned their victory, they won their success, they deserve their
just rewards, and that others cannot just skip over the parts of the
game that require skill.
Focusing on completion and winning in single-­player games is
particularly interesting because of what happens when we think more
deeply about how they are designed and how “winning” works within
them. In Hepler’s case, there was little outcry about differential diffi-
culty modes, although playing on a harder difficulty mode certainly
maintains more credibility for players. Variable difficulties are well es-
tablished in games. Difficulty is even used as a means to reach out to
a “hardcore” audience who believe that things like BioShock Infinite’s
1999 mode are cool. In a reflection on the design of the exceptionally
Judging Skill 134
difficult version of the game, creative director Ken Levine argued that
“the average gamer stops playing when they fail. The hardcore gamer
says ‘That’s it, I’m gonna show this game who’s boss.’”46 The mode
was designed to evoke nostalgia for games of the past, with the tun-
ing intended to evoke how “failure can be fun” and “that old-­school
feeling of ‘If I fail, I deserved to fail’ instead of ‘the game made me
fail.’”47 Part of the idea behind differential difficulty modes embed-
ded in Levine’s comments is the individual responsibility of players
for their fate in the game. As long as the game is properly designed,
the logical extension of the notion that you deserve your failure is that
you also earn your success when you attain it. The victory in a single-­
player video game is tied to your actions, your skill, your efforts, and
your personal drive, absent of any cultural context.
The celebration of skill is an omnipresent thread in discourse about
video games that sets it apart from other media forms. Game publi-
cations are rife with stories about how the best players do things that
are unthinkable for most players. There are stories about players who
conduct speed runs and complete games and objectives faster than
most would think possible, about how certain players can complete
key objectives without ever dying and play games in a way that de-
velopers likely never imagined, like playing through levels in Super
Mario 64 without ever jumping.48 The excessive focus on skill means
that certain elements of games are not to be questioned, as stepping
out of line in the celebration of skill is likely to be met by what one
game journalist describes as “an open invitation to be told how bad
you are at the game and how you only need to ‘git gud.’”49 This kind
of approach sets games apart from other media, as a focus on skill
can be measured and assessed differently. There is certainly a literary
culture around reading difficult books, like those by James Joyce or
David Foster Wallace, and film fans can argue about interpretations
and preferred readings, but video games quantify, measure, and cele-
brate skill in a manner that other media do not.
One place to clearly see the focus on skill is in discussion about the
series of Souls games developed under Hidetaka Miyazaki. Comprising
Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, Dark Souls II, Dark Souls III, and Blood-
borne, the punishing games are best summed up as an “action series
famous (or infamous) for their merciless difficulty.”50 Discussion sur-
 135 Judging Skill
rounding the games includes paeans to players who are able to make
the “toughest enemies look like chumps” or beat the game without
ever taking advantage of the ability to level up and make their own
character stronger.51 The charitable reading of these games is provided
by Laura Hudson, who sums up their appeal:

If you’re playing a Hidetaka Miyazaki game for the first time, as I

was, the learning curve is often steep; for hours and hours, it feels
frustrating and painful, and sometimes incredibly unfair. But here’s
the trick: it’s not. Over time, you start to realize that the game is
actually fair in the absolute, and you even learn to trust it. When
you die, it’s not usually because the game is just mean; it’s because
you screwed up. Much like a martial arts master who knocks you to
the floor every time you leave yourself open, it isn’t actually trying
to crush your spirit; it’s trying to teach you. And if you’re willing
to listen, it will slowly transform you into an incredible badass.52

The general perspective of those who enjoy the game is that “playing
Souls is like climbing a mountain. If you’re at the top it’s worth brag-
ging about, since plenty gave up along the way.”53 All the focus on skill,
though, has a notable impact on how the games are discussed. For the
most part, the newest entry in the series, Bloodborne, was met with
praise, as writers focused on how the skill required by the game pushed
players to their limits and made their eventual successes all the richer.
There were few critical reviews, but two focused on the harms of
pursuing skill at the cost of all else. First, one reviewer contended that
the success of beating the first boss “was simply not worth the aggrava-
tion” and, ultimately, “this kind of game isn’t for everyone, and I’m an
example of who they’re not for.”54 The end result of an insular focus
on skill is more harmful, however, as it actively screens potential new
players out based on their lack of skill. Developing skill-­screening tests
means that the community of people left writing, talking, and think-
ing about games is far different from the pool of potential players
for games. Bloodborne demonstrates a moment where, for one game
journalist, those in game journalism and in core game culture more
broadly “can’t just shout to ourselves about the stuff we like. The
echo chamber of praise for Bloodborne reminds us what an incredi-
Judging Skill 136
ble lack of perspective we have within the world of games criticism,
and that’s not just a practical failure, it’s boring to boot.”55 With an
extreme emphasis on skill, games like these limit who is likely to play
them. Instead of broadening the base of potential players, these games
target those already part of videogame culture, especially when they
are celebrated as essential, system-­selling releases. It is reasonable to
have games targeted at existing audiences, but the focus on skill in a
single-­player game is notable, especially when one considers how the
computer is such a gracious loser.
A primary difference between single-­and multiplayer games is lo-
cating where the wins and losses accrue. In most multiplayer games,
about half the players will win and about half will lose. On the other
hand, single-­player is a bastion of wins for humans. In addition, instead
of facing the horrific words that come with a loss in a game like League
of Legends, when the computer loses there is only joy for the human
winner. Single-­player video games are typically set up to be defeated,
for the player to win and claim the inevitable victory. This feeds di-
rectly into the notion of a meritocracy—­just as players deserve their
failure in a well-­designed game, they are accountable and responsible
for their eventual wins. Single-­player games are often about testing
limits, engaging in trial and error, and figuring out patterns that are
repeated and how to conquer them. This kind of process twists meri-
tocracy, potentially beyond recognition, because in the case of single-­
player video games we are all potentially winners; there quite literally
is no limit to the number of people at the top and no need for down-
ward mobility. If we are all winning, there is no space in which to get
the status differential that makes those at the top feel more powerful,
other than by developing and playing super-­difficult games like Blood-
borne. As such, inequality typically resides in two locations: in compar-
ison to those outside of games and in multiplayer games.
Setting games up on a meritocratic foundation means encourag-
ing inequity and difference. In the case of contemporary single-­player
games, there are three ways to foment inequality: by adding extra-­
difficult modes, by developing games that let the hardcore show off
their skills, or by making gamers feel superior by exploiting the space
in the gap between those who game and those who do not. Policing
these boundaries is crucial to sustaining the hierarchy necessary to feel
superior. The notion that anyone could game or anyone could win
flattens social space far too much and is checked by contentions that
 137 Judging Skill
certain games, techniques, players, designers, and people are more real
or worthwhile than others. Single-­player games have taught us that
if we are talented enough and work hard enough we will win, which
does a lovely job of making everyone feel superior, but it also sets a
precedent that makes for sore losers and vocal backlash when the last
few remaining pegs of differentiation between those who can beat
games and those who cannot are removed.
Multiplayer games are outstanding at demonstrating inequality
and difference. Because they are executed on computers, it is trivially
easy to develop measuring systems that track how successful you are
relative to others. Networked and placed on the Internet, suddenly
the neighborhood gets a whole lot bigger, as the best person you know
offline is not nearly as good as the players you can find online. We can
be ranked and see just how good or bad we are. The singular conceit of
playing with other people is that, at some point, you will be let down;
you will lose because of the actions of another. This idea should be
easy to see in League of Legends, as discussed previously, but it also ap-
pears in a game like World of Warcraft. As WoW released expansions,
raiding, a primary way in which players interacted with large groups
of people, became more difficult. Expectations for individual play-
ers were higher and the action, or lack of action, of one person could
threaten the potential for victory for the other twenty-­four people in
a raid group.56 As things became more difficult there was a profusion
of add-­ons to the game with one sole purpose: tracking who screwed
up. From EnsidiaFails to YouFail to Failbot to WhoFailedWhen, sud-
denly it was important to monitor who was not performing up to ex-
pectations. These player-­created additions to the game were set up to
enforce meritocratic structures and remind players just who was doing
the worst and ruining things for everyone else. While single-­player
gaming is based on your inevitable, earned victory, multiplayer as-
sures that you will inevitably be let down or crushed by someone else.
These twin dynamics—­that you inevitably earn success in one
version of video games and are disappointed in another—­frame the
appeals and context in which players interact. Video games are con-
trolled, contrived experiences, but they are also complicated symbol
systems that structure what players expect and how they are likely
to act. This kind of framing is perfectly suited for a meritocracy. On
the one hand, players can feel good because they are successful; they
can do something that other people cannot. On the other hand, the
Judging Skill 138
fault for failure typically resides in the actions of another. Add in the
dominant masculine norms found in communities built around video
games, and players are constantly placed in positions where proving
their merit and their masculinity is an ongoing battle, making their
status fragile and in need of defense. Assessments of merit and mascu-
linity are clouded and losing erodes both, foreclosing efforts at deliber-
ation and reflection. Building a community around video games based
on meritocracy has one most likely outcome: toxicity and a tendency
to lash out at those who question the normal order of video games.

Toxicity and Meritocracy

Video games are far from the only toxic space in the world. Video
games are also far from the only meritocracy. However, I contend that
video games represent a special, different place perfectly designed and
controlled to actualize an idealized form of meritocracy, with all the
consequences that entails. Video games are predicated on inequality,
on the perception that some people are better than others and that
when one is victorious it is precisely because of that player’s actions,
that player’s timely interventions and button presses. Anything that
questions that normal, meritocratic order is threatening, from open-
ing games up to more people, to producing “games” where players do
not have to show sufficient skill to complete them, to being failed by
teammates you do not think are nearly as good as you are. For many
years now, video games have built a culture where skill is praised and
the best believe they should be rewarded because they have earned
their victories. From the high-­score screens in an arcade to the patches
Activision would send players who beat its Atari games to the leader-
boards in an online game and the gear that players acquire and then
show off in a common meeting area, video games are set up to cel-
ebrate feats of skill. In the world of video games you keep what you
kill, and there is an overwhelming bias in videogame design and vid-
eogame culture to reward merit and treat players as a special, gifted
group of people that are, quite simply, better than those who do not
have the same kind of success at play.
There are certainly reasons for toxicity in games that are not re-
lated to meritocracy. Structural barriers and inequalities of opportu-
nity in society are represented in the people playing video games and
 139 Judging Skill
their interactions with one another. However, a dominant norm in
video games specifically and in technological culture more broadly
is to reward merit and praise the skill of individual people in a way
that seems blind to context and circumstance. As Katherine Sierra, a
woman who has suffered frequent and sustained harassment, puts it
about technology culture more broadly, “A meritocracy is exactly what
I and so many others believed tech to be. ‘After all,’ I wrote nearly a
decade ago, ‘the compiler doesn’t care if the person writing the code
is wearing a black lace bra.’ I was wrong. Embarrassingly, naïvely,
wrong. Because while the compiler doesn’t care, the context in which
programming exists sure as hell does. To ignore that context is the
essence of privilege blindness.”57 Meritocracy sets the frame and the
boundaries in which players interact and in which games are devel-
oped. Given that meritocracy was originally popularized as a satirical
concept pursued by a society on the brink of failure, why should it
be surprising that an actualized meritocracy, like that found in video
games, has a toxic culture?
The whole point of rhetorical analysis is to observe how the words
used, the symbols employed, and the structures built matter. How peo-
ple choose to talk about things and the frameworks they construct end
up shaping what they design and how they interact. In any community
the norms that are followed, the terms that are used, and the symbol
systems that are established end up enabling some appeals while lim-
iting others. In the case of video games, a system has been developed
that rewards individual skill and ability. It is a system that teaches
players that they are special, that they are gifted, and that their efforts
should be rewarded because they have earned their plaudits. It is also
a symbol system that breaks down when questioned, when people at-
tack the potential of the individual or the quality of his or her work.
It is a symbol system predicated on toxicity, one where problems are
inherited because of the focus on individuals, their merit, and what
they are supposed to be able to do on their own. There are problems
in any type of culture, but video games certainly suffer from the im-
pact of meritocratic norms and expectations. Addressing those prob-
lems does not have a straightforward, simple solution, but there are
steps that can be taken to redefine what video games can be and to
change the culture around them.
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5
Learning from Others

There is no single element that causes the problems for videogame

culture, but addressing the toxicity in video games requires facing up
to the current situation and assessing what cultural solutions can be
found to make things better. Game culture is stunted because of a
limited, relatively homogenous group of players, designers, games,
and experiences. An overarching lack of diversity restricts the kinds
of ideas that are addressed and topics covered in games. The reach of
the rhetoric, of discussion in games, is curtailed because of the small
number of voices present. Diversifying the group of people making
and playing games is important and should be addressed, but I believe
fixing those issues will prove impossible as long as game consumers
and developers valorize games predicated on meritocratic norms.
The dominance of meritocracy and the focus on skill and success in
games limit the cognitive space for appeals and thought. Meritocracy
functions as an apologia for why all those diverse populations are not
present in games. Merit tells a story that if those people were good
enough, driven enough, worthy enough, then they, too, could actively
participate in videogame culture. This is a seductive, convincing story
that tells those at the top of the pyramid that they deserve to be there,
that they should be in positions of power to set the terms for engage-
ment with games. A culture based on merit is reassuring and highly
conservative, protecting those at the top and solidifying their control
in setting the agenda. Rhetorically, using the language of merit limits

141
Learning from Others 142
the kinds of appeals that are made and judged as valid. Meritocracy is
a restrictive ideology based on inequality, which is readily fueled by
the lack of diversity in video games.
A limited, focused audience restricts the range of acceptable
thought in games, a dynamic that is also fed by the role of computers
in arbitrating what happens in video games. Offline games are subject
to the human enforcement of rules, which is necessarily a social pro-
cess of negotiation. From house rules to rerolls to subjective decision
making to human error, offline games are riddled with imperfection.
On the other hand, video games are adjudicated by computers, which
are typically read as unbiased agents of rule enforcement. Although
quality work in platform studies demonstrates just how different com-
puter platforms are and how subjectivity is present in computerized
systems, computers are perceived to be neutral.1 For those already in-
vested in meritocratic systems, computers and games can seem like a
perfect pair, as a videogame system will make consistent decisions that
do not change as different players get behind the controller. Although
a game may be decried as unfair or cheap, it will stay the same kind
of unfair for all players, which can convince those playing that their
own personal, individual skill is the cause of their success. The depen-
dence on computers in video games makes a meritocratic approach to
gaming even more persuasive and further restricts the symbol system
surrounding video games.
As it currently stands, the lack of diversity in and around games
enables a continued focus on meritocracy, which further restricts the
kinds of people interested and welcomed to play video games. Breaking
the hold of meritocracy requires looking more broadly, to seeing other,
related activities that can rattle the focus on skill and outline alter-
nate ways of thinking about games. Breaking the hold of meritocracy
stands to change game culture and could help facilitate a videogame
culture that can address the toxicity that currently resides within it.

Deconstructing Merit
One could certainly make a strong argument that all major, contem-
porary Western institutions are riddled with meritocratic norms. A
possible exception is the strong social safety net programs in Scandi-
navia, but meritocracy is currently a dominant ideology for much of
 143 Learning from Others
the world. Lessons from a pair of major Western social structures in-
dicate some of the ways they stand apart from video games and how
thinking about them can generate approaches to building a different
game culture. One of the clearest links to video games can be found
in the greater institution of sports. Although periodically dismissed
because of a jock–­geek divide, sports offer another largely merito-
cratic system, but one that is far more aware of how considerations of
merit are often broken. There are also the clean links between sports
and video games in the paired content of sports video games and the
growth of eSports within video games. A second link can be found
in U.S. higher education, which ostensibly selects students based on
merit and awards millions a year in merit-­based scholarships, but also
preserves several areas where meritocracy is disregarded in favor of
developing a diverse community of people, particularly at highly se-
lective colleges and universities.
These two institutions are largely selected because they are re-
lated to, yet independent from, videogame culture. Associations can be
made, but the three cultures are largely distinct and only occasionally
overlap. Sports and higher education cultures have substantial prob-
lems, some of which can be traced to meritocratic norms, but they also
offer a chance to help see just how dependent on merit videogame
culture is and a chance to get outside of video game culture to look at
it differently. The most difficult part of disrupting a symbol system is
figuring out how to get a vantage point from without to help imagine
ways in which it could be structured differently. By looking at sports
and U.S. higher education it is possible to see some lessons that can
be taken and employed in detoxifying videogame culture. These two
examples are not perfect, but they set the table for looking differently
at meritocratic game design and narrative, to create a perspective that
could then be used to address the toxicity at its root.

Sports and Games

Sports and video games share a substantial number of similarities.
Both constitute large elements of the culture industry and are pri-
mary recreation activities for many participants, in fandom, play, or
both. They are massive economic enterprises that capture billions
of dollars a year. Both have cultural and institutional issues that can
Learning from Others 144
be tracked to meritocracy and there are certainly examples of toxic-
ity in the player and fan cultures of both. Sports video games are a
substantial part of the larger videogame ecosystem, with games like
FIFA, Madden NFL, and NBA 2K selling millions of copies each year.
Sports are far from perfect, and a critique of sports cultures and in-
stitutions can be, and is, its own searing book, but examining some
crucial elements of sports culture enables a more critical look at how
video games are currently designed in a way that ensures toxicity in
the broader videogame community.2
The first key area to think about when considering sports and
video games is the search for perfection and the integration of tech-
nology in that endeavor. Sports video games inhabit an odd space, as
they are frequently attempts at simulation, but they are often seek-
ing to simulate imperfect people. The history of sports video games
is filled with examples of how games have sought to re-­create sports
in an accurate manner. Pong was an early attempt to re-­create tennis,
Intellivision advertised its football offering as a more accurate rendi-
tion of football than Atari’s using the sportswriter George Plimpton
and side-­by-­side screenshots of the games, and John Madden famously
demanded that any football game with his name on it would feature
eleven players on the field for each team, something that had never
been done before because of technical limitations. However, sports are
imperfect and have often sought out technology in an effort to make
more accurate judgments within the context of individual games. The
National Football League initially introduced a limited instant-replay
system in 1986, which was modified and largely solidified into its cur-
rent form by 1999. The system is still subject to substantial rules and
restrictions, but the general idea is that each coach gets two oppor-
tunities to challenge a referee’s decision during the course of a game.
Certain decisions cannot be challenged and, late in each half, challenge
decisions are made by a separate official, but the overarching intent of
the system is to correct for human error.
The videogame version of the NFL, Madden NFL, is a simulation
of a National Football League game. However, instead of being offici-
ated by humans, the video game is effectively adjudicated by the game
platform and game code making judgments about player input and
computer-­controlled artificial intelligence. In the midst of this, there
is little need for an instant replay system to review referees’ decisions.
 145 Learning from Others
The NFL system is designed to combat human error, and the com-
puter replication of that system is actually designed to introduce error
that can then be simulated within the course of the game. Add in va-
garies with the representation of graphics within the game and play-
ers are subject to situations where the game is programmed to give
them inaccurate information. Effectively, the offline sport is seeking
to make better decisions by introducing a replay system, while the vid-
eogame analogue has to introduce doubt and error in order to make
the inclusion of a replay system meaningful. This leads to questions
and complaints from players, ranging from concern about how “only
the computer gets successful challenges” to how the game implements
the challenge resolution—­“the game is smart enough to know that a
challenge should be done, but its [sic] not smart enough to figure out
how to adjust the call”—­to unnecessary computer-­initiated challenges
that function as “pointless comic relief and nothing more.”3 The chal-
lenge feature need not be part of a video game. The call should be
correct in the first place, but trying to mimic an imperfect game re-
quires introducing elements of error into the video game, even if those
errors seem ridiculous. Video games are designed from a state where
we expect them to be perfect, which can make players less willing to
question decisions made within them and more prone to accept the
output as an accurate representation of merit. As the game designer
and competitive game player David Sirlin puts it, “Debates in real
life are highly subjective, but in games we can be absolutely sure who
the winner is.”4 For Sirlin, one of the major factors that distinguish
games is the clear platform they provide for competition; in that con-
text, the deliberate inclusion of error is odd. However, unlike video
games, sports evolved pre-­digitally, so error is often seen as a prob-
lem to be solved with new digital tools, while the video games seek-
ing simulation then attempt to copy those pre-­digital dynamics into
a computerized product.
The NFL is not the only league to use technology in an attempt
to eliminate human judgment and officiating mistakes from the of-
fline version of their sport. Major League Baseball was relatively late
to instant replay, adding it in 2008 and slowly expanding it to review
more human decisions in subsequent years. However, in 2006 MLB
decided to begin installing a PITCHf/x tracking system that uses a
pair of cameras to track the flight and location of every pitched ball.
Learning from Others 146
That information is shared with the public via Major League Base-
ball Advanced Media and used to judge the performance of umpires.
Including this additional level of review for umpire decisions on balls
and strikes has resulted in an increased level of accuracy and an expan-
sion of the strike zone, particularly around the knees, a fundamental
change in the game that may be part of a trend toward rising strikeout
rates in the league.5 Tennis began using a system called Hawk-­Eye in
2005, which replaced Cyclops, a system developed in the 1980s, that
assessed whether serves were in or out. Hawk-­Eye is also used as part
of cricket television coverage and as a system of goal-­line review by
the English Football Association. Goal-­line review was integrated
into the 2014 FIFA World Cup, and the former head of FIFA has ar-
gued for the wider use of technology to potentially overturn refer-
eeing decisions.6 In order to discuss issues in officiating openly, the
National Basketball Association began releasing reports that review
all the major decisions in the last two minutes of close games.7 These
reports often mention errors in officiating with the ultimate goal of
transparency, even when the mistakes may have resulted in a team los-
ing a game because of an incorrect decision.8 The point of all these
choices, and the general trend throughout competitive sports, is to use
technology to eliminate error in human decision making. However,
there is also resistance to the trend of using technology to overrule
human mistakes, as it is both expensive and changes the context of the
sport. Opposition is often the strongest in soccer, as German soccer
voted against installing goal-­line technology because of cost and the
argument by many purists that the inevitable human error is a classic
part of soccer.9 Mistakes ensure debate and discussion, one of the ele-
ments that typify reaction to what is often called “the beautiful game.”
The central line of appeal by those in favor of using technology in
sport to double-­check human decision is that additional review can
make contests more accurate. Underlying that belief is the premise
that the person or team with the most skill should win and that er-
rors in judgment necessarily reward the undeserving. Instant replay,
coach’s challenges, and goal-­line review are designed to make sports
more meritocratic and give a better chance for skill to outweigh luck.
Video games have no such problem. The code may be poorly written
and players could encounter bugs, glitches, or exploits, but officiating
decisions can be perfect within the context of a video game. One need
 147 Learning from Others
not have review in a video game, as the incorrect refereeing decisions
have to be programmed into the game in the first place.
Replay and the integration of review in video games demonstrates
two things. First, sports games are attempts to replicate and simulate
their offline analogues. The pursuit of simulation leads to situations
where elements are integrated into the videogame version that clearly
need not be there, in an attempt to better imitate the sport with which
spectators are familiar. Second, because human decisions are crucial
to sports, sports cannot be perfect meritocracies. Incorrect officiating
decisions will inevitably be made and, although application of tech-
nology is being used to rectify those mistakes, error is an accepted and
acceptable part of sports. The rules of soccer are set up to be open to
interpretation, to the point where a leading sports website can pub-
lish an article about how no one actually understands the rules of the
game.10 Replay review in baseball has led to decisions that are tech-
nically correct but contravene past practices of the game, like when
a player slides into a base and has his foot leave safety for a split sec-
ond that could not be spotted without a slow-­motion replay, causing
a sportswriter to decry the situation as “unbearable.”11 Dustin Johnson
was assessed a penalty in a golf championship decided after he was fin-
ished, yet he bailed out the governing body by winning anyway (and
by a large margin), ensuring that the controversy only drove discus-
sion and debate, instead of dictating a winner and a loser.12 The Super
Bowl–­winning defense of the Seattle Seahawks played with a strategy
of committing fouls on every play, trusting that officials would not
call all the infractions for fear of slowing down the game or seeming
biased against the team.13 Sports are full of human judgments and
subjectivity, which extend to the selection of players. Research in-
dicates that National Football League teams routinely overestimate
their skill in picking players in the draft and that the actual outcomes
are barely better than pure chance.14 Sports are determined by con-
tingency, from the weather, which can reward some athletes and pun-
ish others, to the stadium and pitch dimensions, which can encourage
building a team to best fit a home park or stadium. Injuries routinely
affect what happens in sport, as the winner of a season-­long grind is
just as likely to be the healthiest as the best.15 Sports, driven by con-
temporary society and broadcast networks, are seeking to eliminate
error, but the serendipity of sports has been a defining characteris-
Learning from Others 148
tic.16 This indeterminacy of sport stands in stark contrast to sports
video games, like Madden NFL, where players are given clear, eas-
ily interpreted ratings that are released in advance of the game and
make the process of evaluating athletes transparent.17 The human
judgments that are a key part of sports do not extend to video games,
which are set up to reward skill because they do not involve similar
kinds of human error. A full integration of error and the potential for
mistakes, which could upset a strict meritocracy, are typically written
out of videogame design and culture. When chance is a part of video
games, gamers frequently lobby for it to be eliminated, as in the case
of Mario Kart and the blue shell.
A second area of contrast concerns analytics and team building.
Over the past several years, substantial investments have been made in
sports analytics in an effort to figure out the best possible ways to play
the game. Basketball has seen a massive shift, as insights like shot map-
ping have led teams to recognize that a long two-­point shot is the least
­productive play in the game.18 Because “long twos” are less likely to
draw fouls and are worth fewer points than shooting from behind the
three-­point line, an increasing number of teams have changed their
approaches to attract a different kind of player and teach them to play
in way more likely to generate additional points (i.e., fewer “long twos”
and more three-­point shots).19 Acceptance of this change has become
so complete in a few short years that an aversion to three-­point shots
has been described by prominent NBA writer Zach Lowe as an “ob-
jectively dumb strategy.”20 Similar baseball analytics were celebrated
in the best-­selling book and movie Moneyball. The companion activity
in video games is known as theorycraft or game “meta.” Theorycraft
is an attempt to figure out the hidden rules behind a video game by
solving the algorithms that govern interaction in the game world.21
Meta has emerged as a shorthand version of “metagame,” which ref-
erences the optimal strategies in a given game. In both sports and
video games the metagame analytics seek to solve changes and shifts
over time. One approach can be matched by another, or designers
can alter the rules in order to mitigate a newly dominant approach.
Videogame designers can use patches and updates to change a game,
just as sports leagues can develop new rules to combat hand-­checking
(basketball) or to redefine pass interference (American football). Al-
tered rules spur new developments in analytics and a new meta that
rewards different strategies.
 149 Learning from Others
However, a primary difference between analytics in sports and
video games is the role of team chemistry in figuring out the opti-
mal course. Figuring out approaches or best practices in sports is one
thing, but maximizing their value in practice requires getting a bunch
of human beings to perform in concert. Much like producing a tele-
vision show is more difficult than writing a novel because you simply
do not know how the actors will interact, building a sports team is
different than playing a video game because multiple people have to
work together for a common goal. To some extent, eSports and large
groups of people playing together face chemistry issues, but freedom
of movement is far more fluid in videogame guilds or clans than in
major sports leagues. Much like you do not know when one of your
star actors in a television show may ask off the program (e.g., Ade-
wale Akinnuoye-­Agbaje famously asked off of Lost because he was not
happy shooting in Hawai’i), a player on a sports team may demand a
new contract, a transfer, or a trade.22 As one basketball writer notes,
judging how players can fit and play together “is a huge factor when
it comes to, you know, actually winning games.”23 The focus on man-
aging people, on chemistry, is at the center of a dispute between two
of the NBA’s leading analytics teams, the Houston Rockets and the
Dallas Mavericks.24 Putting optimal talent together on a sports team
is only part of the puzzle; one must also figure out how those people
play with one another. In a video game it is common for the best char-
acters to function smoothly, to the point where top players will often
use highly similar approaches because there is a standard, commonly
accepted best approach to be followed and all players are expected to
fall in line, which places focus on individual or team skill in executing
the “best” strategy.
Team building is another example of how video games present a
more perfect meritocracy than sports. Sports have to account for a
human factor in a way that video games do not. As with replay and
other forms of technology, teams are turning toward technology in an
effort to best discern their players’ strengths and weaknesses.25 How-
ever, video games, in their design and execution, demonstrate a kind of
control of which the general manager of a sports team can only dream.
The fundamental difference between assembling a team in a sports
video game and in real life is that, in real life, the team actually has to
play together. Human limitations and team chemistry are a substan-
tial check on sports analytics, something that makes them partial and
Learning from Others 150
imperfect, while theorycraft and the metagame plow through video
games and can actually solve the black box that resides within them.
A final important difference between sports and video games is the
role of luck. Luck in video games is typically something to be ruled
out. A video gamer facing a run of bad luck may attempt to brute
force a solution and take the role of luck out of the computer’s hands
through his or her repeated effort. Sports, however, are almost defined
by luck. One way to conceptualize the difference between the two is
to think about the role of the short run in sports versus video games.
In video games, with the exception of competitive match play, play-
ers can typically repeat a scenario as often as they desire in order to
minimize the role of luck. Although there is clearly a cost in terms of
time and often in terms of in-­game resources, luck in video games can
be reduced, or even eliminated, through repeated effort. At the very
least, in many single-­player games the player can simply restart the
scenario and try again. In these cases, players are simply facing some
sort of puzzle they need to solve through moving, jumping, shooting,
or some other game mechanic. Sports, though, exist almost exclusively
in the short run. One of the biggest sporting organizations in the
United States, the NCAA, is nearing a billion dollars in revenue per
year on the back of a month-­long single-­elimination men’s basketball
tournament.26 In the United States, major sports champions are deter-
mined by playoffs that are, at most, best-­of-­seven series between the
most successful regular season teams. Tennis tournaments are based on
who is most successful on a given day. Ultimately, elite soccer compe-
titions, like the UEFA Champions League and the FIFA World Cup,
are determined by success or failure in a game or two. Sports are the
realm of the short run, as players have limited careers and succumb
to fatigue, while video games and the computers on which they run
can mitigate the role of luck by simulating the same situation over and
over and over. Video games are defined by the long run.
This difference in opportunity is a fundamental separation be-
tween how certain elements of sports and video games are defined.
Connected to the idea of the short run, luck is an accepted factor in
sports that is generally written out of video games. Baseball has the
category of a perfect game, where a pitcher allows no base runners,
and a no-­hit game, where the pitcher allows no hits. Famed pitcher
Cy Young said, “A pitcher’s got to be good and he’s got to be lucky to
 151 Learning from Others
get a no hit game.”27 Extreme success in sports is generally framed
and shaped by serendipity. Pitching a perfect game requires some-
thing to break in your favor. Sportswriters freely note how almost
every no-­hitter is “as much about luck as anything” and openly talk
about how luck defines success in the NFL; along similar lines, the
soccer star Javier Mascherano injured himself on a key tackle to clinch
a win and responded in postgame interviews by saying, “What I did
anyone could have done. To be in the [World Cup] final you need a
bit of luck.”28 However, in video games, a perfect game is theoreti-
cally possible. Players talk about a perfect boss fight or a perfect en-
counter in which they hit all the right buttons (because there is a set
of buttons in many game circumstances that defines perfection). Billy
Mitchell has been awarded for his perfect game of Pac-­Man.29 As Raph
Koster notes, a focus on skill is something that differentiates games
from books, since “when stories and games are good, you can go back
to them repeatedly and keep learning something new. But we never
speak of mastering a good story.”30 The perception is that skill plays
a much larger role, since player skill in a video game can determine
outcomes, while in sports the outcome is subject to everything from
the wind to a pebble to a stray bird. Sports are filled with stories of
players who were among the greatest ever but did not make it to the
big leagues because things did not break their way. Tales of outstand-
ing players who did not make a major impact as a professional can be
readily found in basketball, soccer, and American football, among oth-
ers.31 Coaches talk about the best players they have seen that simply
did not pan out, and star athletes chime in with contemporaries who
were better but failed at some point due to circumstance. Players, par-
ticularly in high-­cost sports like baseball and hockey, openly talk about
how the need for sponsors, family wealth, or a chance benefactor is a
key precondition for being able to continue to play and develop their
skills while growing up.32 In sports, it is widely accepted that certain
breaks are required in order to make it to the top, a dynamic that is
systematically erased from considerations of success in video games.
Luck also plays a role in the success of a team overall. Building a
sports team requires being ready for a trade or a transfer when it is
available, and certain markets, like major cities or places with lower tax
burdens (like Texas and Florida), often have an advantage over other
localities. This kind of structural advantage can also extend to the level
Learning from Others 152
of an entire league. A recent influx of television money has allowed
teams in England’s Barclay’s Premier League to spend far more than
peers in other countries, and the director of sport for a German club
observed that England’s television money “posed a huge challenge for
all of German football.”33 The 2016 Tour de France was won largely
because the winning cyclist, Chris Froome, was supported by a team
of other star riders (who were paid star salaries) to perform the role of
domestiques.34 Although the Internet makes building a guild a matter
of collecting some of the best people from around the world, sports
teams have to assemble their squads within restrictive structures they
do not wholly control. People playing video games are subject to the
whims of the corporation in charge of the game, but sports teams act
within the bounds of nations, states, cities, and leagues.35 The risk of
injury is also far more likely to derail a group in sports than in video
games, and staying healthy is a crucial part of winning a championship
that sports teams cannot fully control.36 Life can certainly intervene
for a guild chasing a world-­first, but an ill-­placed basketball stanchion
in a glorified practice led to a compound fracture and a missed year
for an NBA All-­Star when Paul George ran into a structural support
in a warm-­up exhibition USA Basketball played in a small, nonstan-
dard gym.37 Sports championships are won in competition with many
other teams, and any approach to winning a title is described by one
sportswriter as a “low-­odds proposition filled with lucky breaks and
moves that play out much differently than the people who make them
anticipate.”38 Video games seek to eliminate luck through brute force
and the ability to restart a fight, battle, or game, all effectively attempts
to construct a perfect meritocracy. The ability to limit the potential
of luck to wreck a player or team allows video games to focus on skill
and merit, and to stamp out the variability and chaos that comes from
simply suffering a bad day or a bad moment. Luck is all about recog-
nizing how skill plus effort is incomplete. The role of luck in sports
means that the best team does not always prevail in a game or match,
which encourages reflection about how the playing field is often rid-
dled with structural inequality.39
The role of contingency in sports—­the combination of factors like
chemistry in team building and the need for luck to be successful—­
means the field is often subject to something akin to serendipity.40
There is no singular, clear way to move forward, no perfect world to
 153 Learning from Others
which athletes and coaches can ascend. There is discussion in sports
of mastery, but not nearly in the same manner that exists around video
games. Sports do not get solved over time, but games can become
solved problems with a definitively optimal approach. Unlike Bar-
tle and Trubshaw’s designed escape of MUD1, sports present a space
where the laws are not fairer and the experience can be incredibly
unkind. Success in sports is contingent, as careers are limited by skill
that degrades over time, and good outcomes can be driven by cir-
cumstance, like ending up on the right team at the right time.41 Elite
athletes do all kinds of work to get better, but there is no real way to
brute force one’s way to a championship like there often is in video
games. The whole notion of a labor-­based game dependent on a grind
emphasizes effort and teaches players that if they work hard enough
and play often enough, they will be successful. Public discussion about
games, even those about competitive multiplayer games like League
of Legends, are rife with analyses of how players must play more often
and try harder in order to get better. Studying sports and their design
offers an example of how to get outside some of the key design fea-
tures that can prop up toxic notions about masculinity in videogame
and technology culture. Sports are not a place where simply trying
harder or inserting more coins is enough. To be successful, athletes
often need to benefit from luck, serendipity, and structural advantages.
On the face of it, sports seem like a meritocracy. Sports celebrate
skill and effort at the highest level. However, the design of sports and
the activities that happen within them check the tyranny of merit by
adding in human judgment, variance, short-­run odds, and luck. There
are also occasions where sports develop rules that are explicitly anti-­
meritocratic. In the Olympics, smaller nations get access to univer-
sality places for one male and one female athlete, who can compete
without making the Olympic qualifying standards required for oth-
ers.42 Universality places ensure that a far greater number of countries
are able to send athletes to the Olympics, often with the goal of rais-
ing awareness about their country or heightening the profile of sports
back home. Other rules limit or structure who is able to participate in a
competition. The NCAA basketball tournaments give automatic entry
to conference tournament winners—­promoting broad representation,
rather than selecting the most meritorious entrants—­in choosing half
the spots for the men’s tournament. Similar rules exist in many Olym-
Learning from Others 154
pic sports that regulate the number of entrants in the competition,
negatively affecting U.S. women gymnasts, Chinese table tennis play-
ers, and Brazilian women beach volleyball players, among others.43 All
of these policies prioritize driving broad interest and inclusion over
efforts to engage in the best competition. Computerized video games
are far easier to control, as they typically present problems that can be
solved and offer the promise of a long run where variance can be min-
imized. There are fewer overarching governing bodies that set out to
facilitate broad representation of participants. Within the difference
and instability of sports, there are lessons for video games. Sports seem
to be pure contests of skill, and the increased integration of technology
may make that more of a reality, but sports are still imperfect and, in
videogame terms, broken or ill balanced. Benefiting from errors and
luck is often key to being successful at sports.
From sports, video games can learn lessons about contingency, hu-
manity, and error. Some Mario games inspire strong negative reactions
from the most hardcore of gamers, but they are also spaces in which
video games embrace the most randomness. Mario Party is polarizing;
for instance, the IGN review of Mario Party 10 argued that “two types
of people get the most enjoyment out of Mario Party: small children
and inebriated adults” and that “kids gleefully absorb it, but adults only
suffer through it for kids’ sake.”44 As Julian Gollop, creator of the crit-
ically acclaimed XCOM: Enemy Unknown observes, random number
generation and luck “is frowned upon” in modern game design and
“lots of modern players don’t like it.”45 XCOM is a turn-­based strat-
egy game that heavily rewards planning, one in which decisions can
have lasting consequences. Luck plays a major role in the game, as the
best plans can be foiled by a bad roll, which could lead to a miss that
later causes the death of a key team member or wipes the whole team.
The argument Gollop makes for luck is based on risk and contingency,
that luck undermines the development of a clear metagame because
good planning can always be trumped by an unlucky outcome. How-
ever, contemporary games are rooted in the notion that “the game is
somehow being ‘unfair’ to a player if something is showing you a 90
percent chance of happening, and then it doesn’t. You played the odds
and you lost, which makes you feel cheated.”46 This perspective on
contemporary players is backed up by the comments in response to
Gollop’s position, with players arguing that in offline games “it’s very
 155 Learning from Others
frustrating to be unlucky at the dice, but in a digital game it feels like
the developer doesn’t care for player experience” and “used in critical
mission objectives, RNG [random number generation] gives a feeling
of Luck2Win.”47 Both comments are predicated on the belief that, in
modern video games, proper planning and skill should win out over
all obstacles. For these kinds of players video games are different from
other activities because they are proper tests of skill. Dependence on
luck is considered bad form, largely because it does not represent a
just adjudication of a player’s merit. Even in games known to employ
luck as a larger factor, developers have spoken openly about their de-
sire to put their thumb on the scale in the favor of players. As the lead
designer of XCOM 2 puts it, “There’s actually a number of things that
tweak the calculations that number in the player’s favor at the lower
difficulty settings”; in the case of an 85 percent chance, the game ac-
tually plays out with the shot as closer to a 95 percent chance in order
to “match the player’s psychological feeling about that number.”48 In
video games our humanity and tolerance for variance is boiled off and
we expect perfection. When we do not get it we tend to cope poorly.
There can be a humanness to video games that is similar to the
error built into the design of sports, thereby resisting the establish-
ment of a pure meritocracy. Increased variance and mechanisms that
upset the dominance of skill permeate the highest level of sports, and
those lessons can be applied to game design to articulate a future that
does not exclusively rely on merit to determine outcomes. Cheating,
prominent in both video games and sports, threatens to short-­circuit
meritocracy, which is likely part of the reason organizing bodies be-
hind both activities actively seek to stamp it out. From the critically
reviled Mario Party to the adored XCOM, there are games that have
followed a model based on randomness and contingency, which need
to be reclaimed and emphasized.

Higher Education and Games

Higher education in the United States frequently attempts to follow
meritocratic norms, but it still offers a number of lessons for detox-
ifying games. On its face, higher education may not seem like it has
much in common with videogame culture. In many ways, however, the
overlap between the two is tied to the fact that both have been con-
Learning from Others 156
structed as ostensibly meritocratic spaces where people of acceptable
merit are welcomed to interact with others. The first part of under-
standing the benefit is to look more deeply at how universities work
and then turn to positive and negative lessons that can be instructive.
A combination of public and private universities, U.S. higher ed-
ucation is heavily subsidized by federal and state governments with
the intent of educating citizens. Part of the mission of many of these
institutions is to serve the greater social good. Most retain nonprofit
status, which confers tax benefits to the institution in exchange for an
obligation to serve the public rather than shareholders. Colleges ac-
tively recruit students, often with an eye toward gathering a diverse
student population. For many institutions, assembling a diverse stu-
dent body is a crucial goal because of the desire to stimulate critical
thinking, and “cultural diversity inherently brings into the classroom a
cultural perspective that is fundamentally diverse and thus forces stu-
dents to understand issues from different points of view.”49 Diversity
is not always a goal in and of itself, but it is a key component in ac-
complishing the deeper goal of provoking thought as a teaching tool.
A second objective in gathering a diverse student population is to
select the right mix from applicants to the institution, determining
who makes the cut for admission and who does not. An entire indus-
try exists to help students maximize their chances of admission, from
test-preparation courses to classes on how to write better application
essays to organized tours that take potential students from campus
to campus so they can learn what they need to do to have the best
chance of being accepted. Colleges can consider many things from
an application, typically focusing on elements like grades, test scores,
and class ranking. In some states race can be a consideration, and most
schools are need a­ ware, which means that they take family income
and likelihood of need for financial aid into consideration. The typ-
ical admissions criteria for a school are designed to give the appear-
ance of a meritocratic selection process; extreme focus is placed on
personal achievements, while a heavy hand is simultaneously placed
on the scale for other factors. Legacy considerations are common at
almost all elite institutions, conferring direct benefits to students who
had family members previously attend the school. Legacy and need-­
aware admissions create a situation in which Josh Freedman argues
it is difficult to understand how a premier school can “grant legacy
 157 Learning from Others
preference and take most of its students from upper class households
while also claiming that it cares deeply about equality, diversity, and
social mobility. In other words: You cannot have your cake, eat it too,
and then accept its cupcakes through legacy admissions.”50 From the
outside, the admissions process is designed to seem meritocratic, but
there are clear cracks where considerations having little to do with an
individual applicant’s merit are weighed.
According to Ross Douthat, the higher education system in the
United States “was overhauled in the middle years of the twentieth
century to be a force for near universal opportunity—­or so the over-
haulers intended,” but it has transformed into a system where social
elites respond to interest in restructuring the system with concerns
like “Why should they [already economically elite Americans] give it
up? It’s not as if our child doesn’t deserve his advantages.”51 Although
there is a heavy veneer of meritocracy, current selection processes for
higher education in the United States largely replicate existing racial
and class differences across generations of students.52 Studies of white
adults in California have found that they back a meritocratic selection
process for college up until it is pointed out that Asian students out-
perform whites on metrics like high school grades and standardized
test scores.53 College matters, as graduates make more money and are
more likely to be engaged at work and happy in their lives, and yet the
appearance of a meritocracy insulates admissions selection from cer-
tain critiques about how already-­privileged students are advantaged
because it appears fair and just.54
There are plenty of articles that address the myth of meritocracy in
higher education, as critics frequently note how tilted the admissions
or academic hiring processes actually are toward those with built-­in
advantages.55 However, college admissions share a lot in common
with advertising and marketing departments for videogame compa-
nies. Just as admissions officers fan out across the country each year
to solicit students for their home institutions, recruiters subject vid-
eogame players to a barrage of ads that seek to draw them in, while
the industry resists efforts to put women at the center of games (e.g.,
on game covers), often only including women, as Becky Chambers
puts it, as “just victims and plot points.”56 The situation is not much
better for racial depictions in games, as people of color represented
in video games are likely to be exoticized and are relegated largely to
Learning from Others 158
roles in sports and fighting titles.57 For black women, the situation is
especially dire. A count of black female protagonists that excludes cus-
tomizable and licensed characters adds up to a total of only fourteen in
the entire history of video games by one game journalist’s counting.58
Where people are reached and on what terms they are contacted mat-
ters. There are some strides that have been made in higher education,
however, that can demonstrate a different path and a chance to reach
a broader, more diverse audience for games.
This is not to say that a university system is a perfect match for
video games. There is a key difference in the relative level of commit-
ment being made in going to a specific college or putting a new disc
in the tray. College is frequently a four-­plus-­year, tens-­of-­thousands-­
of-­dollars experience, while video games typically require a couple
dozen hours and around sixty bucks, plus the cost of the console and
internet access (in the case of mobile devices, free-­to-­play pricing can
lower the barrier to entry even further). There is also a fundamental
difference in the structure of the institutions supporting each indus-
try. I expect that university adjuncts could find a number of things in
common with quality assurance testers running on crunch, but most
universities are nonprofits whereas most game developers and pub-
lishers are not. This leads to different kinds of incentive structures—­
ostensibly social good for a nonprofit, and profits for a business—­but
the long-­term motivations of both are likely aligned in the interest of
growing and sustaining their respective industries. Given these simi-
larities and differences, there are two key lessons that can be learned
by examining U.S. higher education as it pertains to video games: re-
cruiting for diversity and the connection between inputs and outputs.
As race-­based affirmative action programs have become increas-
ingly contentious and schools have seen their enrollments dominated
by students of means, many lower-­income students with the poten-
tial for strong applications simply do not apply. For first-­generation
students, colleges have had to forge a new path for recruitment, as
not knowing others who have gone to college can lead to mispercep-
tions about how likely students are to get into a school and about how
much aid they may receive in order to turn an acceptance into atten-
dance. Universities have found that even if they are likely to qualify
for highly selective schools based on their grades and test scores, most
low-­income students simply do not apply for admission.59 Effectively,
 159 Learning from Others
the background experience you have with college matters. Some of
the programs that have had the best results in getting a more econom-
ically diverse population of applicants are straightforward. Targeted
summer camps, sending potential students packets of information
about schools, and programs that combine short-­term incentives, like
laptops, with long-­term benefits, like full-­ride scholarships, are mak-
ing a dent in developing a more diverse student population of people
who simply would not have applied otherwise.60 Schools have clearly
found that where people are from and what they have been invited to
attend shapes what they are likely to do. These programs give a clear
map about how to address a lack of diversity in games—­one approach
is to actively invite more people in and find ways to make them com-
fortable. Efforts like Girls Make Games, Girls Who Code, Dames
Making Games, and the Pixelles give young women a safe space in
which to develop games.61 Those initiatives should diversify the peo-
ple making games and fundamentally change the kinds of games being
created. Other changes, like growth in both mobile and casual gam-
ing, are likely to change the population of people playing games, giv-
ing the market reason to develop titles to suit a broader population
of players. Seemingly basic moves to include people and make them
feel welcome, while pointing them to the potential of new things, can
diversify previously homogenous groups.
The second key piece that can be learned from higher education
is the link between inputs and outputs when it comes to learning and
experience. Directly linked to the idea of knowledge scaffolding and
merit, there are extraordinarily clear relationships between gradua-
tion rates and college preparedness.62 The most straightforward ways
to improve a school’s graduation rate are to improve the incoming
student body’s grade point average, increase the percentage of full-­
time students, or attract more students from families with means. In-
puts lead to outputs, so changing the composition of the inputs leads
to a changed set of outputs; schools themselves only do so much to
change students.
It is reasonable to presuppose that games may work in a similar
fashion. The skills one brings into a game help shape what happens
within that game. The more background knowledge, development,
and time investment that has been made prior to playing a game, the
more likely one is to be successful. This factor can subvert the notion
Learning from Others 160
of a meritocracy before it starts. Your output, your success, is contin-
gent on dynamics leading up to the game. Instead of being indicative
of your skill, any given game is an examination of what came before,
which is at least somewhat driven by whether you were encouraged to
play video games in the first place. I suspect almost anyone who has
played a fair chunk of video games can talk about how knowledge from
one game translated directly to a new one. Being well versed in that
symbol system makes you far more likely to pick it up quickly in a new
game, which says less about how skilled you are than it does about the
massive structural input advantages from which some players benefit.
It is notable that the world of sports and U.S. higher education are
viewed externally as meritocratic, yet there is widespread acknowl-
edgment that conceiving of them as enterprises based solely on merit
is fundamentally flawed. Meritocratic structures have fallen apart in
sports, where luck and timing are key, and in higher education, where
schools are actively seeking diversity and recognizing the relationship
between inputs and outputs, but they still remain present and promi-
nent in the world of video games. Applying a sense of perfection to the
meritocratic norms that persist in the tech world, video games hold on
to perceptions that players earn their positions with true tests of skill.
The stories in video games further these notions through repeated
narratives about protagonists overcoming any and all reasonable, and
some unreasonable, obstacles through their own efforts. Video games
are built on meritocratic norms, they tell meritocratic stories, and to
disrupt the toxicity in video-game culture it is necessary for both to
be corralled.
There are plenty of places to look when thinking about how to
get the toxicity out of videogame culture. An argument can be made
that there are jerks in any community because there are jerks in the
rest of the world, but there is also a real chance to make things bet-
ter. Looking at other meritocracies and how they address elements
that clearly connect to video games demonstrates just how reliant on
meritocracy video games are. Paired against sports and education, the
focus on skill, merit, and earning your position is far more apparent in
video games. Learning from what other cultures do well or poorly can
provide a way to think about games with a fresh perspective. Beyond
the examples discussed here, I expect that links to a lack of diversity
in the development of television and film, the meritocratic tendencies
 161 Learning from Others
of contemporary technology culture and startups, and the connec-
tions between independent music and independent games all provide
points from which to rethink video games and how they are designed.
Increasing diversity is possible in all kinds of areas, from NASA to
computer science jobs to comics.63 There are many charted paths to
follow, including the work done at Offworld, where Leigh Alexander
and Laura Hudson actively recruited and published a diverse group of
writers to analyze video games and the culture around them.64 Sports
and higher education were chosen as comparative examples because
of the clear links to meritocracy, luck, and diversity, but they also set
the table for engaging in a deeper look at a new path for video games.
In the midst of a toxic game culture built on meritocratic tropes,
there are some promising things happening in game development
that point toward a different future for games. However, maximiz-
ing that future and actually addressing the toxicity requires thinking
differently about games and what they can be. Charting a new path
for games largely means thinking about ways to add to what is avail-
able and to consider the repercussions of continuing along the same
path. The primary idea behind rhetorical analysis is that the symbol
systems we use shape what we do and how we interact with one an-
other. Thinking deeply about the implications of those symbol systems
can help us alter them. Popular, normal decisions and structures fade
into the background, as they just seem like the way things are. Earn-
ing your way through a video game, showing off your skill in battle
to win through your guile, and producing story after story about ris-
ing up from nothing to make it big are the background state of video
games. It is just how things always have been. However, there are
changes happening that can help to build a positive culture around
video games.
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Conclusion
An Obligation to Do Better

The whole point of a meritocracy is to reward skill, which makes

the victors feel like they have earned their rewards and relegates oth-
ers to their deserved lesser status. It is a system that forecloses critical
thought and reflection, as the whole point is to tell the winners that
they have won their place, so they begin to act accordingly. As in the
Paul Piff studies that demonstrate how people act like jerks when they
are winning a rigged game, videogame culture has internalized those
winning lessons year after year.1 Disturbing this system and construct-
ing something different is a difficult task, but there are steps that point
to a less toxic future.
The starting point for changing game culture is recognizing that
the issue is about adding new experiences. There is nothing wrong
with having games that are based on meritocratic norms if those are
only some of the games, rather than almost all of the video games. I
know there are games I find distasteful and I suspect the same is true
for others; changing the rhetorical construction of video games need
not be based on restriction and eliminating titles. Instead, the neces-
sary step is to add more new, different types of games that offer an al-
ternate kind of experience and, potentially, target a new kind of player.
New, different games can open up space for critical reflection and de-
stabilizing norms around merit in video games. Rather than shunning
new experiences or rejecting certain genres as not “real” games, the
one thing videogame culture needs to stop doing is heavily policing

163
Conclusion 164
the notion of what constitutes a “game.” A big tent approach, with a
broad umbrella to include a number of different activities, gives game
culture the chance to learn from new communities of people and get
some joy out of doing something new and different alongside the old
and beloved. New mechanics do trickle into older games, and the first
step to getting rid of the toxicity in games is embracing the possibilities
that exist. Meritocratic games have their place—­I certainly enjoyed
Grand Theft Auto IV and I spent plenty of time competitively raiding
in World of Warcraft—­but I am also tremendously excited about the
possibility of exploring new ideas.
One broad way to start thinking about games differently is to assess
what it is that games let the player do. The typical path of a game is as
an empowerment fantasy. By way of a meritocratic design trope that
allows the player to move forward and become more powerful over
time, video games are often about making the player more capable
than he or she, or any human, really is. From sports games that have
players embodying All-­Stars to first-­person shooters that let players
soak up more bullets and dish out more damage than a human ever
could, games are about making the fantastic ordinary. Focusing on
empowerment limits the kind of story that can be told and restricts
the kind of mechanics players are likely to encounter. These elements
feed a meritocratic symbol system, as these games instruct players that
they are special, different, and superior to those who cannot hack it.
However, there are games emerging that challenge such an expecta-
tion of empowerment.
In 2013, Richard Hofmeier’s Cart Life dominated the Indepen-
dent Games Festival Awards, winning the grand prize, an award for
game narrative, and a third award given to the best abstract, uncon-
ventional game. Cart Life is a different kind of game; Leigh Alexander
observes that the player has to “remember to pay rent, buy grocer-
ies, perhaps try to make friends in the community. If you have time.
Time in Cart Life passes mercilessly, with no opportunity to correct
for things you’ve missed.”2 One character in the game needs to smoke
or he slows down, another character needs to pick up her daughter
after school. The player is placed in a position seeking to balance all
the kinds of chores and tasks a normal person has to juggle on a reg-
ular basis. Alexander argues that the game is effectively about reflec-
tion, as it “has the odd power to throw your life into sharp relief” and
 165 Conclusion
is effectively “a reminder of how deeply games can communicate the
value of small victories.”3 Sporting a Metacritic rating of 79, with pos-
itive reviews from a number of mainstream game outlets, Cart Life
provides a different kind of game experience. Instead of building a
game around making a player increasingly powerful, the game has
you live through the life of someone with everyday problems. The
game is not about a fantasy, aspirational life; it is about reflecting on
the life of people around you about whom you do not always think.
The game is all about empathy and, although players are striving to
make their lives better, it is not driven by the same sort of aspirational
meritocratic narrative typical of most video games.
Another, related game that demonstrates a different mode of game
building is Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please. Simulating the life of a border
patrol agent in Arstotzka, a communist state placed in an imagined
Cold War period, Papers, Please requires players to make the kinds
of decisions border patrol agents need to make on a regular basis.
In the flow of people seeking entry into your country are smugglers,
spies, and terrorists, as well as visitors simply seeking to reunite with
loved ones. The game has been highly reviewed by a wide variety of
sources, earning praise in publications ranging from the paragon of
core gaming, IGN, the PC-­focused Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and broader
news sites like the New Statesman.4 Papers, Please—­with an 85 score on
Metacritic, which would make many AAA game developers envious—­
forces players into a position where they are simultaneously trying
to make border control decisions and take care of their family. Play-
ers are paid for each person correctly processed and can be fined for
improper decisions. Side deals can be cut with shady characters, and
players are often faced with such moral choices as separating families
or deciding whether to let a human trafficker with proper paperwork
into the country, all while trying to process enough people to buy food
and medicine for your own family. The game is dark, stressful, and, as
the additional levels of paperwork stack up, quite difficult. The game
is also notable because of how it is built, which is fundamentally dif-
ferent from most video games.
Reviews of the game tell of its core features, describing how Papers,
Please is an experience, one in which, Justin McElroy believes, play-
ers, in their work at the immigration booth, “will reduce the living,
breathing humans in front of your window to a series of documents.
Conclusion 166
It’s inevitable. Once you’ve made this essential leap, you’ll be staggered
at the injustice you’re willing to visit on your fellow man.”5 The game
instructs about the everyday grind faced by bureaucrats, and Richard
Cobbett observes that “very few other games have so perfectly encap-
sulated just how being trapped in this kind of dehumanising role can
be, in the best possible way, and both inside and out of the dreaded
grey booth.”6 Not exactly “fun,” but not exactly not fun; John Walker
argues that the game “is unquestionably something unique” because
“it is, undeniably a paperwork sim. And perhaps that’s enough to put
some off it entirely. But it’s definitely worth getting past that (other-
wise entirely sensible) prejudice in this case. It’s peculiarly engrossing,
darkly ominous, and a fascinating exploration of morality versus prog-
ress.”7 Players are encouraged to reassess their prior conceptions of
how they would act in a pressure-­filled situation, since, according to
Leigh Alexander, they are forced to choose whether they wish to “per-
form nude body-­scans on frail refugees” to prevent terrorism, which
“forces you to think about the human cost of bureaucracy by creat-
ing empathy with all its living components.”8 Even through the rapid
pace of the game, in which players seek to process as many people as
they can, Papers, Please encourages reflection and critical thought. Did
I really just turn that person down? What choices do I need to make
to provide for my family? Is the fastest way to process people simply
to turn everyone down?
Papers, Please feels and plays differently than most video games,
which Leigh Alexander explains by examining the core of the game:
“Most computer games are power fantasies, but in exploring the daily
work of a border control agent, [game designer Lucas] Pope’s con-
cocted a disempowerment fantasy. What if you weren’t the brave spy
or roguish smuggler, but the guy who has the boring job of stopping
him?”9 Effectively, the game inverts the typical videogame experience.
The player is not all-­powerful but rather consistently stressed and
routinely placed in situations where there are no good, easy choices.
Playing more often can certainly make one more skilled at process-
ing documentation, but the end state of the game is something more
like survival than the glorious future that lies at the end of many other
titles. In fact, beating the game unlocks an “endless mode” where
all there is to do is process documentation. Papers, Please, dark and
gloomy, largely breaks away from meritocratic norms in both narra-
 167 Conclusion
tive and design. It fosters space for reflection and encourages players
to think about choices made both within games and within the world
that exists outside them.
A third game that offers a non-­meritocratic mode of play is Tell-
tale’s series The Walking Dead: The Game.10 Based in the world de-
veloped by the comic books of the same name, the games are episodic
and individual episodes are packaged into seasons held together by
overarching stories and adventures. The game starts by placing play-
ers in the role of Lee Everett, a former University of Georgia pro-
fessor who was convicted of murder and is being transported to jail
when the zombie apocalypse begins. Shortly after beginning he comes
across Clementine, a young girl whose parents are away and whose
babysitter has been transformed into a zombie. The game, especially
the first season, is well reviewed, earning praise from a variety of dif-
ferent outlets, with Metacritic scores in the high 80s and low 90s, de-
pending on the platform being considered. However, one of the most
notable aspects of the series is how it subverts typical notions of what
a game is or should be.
Reviews of the series typically focus on the role of choice in its de-
sign. One reviewer contends that “the most engaging moments in the
series revolve around choice” and that “choices have meaning. Charac-
ters you interact with remember what you’ve said and respond accord-
ingly down the line.”11 The game is morally ambiguous, since the rules
are different in a zombie apocalypse, and reviewer Hollander Cooper
found that players are quickly forced to acknowledge that “there’s no
‘right’ when right can mean shooting an innocent child before it can
turn into a flesh-­eating beast, and there’s no ‘wrong’ when wrong can
mean stealing the supplies you need from those just as needy as you.
The Walking Dead is the story of the choices you can’t live with, and
the choices you can, coming together to create an experience as de-
pressing and pessimistic as it is remarkable and memorable.”12 The
game basically funnels players into situations where they are forced
to make a decision in conversation or where they are forced to quickly
respond to a quick-­time event in order to defend imperiled charac-
ters. Each episode has a handful of decision points where players can
choose different routes through the game, which means that, for Greg
Miller, the game is effectively “like a coloring book: we each have the
same black and white sketch, but it’s up to us to fill it in as we see fit.
Conclusion 168
The relationships I’ve built, the emotions I’ve felt, the choices I’ve
made—­that’s what makes The Walking Dead: The Game so endear-
ing.”13 Choice means conferring agency to players, even if there are a
limited number of scripted options from which the player is deciding.
When it works, Hollander Cooper argues that the game is designed
in a way that, “despite not always being in control, The Walking Dead
makes you feel as though you are. Even though you can’t always save
someone from death, you can give it your best try, shaping the person
you are. And it’s up to you to decide if it’s worth the effort to change
what, in all likelihood, can not [sic] be changed.”14 By effectively mak-
ing the game about choices, rather than combat, The Walking Dead
works differently from many other games and becomes more acces-
sible for a broad audience. By setting the game in a dark, postapoca-
lyptic setting, the design and narrative of The Walking Dead squeeze
out meritocratic narrative and design because there is no grand, es-
capist victory.
The game does not clearly fit in an established gaming genre; its
fence s­ traddling is best shown in the Touch Arcade reviews of the first
two seasons. The reviews are written by different people, and the dif-
ficulty of labeling the game is clear. The first season is assessed as “an
adventure game first and foremost. When there is ‘action,’ it occurs in
QTE [quick-­time event] segments that have you tapping or swiping
contextually as a zombie runs towards you.”15 Fewer than two years
later, the review of the second season notes, “this is less an adventure
game and more of a visual novel, albeit one that does a very good job
of keeping the player within the lines while simultaneously making
them feel like the story is their own.”16 For me, the most interesting
thing about the two seemingly oppositional statements is that I agree
with both of them. The game is both an adventure game and a visual
novel. The Walking Dead: The Game straddles boundaries and sits
in a space between genres, which makes it distinct from other video
games. By opting out of traditional categories, and by utilizing the
narrative tropes that are typical of a zombie apocalypse, The Walking
Dead bucks the meritocratic trends endemic to most contemporary
video games.
An extension of defying established game genres is that The Walk-
ing Dead series does not really depend on skill in the traditional sense
 169 Conclusion
of video games. There are quick-­time events, which can be somewhat
tricky or difficult to manage, but they do not serve as the same sort of
obstacle as the kinds of interactions found in most traditional titles.
Instead of needing to jump on platforms, navigate three-­dimensional
spaces, or master complicated series of button presses, all of which are
routinely found in adventure games, the actions in The Walking Dead
are relatively rare and can be repeated as often as one needs in order to
complete them. Most of the experience of playing the game is reading,
moving around in small, contained areas, and simple selections made
from menus. The events add depth and dynamism to play, but they are
structured in a manner that is forgiving and appeal to a much broader
audience than most other games. By engaging in a more accessible
level of design, The Walking Dead and other games by Telltale subvert
the typical knowledge scaffolding found in video games, as it is acces-
sible to those well versed in video games as well as those who are not.
These benefits are compounded by the fact that the game is based on
a world developed in comic books and television shows. Those origin
points mean that the games implicitly reward transmedia knowledge
found in other texts, quite possibly inviting a larger audience to play.
In blending elements of a visual novel with game play, The Walking
Dead points to another way to avoid the meritocratic trap of video:
by subverting design based on skill transfer, and thereby rejecting the
structural inequality that comes with it.
The Walking Dead’s focus on functioning like a visual novel pro-
vides a way of thinking about the Fullbright Company’s Gone Home.
In this “game” the player takes a first-­person role as Kaitlin Green-
briar, who returns to the house where her parents and sister, Saman-
tha, live, only to find it empty. Samantha left a note on the door to
instruct Kaitlin to not look for any answers; the player can explore
throughout the house to unravel what her family has been doing. Set
in the mid-­1990s and offering rich environmental detail, Gone Home
is as much an experience as anything else. Unlike the visual novel of
The Walking Dead, in Gone Home there are no other characters with
whom to talk. Instead, everything is found through interaction with
the house and the objects within it. Resonance comes in the interac-
tion with the artifacts Kaitlin discovers and in how the game is de-
signed to make the player “feel like you’re in a space, but that you’re
Conclusion 170
also playing a game, and the game is playing back with you.”17 Gone
Home is a compelling, immersive, and interesting experience that chal-
lenges the traditional structure of games.
One of the most interesting aspects of Gone Home is how the re-
ception of the game encouraged reflection about what actually con-
stitutes a video game. While one review described it as “a first-­person
exploratory adventure game,” another went out of its way to point out
that the game play is limited to “walking, reading, and the occasional
mix-­tape listening” and continued on to note that the game “has no
action to speak of. You’ll never see a character’s face, and you’ll never
earn a score on a leaderboard. No online, no multiplayer, no DLC
[downloadable content].”18 Both reviews were quite positive, but they
did not know what to do with the game, a dynamic that surprised the
developers as they found Gone Home becoming “ingrained in the dis-
cussion of what a video game actually is.”19 Gone Home shares elements
with many video games, from mode of distribution to the profile of
the designers to the way in which players move through a rich world.
However, you cannot win Gone Home or prove that you played it
better than someone else did; it is not a meritocratic proving ground.
These factors are precisely why Gone Home is an important piece in
beginning to think about games differently.
Discussion of Gone Home typically focuses on the emotional power
of the game, which is particularly meaningful because the primary
characters and themes in the game are not represented in most video
games. In her review, Danielle Riendeau wrote, “Gone Home resonated
deeply for me, partially because the particulars of the story are eerily
familiar. I was surprised by the story, and even more surprised by my
reaction. I’ve mowed down thousands of bad guys and aliens and evil
henchmen in my 25-­plus-­year gaming career. And I’ve enjoyed emo-
tional experiences and fallen for a number of memorable characters in
that time. But I never expected to see myself—­or such a strong reflec-
tion of myself and my own life—­in a video game.”20 For people who
grew up in the 1990s, Gone Home is a version of our childhood or ad-
olescence. It may not be our tale, but it is close enough to many of our
experiences that the game prompts feeling, nostalgia, and reflection.
A less lyrical, more direct assessment states that “games like The Last
of Us and BioShock Infinite allow us to explore exceptionally realized
worlds, but Gone Home’s world just feels straight-­up real.”21 A third
 171 Conclusion
review argues that Gone Home’s constraints make it feel “stunningly
universal, even though from some angles it’s unique, complicated,
even difficult.”22 Simultaneously possessing a central story and com-
pelling bits and pieces that drive the player to look deeper, Gone Home
is largely about what it was like to live at a particular point in time.
With a different focus and different mechanics than most games,
it should not be surprising that classification of Gone Home is difficult.
The game subverts dominant expectations and is also a compelling
enough experience that it is eminently worthy of attention and discus-
sion. Gone Home is troublesome because it demonstrates an alternate
way of doing things, proving that the games we have played up until
this point were only part of what can be made. In challenging dom-
inant norms and expectations, Gone Home shows how a compelling
videogame experience can be made without any sort of meritocratic
element. Without the leaderboards or crosshairs, one can still develop
a game worthy of awards and extended analysis. Something new can
be done, but when the new way of playing comes along we won’t al-
ways know what to do with it.
Entire genres of games also challenge parts of the design or nar-
rative endemic in meritocratic video games. A whole raft of so-­called
casual games offers alternate modes of game design, often in a way that
maximizes the ability of a wide group of people to play the game and
minimizes the need for finely honed skill. Often derided as “clicker”
games, titles like FarmVille, Mafia Wars, and Kim Kardashian: Holly-
wood are not difficult to play. Most of the action in the games is rele-
gated to a simple click, and then bars move, items spray into the air,
and the cycle is repeated until your energy is exhausted, at which point
you need to wait until your energy refills to play again. Often played
on Facebook or mobile devices, many casual games have a fundamen-
tally different audience than console and PC titles do, one that skews
more heavily toward women and others who are left out of the tradi-
tional category of gamers.
This genre of games often employs elements of meritocratic nar-
ratives, but the mechanics often subvert key elements of meritocratic
game design. Instead of designing the game around puzzles, compli-
cated series of button presses, or the ability to maneuver with two
thumb sticks, games like Kim Kardashian: Hollywood reward per-
sistence, patience, and the desire to keep pushing buttons to watch
Conclusion 172
bars move, all of which challenge the dominant design norms of video
games. Effort is certainly involved in these games, but by stripping out
skill requirements the barrier for entry is lowered and the potential
audience is vast. Casual games are often regarded as lesser than more
mainstream video games, but that perception is based almost exclu-
sively on the relative level of skill involved in playing them. Calling
these games “clickers” or “casual” marginalizes them, and those jeers
are linked to the games’ resistance of meritocratic design norms be-
cause they don’t require the player to show off any “real” skills.
Core console games can also represent complicated relationships
with meritocratic norms. Players in No Man’s Sky get more powerful
over the course of the game in a fairly traditional meritocratic fash-
ion, but the design of the game is more complicated than that. Highly
promoted in advance of its launch and excoriated, even sued, for not
meeting prerelease expectations, No Man’s Sky stepped outside the
meritocratic framework, promoting exploration and long-­term en-
gagement. Separating the game from the hype around it is difficult,
largely because the developer made so many promises that no game
could possibly meet.23 However, one of the most interesting parts of
the game’s release was how reviewers discussed the game. In general,
game reviews are odd things to read and write. Effectively a statement
of personal taste about whether an expenditure is “worth” it, game re-
viewers are obligated to demonstrate that they have sufficiently en-
gaged the game and have developed a knowledgeable opinion about
it. That often leads to an instrumental kind of play based on devel-
oping a perspective that can then be conveyed in an article. Reviews
for No Man’s Sky are different, largely because the game is different.
The Kotaku review engages in two quite different approaches within
a single review. The first was instrumental, as the reviewer sought to
chew through the story to generate something to write about. The
second was lyrical and focused on leisurely exploration. In the end,
Kirk Hamilton concludes, “The first time I played No Man’s Sky, I
moved forward too fast. The second time, I stood still. Now, I’m ready
to set out again, anchored by the things I’ll leave behind.” Hamilton’s
key takeaway is that, when confronted with a different kind of game,
we must relearn how to play it. Forcing a non-­meritocratic game into
a highly rigid framework makes it harder to appreciate it on its own
terms. Certainly the promotion surrounding the game led to criticism,
 173 Conclusion
but there is plenty of room to see how introducing a game based on
exploration requires that players and journalists take time to reframe
their perspectives and appreciate it on its own terms.
Another example of a video game that demonstrates resistance
to meritocratic norms is Faunasphere, a now-­defunct massively mul-
tiplayer online game (MMOG) played on browsers and Facebook.
Faunasphere, subject to a book-­length analysis by Mia Consalvo and
Jason Begy, was largely popular with middle-­aged women players and
resisted the fantasy and science-fiction tropes that dominate most
other video games. The game allowed players to have multiple pets,
and the limit on how many they held was tied to whether they were
paying for the game. Although there were levels to progress through,
the game did not inspire the kind of competition that typifies most ti-
tles. Instead, increasing levels helped players become more successful
at breeding their pets, but the best breeding opportunities required
cooperation. These design choices, in combination with players who
were largely unaware of typical norms in online games, meant that the
game featured what Consalvo and Begy deem a “culture of niceness.”24
The early game play in Faunasphere “depended on players helping one
another—­usually by giving one another eggs for crossbreeding fauna
or different items in order to decorate personal spheres [a house-­like
space].”25 It is quite notable that Faunasphere both attracted a differ-
ent player base than other games and helped structure positive in-
teractions for players. That said, the game only survived for about
two years. Although there are plenty of other short-­lived MMOGs in
gaming history, it is notable that a game company was unable to find
a way to sufficiently market and monetize a title that did not target
conventional demographics.
A final group of titles that show a different future for games, I
would deem experimental. Johann Sebastian Joust, Die Gute Fabrik’s
no-­graphics, motion-­controller version of the folk game Ninja, is a
great example of an alternate mode of design. Players in Johann Se-
bastian Joust are given motion controllers and tasked with keeping
their motion in sync with the music while knocking opponents out of
sync. As the music speeds up, players can move more quickly, but they
must be ready to slow down when the tempo of the music changes.
There are certainly barriers to play—­one needs a whole lot of mo-
tion controllers—­but when the game is being played it works as an
Conclusion 174
invitation for other people to join in. There are far fewer barriers to
playing a game like Joust than most video games, as it relies on move-
ments and the kind of interaction that is far more typical of daily life
than years of sitting behind a controller or a keyboard, even though
the game design advantages those with long arms and good balance.
Other games, like thatgamecompany’s Journey or David O’Reilly’s
Mountain, challenge fundamental notions about what games are and
can be. Journey is a game without words, and reviews laud “its beauti-
ful story without a line of dialogue either spoken or written out” and
describe it as a game where “you never fight. You don’t score points
or compete with anyone. You don’t make meaningful choices or ven-
ture about an open world. There is no clear set of goals or obstacles
to achieve or overcome.”26 In Journey you can play and interact with
another person in a deep, resonant manner, but you cannot talk with
them. Further, the primary interaction you share is one of helping the
other player move forward, instead of competing against them in an
attempt to reach a mutually exclusive goal. The director of Journey
argues that player interaction is structured by game design: “I believe
that very often it’s not really the player that’s an asshole. It’s the game
designer that made them an asshole. If you spend every day killing
one another how are you going to be a nice guy? All console games
are about killing each other, or killing one another together. . . . Our
games make us assholes.”27 Journey is designed with the explicit intent
to cause players to interact positively; by changing how characters in
the game interacted, Journey set up a system designed to encourage
cooperation by awarding the most feedback to players for acts aiding
others.28 This parallels the kind of interactions Consalvo and Begy cite
in Faunasphere: by focusing on something other than killing things,
the terms of interaction change and the community can become more
positive and helpful. Changing the terms for engagement and in-­game
incentive structures can have a massive impact on how players interact
and what they choose to do.
Mountain is odd and challenging, especially as it is a game you do
not really play. As an “ambient procedural mountain simulator,” Moun-
tain gives the player “nothing to ‘play’; your mountain exists, sunlight
and dark play over its green craggy face, weather happens to it. Occa-
sionally a few words appear on the screen: The mountain has thoughts
or feelings about the weather or the night.”29 In the end, Mountain
 175 Conclusion
is at least in part about talking and thinking about the experience of
playing it. It has a certain kind of peace and leads some to wax elo-
quent about the game as a deep endurance challenge; others tend to
uninstall it fairly quickly.30 The game does have an end point, gener-
ally when the mountain is destroyed by something, but the riddle of
Mountain lies mostly in the empty space of interaction between the
player and the procedures generating the mountain. The player does
not have any more control over the mountain than they do over an
offline mountain; the game feels mainly like an inkblot that resists easy
categorization. Even if a game like Mountain is quickly uninstalled,
it is important and worthy of attention because it resists everything I
thought a game could be.
There is also room for experimentation in game modes and de-
sign. When game companies design multiplayer modes, they have
clear choices about how those modes will be played and the terms
for interaction among players. From cooperative to competitive play,
multiplayer can be designed in a number of ways, but the journalist
Mark Serrels speaks for many when he notes that multiplayer modes
in video games often make players “feel a little violent” because they
often encounter situations where they face verbal harassment for mak-
ing small mistakes, which is “not fun. Not fun at all. A huge barrier to
entry. No-­one likes to be shouted at or abused.”31 Multiplayer can be
designed differently, however. Games like Splatoon and Rocket League
are designed to make it okay for players to not be able to perform as
well as others. Developing games that do not depend on killing, in-
creasing the dynamics of the visual design, making the game quicker
so players do not have to dwell on a loss, and giving players a clear role
to play opens up opportunities and decreases the barriers to entry for
new players. These kinds of chances offer up a version of multiplayer
that is more like recreational sports leagues than competitive ones,
which creates a multiplayer space where, Serrels argues, “everyone
is playing, everyone’s enjoying the experience. Even if you lose, even
if you played terribly, everyone leaves happy. Everyone shakes hands
at the end. Everyone is having a good time.”32 Multiplayer is a place
where games still have room to innovate; the design choices made in
those modes are a key factor in disrupting meritocratic norms and re-
placing them with collaboration and fun.
Although many of the games mentioned as positive examples could
Conclusion 176
be readily classified as indie darlings, I certainly hope there are more
interesting games coming on a much wider scale. For now, the inde-
pendent game movement is largely where innovation in games is hap-
pening. This is likely because mainstream, AAA games now require
massive budgets, which make publishers and developers exception-
ally risk averse. Independent studios have more room for experimen-
tation and exploration, so they often can take a chance and produce
games that do not fit conventional norms. The important lesson that
can be taken from these games is that non-­meritocratic games can be
designed, can be interesting, and can be successful. AAA games like
Borderlands 2 and the debut of the “Best Friends Forever” mode also
demonstrate how innovation can happen across games, even if the
debut of that particular mode was marred by the casual sexism of the
discussion around it. Although I doubt that a few games here or there
will resolve the toxicity in game culture, games like these change the
terms on which players interact. There will still be jerks who play, as
there are jerks everywhere, but dropping the meritocratic norms of
video games puts players in a dramatically different position than they
are in contemporary, mainstream games. Disrupting what currently
exists is a fundamental part of addressing toxicity, which needs to reach
beyond banning particular players to affect the design and narrative
in the games themselves. The abandonment of meritocratic norms is
likely what makes these games contentious for some, as it is readily
apparent they symbolize a new future for video games.

Dear Game Designers

Changing the meritocratic norms in games and building better com-
munities in games involves at least two major steps that can be learned
from other areas where meritocracies are cracking and from the games
that chart a different path for game design. The first piece of de-
constructing the meritocratic norms in games is to infuse risk into
or change the way competition works, particularly in single-­player
games. One of the key effects of the meritocratic design of games is
that players are largely in control. Through their effort, skill, and per-
sistence, they are assured a win. Competitive multiplayer takes away
an assured victory, but the fault of the loss is not necessarily yours, as
so many teammates are clearly performing worse than you are. Video
 177 Conclusion
games do not have to be this way. Early video games, like Space In-
vaders and Donkey Kong, did not have win conditions. Although classic
arcade games often had kill screens, where the game simply stopped,
the most common end state for almost all was that the game sped
up to a point where the player was no longer able to keep up. Video
games need the risk and contingency that, to some degree, come with
sports, where players fundamentally understand that the success they
see is not always their own. Serendipity and luck are primary ways to
disrupt meritocratic game design, as minimizing elements of skill is
part of a symbol system that stands in contrast to meritocracy. The
other route is to follow the path of Gone Home and skip altogether the
leaderboard, competition, and other elements that typify meritocratic
video games. Opting out of meritocratic expectations changes both
the experience of the game and the audience video games are likely
to reach, all while providing a compelling product.
Developing games that have hints of meritocracy leads to bigger
problems than one would think. Study after study, from Paul Piff’s
work with Monopoly to Robert H. Frank’s work on skill and sharing,
demonstrate how people who find themselves in a stronger position
act terribly toward others.33 Shannon K. McCoy and Brenda Major
have found that any sort of meritocratic cue can cause those very
human feelings to rise up, which disrupts efforts to develop a pos-
itive community around a game.34 However, there is work that also
shows the promise of a different approach. Inducing feelings of grati-
tude in players produces the opposite kind of response. When people
are put into a state of gratitude, like when they acknowledge the role
of luck in their success, Monica Y. Bartlett and David DeSteno have
found they increase their efforts to help others, even if it costs them
personally.35 Even better, instead of the negative health benefits that
come with meritocratic systems, Nancy Digdon and Amy Koble found
that gratitude tends to make people feel better.36 Perhaps most strik-
ing from a game design perspective, Nathan DeWall and his team of
researchers found that people put into a state of gratitude are more
likely to feel empathy toward others and less likely to act aggressively
when provoked.37 Designing games with an eye toward prompting
gratitude and reflection about good fortune is far more likely to en-
courage players to engage productively with one another. Instead of
the relentless focus on the individual that comes with meritocracy,
Conclusion 178
gratitude facilitates consideration of a group, of a larger system and
the well-­being of all.
A second way to disrupt the meritocracy is to think through how
to seed and recruit new communities of people in an effort to detox-
ify games. As Richard Bartle noted long ago, when the community of
a game falls out of balance, the attrition of certain player types can
produce a death spiral in which no one is getting what they want out
of a game.38 Higher education demonstrates the value of recruitment,
and some games have made similar efforts. Monaco: What’s Yours Is
Mine is a PC game in which players work together to execute a heist.
Fundamentally a cooperative game, the efforts of any one player to
subvert the mission would make the game far less fun for all of his
or her teammates. The beta and early community of the game was
seeded through special invitations given to active readers of Rock,
Paper, Shotgun, with the intent of attracting positive players. Effec-
tively, Monaco’s developers sought to attract players seeking to play
the game with other players in an effort to set positive norms before
the title officially launched. In a game dependent on people working
together, developing a positive community is a critical step that is far
harder to fix after people have already seen negative behavior. Craft-
ing a proper, nontoxic symbol system in advance of officially releas-
ing the game at least gave Monaco and its players a chance to develop
a supportive community.
Another way to think about achieving similar goals would be to
take a lesson from sports and seek to include a broader representa-
tion of players, with the intent of benefiting the system in the long
term, displacing a relentless focus on who is best right now. From the
universality place that ensures representation from a broader range
of countries to the NCAA bids given to small teams destined to get
demolished in the first round of a basketball tournament, inclusivity
has substantial benefits in competitive play. Finding ways to promote,
celebrate, and advance players throughout the various skill levels can
encourage others to see a path forward for themselves. When Riot
relies on simply growing the player base of League of Legends to ad-
dress issues of diversity, it misses opportunities to actually move things
forward. Instead, it could seek out communities of people who play
less or who are not as widely represented and give them a chance to
participate on a prominent platform. An inclusive approach can spur
the imagination and help players think about how they can become
 179 Conclusion
part of something larger, instead of lamenting that they simply can-
not reach the heights of the best players in the game.

Our Obligation
There is no one, clear answer to fixing games. However, the vid-
eogame community stands apart in its willingness to attack its own.
As I write, GamerGate is still ongoing—­and I am sure that more
will occur between when I write this and when you read this—­but
among the many takeaways from GamerGate is the undercurrent
that those in the videogame community understand what is going on,
but those outside it do not.39 There are certainly elements of game
journalism worthy of questioning—­from the pro-­consumption stand-
point of most reviews to the money paid to YouTubers in exchange
for favorable coverage of games and the promotion of questionably
legal, assuredly rigged gambling sites through online videos—­but, as
a movement, GamerGate functions more like a mob of harassment
than a bona fide organization for addressing structural problems in
video games.40 The general technology community calls it “the most
depressing thing to have happened in games in quite some time,” and
larger, general-purpose publications refer to it as a “misogynist and
racist movement” that should be considered a hate group: “There is
no neutral stance to take on that—­we are either with them or against
them.”41 Videogame culture is insular, restricted, and toxic. There are
real impacts to these kinds of campaigns beyond the people harassed
and bullied out of covering video games—­namely, many won’t take
on writing about video games as a topic in the first place. One jour-
nalist recounted talking to a colleague who was grateful for not cov-
ering video games even though “here is a guy who spends all day on
the phone with officials from the Pentagon trying to ferret out which
multi-­billion dollar weapon systems are actually expensive boondog-
gles and, thanks to Gamergate, he’s terrified to even spill a drop of
virtual ink covering video games.”42 Toxic culture and repressive cam-
paigns have the effect of pushing people out, silencing voices, and
cutting off discussion. Reconstructing videogame culture requires rec-
ognizing that many talented, good people are being bullied and have
stopped thinking about, writing about, and playing games before they
even started. Although some people at the heart of GamerGate have
been linked to misogynist, white supremacist, and other hate cam-
Conclusion 180
paigns, the videogame community provided a fertile ground within
which to attract adherents to their message and sustain the effort long
past its sell-­by date.
Games have been telling gamers for a long time that if they are
good enough and work hard enough they will have earned the wins
they collect at the end of the level. There is no single cause to all these
problems, but these concerns are closely linked to the kinds of issues
Michael Young originally hypothesized would occur under a meritoc-
racy. The hate, the lack of understanding, the feelings of superiority,
all these elements are tightly linked to symbol systems related to merit
and earning one’s advancements. As Whitney Phillips observed about
trolls and discourse online, it is often the systems and structures that
need to be addressed, as changing problematic norms is a key factor
in addressing troublesome communities.
The job of rhetorical analysis is to disrupt moments like this one in
video games. Rhetorical criticism is well designed to assess a symbol
system and how it works to enable certain kinds of appeals and dis-
courage others. The new perspective that can be given by rhetoric is
similar to the direct engagement that can be furthered by certain kinds
of education. In advocating for the active learning that often typifies a
Jesuit education, Rev. Peter-­Hans Kolvenbach explained that “when
the heart is touched by direct experience, the mind may be challenged
to change.”43 The beautiful thing about video games is that they can
provide a direct experience for their players. The horrible thing is that
they have primarily offered only a limited, meritocratic experience.
However, there is plenty of room for change. Addressing toxicity in
games requires taking on the meritocratic design and narratives woven
within them. Certain games and elements of other parts of culture give
a roadmap for how video games can change, which can disrupt what
exists now with something new. I hope that is a journey we, as a part
of videogame culture, take on in order to make video games a more
accepting, less toxic place. It is dangerous for any of us to go alone,
so we must gather what resources we can to make video games and
game culture better. We have an obligation and an opportunity to fix
a desperately broken system. It’s time for change. We can do it. We
need to do it. Let’s get started.
Acknowledgments

Although my name is the one on the cover of this book, there are many
people without whom this project simply could not have happened.
Thank you to everyone who helped make this possible.
The initial seeds of this project began in the Arrupe Seminar at
Seattle University. Thank you to Father Peter Ely, SJ, and Jennifer
Tilghman-­Havens for being exceptional moderators and to all of my
Arrupe group mates. I would not have thought about this project in
the way I did without the Arrupe Seminar. Funding for the begin-
ning of this project came as a part of a Seattle University College of
Arts and Sciences Dean’s Research Fellowship. Thank you to Anina
Walas and Katheryn Smith for rocking your projects. Thanks to the
colleagues in my department for supporting my work.
Professional feedback at many conferences and presentations was
incredibly valuable. My first presentation on this topic was given as
part of an invitation by Mia Consalvo at her M-­Lab at Concordia
University. Thank you to Mia for offering the opportunity to pres-
ent the work in a nascent stage and to all who attended. In particular,
Bart Simon made huge contributions to the early stages of my think-
ing, and many of my responses to his comments show up in the final
version of the work. Thank you to Adrienne Shaw for answering all
of my questions about the University of Minnesota Press. Thank you
to all who made contributions or comments that helped push and
adapt my thinking or provided an example for how to think about

181
Acknowledgments 182
these concepts. Substantial credit for the quality of the arguments in
the book is due to the contributions of its reviewers: Mia Consalvo,
Torill Mortensen, Carly Kocurek, and the anonymous “Reviewer 2.”
Thank you to Cathy Hannabach and Emma Johnson at Ideas on First
for the awesome index.
The University of Minnesota Press has been amazing through-
out this process. I am deeply indebted to Jason Weidemann, who
gave great advice for my first book; I am so glad we got to work to-
gether on this one. His comments on the manuscript were insight-
ful and provocative, and he definitely made the book better. Danielle
Kasprzak and Erin Warholm gave great guidance and feedback, and
I hope to work with them more in the future. Nicholas Taylor and
Mike Stoffel deserve credit for quality copyediting. Thanks to Daniel
Ochsner for moving the book through the production process. Thank
you to everyone at the Press who made this possible and consistently
made it a better book.
Thank you to all the people who kept me going and asked good
questions. Thank you to Fatima Azami and everyone at Mother’s Place
for watching Piper. Thank you to Caitlin Ring Carlson for running
and keeping me sane, and to Wayno for driving us to races and in-
troducing me to SWGOH. Thanks to Rick Malleus for helping me
keep perspective. Thank you to Beth Slattery for providing the first
feedback on the written version of this project. Thank you to Me-
lissa Marion Rosenberry and my best friend, Suzanne, for keeping
me laughing. Thank you to Martha Aby for quality walks and talks.
Thanks to Eleanor, Addy, Amy, and Beth Meyer for helping me keep
perspective on life. Thanks to the fine folks at Georgetown Brewery,
particularly Lauren and Max, for keeping me hydrated. Thank you
to the people involved in Lost and Battlestar Galactica, who gave me
something to watch as I wrote.
Most of all, thank you to my family. Lisa, your constant requests
for a dedication amused me. Maybe one of these days. Mom and Dad,
thanks for asking questions, giving feedback, and supporting me. I ap-
preciate it. Thanks to the Minnesota crew of Trudie Harris, Greg Har-
ris, Richard Wieser, and Ashley Wieser for making each trip there fun.
Thanks to Casey Byrne and Chris Lott. Thank you to Adam Conway.
Most of all, thank you to Erin, Piper, and Ingrid. I could not do what
I do without you three. Thank you so much for all you add to life.
Notes

Introduction
1. Taylor Wofford, “APA Says Video Games Make You Violent, but Crit-
ics Cry Bias,” Newsweek, 20 August 2015, http://www.newsweek.com/apa-video
-games-violence-364394.
2. Tom Chatfield, “Videogames Now Outperform Hollywood Movies,”
The Guardian, 27 September 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/
gamesblog/2009/sep/27/videogames-hollywood; Aphra Kerr, The Business and
Culture of Digital Games: Gamework and Gameplay (London: Sage, 2006).
3. In this text I generally use videogame culture and the culture around
video games as interchangeable terms. I contend that there is a culture around
video games that is distinct from other cultures. Although the people participat-
ing in the culture around video games are also part of other cultures, the interac-
tions around video games offer a specific set of common texts and experiences. It
is important to remember that videogame culture is certainly affected by other
cultural norms, including meritocracy, norms and practices of the internet, and
various other social and cultural factors. This culture is largely populated by
people who would describe themselves as gamers and is often referred to as a
hardcore audience for video games.
4. Keith Stuart, “Gamer Communities: The Positive Side,” The Guardian,
31 July 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2013/jul/31/
gamer-communities-positive-side-twitter.
5. Leigh Alexander, “GDC Online: Bartle on MUD’s ‘Soul,’ Design ‘Must
Want to Say Something,’” Gamasutra, 8 October 2010, http://www.gamasutra.
com/view/news/121595/GDC_Online_Bartle_On_MUDs_Soul_Design_
Must_Want_To_Say_Something.php.

183
Notes to Introduction 184
6. Simon Parkin, “The Man Who Made a Game to Change the World,”
Eurogamer, 30 October 2014, http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-10-30
-the-utopia-that-never-died.
7. Ibid.
8. Chief Pat, “The State of Clash Royale,” YouTube, 15 July 2016, https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_vHdhSgGmw.
9. PandabBoj, “What Part of This Game Is Fun Exactly?” Clash Royale
Forum, 27 July 2016, http://forum.supercell.net/showthread.php/1213578
-What-part-of-this-game-is-fun-exactly; QuaternionsRock, “Legendaries Are
Slowly Breaking the Game (Not Just Another Rant Post),” reddit, 27 July 2016,
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClashRoyale/comments/4uvxbc/legendaries_are_
slowly_breaking_the_game_not_just/.
10. International Game Developers Association, “Game Developer De-
mographics: An Exploration of Workforce Diversity,” October 2005, http://c
.ymcdn.com/sites/www.igda.org/resource/collection/9215B88F-2AA3-4471
-B44D-B5D58FF25DC7/IGDA_DeveloperDemographics_Oct05.pdf.
11. International Game Developers Association, “Developer Satisfaction Sur-
vey 2015: Summary Report,” 2 September 2015, https://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www
.igda.org/resource/collection/CB31CE86-F8EE-4AE3-B46A-148490336605/
IGDA%20DSS%202015-SummaryReport_Final_Sept15.pdf.
12. Robin Potanin, “Forces in Play: The Business and Culture of Videogame
Production,” in Fun and Games ’10: Proceedings of the 3rd International Confer-
ence on Fun and Games, ed. Vero Vanden Abeele et al. (New York: ACM, 2010),
138.
13. Matthew Handrahan, “Ubisoft: Creativity and Commerce in AAA Devel-
opment,” Games Industry, 28 June 2016, http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles
/2016-06-28-ubisoft-creativity-and-commerce-in-aaa-development.
14. Paul Tamburro, “Top 10 Most Memorable GTA Characters,” Crave, 2
November 2012, http://www.craveonline.com/site/198965-top-10-most-mem
orable-gta-characters.
15. Arthur Chu, “It’s Dangerous to Go Alone: Why Are Gamers So Angry?”
The Daily Beast, 28 August 2014, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014
/08/28/it-s-dangerous-to-go-alone-why-are-gamers-so-angry.html.
16. Paul Kennedy, “The Dangerous Game: Gamergate and the ‘Alt-­Right,’”
CBC Radio, 30 November 2016, http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-dangerous
-game-gamergate-and-the-alt-right-1.3874259.
17. Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping
the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2015), 11.
18. The website 100 People: A World Portrait tracks breakdowns in what our
lives would be like if we were a village of one hundred people; see http://www
 185 Notes to Introduction
.100people.org/statistics_100stats.php. This is also one of Father Steven Sund-
borg’s favorite anecdotes to use in his speeches.
19. Kovie Biakolo, “The Lie of Meritocracy and the Illusion of the Amer-
ican Dream,” Thought Catalog, 8 January 2014, http://thoughtcatalog.com/
kovie-biakolo/2014/01/the-lie-of-meritocracy-and-the-illusion-of-the-ameri-
can-dream/; Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America after Mer-
itocracy (New York: Crown, 2012); Leanne S. Son Hing, D. Ramona Bobocel,
and Mark P. Zanna, “Meritocracy and Opposition to Affirmative Action: Mak-
ing Concessions in the Face of Discrimination,” Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 83, no. 3 (2002): 493–­509; Leanne S. Son Hing, D. Ramona Bobocel,
Mark P. Zanna, Donna M. Garcia, Stephanie S. Gee, and Katie Orazietti, “The
Merit of Meritocracy,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101, no. 3
(2011): 433–­50.
20. Matthew H. Barton and Paul D. Turman, “VH1’s ‘Behind the Music’ and
American Culture: The Role of Myth in a Meritocracy,” Texas Speech Communi-
cation Journal 34 (Summer 2009): 8–­23; Jennifer Goodman, “The Meritocracy
Myth: National Exams and the Depoliticization of Thai Education,” Sojourn:
Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 28, no. 1 (2013): 101–­31; Naa Oyo A.
Kwate and Ilan H. Meyer, “The Myth of Meritocracy and African American
Health,” American Journal of Public Health 100, no. 10 (2010): 1831–­34; Ste-
phen J. McNamee and Robert K. Miller, The Meritocracy Myth (Lanham, Md.:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).
21. Dylan Matthews, “Donald Trump Isn’t Rich Because He’s a Great In-
vestor: He’s Rich Because His Dad Was Rich,” Vox, 2 September 2015, http://
www.vox.com/2015/9/2/9248963/donald-trump-index-fund.
22. Ezra Klein, “Ta-­Nehisi Coates: ‘I’m a Big Believer in Chaos,’” Vox, 19
December 2016, http://www.vox.com/conversations/2016/12/19/13952578/ta
-nehisi-coates-ezra-klein.
23. Glenn Kessler, “Trump’s False Claim He Built His Empire with a ‘Small
Loan’ from His Father,” Washington Post, 20 December 2016, https://www
.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/03/03/trumps-false-claim-
he-built-his-empire-with-a-small-loan-from-his-father/.
24. Alex Abad-­Santos, “Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian Are Kin-
dred Spirits,” Vox, 19 December 2016, http://www.vox.com/culture/2016/12
/19/13956596/donald-trump-kim-kardashian-kindred-spirits.
25. Henry Farrell, “How the Chris Hayes Book Twilight of the Elites Ex-
plains Trump’s Appeal,” Vox, 13 October 2016, http://www.vox.com/the-big
-idea/2016/10/13/13259860/twilight-elites-trump-meritocracy.
26. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-­Industrial Society: A Venture in Social
Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 453; Michael Young, The Rise of the
Meritocracy (1958; repr., New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2008).
Notes to Introduction 186
27. Peter Saunders, “Might Britain Be a Meritocracy?” Sociology 29, no. 1
(1995): 27.
28. Peter Saunders, “Social Mobility in Britain: An Empirical Evaluation of
Two Competing Explanations,” Sociology 31, no. 2 (1997): 283.
29. Sigal Alon and Marta Tienda, “Diversity, Opportunity, and the Shift-
ing Meritocracy in Higher Education,” American Sociological Review 72, no. 4
(2007): 489.
30. Jo Littler, “Celebrity and ‘Meritocracy,’” Soundings 26 (Spring 2004): 122.
31. Jo Littler, “Meritocracy as Plutocracy: The Marketing of ‘Equality’ under
Neoliberalism,” New Formations 80–­81 (2013): 52.
32. Ruth Levitas, “Shuffling Back to Equality?” Soundings 26 (Spring 2004):
69.
33. Littler, “Meritocracy as Plutocracy,” 54.
34. Son Hing, Bobocel, and Zanna, “Meritocracy and Opposition to Affir-
mative Action,” 433.
35. Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things; Adrienne Shaw, “The
Internet Is Full of Jerks, Because the World Is Full of Jerks: What Feminist
Theory Teaches Us about the Internet,” Communication and Critical/Cultural
Studies 11, no. 3 (2014): 273–­77.
36. Amanda Hess,“Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet,” Pacific Stan-
dard, 6 January 2014, http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior
/women-arent-welcome-internet-72170/.
37. Laura Hudson, “That Game of Thrones Scene Wasn’t a ‘Turn-­On,’ It
Was Rape,” Wired, 21 April 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/04/game-of
-thrones-rape/; Maureen Ryan, “‘Tyrant’s’ Rape Cliches Are Just the Last Straw,”
Huffington Post, 24 June 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/24/tyrant
-fx_n_5525441.html.
38. Zeynep Tufekci, “No, Nate, Brogrammers May Not Be Macho, but
That’s Not All There Is to It,” The Message, 19 March 2014, https://medium
.com/technology-and-society/2f1fe84c5c9b.
39. Lea Coligado, “A Female Computer Science Major at Stanford: ‘Floored’
by the Sexism,” Fortune, 17 February 2015, http://fortune.com/2015/02/17/
a-female-computer-science-major-at-stanford-floored-by-the-sexism/; Mi-
chelle Goldberg, “Feminist Writers Are So Besieged by Online Abuse
That Some Have Begun to Retire,” Washington Post, 20 February 2015,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/online-feminists-increasingly-ask
-are-the-psychic-costs-too-much-to-bear/2015/02/19/3dc4ca6c-b7dd-11e4-a
200-c008a01a6692_story.html; Hess, “Why Women Aren’t Welcome on
the Internet”; Ellen Pao, “Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao: The Trolls
Are Winning the Battle for the Internet,” Washington Post, 16 July 2015,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-cannot-let-the-internet-trolls
 187 Notes to Introduction
-win/2015/07/16/91b1a2d2-2b17-11e5-bd33-395c05608059_story.html; Julia
Carrie Wong, “Women Considered Better Coders—­but Only If They Hide
Their Gender,” The Guardian, 12 February 2016, http://www.theguardian
.com/technology/2016/feb/12/women-considered-better-coders-hide-gender
-github.
40. Leigh Alexander, “EA’s LGBT Event Aims to Be a First Step toward
Cultural Change,” Gamasutra, 7 March 2013, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/
news/187769/EAs_LBGT_event_aims_to_be_a_first_step_toward_cultural_
change.php; Mia Consalvo, “Confronting Toxic Gamer Culture: A Challenge for
Feminist Game Studies Scholars,” Ada, November 2012, http://adanewmedia
.org/2012/11/issue1-consalvo/; Adrienne Shaw, “Changing the Conversation,
Not Just the Games,” Antenna, 12 March 2013, http://blog.commarts.wisc
.edu/2013/03/12/changing-the-conversation-not-just-the-games/; John Walker,
“Misogyny, Sexism, and Why RPS Isn’t Shutting Up,” Rock, Paper, Shotgun, 6
April 2013, http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/06/misogyny-sexism
-and-why-rps-isnt-shutting-up/.
41. Jenny Haniver, “About,” Not in the Kitchen Anymore, 21 February 2016,
http://www.notinthekitchenanymore.com/about/; gtz jaspir, likeOMGitsFE-
DAY, and inklesspen, “Fat, Ugly, or Slutty,” n.d., Fat, Ugly, or Slutty, http://
fatuglyorslutty.com/.
42. Amanda Marcotte, “Online Misogyny: Can’t Ignore It, Can’t Not Ignore
It,” Slate, 13 June 2012, http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/06/13/on-
line_misogyny_reflects_women_s_realities_though_in_a_cruder_way_than_is_
customary_offline_.html.
43. Consalvo, “Confronting Toxic Gamer Culture”; Mathew Jones, “Com-
ments Aren’t Disabled: Here’s What People Are Saying about Tropes vs.
Women,” Gameranx, 8 March 2013, http://www.gameranx.com/features/
id/13300/article/comments-aren-t-disabled-here-s-what-people-are-saying
-about-tropes-vs-women/.
44. Leigh Alexander, “Opinion: In the Sexism Discussion, Let’s Look at
Game Culture,” Gamasutra, 16 July 2012, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/
news/174145/.
45. Chu, “It’s Dangerous to Go Alone.”
46. Film Crit Hulk, “Film Crit Hulk Smash: on despair, gamergate and
quitting the hulk,” Badass Digest, 27 October 2014, http://badassdigest
.com/2014/10/27/film-crit-hulk-smash-on-despair-gamergate-and-quitting
-the-hulk/.
47. Maeve Duggan, “Online Harassment,” Pew Research Center: Internet, Sci-
ence & Tech, 22 October 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online
-harassment/.
48. Edge Staff, “Why Is the Game Industry Still Fixated on Breasts?” Edge
Notes to Introduction 188
Online, 15 March 2013, http://www.edge-online.com/features/why-is-the-game
-industry-still-fixated-on-breasts/.
49. Rory Young, “Team Ninja Studio Head Says DOA 5’s Female Depiction
Is Cultural,” Neoseeker, 23 August 2012, http://www.neoseeker.com/news/20486
-team-ninja-studio-head-says-doa-5s-female-depiction-is-cultural/.
50. Becky Chambers, “Why Games with Female Protagonists Don’t Sell, and
What It Says about the Industry,” The Mary Sue, 23 November 2012, http://
www.themarysue.com/why-games-with-female-protagonists-dont-sell-and
-what-it-says-about-the-industry/.
51. Rich McCormick, “Adding Female Characters to New ‘Assassin’s Creed’
Would ‘Double the Work,’ Says Ubisoft,” The Verge, 11 June 2014, http://www
.theverge.com/2014/6/11/5799386/no-female-characters-in-assassins-creed
-unity-too-much-work; Rachel Weber, “Naughty Dog: We’ve Been Asked to
Push Ellie to the Back of the Box Art,” Games Industry, 12 December 2012,
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-12-12-naughty-dog-theres-a
-misconception-that-if-you-put-a-girl-on-the-cover-the-game-sells-less; Mike
Williams, “Rockstar’s Houser Explains Lack of Female Protagonist in GTA
V,” Games Industry, 10 September 2013, http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles
/2013-09-10-rockstars-houser-explains-lack-of-female-protagonist-in-gta-v.
52. Nathan Ditum, “FIFA’s Struggle to Include Women Reveals a Lot about
Gaming’s Problems with Diversity,” Kotaku, 15 July 2015, http://www.kotaku.co
.uk/2015/07/15/fifas-struggle-to-include-women-reveals-a-lot-about-gamings
-problems-with-diversity.
53. Evan Narcisse, “Video Games’ Blackness Problem,” Kotaku, 19 February
2015, http://kotaku.com/video-games-blackness-problem-1686694082.
54. Tauriq Moosa, “Colorblind: On The Witcher 3, Rust, and Gaming’s Race
Problem,” Polygon, 3 June 2015, http://www.polygon.com/2015/6/3/8719389/
colorblind-on-witcher-3-rust-and-gamings-race-problem.
55. Ibid.
56. Sidney Fussell, “Video Games without People of Color Are Not ‘Neu-
tral,’” Offworld, 26 June 2015, http://boingboing.net/2015/06/26/race-video
-games-witcher-3.html.
57. Don Crothers, “GamerGate Drives Critic Tauriq Moosa Off Twitter,”
Inquisitr, 27 June 2015, http://www.inquisitr.com/2207377/gamergate-drives
-critic-tauriq-moosa-off-twitter/; Jessica Lachenal, “#IStandWithTauriq: Tauriq
Moosa Leaves Twitter After Sustained Harassment Campaign Led by Gamer-
Gate,” The Mary Sue, 27 June 2015, http://www.themarysue.com/i-stand-with
-tauriq/.
58. Potanin, “Forces in Play,” 136.
59. Ibid., 140, 141.
 189 Notes to Introduction
60. Carly A. Kocurek, Coin-­Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the
Video Game Arcade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 188.
61. Kishonna L. Gray, Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live: Theoretical
Perspectives from the Virtual Margins (New York: Routledge, 2014), 16.
62. Ibid.
63. Nathan Grayson, “Twitch Chat Racism Changed Hearthstone Pro Ter-
rence Miller’s Career,” Kotaku, 7 October 2016, http://kotaku.com/hearthstone
-pro-terrence-miller-hopes-to-clean-up-twitc-1787551043.
64. Mia Consalvo and Christopher A. Paul, “Welcome to the Discourse of
the Real: Constituting the Boundaries of Games and Players,” FDG (2013):
55–­62.
65. Adrienne Shaw, Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Mar-
gins of Gamer Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
66. Stephanie Llamas, “Why all Gamers Matter—­My View as a Female
Games Analyst,” Superdata, 28 October 2014, http://www.superdataresearch
.com/blog/why-all-gamers-matter/.
67. To view the opening cinematics and early game play, see kingdavidgam
ing, “The Beginning of Skyrim (Part 1)” and “The Beginning of Skyrim (Part
2),” YouTube, 12 November 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Cdoyqs
NdaE and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiqjhkpNqg8.
68. Statistic Brain, “Skyrim: The Elder Scrolls V Statistics,” Statistic Brain,
12 April 2015, http://www.statisticbrain.com/skyrim-the-elder-scrolls-v-statis
tics/.
69. For more on rhetoric, see Ian Bogost, “Writing Books People Want to
Read: Or, How to Stake Vampire Publishing,” Ian Bogost, 30 May 2011, http://
bogost.com/writing/blog/writing_books_people_want_to_r/; Ian Bogost, “The
Rhetoric of Video Games,” in The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games,
and Learning, ed. Katie Salen, 117–­39 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008);
Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1969); Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Susan Schultz Huxman, The Rhetor-
ical Act: Thinking, Speaking, and Writing Critically (Belmont, Calif.: Thomson/
Wadsworth, 2009); Ronald Greene, “The Aesthetic Turn and the Rhetorical
Perspective on Argumentation,” Argumentation & Advocacy 35, no. 1 (1998):
19; Todd Harper, “Rules, Rhetoric, and Genre: Procedural Rhetoric in Persona
3,” Games and Culture 6, no. 5 (2011): 395–­413; Christopher A. Paul, Wordplay
and the Discourse of Video Games: Analyzing Words, Design, and Play (New York:
Routledge, 2012); Edward Schiappa, “Second Thoughts on the Critiques of Big
Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 34, no. 3 (2001): 260–­74; Robert L. Scott, “On
Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic,” Central States Speech Journal 18, no. 1 (1967):
9–­17; Gerald A. Voorhees, “The Character of Difference: Procedurality, Rhet-
Notes to Introduction 190
oric, and Roleplaying Games,” Game Studies 9, no. 2 (2009): http://gamestudies
.org/0902/articles/voorhees; David Zarefsky, “Knowledge Claims in Rhetorical
Criticism,” Journal of Communication 58, no. 4 (2008): 629–­40.
70. For a thorough explanation of “The Journey” and how it plays in prac-
tice, see Chris Tapsell, “FIFA 17 The Journey Walkthrough—­How to Play a
Full Season and Get All Rewards,” Eurogamer, 25 November 2016, http://www
.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-11-25-fifa-17-the-journey-walkthrough-how
-to-play-a-full-season-and-get-all-rewards. Also, the mode was not included
in PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game, as EA claimed there were techni-
cal limitations with the older consoles, likely having to do with their use of the
Frostbite game engine.

1. Leveling Up in Life
1. Henry Farrell, “How the Chris Hayes Book Twilight of the Elites
Explains Trump’s Appeal,” Vox, 13 October 2016, http://www.vox.com/the-
big-idea/2016/10/13/13259860/twilight-elites-trump-meritocracy.
2. The Guodian manuscripts are tremendously informative about ancient
China, to the point where it has been said that they transformed “our under-
standing of the formative era of China’s religious and political philosophy.” See
Kenneth Holloway, Guodian: The Newly Discovered Seeds of Chinese Religious
and Political Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1.
3. Ibid., 13, 14, 110, 130.
4. Benjamin A. Elman, Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial
China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 1.
5. The most thorough integrations of meritocracy that I have read about
in China happened during the T’ang (618–­906), Ming (1368–­1644), and Qing
(1644–­1912) dynasties. There are also some mentions of a move toward meri-
tocracy in the Sui dynasty (581–­618). For more, see Denis Twitchett, The Birth
of Chinese Meritocracy: Bureaucrats and Examinations in T’ang China (London:
China Society, 1976).
6. Elman, Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China, 316.
7. Robin Potanin, “Forces in Play: The Business and Culture of Videogame
Production,” in Fun and Games ’10: Proceedings of the 3rd International Confer-
ence on Fun and Games, ed. Vero Vanden Abeele et al. (New York: ACM, 2010),
135–­43. Another excellent argument from a similar perspective is Janine Fron,
Tracy Fullerton, Jacquelyn Ford Morie, and Celia Pearce, “The Hegemony of
Play,” DiGRA ’07: Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Sit-
uated Play 4 (September 2007): 1–­10.
8. The first published use of the term I have seen actually comes in the
writing of Alan Fox, who wrote an essay called “Class and Equality” for Socialist
Quarterly two years before Young’s book. Fox’s use of the term is overwhelm-
 191 Notes to Chapter 1
ingly negative, as the meritocracy is seen as an extension of a social system that
furthered the “distance between the extremes of the social strata.” Fox also casts
meritocracy in moral terms, with those at the top taking advantage of the “un-
blessed” and not recognizing that they are “blessed.” See Alan Fox, “Class and
Equality,” Socialist Commentary, May 1956, 11–­13.
9. Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958; repr., New Brunswick,
N.J.: Transaction, 2008), xvii.
10. Patricia Hernandez, “Overwatch: The Kotaku Review,” Kotaku, 1 June
2016, http://kotaku.com/overwatch-the-kotaku-review-1779831636.
11. Ibid.
12. Nathan Grayson, “Overwatch Doesn’t Do Enough for Its Support He-
roes,” Kotaku, 1 June 2016, http://kotaku.com/overwatch-doesnt-do-enough-for
-its-support-heroes-1779909864; Philippa Warr, “Overwatch: Why We Need a
2-­Person Play of the Game,” Rock, Paper, Shotgun, 31 May 2016, https://www
.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/05/31/overwatch-play-of-the-game/.
13. Grayson, “Overwatch Doesn’t Do Enough for Its Support Heroes.”
14. Nathan Grayson, “The Overwatch Characters Who Get Play of the
Game Most (and Least) Often,” Kotaku, 7 September 2016, http://kotaku.com/
the-overwatch-characters-who-get-play-of-the-game-most-1786354626.
15. Nathan Grayson, “Overwatch’s Director on Competitive Mode, Contro-
versies, and the Future,” Kotaku, 18 July 2016, http://kotaku.com/overwatchs
-director-on-competitive-controversies-and-1783869335.
16. Ibid.
17. Blizzard Entertainment, “Welcome to Competitive Play,” Overwatch, 28
June 2016, https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/blog/20167051.
18. Nathan Grayson, “How Overwatch’s Competitive Mode Works,” Ko-
taku, 29 June 2016, http://kotaku.com/how-overwatchs-competitive-mode
-works-1782839858.
19. Patricia Hernandez, “Overwatch Fans Have Turned Soldier 76 into a
Dad,” Kotaku, 29 July 2016, http://kotaku.com/overwatch-fans-have-turned
-soldier-76-into-a-dad-1784531869.
20. Nathan Grayson, “Overwatch’s Competitive Mode Is at Odds with the Rest
of the Game,” Kotaku, 1 July 2016, http://kotaku.com/overwatchs-competitive
-mode-is-at-odds-with-the-rest-of-1782990226.
21. Ibid.
22. InternetBitch6969, “Competitive Community Is Mostly Toxic,” reddit,
1 July 2016, https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/4qsntg/competi
tive_community_is_mostly_toxic/.
23. Nathan Grayson, “How Blizzard Is Trying to Fix Overwatch’s Toxicity
Problem,” Kotaku, 15 July 2016, http://kotaku.com/how-blizzard-is-trying-to
-fix-overwatchs-toxicity-probl-1783749976.
24. Ibid.
Notes to Chapter 1 192
25. Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping
the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2015).
26. Geoff Colvin, “A CEO’s Passionate Defense of ‘Stack Ranking’ Employ-
ees,” Fortune, 19 November 2013, http://fortune.com/2013/11/19/a-ceos-passion
ate-defense-of-stack-ranking-employees/; Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, “In-
side Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” New York Times, 15
August 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon
-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html.
27. Young, Rise of the Meritocracy, 96.
28. Michael Young, “Down with Meritocracy,” The Guardian, 28 June 2001,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment.
29. Nathan Grayson, “The Guy with the Lowest Possible Rank in Over-
watch,” Kotaku, 23 August 2016, http://kotaku.com/the-guy-with-the-lowest
-possible-rank-in-overwatch-1785662123.
30. Ibid.
31. Jesper Juul, The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video
Games (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013), 81.
32. Ibid., 1.
33. David Harvey summarizes many of these changes, arguing that the ac-
celeration of consumption in modern society was driven by two key factors
that permeated society: the expansion of mass markets in video and children’s
games, and a transition toward the consumption of services and away from the
consumption of goods. For more, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmo-
dernity (Oxford, U.K.: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
34. Young, “Down with Meritocracy.”
35. Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy
(New York: Crown, 2012), 45.
36. Robert Guthrie, “Inside the Grim World of Minecraft’s Prison Servers,”
Kotaku, 24 June 2016, http://kotaku.com/inside-the-grim-world-of-minecrafts
-prison-servers-1782517890.
37. Ibid.
38. Young, Rise of the Meritocracy, xi.
39. Ibid., xi–­xii.
40. Daniel Bell, “On Meritocracy and Equality,” Public Interest 29 (Fall 1972):
30.
41. R. J. Herrnstein, I.Q. in the Meritocracy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971),
221–­22.
42. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-­Industrial Society: A Venture in Social
Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 426–­27.
 193 Notes to Chapter 1
43. Bell consistently uses the universal “man” to refer to all people. Claiming
that there are not substantial structural barriers to exhibiting skill and effort is
particularly rich when relying on sexist language to make the case.
44. Herrnstein, I.Q. in the Meritocracy, 221.
45. Peter Saunders, “Social Mobility in Britain: An Empirical Evaluation of
Two Competing Explanations,” Sociology 31, no. 2 (1997): 282.
46. Bell, “On Meritocracy and Equality,” 31–­32.
47. Ibid., 40.
48. Ibid., 67.
49. Saunders, “Social Mobility in Britain,” 562.
50. Bell, Coming of Post-­Industrial Society, 454.
51. Stephen J. McNamee and Robert K. Miller, “The Meritocracy Myth,”
Sociation Today 2, no. 1 (2004): 3.
52. Ibid., 4.
53. Naa Oyo A. Kwate and Ilan H. Meyer, “The Myth of Meritocracy and
African American Health,” American Journal of Public Health 100, no. 10 (2010):
1831–­34.
54. Jo Littler, “Celebrity and ‘Meritocracy,’” Soundings 26 (Spring 2004): 60.
55. Ibid.
56. Meritocracy and meritocratic norms can also be seen in plenty of other
contexts and in many other countries. For more, see Livia Barbosa, “Meritocracy
and Brazilian Society,” Revista de Administração de Empresas 54, no. 1 (2014):
80–­85; Jennifer Goodman, “The Meritocracy Myth: National Exams and the
Depoliticization of Thai Education,” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast
Asia 28, no. 1 (2013): 101–­31; Surinder S. Jodhka and Katherine Newman, “In
the Name of Globalisation: Meritocracy, Productivity and the Hidden Language
of Caste,” Economic and Political Weekly 42, no. 41 (2007): 4125–­32; Takehiko
Kariya, Education Reform, and Social Class in Japan: The Emerging Incentive Di-
vide, trans. Michael Burtscher (New York: Routledge, 2013); Kenneth Paul Tan,
“Meritocracy and Elitism in a Global City: Ideological Shifts in Singapore,” In-
ternational Political Science Review 29, no. 1 (2008): 7–­27; Godfrey B. Tangwa,
Road Companion to Democracy and Meritocracy: Further Essays from an African
Perspective (Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa RPCIG, 2010).
57. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites, 22.
58. Shannon K. McCoy and Brenda Major, “Priming Meritocracy and the
Psychological Justification of Inequality,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychol-
ogy 43, no. 3 (2007): 341.
59. John Beck, Meritocracy, Citizenship and Education: New Labour’s Legacy
(London: Continuum, 2008), 25.
60. Kwate and Meyer, “Myth of Meritocracy and African American Health.”
Notes to Chapter 1 194
61. Richard Breen and John H. Goldthorpe, “Class Inequality and Meritoc-
racy: A Critique of Saunders and an Alternative Analysis,” British Journal of So-
ciology 50, no. 1 (1999): 22.
62. Brian Ashcraft, “Korean Woman Kicks Ass at Overwatch, Gets Accused
of Cheating [Update],” Kotaku, 21 June 2016, http://kotaku.com/korean-woman
-kicks-ass-at-overwatch-gets-accused-of-ch-1782343447.
63. Aja Romano, “How a Teen Girl’s Mad Overwatch Skills Struck a
Major Blow to Sexism in Gaming,” Vox, 23 June 2016, http://www.vox.com
/2016/6/23/12002454/how-a-teen-girl-s-mad-overwatch-skills-struck-a-major
-blow-to-sexism-in-gaming.
64. Ashcraft, “Korean Woman Kicks Ass at Overwatch, Gets Accused of
Cheating.”
65. Romano, “How a Teen Girl’s Mad Overwatch Skills Struck a Major Blow
to Sexism in Gaming.”
66. Samuel Lingle, “Blizzard Vows Zero Tolerance for Overwatch Cheaters
but Adds: ‘Some Players Are Just Really Good,’” Daily Dot, 13 May 2016, http://
www.dailydot.com/esports/blizzard-overwatch-anti-cheat/.
67. The treatment of people of color in video games is complicated, particu-
larly given the prominence and success of many high-­profile Asian, particularly
Korean, players. Racism is a massive issue in game culture regardless.
68. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites, 225.
69. Jeff Spross, “You’re Probably Richer Than You Think You Are: How In-
equality Screws with Our Perspective,” The Week, 27 January 2015, http://theweek
.com/articles/535887/youre-probably-richer-than-think-are-howinequality
screws-ourperspective.
70. Craig Haney and Aida Hurtado, “The Jurisprudence of Race and Mer-
itocracy: Standardized Testing and ‘Race-­Neutral’ Racism in the Workplace,”
Law and Human Behavior 18, no. 3 (1994): 240.
71. James Brightman, “I’m Doing This Because I’m a Gamer,” Games Indus-
try, 2 June 2016, http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-06-02-im-doing
-this-because-im-a-gamer; Potanin, “Forces in Play.”
72. Carly A. Kocurek, Coin-­Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the
Video Game Arcade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), xxiii.
73. Halli Bjornsson, “Smart Lessons 17 Million Organic Installs Taught Us
about Mobile,” Games Industry, 19 July 2016, http://www.gamesindustry.biz
/articles/2016-07-19-smart-lessons-17-million-organic-installs-taught-us
-about-mobile.
74. Ageism is relatively under-­discussed as it pertains to video games, but
one take on it can be found in Jeff Vogel, “Age, Pleasing Apple, and Trying to
Climb Out of the Hole,” Bottom Feeder, 10 June 2015, http://jeff-vogel.blogspot
.com/2015/06/age-pleasing-apple-and-trying-to-climb.html.
 195 Notes to Chapter 1
75. Neil Irwin, “Ben Bernanke on Life, Love, and Intestinal Parasites,” Wash-
ington Post, 2 June 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/
wp/2013/06/02/ben-bernanke-on-life-cynicism-beauty-and-love.
76. Robert H. Frank, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meri-
tocracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016), Kindle ed., loc. 318.
77. Ibid., loc. 82.
78. Zack Beauchamp, “One Graphic That Shows Your Mom Was Right: The
World Isn’t Fair,” Vox, 28 May 2015, http://www.vox.com/2015/5/28/8663065/
inequality-global-income; Matt O’Brien, “Poor Kids Who Do Everything
Right Don’t Do Better Than Rich Kids Who Do Everything Wrong,” Washing-
ton Post, 18 October 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/
wp/2014/10/18/poor-kids-who-do-everything-right-dont-do-better-than-rich
-kids-who-do-everything-wrong/.
79. William Deresiewicz, “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League: The Na-
tion’s Top Colleges Are Turning Our Kids into Zombies,” New Republic, 21 July
2014, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivy-league-schools-are-over
rated-send-your-kids-elsewhere.
80. Danielle Douglas-­Gabriel, “College Is Not the Great Equalizer for
Black and Hispanic Graduates,” Washington Post, 17 August 2015, http://www
.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/08/17/college-is-not-the
-great-equalizer-for-black-and-hispanic-graduates/; Christopher Ingraham,
“Still Think America Is the ‘Land of Opportunity’? Look at This Chart,”
Washington Post, 22 February 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/
wonk/wp/2016/02/22/still-think-america-is-the-land-of-opportunity-look-at
-this-chart/.
81. Jo Littler, “Meritocracy as Plutocracy: The Marketing of ‘Equality’ under
Neoliberalism,” New Formations 80–­81 (2013): 55.
82. Stephen J. McNamee and Robert K. Miller, The Meritocracy Myth (Lan-
ham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 208.
83. Thank you to Mia Consalvo for lending this phrasing.
84. Anna Anthropy, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals,
Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-­Outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You
Are Taking Back an Art Form (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), Kindle ed.,
loc. 100.
85. Raph Koster, Theory of Fun for Game Design (Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly,
2013), Kindle ed., loc. 1314.
86. Adrienne Shaw, Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Mar-
gins of Gamer Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 41.
87. Matthew Handrahan, “Ubisoft: Creativity and Commerce in AAA De-
velopment,” Games Industry, 28 June 2016, http://www.gamesindustry.biz/
articles/2016-06-28-ubisoft-creativity-and-commerce-in-aaa-development.
Notes to Chapter 1 196
88. Potanin, “Forces in Play.”
89. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites, 40.
90. Kocurek, Coin-­Operated Americans.
91. Anthropy, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, loc. 105.
92. Koster, Theory of Fun for Game Design, loc. 1343.
93. Kocurek, Coin-­Operated Americans; Potanin, “Forces in Play.”
94. Anthropy, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, loc. 236.
95. Peter Kellner, “Yes, We Still Need Meritocracy,” New Statesman, 9 July
2001, http://www.newstatesman.com/node/153755; Ruth Levitas, “Shuffling
Back to Equality?” Soundings 26 (Spring 2004): 69.
96. Jennifer de Winter, Shigeru Miyamoto: Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong,
The Legend of Zelda (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).
97. Emilio J. Castilla and Stephen Benard, “The Paradox of Meritocracy in
Organizations,” Administrative Science Quarterly 55, no. 4 (2010): 572.
98. Robin DiAngelo, “White Fragility,” International Journal of Critical
Pedagogy 3, no. 3 (2011): 54–­70; Ryan D. Enos, “Casual Effect of Intergroup
Contact on Exclusionary Attitudes,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sci-
ences of the United States of America 111, no. 10 (2014): 3699–­704; German
Lopez, “Research Says There Are Ways to Reduce Racial Bias: Calling Peo-
ple Racist Isn’t One of Them,” Vox, 15 November 2016, http://www.vox.com/
identities/2016/11/15/13595508/racism-trump-research-study; Dylan Mat-
thews, “Donald Trump Has Every Reason to Keep White People Thinking
about Race,” Vox, 30 November 2016, http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics
/2016/11/30/13765248/donald-trump-race-priming-political-science.
99. Shannon K. McCoy and Brenda Major, “Priming Meritocracy and the
Psychological Justification of Inequality,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychol-
ogy 43, no. 3 (2007): 342.
100. Ibid., 351.
101. Frank, Success and Luck, 1472.
102. Craig Haney and Aida Hurtado, “The Jurisprudence of Race and Mer-
itocracy: Standardized Testing and ‘Race-­Neutral’ Racism in the Workplace,”
Law and Human Behavior 18, no. 3 (1994): 224.
103. James Fraser and Edward Kick, “The Interpretive Repertories of Whites
on Race-­Targeted Policies: Claims Making of Reverse Discrimination,” Socio-
logical Perspectives 43, no. 1 (2000): 26–­27.
104. McCoy and Major, “Priming Meritocracy and the Psychological Justifi-
cation of Inequality,” 342.
105. McNamee and Miller, Meritocracy Myth, 40.
106. For much more on eSports, see “e-­Sports and Pro Gaming Literature,”
T. L. Taylor, n.d., http://tltaylor.com/teaching/e-sports-and-pro-gaming-litera
 197 Notes to Chapter 2
ture/. For more on competitive gaming and Korea, see Dal Yong Jin, Korea’s
Online Gaming Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010).
107. Todd Harper, The Culture of Digital Fighting Games: Performance and
Practice (New York: Routledge, 2014).
108. Littler, “Meritocracy as Plutocracy,” 66.
109. Christopher A. Paul, “Eve Online Is Hard and It Matters,” in Internet
Spaceships Are Serious Business: An Eve Online Reader, ed. Marcus Carter, Kelly
Bergstrom, and Darryl Woodford, 17–­30 (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 2016).
110. Nick Monroe, “‘Git Gud’ Culture Gives Us the Best of Gaming,” Gam-
eranx, 18 May 2016, http://gameranx.com/features/id/54186/article/git-gud
-culture-gives-us-the-best-of-gaming/.
111. Carol C. Mukhopadhyay, “StarPower: Experiencing a Stratified Soci-
ety,” What’s Race Got to Do with It?, 2004, http://www.whatsrace.org/pages/
starpower.htm; Simulation Training Systems, “StarPower—­Use & Abuse of
Power, Leadership & Diversity,” n.d., http://www.simulationtrainingsystems
.com/schools-and-charities/products/starpower/.
112. Donella Meadows, “Why Would Anyone Want to Play Starpower,” Do-
nella Meadows Institute, 4 December 2011, http://www.donellameadows.org/
archives/why-would-anyone-want-to-play-starpower/.
113. Lisa Miller, “The Money-­Empathy Gap,” New York Magazine, 1 July
2012, http://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/.
114. Jessica Gross, “6 Studies on How Money Affects the Mind,” TED Blog,
20 December 2013, http://blog.ted.com/2013/12/20/6-studies-of-money-and
-the-mind/.
115. Current norms of merit and success in games were set by early players,
and the most successful helped craft systems that were self-­beneficial; those prac-
tices then filtered out to the wider community of players. For more on ideology,
see Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks: Volume One, trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg
and Antonio Callari (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

2. A Toxic Culture
1. John Banks and Sal Humphreys, “The Labour of User Co-­creators:
Emergent Social Network Markets?” Convergence 14, no. 4 (2008): 401–­18; John
Banks and Jason Potts, “Co-­creating Games: A Co-­evolutionary Analysis,” New
Media & Society 12, no. 2 (2010): 253–­70; Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The
Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007); Mia Con-
salvo and Jason Begy, Players and Their Pets: Gaming Communities from Beta to
Sunset (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); T. L. Taylor, “The
Notes to Chapter 2 198
Assemblage of Play,” Games and Culture 4, no. 4 (2009): 331–­39; T. L. Taylor,
Play between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2006); Gerald A. Voorhees, “I Play Therefore I Am: Sid Meier’s Civiliza-
tion, Turn-­Based Strategy Games and the Cogito,” Games and Culture 4, no. 3
(2009): 254–­75.
2. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature,
and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); Kenneth Burke, A
Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
3. Ellie Zolfagharifard, “Could Our Ancestors See Blue? Ancient People
Didn’t Perceive the Colour Because They Didn’t Have a Word for It, Say Scien-
tists,” Daily Mail Online, 2 March 2015, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/
article-2976405/Could-ancestors-blue-Ancient-civilisations-didn-t-perceive
-colour-didn-t-word-say-scientists.html.
4. David Zarefsky, “Knowledge Claims in Rhetorical Criticism,” Journal of
Communication 58, no. 4 (2008): 629–­40.
5. Bogost, Persuasive Games; Jeroen Bourgonjon, Kris Rutten, Ronald Soe-
taert, and Martin Valcke, “From Counter-­Strike to Counter-­Statement: Using
Burke’s Pentad as a Tool for Analysing Video Games,” Digital Creativity 22, no.
2 (2011): 91–­102; Todd Harper, “Rules, Rhetoric, and Genre: Procedural Rhet-
oric in Persona 3,” Games and Culture 6, no. 5 (2011): 395–­413; Ken S. McAl-
lister, Game Work: Language, Power, and Computer Game Culture (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 2004); Christopher A. Paul, Wordplay and the Dis-
course of Video Games: Analyzing Words, Design, and Play (New York: Routledge,
2012); Gerald A. Voorhees, “The Character of Difference: Procedurality, Rhet-
oric, and Roleplaying Games,” Game Studies 9, no. 2 (2009): http://gamestudies
.org/0902/articles/voorhees.
6. Mia Consalvo and Christopher A. Paul, “Welcome to the Discourse of
the Real: Constituting the Boundaries of Games and Players,” FDG (2013):
55–­62.
7. Taylor, “Assemblage of Play.”
8. Banks and Humphreys, “Labour of User Co-­creators”; Banks and Potts,
“Co-­creating Games.”
9. Adrienne Shaw, “What Is Video Game Culture? Cultural Studies and
Game Studies,” Games and Culture 5, no. 4 (2010): 403–­24.
10. Charlie Hall and Danielle Riendeau, “Mass Surveillance, Watch Dogs
and the Militarized Police: When Strapping Cameras on People Is a Good
Idea,” Polygon, 14 August 2014, http://www.polygon.com/2014/8/14/6000267/
ferguson-police-cameras-watch-dogs; Htown, “Polygon—­‘What Watch Dogs
Can Teach Us About the Situation in Ferguson,’” NeoGAF, 14 August 2014,
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=874691; Stephen Totilo, “An-
tonin Scalia’s Landmark Defense of Violent Video Games,” Kotaku, 13 Feb-
 199 Notes to Chapter 2
ruary 2016, http://kotaku.com/antonin-scalias-landmark-defense-of-violent
-video-games-1758990360.
11. Carly A. Kocurek, Coin-­Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the
Video Game Arcade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
12. Adrienne Shaw, “Do You Identify as a Gamer? Gender, Race, Sexuality,
and Gamer Identity,” New Media & Society 14, no. 1 (2012): 28–­44; Adrienne
Shaw, “On Not Becoming Gamers: Moving beyond the Constructed Audience,”
Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 2 (2013): http://adanew
media.org/2013/06/issue2-shaw/.
13. Mia Consalvo, Timothy Dodd Alley, Nathan Dutton, Matthew Falk,
Howard Fisher, Todd Harper, and Adam Yulish, “Where’s My Montage? The
Performance of Hard Work and Its Reward in Film, Television, and MMOGs,”
Games and Culture 5, no. 4 (2010): 381–­402; Nick Yee, “The Labor of Fun: How
Video Games Blur the Boundaries of Work and Play,” Games and Culture 1, no.
1 (2006): 68–­71.
14. Adrienne Shaw, “The Internet Is Full of Jerks, Because the World Is Full
of Jerks: What Feminist Theory Teaches Us about the Internet,” Communication
and Critical/Cultural Studies 11, no. 3 (2014): 273–­77.
15. Brad McCarty, “70 Million Users, 1+ Billion Hours Every Month:
League of Legends Is the World’s Most Played Video Game,” The Next Web,
12 October 2012, http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2012/10/12/70-million
-users-1-billion-hours-every-month-league-of-legends-is-the-worlds-most
-played-game/; Paul Tassi, “Monstrous Viewership Numbers Show ‘League of
Legends’ Is Still eSports King,” Forbes, 11 December 2015, http://www.forbes
.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/12/11/monstrous-viewership-numbers-show-league
-of-legends-is-still-esports-king; Paul Tassi, “Riot’s ‘League of Legends’ Reveals
Astonishing 27 Million Daily Players, 67 Million Monthly,” Forbes, 27 January 2014,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2014/01/27/riots-league-of-legends
-reveals-astonishing-27-million-daily-players-67-million-monthly/.
16. Jeffrey Lin, “Why Do You Hate ‘Toxic’ Players? They Are Fun and If
Needed They Can Be Muted Anyway,” ask.fm, 2015, http://ask.fm/RiotLyte/
answer/130575100866; Christian Nutt, “League of Legends: Changing Bad Player
Behavior with Neuroscience,” Gamasutra, 5 December 2012, http://www.gama
sutra.com/view/news/178650/League_of_Legends_Changing_bad_player_
behavior_with_neuroscience_.php.
17. Game Politics Staff, “Riot Cracking Down on Unruly ‘League of Leg-
ends’ Players,” Game Politics, 22 July 2014, http://gamepolitics.com/2014/07/22/
riot-cracking-down-unruly-league-legends-players.
18. Megan Farokhmanesh, “Riot Continues to Crack Down on ‘Toxic’
League of Legends Pro Players,” Polygon, 2 June 2014, http://www.polygon
.com/2014/6/2/5772642/riot-league-of-legends-ban-pro-players; Ethan Gach,
Notes to Chapter 2 200
“League of Legends Pro Suspended during Worlds for Toxic Chat, Will Be Fined
$2,000,” Kotaku, 9 October 2016, http://kotaku.com/league-of-legends-pro
-suspended-during-worlds-for-toxic-1787589483; Michael McWhertor, “The
League of Legends Team of Scientists Trying to Cure ‘Toxic Behavior’ On-
line,” Polygon, 13 October 2012, http://www.polygon.com/2012/10/17/3515178/
the-league-of-legends-team-of-scientists-trying-to-cure-toxic; Jenna Pitcher,
“Riot Tests New League of Legends Insta-­Ban Feature,” IGN, 27 August 2014,
http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/08/27/riot-tests-new-league-of-legends-insta
-ban-feature.
19. Timothy Burke, “Hell Is Other Gamers (and Some Games),” Easily Dis-
tracted, 2 August 2012, http://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2012/08/02/
hell-is-other-gamers-and-some-games/.
20. Andrew Todd, “Video Games, Misogyny, and Terrorism: A Guide to
Assholes,” Badass Digest, 26 August 2014, http://badassdigest.com/2014/08/26/
video-games-misogyny-and-terrorism-a-guide-to-assholes.
21. Colin Campbell, “Sarkeesian Driven out of Home by Online
Abuse and Death Threats,” Polygon, 27 August 2014, http://www.polygon
.com/2014/8/27/6075679/sarkeesian-driven-out-of-home-by-online-abuse
-and-death-threats.
22. Zoë Quinn, “Once Again, I Will Not Negotiate with Terrorists,”
Quinnspiracy, August 19, 2014, http://ohdeargodbees.tumblr.com/post/9518865
7119/once-again-i-will-not-negotiate-with-terrorists.
23. Zoë Quinn, “Final Thoughts on This Whole Kerfuffle,” Zoë Quinn,
29 August 2014, http://ohdeargodbees.tumblr.com/post/96115946094/final
-thoughts-on-this-whole-kerfuffle.
24. Carolyn Cox, “[updated] Female Game Journalists Quit over Harass-
ment, #GamerGate Harms Women,” The Mary Sue, 4 September 2014, http://
www.themarysue.com/gamergate-harms-women/.
25. Anna Merlan, “A Man Is Making Bizarre, Terrifying YouTube Videos
about Brianna Wu,” Jezebel, 2 February 2015, http://jezebel.com/a-man-is
-making-bizarre-terrifying-youtube-videos-abou-1683221832; Stephen To-
tilo, “Another Woman in Gaming Flees Home Following Death Threats,”
Kotaku, 11 October 2014, http://kotaku.com/another-woman-in-gaming
-flees-home-following-death-thre-1645280338; Brianna Wu, “Why GSX Is
Withdrawing from PAX East,” Space Channel 6, 2015, http://spacechannel6
.com/post/111384260988/why-gsx-is-withdrawing-from-pax-east.
26. Brianna Wu, “No Skin Thick Enough: The Daily Harassment of
Women in the Game Industry,” Polygon, 22 July 2014, http://www.polygon
.com/2014/7/22/5926193/women-gaming-harassment.
27. Crystal K. M., “Having Thick Skin: Harassment in the Industry,” Phoe-
 201 Notes to Chapter 2
nixDown, 23 July 2014, http://iphoenixdown.com/2014/07/23/having-thick
-skin-harassment-in-the-industry/.
28. It is notable how having two people who likely have vastly different
amounts of experience with a game or game genre leads to the more experi-
enced person being more successful. This certainly seemed to be testing some-
thing other than merit or skill at Killer Instinct.
29. Rebecca Greenfield, “The Rape ‘Joke’ at Microsoft’s E3 Reveal Is a Big-
ger Deal Than Another Bad ‘Joke,’” The Atlantic, 10 June 2013, https://www
.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/microsoft-e3-rape-joke/314326/.
30. Jillian Scharr, “What the Xbox Press Event Rape Joke Says about
the Gaming Industry,” NBC News, 11 June 2013, http://www.nbcnews.com/
id/52175677/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/t/what-xbox-press
-event-rape-joke-says-about-gaming-industry.
31. Carol Pinchefsky, “Really? IGDA Party at GDC Brings on the Female
Dancers,” Forbes, 27 March 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolpinchefsky
/2013/03/27/really-igda-party-at-gdc-brings-on-the-female-dancers/.
32. Megan Farokhmanesh, “Women in the Gaming Industry Share Their
Reason to Be in the Business,” Polygon, 28 March 2013, http://www.polygon
.com/2013/3/28/4155650/women-in-the-gaming-industry-share-their-number
-one-reason-to-be-in.
33. Griffin McElroy, “IGDA Draws Backlash, Member Resignations over
Female Dancers at GDC Party (Update: IGDA Responds),” Polygon, 28 March
2013, http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/28/4157266/igda-gdc-party-brenda
-romero-resignation.
34. Lesley, “What Are Dickwolves, and What Do They Have to Do with
Rape Culture? A Cautionary Tale of How Not to Respond to Feminist Crit-
icism,” xoJane, 4 September 2013, http://www.xojane.com/issues/dickwolves
-penny-arcade-pax-rape-culture-mike-krahulik; Maddy Myers, “Gaming, Rape
Culture, and How I Stopped Reading Penny Arcade,” Boston Phoenix, 7 March
2011, http://thephoenix.com/boston/life/116456-gaming-rape-culture-and
-how-i-stopped-reading-pe/; Anastasia Salter and Bridget Blodgett, “Hypermas-
culinity & Dickwolves: The Contentious Role of Women in the New Gaming
Public,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56, no. 3 (2012): 401–­16.
35. Rachel Edidin, “Why I’m Never Going Back to Penny Arcade Expo,”
Wired, 5 September 2013, http://www.wired.com/2013/09/penny-arcade-expo
-dickwolves/.
36. Elizabeth Sampat, “Quit Fucking Going to PAX Already, What Is Wrong
with You,” Elizabeth Sampat, 3 September 2013, http://elizabethsampat.com/
quit-fucking-going-to-pax-already-what-is-wrong-with-you/.
37. Nicholas T. Taylor, “Play Globally, Act Locally: The Standardization of
Notes to Chapter 2 202
Pro Halo 3 Gaming,” International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology 3,
no. 1 (2011); T. L. Taylor, Raising the Stakes: The Professionalization of Com-
puter Gaming (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012); Emma Witkowski, “On the
Digital Playing Field: How We ‘Do Sport’ with Networked Computer Games,”
Games and Culture 7, no. 5 (2012): 349–­74.
38. Todd Harper, The Culture of Digital Fighting Games: Performance and
Practice (New York: Routledge, 2014), 125.
39. Nathan Grayson, “Twitch Chat Racism Changed Hearthstone Pro Ter-
rence Miller’s Career,” Kotaku, 7 October 2016, http://kotaku.com/hearthstone
-pro-terrence-miller-hopes-to-clean-up-twitc-1787551043.
40. IGN Staff, “Cross Assault: The Full Story,” IGN, 21 March 2012, http://
www.ign.com/articles/2012/03/21/cross-assault-the-full-story.
41. Dylan Garner, “Capcom Announces Cast for ‘Cross Assault’ Reality Se-
ries,” Video Game Writers, 16 February 2012, http://videogamewriters.com/cap-
com-announces-cast-for-cross-assault-reality-series-39004.
42. IGN Staff, “Cross Assault.”
43. Patrick Klepek, “When Passions Flare, Lines Are Crossed [updated],”
Giant Bomb, 2012, http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/when-passions-flare-
lines-are-crossed-updated/1100-4006/.
44. Ibid.
45. Jim Sterling, “Sexual Harassment and Fightin’ Drama, Together at
Last!” Destructoid, 28 February 2012, http://www.destructoid.com/sexual
-harassment-and-esports-drama-together-at-last-222877.phtml.
46. Amy O’Leary, “In Virtual Play, Sex Harassment Is All Too Real,” New
York Times, 1 August 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/us/sexual
-harassment-in-online-gaming-stirs-anger.html.
47. Harper, Culture of Digital Fighting Games; Maddy Myers, “One
Woman’s Battle against the Anxious Masculinity of the Fighting-­Games
Scene,” Boston Phoenix, 16 October 2012, http://thephoenix.com/boston/rec
room/145892-one-womans-battle-against-the-anxious-masculinity/.
48. Wesley Yin-­Poole, “Borderlands 2: Gearbox Reveals the Mechromancer’s
‘Girlfriend Mode’ Update: Randy Pitchford Unhappy with Connotations,” Eu-
rogamer, 13 August 2012, http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-08-13-border
lands-2-gearbox-reveals-the-mechromancers-girlfriend-mode.
49. Ibid.
50. Ian Miles Cheong, “Girlfriend Mode: Casual Sexism in the Game Indus-
try,” Gameranx, 13 August 2012, http://www.gameranx.com/features/id/8535/
article/girlfriend-mode-casual-sexism-in-the-game-industry/.
51. Brandon Sheffield, “Opinion: Borderlands 2’s ‘Girlfriend Mode’ and Ca-
sual Sexism,” Gamasutra, 14 August 2012, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/
 203 Notes to Chapter 2
news/175878/Opinion_Borderlands_2s_Girlfriend_Mode_and_casual_sexism
.php.
52. Colin Moriarty, “Opinion: Borderlands 2 and the Girlfriend Mode
Farce,” IGN, 13 August 2012, http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/08/14/opinion
-borderlands-2-and-the-girlfriend-mode-farce.
53. Leigh Alexander, “The Mixed Blessing of ‘Girlfriend Mode,’” Gama-
sutra, 20 September 2012, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/177006/The_
mixed_blessing_of_Girlfriend_Mode.php.
54. “The Pledge,” Gamers against Bigotry, 2014, http://gamersagainstbigotry
.org/.
55. Jason Schreier, “Anti-­bigotry Gaming Site Defaced with Racial Slurs,”
Kotaku, 24 July 2012, http://kotaku.com/5928723/anti+bigotry-gaming-site
-defaced-with-racial-slurs; Jason Simon, “Gamers against Bigotry Targeted
by Hackers, 1500 Pledges Erased,” Kill Screen Daily, 24 July 2012, http://
killscreendaily.com/articles/news/gamers-against-bigotry-targeted-hackers
-pledges-erased/.
56. One of the best analyses of race in video games is Kishonna L. Gray,
Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live: Theoretical Perspectives from the Vir-
tual Margins (New York: Routledge, 2014).
57. David Leonard, “Not a Hater, Just Keepin’ It Real : The Importance of
Race-­and Gender-­Based Game Studies,” Games and Culture 1, no. 1 (2006):
83–­88.
58. David Leonard, “Young, Black (& Brown) and Don’t Give a Fuck: Virtual
Gangstas in the Era of State Violence,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodolo-
gies 9, no. 2 (2009): 248–­72; Paul, Wordplay and the Discourse of Video Games.
59. Kishonna L. Gray, “Deviant Bodies, Stigmatized Identities, and Racist
Acts: Examining the Experiences of African-­American Gamers in Xbox Live,”
New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 18, no. 4 (2012): 261–­76.
60. Derek A. Burrill, Die Tryin’: Videogames, Masculinity, Culture (New York:
Peter Lang, 2008), 138.
61. R.  W. Connell, Masculinities: Knowledge, Power, and Social Change
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 54–­56.
62. Many of the articles referenced in this section have at least some ele-
ment of the origins of GamerGate in them, though I am partial to Jack Gard-
ner’s. An ongoing timeline of GamerGate is being maintained as of this writing
at GamerGhazi, “A Comprehensive Timeline of Gamergate (with Sources),”
reddit, 3 September 2015, https://www.reddit.com/r/GamerGhazi/wiki/time
line. Additional histories can be found in the following: Zachary Jason, “Game
of Fear,” Boston Magazine, May 2015, http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/
article/2015/04/28/gamergate/; Helen Lewis, “Gamergate: A Brief History of
Notes to Chapter 2 204
a Computer-­Age War,” The Guardian, 11 January 2015, http://www.theguard
ian.com/technology/2015/jan/11/gamergate-a-brief-history-of-a-computer
-age-war.
63. Jack Gardner, “GamerGate’s Origins and What It Is Now,” Game In-
former, 20 October 2014, http://www.gameinformer.com/blogs/members/b/
jackalope38_blog/archive/2014/10/20/gamergate-39-s-origins-and-what-it-is
-now.aspx.
64. Ibid.
65. Quinn, “Once Again, I Will Not Negotiate with Terrorists.” There is an
interlude here, wherein Quinn is accused of ruining an event put on by the Fine
Young Capitalists. 4Chan raised money to fund the Fine Young Capitalists and
spite Quinn, which also led to the creation of Vivian James, who was taken up
as a symbol for the movement, was to feature in video games, was designed as
the average female gamer, and whose color scheme is a reference to a rape GIF.
66. Andy Baio, “72 Hours of #Gamergate,” The Message, 27 October
2014, https://medium.com/message/72-hours-of-gamergate-e00513f7cf5d;
Cox, “[updated] Female Game Journalists Quit over Harassment”; Aja Ro-
mano, “Zoe Quinn Claims 4chan Was Behind GamerGate the Whole Time,”
Daily Dot, 6 September 2014, http://www.dailydot.com/geek/zoe-quinn-outs
-4chan-behind-gamergate/; Brianna Wu, “Rape and Death Threats Are Ter-
rorizing Female Gamers: Why Haven’t Men in Tech Spoken Out?” Washing-
ton Post, 20 October 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/
wp/2014/10/20/rape-and-death-threats-are-terrorizing-female-gamers-why
-havent-men-in-tech-spoken-out/.
67. Zoë Quinn, “5 Things I Learned as the Internet’s Most Hated Person,”
Cracked, 16 September 2014, http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-i-learned
-as-internets-most-hated-person/.
68. Frank Lantz, “#Gamergate,” Gamasutra, 24 October 2014, http://www
.gamasutra.com/blogs/FrankLantz/20141024/228523/GamerGate.php.
69. Film Crit Hulk, “Film Crit Hulk Smash: on despair, gamergate and
quitting the hulk,” Badass Digest, 27 October 2014, http://badassdigest
.com/2014/10/27/film-crit-hulk-smash-on-despair-gamergate-and-quitting
-the-hulk/.
70. This was also turned into a meme in critique of GamerGate. Cf. Victo-
ria McNally, “Gamergate Roundup: IGN & Occupy Wall Street Comment on
GG, Internet Makes Hella Memes,” The Mary Sue, 24 October 2014, http://
www.themarysue.com/gamergate-round-up/.
71. There are various arguments to make about how game journalism is bro-
ken, but I am partial to ones like Dave Cook, “How Modern Games Coverage
Has Reduced Critics to Human Punching Bags,” Vice, 13 April 2015, http://
 205 Notes to Chapter 2
www.vice.com/en_uk/read/how-modern-games-coverage-has-reduced-critics
-to-human-punching-bags-224.
72. Leigh Alexander, “‘Gamers’ Don’t Have to Be Your Audience: ‘Gamers’
Are Over,” Gamasutra, 28 August 2014, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news
/224400/Gamers_dont_have_to_be_your_audience_Gamers_are_over.php;
Dan Golding, “The End of Gamers,” Dan Golding, 28 August 2014, http://
dangolding.tumblr.com/post/95985875943/the-end-of-gamers.
73. Andy Chalk, “BioWare Breaks Down Mass Effect 3 Game Modes,” The
Escapist, 11 January 2012, http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/115186
-BioWare-Breaks-Down-Mass-Effect-3-Game-Modes.
74. Jonathan Holmes,“Why Does the Term ‘Gamer’ Feel Important?” Destruc-
toid, 31 August 2014, http://www.destructoid.com/why-does-the-term-gamer
-feel-important-280451.phtml.
75. Casey Johnston, “The Death of the ‘Gamers’ and the Women Who
‘Killed’ Them,” Ars Technica, 28 August 2014, http://arstechnica.com/gaming
/2014/08/the-death-of-the-gamers-and-the-women-who-killed-them/.
76. The saga of the “Sad Puppies” and the 2015 Hugo Awards for science
fiction points to how readers can have substantial cultural conflicts. For more,
see Amy Wallace, “Who Won Science Fiction’s Hugo Awards, and Why It
Matters,” Wired, 23 August 2015, http://www.wired.com/2015/08/won-science
-fictions-hugo-awards-matters/.
77. Rich McCormick, “Intel Buckles to Anti-­feminist Campaign by Pull-
ing Ads from Gaming Site,” The Verge, 2 October 2014, http://www.theverge
.com/2014/10/2/6886747/intel-buckles-to-anti-feminist-campaign-by-pulling
-ads-from-gaming.
78. Owen S. Good, “Intel Issues Apology Regarding Its Advertising and
‘Gamergate,’” Polygon, 4 October 2014, http://www.polygon.com/2014/10/4
/6906909/intel-gamergate-advertising-gamasutra; Josh Lowensohn, “Intel
Opposes Gamergate as Part of $300 Million Effort to Fix Diversity in Tech,”
The Verge, 6 January 2015, http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/6/7505929/intel
-investing-300-million-to-fix-diversity-ces-2015.
79. Eric Johnson, “Adobe Distances Itself from Gawker after Writer’s Gamer-
gate Tweet,” Recode, 22 October 2014, http://recode.net/2014/10/22/adobe
-distances-self-from-gawker-after-writers-gamergate-tweet/.
80. Adobe Corporate Communications, “When Anti-­bullying Efforts Back-
fire,” Adobe News, 28 October 2014, http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations
/2014/10/when-anti-bullying-efforts-backfire.html.
81. Max Read, “How We Got Rolled by the Dishonest Fascists of Gamer-
gate,” Gawker, 22 October 2014, http://gawker.com/how-we-got-rolled-by-the
-dishonest-fascists-of-gamergat-1649496579.
Notes to Chapter 2 206
82. In an effort at disclosure, I was elected a board member of DiGRA at
this conference, am serving as vice president as of this writing, and was both an
invited member of the fishbowl and an active note taker for the session.
83. Shira Chess and Adrienne Shaw, “A Conspiracy of Fishes, or, How We
Learned to Stop Worrying about #Gamergate and Embrace Hegemonic Mas-
culinity,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 59, no. 1 (2015): 208–­20;
Shira Chess and Adrienne Shaw, “We Are All Fishes Now: DiGRA, Feminism,
and Gamergate,” Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association 2, no.
2 (2016): 21–­30; Torill Elvira Mortensen, “Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long
Event of #Gamergate,” Games and Culture, 13 April 2016, 1–­20.
84. Mortensen, “Anger, Fear, and Games.”
85. Jose Zagal, “On Chairing a Games Research Conference,” Transactions
of the Digital Games Research Association 2, no. 2 (2016): 16.
86. Chess and Shaw, “Conspiracy of Fishes,” 214.
87. Chess and Shaw, “We Are All Fishes Now.”
88. Mortensen, “Anger, Fear, and Games.”
89. Adrienne Shaw, “Do You Identify as a Gamer? Gender, Race, Sexuality,
and Gamer Identity,” New Media & Society 14, no. 1 (2012): 28–­44.
90. Keith Stuart, “Brianna Wu and the Human Cost of Gamergate: ‘Every
Woman I Know in the Industry Is Scared,’” The Guardian, 17 October 2014,
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/17/brianna-wu-gamergate
-human-cost.
91. Emily Greer, “A Natural A/B Test of Harassment,” Kongregate Developer
News, 23 October 2014, http://developers.kongregate.com/blog/a-natural-a-b
-test-of-harassment.
92. Chris Kluwe, “Why #Gamergaters Piss Me the F*** Off,” The Cauldron,
21 October 2014, https://medium.com/the-cauldron/why-gamergaters-piss
-me-the-f-off-a7e4c7f6d8a6; Sarah Gray, “‘Gamergate Is Now Irredeemably
Toxic’: The Top 10 Takeaways from Chris Kluwe’s Reddit AMA,” Salon, 23 Oc-
tober 2014, http://www.salon.com/2014/10/23/gamergate_is_now_irredeemably
_toxic_the_top_10_takeaways_from_chris_kluwes_reddit_ama/.
93. Felicia Day, “The Only Thing I Have to Say about Gamer Gate,”
Felicia’s Melange, 23 October 2014, http://thisfeliciaday.tumblr.com/post
/100700417809/the-only-thing-i-have-to-say-about-gamer-gate.
94. Brandon Griggs, “Actress Harassed Online over #Gamergate,” CNN, 23
October 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/23/living/felicia-day-gamergate/
index.html; Kirk Hamilton, “Felicia Day and Gamergate: This Is What Happens
Now,” Kotaku, 24 October 2014, http://kotaku.com/felicia-day-and-gamergate
-this-is-what-happens-now-1650544129.
95. Sam Laird, “Chris Kluwe: GamerGate a Symptom of Society’s Misog-
 207 Notes to Chapter 2
yny Problem,” Mashable, 26 October 2014, http://mashable.com/2014/10/25/
gamergate-chris-kluwe/.
96. Chris Suellentrop, “Can Video Games Survive?” New York Times,
25 October 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/opinion/sunday/the
-disheartening-gamergate-campaign.html; Anita Sarkeesian, “It’s Game
Over for ‘Gamers,’” New York Times, 28 October 2014, http://www.nytimes
.com/2014/10/29/opinion/anita-sarkeesian-on-video-games-great-future.html.
97. Dave Lee, “Zoe Quinn: Gamergate Must Be Condemned,” BBC News,
29 October 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29821050; Todd
VanDerWerff, “#Gamergate Has Won a Few Battles: It Will Lose the War,”
Vox, 23 October 2014, http://www.vox.com/2014/10/23/7044593/gamergate;
Leigh Alexander, “Sexism, Lies, and Video Games: The Culture War Nobody
Is Winning,” Time, 5 September 2014, http://time.com/3274247/video-game
-culture-war/; Taylor Wofford, “Is Gamergate about Media Ethics or Harass-
ing Women? Harassment, the Data Shows,” Newsweek, 25 October 2014, http://
www.newsweek.com/gamergate-about-media-ethics-or-harassing-women
-harassment-data-show-279736; Wu, “Rape and Death Threats Are Terroriz-
ing Female Gamers.”
98. Alex Abad-­Santos, “#Gamergate Loves Stephen Colbert: Stephen Col-
bert Does Not Love Them Back,” Vox, 30 October 2014, http://www.vox.com/
xpress/2014/10/30/7131071/stephen-colbert-anita-sarkeesian-gamergate; Brian
Crecente, “Brianna Wu: ‘I’m Not Going to Get Bullied out of This Industry,’” Poly-
gon, 14 October 2014, http://www.polygon.com/2014/10/14/6974547/brianna
-wu-im-not-going-to-get-bullied-out-of-this-industry; Lee, “Zoe Quinn.”
99. Chris Plante, “Gamergate Is Dead,” The Verge, 30 October 2014, http://
www.theverge.com/2014/10/30/7131931/gamergate-is-dead.
100. Adi Robertson, “The Law & Order Gamergate Episode Manages to
Be Even More Depressing Than Gamergate,” The Verge, 12 February 2015,
http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/12/8026175/law-and-order-svu-gamergate
-episode. Discussion about the episode was widespread both before and after
it aired. Other perspectives on it can be found in Leigh Alexander, “Law &
Order: SVU ‘Intimidation Game’ Is Not What Games Are About,” Hopes&
Fears, 13 February 2015, http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/culture/video
-games/168413-gamergate-svu-episode-reviewed-by-leigh-alexander; Cait-
lin Dewey, “This Is the Final Word on Gamergate—­and It’s from ‘Law &
Order: SVU,’” Washington Post, 11 February 2015, https://www.washington
post.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/02/11/this-is-the-final-word-on-gamer
gate-and-its-from-law-order-svu/; Philip Kollar, “Law & Order: SVU to Air
Episode Based on GamerGate,” Polygon, 29 January 2015, http://www.poly
gon.com/2015/1/29/7949153/law-order-svu-gamergate-episode-nbc-tv; Jason
Notes to Chapter 2 208
Schreier, “So That Was Law & Order’s Gamergate Episode,” Kotaku, 11 Feb-
ruary 2015, http://kotaku.com/so-that-was-law-orders-gamergate-episode
-1685333828.
101. Eric Johnson, “Shadows of Gamergate, but Few Answers, Material-
ize at Gaming Industry Shindig,” Recode, 9 February 2015, http://recode.net
/2015/02/09/shadows-of-gamergate-but-few-answers-materialize-at-gaming
-industry-shindig/.
102. Natalie Zina Walschots, “Finish Him!” This, 10 March 2015, http://this.org
/magazine/2015/03/10/finish-him/.
103. Ben Kuchera, “The Year of GamerGate: The Worst of Gaming Cul-
ture Gets a Movement,” Polygon, 30 December 2014, http://www.polygon.com
/2014/12/30/7460777/gamergate-2014-just-the-worst.
104. mr stroke, “GAF FOTY 2014-­Fail of the Year-­Results-­Winner of the
2014 Shit Sandwich Goes to . . . ,” NeoGAF, 23 December 2014, http://www
.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=957568; Paul Verhoeven, “The Big-
gest Nerd Stories of 2014,” TheVine, 28 December 2014, http://www.thevine
.com.au/life/tech/the-biggest-nerd-stories-of-2014-20141228-292442/; Nadia
Kayyali and Danny O’Brien, “Facing the Challenge of Online Harassment,” Elec-
tronic Frontier Foundation, 8 January 2015, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015
/01/facing-challenge-online-harassment.
105. Brian Crecente, “Depression Quest Creator Speaks at Congressional
Briefing on Cyberstalking,” Polygon, 15 April 2015, http://www.polygon.com/2015
/4/15/8420237/depression-quest-creator-speaks-at-congressional-briefing-on;
Jeff Grubb, “Massachusetts Congresswoman Urges FBI to Take Gamergate
Seriously,” VentureBeat, 10 March 2015, http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/10/
massachusetts-congresswoman-urges-fbi-to-take-gamergate-seriously/; Mary
Elizabeth Williams, “Twitter Trolls, Your Days Are Numbered: The Depart-
ment of Justice Is Finally Taking Online Harassment Like #Gamergate Seri-
ously,” Salon, 29 May 2015, http://www.salon.com/2015/05/29/twitter_trolls
_your_days_are_numbered_the_department_of_justice_is_finally_taking_on-
line_harassment_like_gamergate_seriously/; Brianna Wu, “It’s Time for the
FBI to Prosecute Gamergate Trolls,” Daily Dot, 12 March 2015, http://www
.dailydot.com/opinion/brianna-wu-fbi-death-threats-gamergate/; Brianna Wu,
“[updated] Gamergate Death Threat Is a Slam Dunk for Prosecutors: Will
They Act?” The Mary Sue, 22 May 2015, http://www.themarysue.com/will
-prosecutors-act-on-gamergate-death-threat/.
106. Benjamin Barber, Twitter, 15 October 2014, https://twitter.com/endo
morphosis/status/522520577249001473.
107. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites.
108. Lantz, “#GamerGate.”
109. Matt Lees, “What Gamergate Should Have Taught Us about the ‘Alt-­
 209 Notes to Chapter 3
Right,’” The Guardian, 1 December 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/tech
nology/2016/dec/01/gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump. See also Paul Kennedy,
“The Dangerous Game: Gamergate and the ‘Alt-­Right,’” CBC Radio, 30 No-
vember 2016, http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-dangerous-game-gamergate
-and-the-alt-right-1.3874259.

3. Coding Meritocracy
1. Jesper Juul, The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video
Games (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013).
2. Robin Potanin, “Forces in Play: The Business and Culture of Videogame
Production,” in Fun and Games ’10: Proceedings of the 3rd International Confer-
ence on Fun and Games, ed. Vero Vanden Abeele et al. (New York: ACM, 2010),
135–­43.
3. Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy
(New York: Crown, 2012); Ruth Levitas, “Shuffling Back to Equality?” Sound-
ings 26 (Spring 2004): 59–­72; Jo Littler, “Meritocracy as Plutocracy: The Mar-
keting of ‘Equality’ under Neoliberalism,” New Formations 80–­81 (2013): 52–­72;
Kenneth Paul Tan, “Meritocracy and Elitism in a Global City: Ideological Shifts
in Singapore,” International Political Science Review 29, no. 1 (2008): 7–­27; Mi-
chael Young, “Down with Meritocracy,” The Guardian, 28 June 2001, http://
www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment; Michael Young, The Rise
of the Meritocracy (1958; repr., New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2008).
4. Jennifer Goodman, “The Meritocracy Myth: National Exams and the
Depoliticization of Thai Education,” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in South-
east Asia 28, no. 1 (2013): 101–­31; Naa Oyo A. Kwate and Ilan H. Meyer, “The
Myth of Meritocracy and African American Health,” American Journal of Public
Health 100, no. 10 (2010): 1831–­34; Stephen J. McNamee and Robert K. Miller,
The Meritocracy Myth (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).
5. Juul, Art of Failure, 74–­75.
6. Ben Barrett, “Getting Better at Hearthstone with Computers,” Rock,
Paper, Shotgun, 4 September 2014, http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014
/09/04/getting-better-at-hearthstone-with-computers/.
7. At the first ever Clash Royale tournament the mortar player was merci-
lessly booed and the card was made weaker shortly after the tournament. The
card creates a building that enables players to attack from their side of the map,
which is a more defensible position and does not facilitate “fun” play. In tourna-
ment fighting games, certain characters and stages are often banned as players
find them too powerful and unbalanced, thereby subverting the contest of skill
they are seeking. Sports games are based on unbalanced teams, but those teams
are all given ratings. It is typically considered bad form to use a radically more
Notes to Chapter 3 210
powerful team than your opponent does, unless an agreement was made to do
so in advance. That agreement typically is made to pursue a more equal contest
where the more skilled player (I’m looking at you, Miguel Sicart) takes a lesser
team and still beats me.
8. Mia Consalvo, Cheaters: Gaining Advantage in Videogames (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2007).
9. Chris Kohler, “Why Can’t Nintendo Stop Ruining Mario Kart?” Wired,
15 May 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/05/mario-kart-8-wii-u/.
10. Celestius, “Most Annoying Mario Kart Wii Items,” TheTopTens, 19 July
2016, http://www.thetoptens.com/annoying-mario-kart-wii-items/.
11. Stephen Totilo, “The Maker of Mario Kart Justifies the Blue Shell,”
Kotaku, 9 March 2011, http://kotaku.com/5780082/the-maker-of-mario-kart
-justifies-the-blue-shell.
12. BlazeAssassin, “I Wish They Would Add a ‘Skill’ Mode to MP Games,”
GameFAQs, 28 March 2012, http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/632974-mario
-party-9/62381927; Turbo_TRex, “There’s Too Much Reliance on Luck in
This Game,” GameFAQs, 19 January 2014, http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards
/711406-mario-party-island-tour/68375685.
13. “Banned Stage,” SmashWiki, n.d., http://www.ssbwiki.com/Banned_
stage.
14. Mia Consalvo, “Hardcore Casual: Game Culture Return(s) to Raven-
hearst,” FDG ’09: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Foundations
of Digital Games (New York: ACM, 2009), 50–­54.
15. Derek Strickland, “Halo Online Pay to Win Microtransactions Re-
vealed,” VR World, 26 March 2015, http://www.vrworld.com/2015/03/26/halo
-online-pay-to-win-microtransactions-revealed/.
16. Leigh Alexander, “Watergun Assassin: The Grand Game Story of Street
Wars,” Gamasutra, 6 August 2014, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news
/222713/Watergun_assassin_The_grand_game_story_of_Street_Wars.php.
17. Stephen Totilo, “The Uncracked Secrets of Pokémon Go Egg-­Hatching,”
Kotaku, 28 July 2016, http://kotaku.com/the-uncracked-secrets-of-pokemon-go
-egg-hatching-1784339902.
18. Alexander, “Watergun Assassin.”
19. Ethan Ham, “Rarity and Power: Balance in Collectible Object Games,”
Game Studies 10, no. 1 (2010): http://gamestudies.org/1001/articles/ham.
20. Eli Hodapp, “‘Hearthstone’ Curse of Naxxramas Review: Easily the
Best Way New Collectable Card Game Cards Have Ever Been Released,”
Touch Arcade, 21 August 2014, http://toucharcade.com/2014/08/21/hearthstone
-curse-of-naxxramas-review/.
21. Ibid.
22. Eugene Lee, “Tomb Raider to Survivor, Reimagining Lara Croft,” En-
 211 Notes to Chapter 4
tropy, 30 June 2014, http://entropymag.org/tomb-raider-to-survivor-reimagin
ing-lara-croft/.
23. Evan Narcisse, “Tomb Raider: The Kotaku Review,” Kotaku, 25 February
2013, http://kotaku.com/5986619/tomb-raider-the-kotaku-review.
24. This is especially interesting in consideration of how Lara Croft was re-
booted away from her lineage of inheritance and wealth in the newest install-
ment of the series.
25. Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online
Games (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 114.
26. Simon Parkin, “If You Love Games, You Should Refuse to Be Called a
Gamer,” New Statesman, 9 December 2013, http://www.newstatesman.com/if
-you-love-games-you-are-not-a-gamer.
27. Ibid.
28. Elizabeth Harper, “Should You Lose Experience When You Die?” En-
gadget, 7 April 2007, https://www.engadget.com/2007/04/07/should-you-lose
-experience-when-you-die/.

4. Judging Skill
1. Jesper Juul, The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video
Games (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013).
2. Benjamin Sell and Michael Hartman, “Gear Score in World of War-
craft: What Is It and How Do I Know What Mine Is?” Altered Gamer, 18 April
2012, http://world-of-warcraft.alteredgamer.com/wow-basics/71203-gear-score
-in-world-of-warcraft-what-is-it-and-how-do-i-know-what-mine-is/; “Gear
Score,” WoWWiki, n.d., http://wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/Gear_score.
3. Gus Mustrapa, “Gamer Earns Every World of Warcraft Achievement,”
Wired, 3 December 2009, http://www.wired.com/2009/12/world-of-warcraft
-achievement/; Starym, “A History of World Firsts: Vanilla,” Manaflask,
1 March 2014, http://manaflask.com/en/articles/a-history-of-world-firsts
-vanilla#; Gergo Vas, “The First Player to Unlock All 2,057 of World of War-
craft’s Achievements,” Kotaku, 22 April 2014, http://kotaku.com/russian-player
-unlocks-all-2-057-achievements-in-world-1566029494.
4. For general background on raiding, please see Mark Chen, Leet Noobs:
The Life and Death of an Expert Player Group in World of Warcraft (New York:
Peter Lang, 2011).
5. A general background on DKP can be found in Krista-­Lee Malone,
“Dragon Kill Points: The Economics of Power Gamers,” Games and Culture 4,
no. 3 (2009): 296–­316.
6. Mark Silverman and Bart Simon, “Discipline and Dragon Kill Points in
the Online Power Game,” Games and Culture 4, no. 4 (2009): 364.
Notes to Chapter 4 212
7. Ibid., 371.
8. Michael McWhertor, “The League of Legends Team of Scientists Trying
to Cure ‘Toxic Behavior’ Online,” Polygon, 13 October 2012, http://www.poly
gon.com/2012/10/17/3515178/the-league-of-legends-team-of-scientists-trying
-to-cure-toxic; Paul Tassi, “Riot’s ‘League of Legends’ Reveals Astonishing 27
Million Daily Players, 67 Million Monthly,” Forbes, 27 January 2014, http://
www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2014/01/27/riots-league-of-legends-reveals
-astonishing-27-million-daily-players-67-million-monthly/.
9. McWhertor, “League of Legends Team of Scientists Trying to Cure
‘Toxic Behavior’ Online.”
10. Colin Campbell, “How Riot Games Encourages Sportsmanship in
League of Legends,” Polygon, 20 March 2014, http://www.polygon.com
/2014/3/20/5529784/how-riot-games-encourages-sportsmanship-in-league
-of-legends.
11. Luke Plunkett, “Pro League of Legends Player Banned for Harass-
ment, Abuse & ‘Negative Attitude,’” Kotaku, 4 December 2012, http://kotaku
.com/5965713/pro-league-of-legends-player-banned-for-harassment-abuse
-negative-attitude. For academic studies of the governance systems in League
of Legends, see Jeremy Blackburn and Haewoon Kwak, “stfu noob! Predicting
Crowdsourced Decisions on Toxic Behavior in Online Games,” in WWW ’14:
Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web (New York:
ACM, 2014), 877–­88; Yubo Kou and Bonnie Nardi, “Governance in League of
Legends: A Hybrid System,” FDG (2014): https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/;
Haewoon Kwak, Jeremy Blackburn, and Seungyeop Han, “Exploring Cyber-
bullying and Other Toxic Behavior in Team Competition Online Games,” in
CHI ’15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems (New York: ACM, 2015), 3739–­48.
12. Elo is a system originally designed for chess that has found its way into a
number of technical products in some form, from video games to the forerun-
ner to Facebook. The system is based on trying to match players of equal skill
against each other. Players start out with a baseline rating, which goes up and
down as they lose matches. Beating a higher-­rated player leads to a larger boost
than beating a player with a similar rating to your own. Conversely, losing to
a lower-­ranked player can lead to a substantial lowering of your own rating. In
my experience, Elo makes games feel weightier as there are somewhat durable
consequences to each match.
13. YurdleTheTurtle, “Beginner’s Guide to Ranked Games,” League of Leg-
ends Community, 5 May 2013, http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/
showthread.php?t=1194168.
14. Ibid.
15. Nathan Grayson, “The Guy with the Lowest Possible Rank in Over-
 213 Notes to Chapter 4
watch,” Kotaku, 23 August 2016, http://kotaku.com/the-guy-with-the-lowest
-possible-rank-in-overwatch-1785662123.
16. Dillion Skiffington, “League of Legends’ Neverending War on Toxic
Behavior,” Kotaku, 19 September 2014, http://kotaku.com/league-of-legends
-neverending-war-on-toxic-behavior-1636894289.
17. Riot Socrates, “Ranked Restrictions,” League of Legends Boards, 24
September 2014 http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/miscellaneous
/1LJP1ovA-ranked-restrictions.
18. Nathan Grayson, “League of Legends Restricting Toxic Players from
Ranked Games,” Kotaku, 23 September 2014, http://kotaku.com/league-of
-legends-restricting-toxic-players-from-ranked-1638305092.
19. Skiffington, “League of Legends’ Neverending War on Toxic Behavior.”
20. Ibid.
21. Yannick LeJacq, “Losing in MOBAs Should Be More Fun,” Ko-
taku, 29 April 2015, http://kotaku.com/losing-in-mobas-should-be-more
-fun-1701067967.
22. Philippa Warr, “Wot I Learned: League of Legends Q&A,” Rock, Paper,
Shotgun, 26 October 2014, http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/10/26/lol
-2015-changes/.
23. Yannick LeJacq, “Why Riot Tweaks League of Legends to Make It Better
for Its Best Players,” Kotaku, 19 May 2015, http://kotaku.com/why-riot-tweaks
-league-of-legends-to-make-it-better-for-1705527275.
24. Jeffrey Lin, “Tweet,” Twitter, 28 May 2015, https://twitter.com/riotlyte/
status/604005785245335552.
25. Brenna Hillier, “Only 2% of League of Legends Matches Include Abuse,
Says Riot,” VG247, 9 July 2015, http://www.vg247.com/2015/07/09/only-2-of
-league-of-legends-matches-include-abuse-says-riot/.
26. Vikki Blake, “‘Online Harassment Is Not an Impossible Problem,’ Says
Riot,” Destructoid, 9 July 2015, http://www.destructoid.com/-online-harassment
-is-not-an-impossible-problem-says-riot-295658.phtml.
27. Five-­star heroes have a 0.01 percent chance of being drawn out of the
free pack that players get once a day and a 0.25 percent chance of being drawn
out of a paid pack. A paid character costs about five dollars as of this writing.
28. Paul Tassi, “The World’s Best ‘Clash Royale’ Player Has Spent $12k
on the Game, and for Good Reason,” Forbes, 1 April 2016, http://www.forbes
.com/sites/insertcoin/2016/04/01/the-worlds-best-clash-royale-player-has
-spent-12k-on-the-game-and-for-good-reason.
29. Eli Hodapp, “Seven Ways ‘Clash Royale’ Should Be More Like Pepper-
oni Pizza,” Touch Arcade, 20 May 2016, http://toucharcade.com/2016/05/20/
seven-ways-clash-royale-should-be-more-like-pepperoni-pizza/.
30. Dean Takahashi, “With Patience, I Defeated Supercell’s Monetization
Notes to Chapter 4 214
Strategy in Clash Royale,” VentureBeat, 28 April 2016, http://venturebeat.com
/2016/04/28/with-patience-i-defeated-supercells-monetization-strategy-in
-clash-royale/.
31. dragonroar3, “Tournaments Make Me Not Want to Play Ranked,” red-
dit, 10 July 2016, https://www.reddit.com/r/ClashRoyale/comments/4s45yv
/tournaments_make_me_not_want_to_play_ranked/.
32. Eli Hodapp, “Supercell Doubles Down on Never Muting Emotes in
‘Clash Royale,’” Touch Arcade, 14 June 2016, http://toucharcade.com/2016/06/14
/supercell-doubles-down-on-never-muting-emotes-in-clash-royale/.
33. Clash Royale Team, “Emotes,” Clash Royale, 14 June 2016, https://
clashroyale.com/blog/news/emotes.
34. Hodapp, “Supercell Doubles Down on Never Muting Emotes in ‘Clash
Royale.’”
35. Clash Royale Team, “Rethinking Emotes,” Clash Royale, 6 September
2016, https://clashroyale.com/blog/news/rethinking-emotes.
36. David Amsden, “‘Madden’ and Me: How Football’s Biggest Video Game
Took Over My Life,” Rolling Stone, 28 August 2015, http://www.rollingstone.com
/sports/features/madden-and-me-how-footballs-biggest-video-game-took
-over-my-life-20150828.
37. Owen S. Good, “Meet the Million-­Point Man of Xbox Live,” Polygon, 22
March 2014, http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/22/5533384/meet-the-million
-point-man-of-xbox-live; Greg Kumparak, “It Took 8 Years, but Someone
Just Broke One Million Gamerscore on Xbox Live,” TechCrunch, 12 March
2014, http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/12/it-took-8-years-but-someone-just
-broke-one-million-gamerscore-on-xbox-live/; Luke Plunkett, “Meet the First
Gamer to Get One Million Achievement Points,” Kotaku, 13 March 2014,
http://kotaku.com/watch-live-as-a-hero-gets-a-gamerscore-of-over-one-mill
-1542821937/1542852654.
38. Good, “Meet the Million-­Point Man of Xbox Live.”
39. Joel Goodwin, “The Trouble with Serious Games,” Electron Dance,
14 September 2014, http://www.electrondance.com/the-trouble-with-serious
-games/.
40. Jen Gerson, “Dragon Age Writer Jennifer Hepler Talks about Leaving
Bioware, but Not for Being Harrassed,” National Post, 19 August 2013, http://
news.nationalpost.com/2013/08/19/jennifer-hepler/.
41. Susana Polo, “Inclusion: What Jennifer Hepler’s Story Is All About,”
The Mary Sue, 20 February 2012, http://www.themarysue.com/inclusion-what
-jennifer-heplers-story-is-all-about/.
42. Ibid.
43. Andy Chalk, “BioWare Breaks Down Mass Effect 3 Game Modes,” The
 215 Notes to Chapter 4
Escapist, 11 January 2012, http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/115186
-BioWare-Breaks-Down-Mass-Effect-3-Game-Modes.
44. Tina Amini, “BioWare Writer Describes Her Gaming Tastes; Angry
Gamers Call Her a ‘Cancer,’” Kotaku, 20 February 2012, http://kotaku.com
/5886674/bioware-writer-describes-her-gaming-tastes-angry-gamers-call-her
-a-cancer; Stephanie Gutowski, “Attack of the Internet: Saving Bioware’s Jen-
nifer Hepler,” RipTen Videogame Blog, 24 February 2012, http://www.ripten
.com/2012/02/24/attack-of-the-internet-saving-biowares-jennifer-hepler/.
45. Chris Priestly, “Our Statement Supporting a Valued Employee,” BioWare
Forum, 21 February 2012, http://forum.bioware.com/topic/259859-our-state
ment-supporting-a-valued-employee/.
46. Mike Fahey, “Average Gamers Are Going to Hate Bioshock Infinite’s 1999
Mode,” Kotaku, 23 January 2012, http://kotaku.com/5878338/average-gamers
-are-going-to-hate-bioshock-infinites-1999-mode.
47. Ibid.
48. Patricia Hernandez, “GTA Players Beat All of the Heists without Ever
Dying,” Kotaku, 16 March 2015, http://kotaku.com/gta-v-players-beat-all-of
-heists-without-ever-dying-1691705013; Patricia Hernandez, “The Man Who
Does the Impossible in Super Mario 64,” Kotaku, 17 March 2015, http://kotaku
.com/the-man-who-does-the-impossible-in-super-mario-64-1656869221; Jason
Schreier, “Someone Beat Pillars of Eternity in under 40 Minutes,” Kotaku,
14 April 2015, http://kotaku.com/someone-beat-pillars-of-eternity-in-under
-40-minutes-1697709938.
49. Nic Rowen, “Review: Evolve,” Destructoid, 13 February 2015, http://www
.destructoid.com/review-evolve-287650.phtml.
50. Laura Hudson, “In Bloodborne’s Brutal World, I Found Myself,” Off-
world, 10 April 2015, http://boingboing.net/2015/04/10/bloodborne.html.
51. Patricia Hernandez, “Incredible Bloodborne Player Beats Game without
Ever Leveling Up,” Kotaku, 3 April 2015, http://kotaku.com/incredible-blood-
borne-player-beats-game-without-ever-le-1695418129; Patrick Klepek, “Skilled
Dark Souls II Player Makes Toughest Enemies Look Like Chumps,” Kotaku, 10
February 2015, http://kotaku.com/skilled-dark-souls-ii-player-makes-toughest
-enemies-loo-1684963271.
52. Hudson, “In Bloodborne’s Brutal World, I Found Myself.”
53. Patrick Klepek, “Apparently I’m Not Playing Demon’s Souls the ‘Right
Way,’” Kotaku, 19 February 2015, http://kotaku.com/apparently-im-not-playing
-demons-souls-the-right-way-1686815820.
54. Dan Stapleton, “How and Why Bloodborne Lost Me,” IGN, 26 March
2015, http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/03/26/how-and-why-bloodborne-lost
-me.
Notes to Chapter 5 216
55. Dave Thier, “Echo Chamber: ‘Bloodborne’s’ Critical Praise Is Gam-
ing Journalism’s Failure,” Forbes, 27 March 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites
/davidthier/2015/03/27/echo-chamber-bloodbornes-critical-praise-is-gaming
-journalisms-failure/print/.
56. Or nine, or thirty-­nine, depending on when and what you were raiding.
57. Katherine Sierra, “Silicon Valley Could Learn a Lot from Skater Cul-
ture: Just Not How to Be a Meritocracy,” Wired, 23 February 2015, http://www
.wired.com/2015/02/silicon-valley-thinks-can-learn-skater-culture-terrible
-idea/.

5. Learning from Others

1. Steven E. Jones and George K. Thiruvathukal, Codename Revolution: The
Nintendo Wii Platform (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012); Nick Montfort
and Ian Bogost, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2009).
2. An excellent example of a book about sports culture is Dave Zirin, Game
Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down (New York: New
Press, 2013).
3. feedmeacid, “Challenging the Play Is Broken,” GameFAQs, 9 October
2012, http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/656454-madden-nfl-13/64260364,
robd42; “Challenging the Refs Call?” GameFAQs, 5 October 2011, http://www
.gamefaqs.com/boards/625123-madden-nfl-12/60536576; Ebenezer Samuel,
“System Update: Madden 15 Fumbled a Couple of Details,” Daily News, 29
August 2014, http://nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv/system-update-madden
-15-fumbled-couple-details-article-1.1921335.
4. David Sirlin, Playing to Win: Becoming the Champion (n.p.: David Sirlin,
2005), Kindle ed., loc. 96.
5. David Leonhardt, “The Strike-­Zone Revolution,” New York Times, 23 Oc-
tober 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/24/upshot/the-strike-zone-revo
lution.html; Jeff Sullivan, “Umpires Are Improving,” FanGraphs Baseball, 28
February 2013, http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/umpires-are-improving/.
6. Rich Trenholm, “Coaches Could Challenge Refs with TV Replays, Says
Soccer Boss Sepp Blatter,” CNET, 8 September 2014, http://www.cnet.com/news
/coaches-could-challenge-refs-with-tv-replays-says-soccer-boss-sepp-blatter/.
7. “NBA to Share ‘Last Two Minutes’ Officiating Reports Beginning
March 2,” National Basketball Association, 27 February 2015, http://www.nba
.com/2015/news/02/27/officating-reports-official-release/.
8. Kevin Draper, “NBA Says Refs Missed Five Calls on Final Thunder-
Spurs Possession,” Deadspin, 3 May 2016, http://deadspin.com/nba-says-refs
-missed-five-calls-on-final-spurs-thunder-1774523941.
 217 Notes to Chapter 5
9. Kit Holden, “Why Did the Bundesliga Turn Down Goal Line Technol-
ogy?” The Independent, 24 March 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/sport
/football/european/why-did-the-bundesliga-turn-down-goal-line-technology
-9213017.html.
10. Bobby Warshaw, “No One Understands Soccer’s Rules, and That’s
a Problem,” Deadspin, 14 June 2016, http://screamer.deadspin.com/no-one
-understands-soccers-rules-and-thats-a-problem-1781973591.
11. Tom Ley, “Replay Is Turning Baseball into Football and I Hate It,” Dead-
spin, 12 October 2015, http://deadspin.com/replay-is-turning-baseball-into
-football-and-i-hate-it-1736111661.
12. Jaime Diaz, “After Further Review, the USGA Got Real Lucky Dustin
Johnson Won the U.S. Open by More Than One Stroke,” Golf Digest, 20 June
2016, http://www.golfdigest.com/story/after-further-review-the-usga-got-real
-lucky-dustin-johnson-won-the-us-open-by-more-than-one-stroke.
13. Barry Petchesky, “The Secret of the Seahawks’ Defense? Fouling,
Maybe,” Deadspin, 10 January 2014, http://deadspin.com/the-secret-of-the
-seahawks-defense-fouling-maybe-1498806994.
14. Daniel Rich, “For Wharton Professor Cade Massey, the NFL Draft Is
a Crapshoot,” Daily Pennsylvanian, 14 October 2013, http://www.thedp.com/
article/2013/10/nfl-draft-analysis-cade-massey.
15. Dave McMenamin, “LeBron James: Warriors Are ‘Most Healthy Team
I’ve Ever Seen in NBA History,’” ESPN, 23 November 2015, http://espn.go
.com/nba/story/_/id/14204846/lebron-james-says-golden-state-warriors-most
-healthy-team-ever-seen.
16. Claire McNear, “The End of Mike Carey, and the Twilight of Human
Error,” The Ringer, 13 June 2016, https://theringer.com/nfl-mike-carey-rules
-analyst-human-error-edd2226e9a29.
17. EA Sports, “Madden NFL 16 Player Ratings,” 2015, https://www.easports
.com/madden-nfl/player-ratings.
18. Mark McClusky, “This Guy’s Quest to Track Every Shot in the NBA
Changed Basketball Forever,” Wired, 28 October 2014, http://www.wired.com
/2014/10/faster-higher-stronger.
19. Dylan Burkhardt, “How Iowa State Eliminated the Mid-­Range Jumper,”
Shot Analytics, 18 March 2014, http://www.shotanalytics.com/2014/03/18/iowa
-state-eliminated-mid-range-jumper/.
20. Zach Lowe, “The Tiers of the NBA: Ranking the Teams from Top to
Bottom,” Grantland, 28 October 2014, http://grantland.com/the-triangle/nba
-rankings-san-antonio-spurs-los-angeles-clippers-oklahoma-city-thunder
-cleveland-cavaliers/.
21. Christopher A. Paul, “Optimizing Play: How Theorycraft Changes
Gameplay and Design,” Game Studies 11, no. 2 (2011): http://gamestudies.org
Notes to Chapter 5 218
/1102/articles/paul; Christopher A. Paul, Wordplay and the Discourse of Video
Games: Analyzing Words, Design, and Play (New York: Routledge, 2012); Karin
Wenz, “Theorycrafting: Knowledge Production and Surveillance,” Information,
Communication & Society 16, no. 2 (2013): 178–­93.
22. Jennifer Armstrong, “Life after Death for the Man behind Lost’s Mr.
Eko,” Entertainment Weekly, 3 November 2006, http://www.ew.com/ew/article
/0,,1553848,00.html.
23. Brett Koremenos, “Assets and Fit,” Grantland, 5 March 2015, http://
grantland.com/the-triangle/nba-shootaround-physical-graffiti/.
24. Adrian Wojnarowski, “Rockets GM Daryl Morey Fires Back at Mav-
ericks Owner Mark Cuban,” Yahoo Sports, 29 September 2014, http://sports
.yahoo.com/news/rockets-gm-daryl-morey-fires-back-at-mavericks-owner
-mark-cuban-082844311.html.
25. Pablo S. Torre and Tom Haberstroh, “New Biometric Tests Invade the
NBA,” ESPN, 6 October 2014, http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/11629773/
new-nba-biological-testing-less-michael-lewis-more-george-orwell.
26. Gary Jacobson, “Inside the Final Four Finances: The March toward $1
Billion in Revenue,” Dallas Morning News, 4 April 2014, http://www.dallasnews
.com/sports/college-sports/ncaa-tournament/the-scene/20140403-inside-final
-four-finances-cuban-ncaa-tournament-won-t-get-fat-like-nfl.ece.
27. Cy Young, “Cy Young Perfect Game Box Score,” Baseball Almanac, n.d.,
http://www.baseball-almanac.com/boxscore/05051904.shtml.
28. Jeff Passan, “Tim Lincecum’s No-­Hitter Shows His Very Best Is Still
Better Than Most,” Yahoo Sports, 25 June 2014, https://sports.yahoo.com/news/
tim-lincecum-still-good-enough-for-no-hitter-even-if-he-s-a-different-than
-before-011427676.html; Maxi Rodriguez, “Javier Mascherano Says He Tore
His Anus During Semifinal against Netherlands,” Yahoo Sports, 10 July 2014,
https://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/soccer-dirty-tackle/javier-mascherano-says-he
-tore-his-anus-during-semifinal-against-netherlands-154255457-soccer.html;
Chris Sprow, “The NFL’s ‘Luckiest’ Teams,” ESPN, 30 December 2011, http://
insider.espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/7400317/the-luckiest-teams-nfl-sometimes
-turn-the-greatest-nfl.
29. Mike Fahey, “Pac-­Man World Record Broken,” Kotaku, 11 September
2009, http://kotaku.com/5357260/pac-man-world-record-broken.
30. Raph Koster, Theory of Fun for Game Design (Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly,
2013), Kindle ed., loc. 890.
31. Angel Diaz and Rafael Canton, “The 20 Greatest Basketball Players
to Never Play in the NBA,” Complex, 9 November 2012, http://www.complex
.com/sports/2012/11/the-20-greatest-players-who-never-played-in-the-nba/;
“World Football: The Top 10 Most Promising Players That Never Made It,”
 219 Notes to Chapter 5
Bleacher Report, 3 June 2011, http://bleacherreport.com/articles/708618-guti-and
-the-top-10-promising-players-that-never-made-it-and-busted; Adam Lazarus,
“10 Best NFL Players That Never Were,” Bleacher Report, 12 April 2012, http://
bleacherreport.com/articles/1143472-the-10-best-nfl-players-that-never-were.
32. Andrew McCutchen, “Left Out,” The Players’ Tribune, 13 February 2015,
http://www.theplayerstribune.com/left-out/.
33. PA Sport, “Manchester City’s Kevin De Bruyne Offer ‘Astonishing’—­
Wolfsburg Chief,” ESPN FC, 28 August 2015, http://www.espnfc.us/story
/2584407/manchester-city-kevin-de-bruyne-offer-astonishing-chief.
34. Patrick Redford, “How Chris Froome Dominated the Tour De France,”
Deadspin, 26 July 2016, http://fittish.deadspin.com/how-chris-froome-dominated
-the-tour-de-france-1784285012.
35. One example of the importance of corporations being in charge of eSports
and how that affects play can be seen in the debate surrounding relegation and
League of Legends. For more, see Vince Nairn, “LCS Owners Send Letter to Riot
Games about Concerns Regarding Relegation, Financial Stability and Char-
ter Membership,” Slingshot, 12 November 2016, https://slingshotesports.com
/2016/11/12/riot-games-lett-lcs-owners-league-of-legends-concerns-relegation
-financial-stability/.
36. Andrew Sharp, “The Warriors Were Too Good at Everything to Ever
Really Lose Anything,” Grantland, 17 June 2015, http://grantland.com/the-tri
angle/the-warriors-were-too-good-at-everything-to-ever-really-lose-anything/.
37. Dan Diamond, “Paul George Injury: Why the Stanchions Were So
Close, and How to Fix It,” Forbes, 2 August 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites
/dandiamond/2014/08/02/paul-george-injury-how-one-expert-would-make
-sure-it-never-happens-again/.
38. Zach Lowe, “A Playoff Problem: If the Celtics Are Trying to Rebuild,
Then Why the Postseason Push?” Grantland, 31 March 2015, http://grantland
.com/the-triangle/a-playoff-problem-if-the-celtics-are-trying-to-rebuild-then
-why-the-postseason-push/.
39. Sports certainly has its own structural inequalities, not the least of which
is the cost to play certain sports. For a perspective on how this affects hockey, see
Geordie Tait, “The Puck Stops Here,” Star City Games, 20 October 2010, http://
www.starcitygames.com/magic/misc/20314_The_Puck_Stops_Here.html.
40. I deeply appreciate this suggestion from the anonymous “Reviewer 2,”
who read an earlier version of this chapter.
41. The best example of this may be the AAAA baseball player, who is good
enough to dominate AAA baseball but not good enough to play consistently in
Major League Baseball.
42. Rodger Sherman, “The Story of the Slowest Athletes at the Rio Olym-
Notes to Chapter 5 220
pics, and Why They Compete,” SBNation, 19 August 2016, http://www.sbnation
.com/2016/8/19/12467438/rio-olympics-2016-athletes-small-nations-richson
-simeon.
43. Rodger Sherman, “This Is Why Gabby Douglas Isn’t in the Olympics
Gymnastics All-­Around Finals,” SBNation, 11 August 2016, http://www.sbnation
.com/2016/8/7/12400004/team-usa-gymnastics-olympics-all-around-simone
-biles-aly-raisman-gabby-douglas-2-per-country-rule.
44. Samuel Claiborn, “Mario Party 10 Review: Party Yawn,” IGN, 17 March
2015, http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/03/17/mario-party-10-review.
45. Phill Cameron, “A Quick Argument for ‘Luck’ in Strategy Game Design,
from XCOM 2’s Creator,” Gamasutra, 6 August 2015, http://www.gamasutra.com
/view/news/249978/A_quick_argument_for_luck_in_strategy_game_design
_from_XCOMs_creator.php.
46. Ibid.
47. Tiago Raposo, comment on ibid.; Anton Temba, comment on ibid.
48. Roy Graham, “Jake Solomon Explains the Careful Use of Randomness
in XCOM 2,” Gamasutra, 1 March 2016, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news
/266891/Jake_Solomon_explains_the_careful_use_of_randomness_in_XCOM
_2.php.
49. Matthew Lynch, “Diverse Conversations Recruiting a Diverse Student
Population,” Huffington Post, 4 February 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com
/matthew-lynch-edd/diverse-conversations-rec_b_4724817.html.
50. Josh Freedman, “The Farce of Meritocracy: Why Legacy Admissions
Might Actually Be a Good Thing,” Forbes, 14 November 2013, http://www
.forbes.com/sites/joshfreedman/2013/11/14/the-farce-of-meritocracy-in-elite
-higher-education-why-legacy-admissions-might-be-a-good-thing/.
51. Ross Douthat, “Does Meritocracy Work?” The Atlantic, 1 November
2005, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/11/does-meritocracy
-work/304305/.
52. Tamar Lewin, “Colleges Seek New Paths to Diversity after Court Rul-
ing,” New York Times, 22 April 2014 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/us/
turning-to-new-means-of-promoting-diversity.html.
53. Scott Jaschik, “Meritocracy or Bias?” Inside Higher Ed, 13 August 2013,
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/08/13/white-definitions-merit-and
-admissions-change-when-they-think-about-asian-americans.
54. Libby Nelson, “The Formula for a Good Life after College,” Vox, 6 May
2014, http://www.vox.com/2014/5/6/5683788/the-science-of-a-good-life-after
-college.
55. Jia Tolentino, “All the Greedy Young Abigail Fishers and Me,” Jezebel,
28 June 2016, http://jezebel.com/all-the-greedy-young-abigail-fishers-and
-me-1782508801; Marcus Woo, “Infoporn: College Faculties Have a Serious
 221 Notes to Chapter 5
Diversity Problem,” Wired, 19 February 2015, http://www.wired.com/2015/02/
infoporn-college-faculties-serious-diversity-problem/.
56. Becky Chambers, “Why Games with Female Protagonists Don’t Sell,
and What It Says about the Industry,” The Mary Sue, 23 November 2012,
http://www.themarysue.com/why-games-with-female-protagonists-dont-sell
-and-what-it-says-about-the-industry; Matthew Handrahan, “No Female
Assassin’s Creed Characters a ‘Reality of Development,’” Games Industry,
12 June 2014, http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-06-11-no-female
-assassins-creed-characters-a-reality-of-development; Cameron Kunzelman,
“In Watch Dogs, Women Are Just Victims and Plot Points,” Paste, 28 May
2014, http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2014/05/in-watch-dogs-women
-are-victims-and-plot-points.html; Carolyn Petit, “Fear of a Woman Warrior,”
GameSpot, 22 February 2013, https://www.gamespot.com/articles/fear-of-a
-woman-warrior/1100-6404142/; Rachel Weber, “Naughty Dog: We’ve Been
Asked to Push Ellie to the Back of the Box Art,” Games Industry, 12 December
2012, http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-12-12-naughty-dog-theres-a
-misconception-that-if-you-put-a-girl-on-the-cover-the-game-sells-less; Mike
Wehner, “Devs Had to Demand Female Focus Testers for The Last of Us,” The Es-
capist, 8 April 2013, http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/123139-Devs
-Had-to-Demand-Female-Focus-Testers-for-The-Last-of-Us.
57. David Leonard, “Not a Hater, Just Keepin’ It Real: The Importance of
Race-­and Gender-­Based Game Studies,” Games and Culture 1, no. 1 (2006):
83–­88.
58. Jef Rouner, “Would You Believe There Have Been Only 14 Playable
Black Women in Gaming?” Houston Press, 5 June 2015, http://www.houstonpress
.com/arts/would-you-believe-there-have-been-only-14-playable-black-women
-in-gaming-7484017.
59. Richard Pérez-­Peña, “Generation Later, Poor Are Still Rare at Elite Col-
leges,” New York Times, 25 August 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/26/
education/despite-promises-little-progress-in-drawing-poor-to-elite-colleges
.html.
60. David Leonhardt, “‘A National Admissions Office’ for Low-­Income Striv-
ers,” New York Times, 16 September 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09
/16/upshot/a-national-admissions-office-for-low-income-strivers.html; David
Leonhardt, “A Simple Way to Send Poor Kids to Top Colleges,” New York
Times, 29 March 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/opinion/sunday/a
-simple-way-to-send-poor-kids-to-top-colleges.html; Peg Tyre, “Improving Eco-
nomic Diversity at the Better Colleges,” New York Times, 5 February 2014, http://
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/05/improving-economic-diversity
-at-the-better-colleges/.
61. Leigh Alexander, “These Girls Are Ready to Shape the Future of Game
Notes to Conclusion 222
Development,” Gamasutra, 29 July 2014, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news
/221883/These_girls_are_ready_to_shape_the_future_of_game_development
.php; Tanya X. Short, “Gaming the System: How Pixelles Make (More and
More) Games,” Gamasutra, 20 March 2015, http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/
TanyaXShort/20150320/238808/Gaming_the_System_How_Pixelles_Make
_More_and_More_Games.php.
62. Paul Fain, “Inputs Trump Outputs,” Inside Higher Ed, 1 August 2013,
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/08/01/incoming-student-charac
teristics-determine-graduation-rates-studies-find.
63. “Please Come Work with Me,” Brie Code, 2015, http://briecode.tumblr
.com/post/123327104135/please-come-work-with-me; Jenny Kutner, “Feminist
Thor Selling Way More Comic Books Than Dude Thor,” Salon, 29 March 2015,
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/19/feminist_thor_selling_way_more_comic
_books_than_dude_thor/; Melissa Jun Rowley, “How NASA Broke the Gen-
der Barrier in STEM,” Fast Company, 23 June 2015, http://www.fastcompany
.com/3047618/strong-female-lead/how-nasa-broke-the-gender-barrier-in-stem.
64. Leigh Alexander, “The Good News,” Leigh Alexander, 10 March 2015,
http://leighalexander.net/the-good-news/.

Conclusion
1. TEDxMarin, “Paul Piff: Does Money Make You Mean?” TED, October
2013, https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_piff_does_money_make_you_mean.
2. Leigh Alexander, “Gamer’s Paradise: The Bleak, Toilsome World of Cart
Life,” Creators Project, 13 March 2013, http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog
/gamers-paradise-the-bleak-toilsome-world-of-icart-lifei.
3. Ibid.
4. Alexander, “Gamer’s Paradise”; Richard Cobbett, “Papers, Please Review,”
IGN, 12 August 2013, http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/08/12/papers-please
-review; John Walker, “Wot I Think: Papers, Please,” Rock, Paper, Shotgun, 12 Au-
gust 2013, http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/08/12/wot-i-think-papers
-please/.
5. Justin McElroy, “Papers, Please Review: Mundane Tyranny,” Polygon,
9 August 2013, http://www.polygon.com/2013/8/9/4606420/papers-please
-review-mundane-tyranny.
6. Cobbett, “Papers, Please Review.”
7. Walker, “Wot I Think.”
8. Leigh Alexander, “GTA V Is Not Subversive—­but These Games Are,”
The Guardian, 27 September 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/technology
/2013/sep/27/gta-v-transgressive-video-games.
9. Leigh Alexander, “Papers, Please: Why Make a Computer Game about
 223 Notes to Conclusion
Border Control?” New Statesman, 16 September 2013, http://www.newstatesman
.com/sci-tech/2013/09/papers-please%20why-make-computer-game-about
-border-control.
10. Thank you to Nicholas T. Taylor for suggesting I analyze The Walking
Dead.
11. Brad Nicholson, “‘Walking Dead: The Game’ Review—­a Dark Zombie
Tale,” Touch Arcade, 27 November 2012, http://toucharcade.com/2012/11/27
/the-walking-dead-the-game-review-a-dark-zombie-tale/.
12. Hollander Cooper, “The Walking Dead Game Review,” GamesRadar, 26
November 2012, http://www.gamesradar.com/the-walking-dead-review/.
13. Greg Miller, “The Walking Dead: The Game Review,” IGN, 12 De-
cember 2012, http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/12/12/the-walking-dead-the
-game-review.
14. Cooper, “Walking Dead Game Review.”
15. Nicholson, “Walking Dead.”
16. Shaun Musgrave, “‘The Walking Dead: Season Two’ Review: Experience
the Apocalypse from a Different Perspective,” Touch Arcade, 29 August 2014,
http://toucharcade.com/2014/08/29/the-walking-dead-season-two-review/.
17. Brandon Sheffield, “What Makes Gone Home a Game?” Gamasutra,
20 March 2014, http://gamasutra.com/view/news/213612/What_makes_Gone
_Home_a_game.php.
18. Dale North, “Review: Gone Home,” Destructoid, 1 October 2013, http://
www.destructoid.com/review-gone-home-262626.phtml.
19. Kris Graft, “For Gone Home’s Designer, ‘What Is a Game?’ Is a Question
Worth Exploring,” Gamasutra, 14 March 2014, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/
news/212853/For_Gone_Homes_designer_what_is_a_game_is_a_question_
worth_exploring.php.
20. Danielle Riendeau, “Gone Home Review: Living Room,” Polygon, 15
August 2013, http://www.polygon.com/2013/8/15/4620172/gone-home-review
-if-these-walls-could-talk.
21. Marty Sliva, “Gone Home Review,” IGN, 15 August 2013, http://www
.ign.com/articles/2013/08/15/gone-home-review.
22. Leigh Alexander, “How Gone Home’s Design Constraints Lead to a
Powerful Story,” Gamasutra, 15 August 2013, http://gamasutra.com/view/
news/198340/How_Gone_Homes_design_constraints_lead_to_a_powerful_
story.php.
23. Jason Schreier, “The No Man’s Sky Hype Dilemma,” Kotaku, 18 August
2016, http://kotaku.com/the-no-mans-sky-hype-dilemma-1785416931.
24. Mia Consalvo and Jason Begy, Players and Their Pets: Gaming Commu-
nities from Beta to Sunset (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015),
44.
Notes to Conclusion 224
25. Ibid., 67.
26. Erik Kain, “‘Journey’ Review: Making Video Games Beautiful,” Forbes,
4 December 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/12/04/journey
-review-making-video-games-beautiful/.
27. Simon Parkin, “Jenova Chen: Journeyman,” Eurogamer, 21 July 2015,
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-04-02-jenova-chen-journeyman.
28. Ibid.
29. Leigh Alexander, “There Is Nothing to ‘Do’ in O’Reilly’s Mountain—­
and That’s a Good Thing,” Gamasutra, 8 July 2014, http://gamasutra.com/view/
news/220443/There_is_nothing_to_do_in_OReillys_Mountain__and_thats_a_
good_thing.php.
30. Ben Kuchera, “Mountain Could Be a $1 Joke, and I Think I’m the Butt,”
Polygon, 3 July 2014, http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/3/5868087/mountain
-indie-game-joke-satire-self-loathing; Cameron Kunzelman, “Mountain Re-
view (PC/Mac/iOS),” Paste, 3 July 2014, http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles
/2014/07/mountain-review-pcmacios.html.
31. Mark Serrels, “Multiplayer Games Where It’s Okay to Suck,” Ko-
taku, 28 July 2015, http://kotaku.com/multiplayer-games-where-its-okay-to
-suck-1720756255.
32. Ibid.
33. TEDxMarin, “Paul Piff: Does Money Make You Mean?”; Robert H.
Frank, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016), Kindle ed.
34. Shannon K. McCoy and Brenda Major, “Priming Meritocracy and the
Psychological Justification of Inequality,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychol-
ogy 43 (2007): 341–­51.
35. Monica Y. Bartlett and David DeSteno, “Gratitude and Prosocial Behav-
ior: Helping When It Costs You,” Psychological Science 17, no. 4 (2006): 319–­25.
36. Nancy Digdon and Amy Koble, “Effects of Constructive Worry, Imag-
ery Distraction, and Gratitude Interventions on Sleep Quality: A Pilot Trial,”
Applied Psychology: Health and Well-­Being 3, no. 2 (2011): 193–­206.
37. C. Nathan DeWall, Nathaniel M. Lambert, Richard S. Pond Jr., Todd
B. Kashdan, and Frank D. Fincham, “A Grateful Heart Is a Nonviolent Heart:
Cross-­Sectional, Experience Sampling, Longitudinal, and Experimental Evi-
dence,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 3, no. 2 (2012): 232–­40.
38. Richard Bartle, “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit
Muds,” Muse, 28 August 1996, http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm.
39. Jay Hathaway, “What Is Gamergate, and Why? An Explainer for Non-­
Geeks,” Gawker, 10 October 2014, http://gawker.com/what-is-gamergate-and
-why-an-explainer-for-non-geeks-1642909080; Matt Lees, “What Gamergate
Should Have Taught Us about the ‘Alt-­Right,’” The Guardian, 1 December
 225 Notes to Conclusion
2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/01/gamergate-alt
-right-hate-trump.
40. Mike Fahey, “YouTube Corruption Sinks Even Deeper into the Gutter,”
Games Industry, 8 July 2016, http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-07-08
-youtube-corruption-sinks-even-deeper-into-the-gutter; Rob Fahey, “Dirty
Videos,” Games Industry, 10 October 2014, http://www.gamesindustry.biz
/articles/2014-10-10-dirty-videos.
41. Jennifer Allaway, “#Gamergate Trolls Aren’t Ethics Crusaders; They’re
a Hate Group,” Jezebel, 13 October 2014, http://jezebel.com/gamergate
-trolls-arent-ethics-crusaders-theyre-a-hate-1644984010; Tadhg Kelly, “The
#Gamergate Question,” TechCrunch, 7 September 2014, http://techcrunch
.com/2014/09/07/the-gamergate-question/; Leo Reyna, “#Gamergate Revealed
as Misogynist and Racist Movement from 4chan,” The Examiner, 6 September
2014, http://www.examiner.com/article/gamergate-revealed-as-misogynist-and
-racist-movement-from-4chan; Jon Stone, “Gamergate’s Vicious Right-­Wing
Swell Means There Can Be No Neutral Stance,” The Guardian, 13 October
2014, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/13/gamergate-right
-wing-no-neutral-stance.
42. Aaron Sankin, “Why the Trolls Are Winning #Gamergate,” The Daily Dot,
17 October 2014, http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/trolls-winning-gamergate
-anita-sarkeesian/.
43. Peter-­Hans Kolvenbach, “The Service of Faith and the Promotion of
Justice in American Jesuit Higher Education,” Santa Clara University, 6 Octo-
ber 2000, https://www.scu.edu/ic/programs/ignatian-tradition-offerings/stories/
the-service-of-faith-and-the-promotion-of-justice-in-american-jesuit-higher
-education.html.
This page deliberately left blank
Gameography

Games discussed in this book are listed here in alphabetical order by

title. More information about most of the console and PC games men-
tioned can be found at MobyGames.com. Other games can be found
on Wikipedia, apps are most likely to be found on the iOS App Store,
and board games are likely to be found on BoardGameGeek.com.

Ascension: Deckbuilding Game. Card game. Designed by John Fiorillo and Jus-
tin Gary. Stone Blade Entertainment, 2010. Also available on iOS. https://
boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/69789/ascension-deckbuilding-game.
Bioshock (series). The first game was developed by 2K Australia and 2K Bos-
ton. 2K Games, 2007. http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/bioshock
-series.
Bioshock Infinite. PS3. Developed by Irrational Games. 2K Games, 2013. http://
www.mobygames.com/game/bioshock-infinite_.
Bloodborne. PS4. Developed by FromSoftware. Sony Computer Entertainment,
2015. http://www.mobygames.com/game/playstation-4/bloodborne.
Borderlands (series). The first game was developed by Gearbox Software. 2K
Games, 2009. http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/borderlands-series.
Borderlands 2. Xbox 360. Developed by Gearbox Software. 2K Games, 2012.
Android, Linux, PS3, Windows. http://www.mobygames.com/game/border
lands-2.
Bully. PS2. Developed by Rockstar Vancouver. Rockstar Games, 2006. PS3, PS4.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/bully.

227
Gameography 228
Candy Crush Saga. iOS. Developed by Midasplayer AB. King.com, 2012. An-
droid, browser, Windows Apps. http://www.mobygames.com/game/candy
-crush-saga.
Cart Life. Windows. Developed by Richard Hofmeier. Open source, 2011.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cart_Life.
Civilization (series). The first game was developed by MPS Labs. MicroProse
Software, 1991. http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/civilization
-series.
Clash of Clans. iOS. Developed by Supercell. Supercell, 2012. Android. http://
www.mobygames.com/game/clash-of-clans.
Clash Royale. iOS. Developed by Supercell. Supercell, 2016. Android. https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_Royale.
Cook, Serve, Delicious. iOS. Developed by Vertigo Gaming. Vertigo Gaming,
2013. Windows. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cook-serve-delicious!/
id582153229.
Cow Clicker. Browser. Developed by Ian Bogost. Ian Bogost, 2010. https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker.
Dark Souls. PS3. Developed by FromSoftware. FromSoftware, 2011. Xbox 360.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dark-souls.
Dark Souls II. PS3. Developed by FromSoftware. Namco Bandai, 2014. Win-
dows, Xbox 360. http://www.mobygames.com/game/dark-souls-ii.
Dark Souls III. PS4. Developed by FromSoftware. FromSoftware, 2016. Win-
dows, Xbox One. http://www.mobygames.com/game/dark-souls-iii.
Dear Esther. Windows. Developed by The Chinese Room. The Chinese Room,
2012. Linux, Macintosh. http://www.mobygames.com/game/dear-esther.
Demon’s Souls. PS3. Developed by FromSoftware and Sony Computer Enter-
tainment Japan. Atlus USA, 2009. http://www.mobygames.com/game/ps3/
demons-souls.
Destiny. PS4. Developed by Bungie. Activision Publishing, 2014. PS3, Xbox 360,
Xbox One. http://www.mobygames.com/game/destiny_.
Diablo. Windows. Developed by Blizzard Entertainment and Blizzard North.
Blizzard Entertainment, 1996. Macintosh, PlayStation. http://www.moby
games.com/game/diablo.
Dominion. Card game. Designed by Donald X. Vaccarino. Rio Grande Games,
2008. Also available on iOS. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/36218/
dominion.
Donkey Kong. Arcade. Developed by Ikegami Tsushinki and Nintendo. Nin-
tendo, 1981. Available on many, many platforms. http://www.mobygames
.com/game/donkey-kong.
Dragon Age II. PS3. Developed by BioWare. Electronic Arts, 2011. Macintosh,
Windows, Xbox 360. http://www.mobygames.com/game/dragon-age-ii.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. PS3. Developed by Bethesda Game Studio.
 229 Gameography
Bethesda Softworks, 2011. Windows, Xbox 360. http://www.mobygames
.com/game/elder-scrolls-v-skyrim.
EVE Online. Windows. Developed by CCP Games. Crucial Entertainment,
2003. Linux, Macintosh. http://www.mobygames.com/game/eve-online.
EverQuest. Windows. Developed by Verant Interactive. 989 Studios, 1999. Mac-
intosh. http://www.mobygames.com/game/everquest.
FarmVille. Browser. Developed by Zynga Game Network. Zynga Game Net-
work, 2009. iOS. http://www.mobygames.com/game/farmville.
Fashion Story. iOS. Developed by TeamLava. TeamLava, 2011. Android. http://
www.mobygames.com/game/fashion-story.
Faunasphere. Browser. Developed by BigFish Games. BigFish Games, 2009.
http://www.mmorpg.com/faunasphere.
FIFA 14. PS4. Developed by Electronic Arts Canada. Electronic Arts, 2013.
Xbox One. http://www.mobygames.com/game/fifa-14.
FIFA 16. PS4. Developed by Electronic Arts Canada. Electronic Arts, 2015.
Windows, Xbox One. http://www.mobygames.com/game/fifa-16.
FIFA 17. PS4. Developed by Electronic Arts Canada and Bucharest. EA Sports,
2016. PS3, Windows, Xbox 360, Xbox One. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
FIFA_17.
Final Fantasy (series). The first game was developed by Square. Square, 1987.
http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/final-fantasy-series.
Final Fantasy XI Online. PS2. Developed by Square Enix. Square Enix, 2003.
Windows. http://www.mobygames.com/game/final-fantasy-xi-online_.
Gone Home. Windows. Developed by The Fullbright Company. The Fullbright
Company, 2013. Linux, Macintosh, PS4, Xbox One. http://www.mobygames
.com/game/gone-home.
Grand Theft Auto (series). The first game was developed by DMA Design Lim-
ited. BMG Interactive Entertainment, 1997. http://www.mobygames.com/
game-group/grand-theft-auto-series.
Grand Theft Auto III. PS2. Developed by DMA Design Limited. Rockstar
Games, 2001. Android, iOS, Macintosh, PS3, PS4, Windows. http://www
.mobygames.com/game/grand-theft-auto-iii.
Grand Theft Auto IV. PS3. Developed by Rockstar North. Rockstar Games,
2008. Windows, Xbox 360. http://www.mobygames.com/game/grand
-theft-auto-iv.
Grand Theft Auto V. PS4. Developed by Rockstar North. Rockstar Games, 2013.
PS3, Windows, Xbox 360, Xbox One. http://www.mobygames.com/game/
grand-theft-auto-v.
Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. Nintendo DS. Developed by Rockstar
Leeds and Rockstar North. Rockstar Games, 2009. Android. iOS, PSP.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/grand-theft-auto-chinatown-wars.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Windows. Developed by Rockstar North.
Gameography 230
Rockstar Games, 2004. Android, Fire OS, iOS, Macintosh, PS2, PS3, PS4,
Windows, Windows Apps, Windows Phone, Xbox, Xbox 360. http://www
.mobygames.com/game/grand-theft-auto-san-andreas.
Halo (series). The first game was developed by Bungie Studios. Microsoft Cor-
poration, 2001. http://www.mobygames.com/game/halo-combat-evolved.
Halo Online. Windows. Developed by Saber Interactive. Innova Software, 2015.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HaloOnline/.
Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. iOS. Developed by Blizzard Entertainment.
Blizzard Entertainment, 2014. Android, Macintosh, Windows. http://www
.mobygames.com/game/hearthstone-heroes-of-warcraft.
Johann Sebastian Joust. PS3. Developed by Die Gute Fabrik. Die Gute Fabrik,
2014. Linux, PS4, Windows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportsfriends.
Journey. PS4. Developed by thatgamecompany. Sony Computer Entertainment
America, 2012. PS3. http://www.mobygames.com/game/journey.
Killer Instinct. Xbox One. Developed by Double Helix Games. Microsoft
Studios, 2013. Windows Apps. http://www.mobygames.com/game/killer
-instinct_.
Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. iOS. Developed by Blammo Games. Glu Mobile,
2014. Android, Browser, Macintosh. http://www.mobygames.com/game/
kim-kardashian-hollywood.
The Last of Us. PS4. Developed by Naughty Dog. Sony Computer Entertain-
ment America, 2013. PS3. http://www.mobygames.com/game/ps3/last-
of-us.
League of Legends. Windows. Developed by Riot Games. Riot Games, 2009.
Macintosh. http://www.mobygames.com/game/league-of-legends.
Madden NFL (series). The first game in the series was John Madden Football.
Developed by Electronic Arts. Electronic Arts, 1988. http://www.moby
games.com/game-group/madden-series.
Mafia Wars. Browser. Developed by Zynga Game Network. Zynga Game Net-
work, 2008. http://www.mobygames.com/game/browser/mafia-wars.
Magic: The Gathering. Card game. Designed by Richard Garfield. Wizards of the
Coast, 1993. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/463/magic-gathering.
Mario Kart (series). The first game in the series was Super Mario Kart. Devel-
oped by Nintendo EAD. Nintendo, 1992. http://www.mobygames.com/
game-group/mario-kart-series.
Mario Kart 64. Nintendo 64. Developed by Nintendo EAD. Nintendo, 1996.
Wii, Wii U. http://www.mobygames.com/game/mario-kart-64.
Mario Kart Wii. Wii. Developed by Nintendo EAD. Nintendo, 2008. http://
www.mobygames.com/game/mario-kart-wii.
Mario Party (series). The first game was developed by Hudson Soft Company.
Nintendo of America, 1999. http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/
mario-party-series.
 231 Gameography
Mario Party 8. Wii. Developed by Hudson Soft Company. Nintendo of Amer-
ica, 2007. http://www.mobygames.com/game/mario-party-8.
Mario Party 10. Wii U. Developed by Nd Cube. Nintendo of America, 2015.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/mario-party-10.
Marvel Mighty Heroes. iOS. Developed by DeNA. DeNA, 2015. Android. http://
dena.com/intl/press/2015/03/dena-and-marvel-release-marvel-mighty
-heroes-a-real-time-multiplayer-brawler-for-iphone-ipad-ipod-to.html.
Marvel Puzzle Quest. iOS and Windows. Developed by Demiurge Studios. D3
Publisher of America, 2013. Android. http://www.mobygames.com/game/
marvel-puzzle-quest.
Mass Effect 3. PS3. Developed by BioWare Corporation. Electronic Arts, 2012.
Windows, Xbox 360. http://www.mobygames.com/game/mass-effect-3.
Minecraft. Windows. Developed by Mojang. Mojang, 2010. Browser, Linux,
Macintosh. http://www.mobygames.com/game/minecraft.
Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine. Windows. Developed by Pocketwatch Games.
Headup Games GmbH & Co., 2013. Macintosh. http://www.mobygames
.com/game/monaco-whats-yours-is-mine_.
Mountain. iOS. Designed by David O’Reilly, 2014. Android, Linux, Macintosh.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/mountain.
MUD1. Designed by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle, 1978. https://en.wiki
pedia.org/wiki/MUD1.
NBA 2K (series). The first game was developed by Visual Concepts Enter-
tainment. SEGA of America, 1999. http://www.mobygames.com/search/
quick?q=nba2k.
NBA 2K13. PS3. Developed by Visual Concepts. 2K Sports, 2012. Android,
iOS, PSP, Wii, Wii U, Windows, Xbox 360. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
NBA_2K13.
NBA 2K16. PS4. Developed by Visual Concepts. 2K Sports, 2015. Android,
iOS, PS3, Windows, Xbox 360, Xbox One. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
NBA_2K16.
Ninja. Folk game. http://ultimateninjacombat.com/.
No Man’s Sky. PS4. Developed by Hello Games. Hello Games, 2016. Windows.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/no-mans-sky.
Overwatch (Origins Edition). PS4. Developed by Blizzard Entertainment. Bliz-
zard Entertainment, 2016. Windows, Xbox One. http://www.mobygames
.com/game/overwatch-origins-edition.
Papers, Please. iOS and Windows. Developed by 3909. 3909, 2013. Linux, Mac-
intosh. http://www.mobygames.com/game/papers-please.
Persona 4 Golden. PS Vita. Developed by Atlus Co. Index Digital Media, 2012.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/ps-vita/persona-4-golden.
The Pioneer Trail. Browser. Developed by Zynga East. Zynga, 2010. https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pioneer_Trail.
Gameography 232
Pokémon Go. iOS. Developed by Niantic, Nintendo, and The Pokémon Com-
pany, 2016. Android. http://www.mobygames.com/game/pokmon-go.
Pong. Arcade. Developed by Atari and Atari, Inc., 1972.
Populous. SNES. Developed by Bullfrog Productions. Electronic Arts, 1989.
Multiple platforms. http://www.mobygames.com/game/populous.
Red Dead Redemption. Xbox 360. Developed by Rockstar San Diego. Rockstar
Games, 2010. PS3. http://www.mobygames.com/game/red-dead-redemption.
Restaurant Story. iOS. Developed by TeamLava. TeamLava, 2010. Android.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/restaurant-story.
Risk. Board game. Designed by Albert Lamorisse and Michael I. Levin, 1959.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/181/risk.
Rocket League. PS4. Developed by Psyonix. Psyonix, 2015. Linux, Macintosh,
Windows. http://www.mobygames.com/game/rocket-league.
Sally’s Spa. iOS. Developed by GamesCafe.com. RealArcade, 2008. Android,
BlackBerry, Macintosh, Windows, Windows Phone. http://www.mobygames
.com/game/sallys-spa.
Solitaire. Card game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patience_(game).
Space Invaders. Arcade. Developed by Taito. Taito, 1978. Multiple platforms.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/space-invaders.
Splatoon. Wii U. Developed by Nintendo EAD. Nintendo of America, 2015.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/wii-u/splatoon.
Star Wars Galaxies. Windows. Developed by Sony Online Entertainment. Lucas-
Arts, 2003. http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/star-wars-galaxies
-an-empire-divided-collectors-edition.
Star Wars: The Old Republic (series). The first game was developed by BioWare.
LucasArts, 2003. http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/star-wars-the
-old-republic-games.
Starcraft. Windows. Developed by Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard Entertain-
ment, 1998. Macintosh. http://www.mobygames.com/game/starcraft.
Stardom: The A-­List. iOS. Developed by Blammo Games. Glu Mobile, 2011.
Android. http://www.mobygames.com/game/stardom-the-a-list.
Stardom: Hollywood. iOS. Developed by Blammo Games. Glu Mobile, 2013.
Android. http://www.mobygames.com/game/stardom-hollywood.
StarPower. Live action game. Designed by R. Garry Shirts, 1969. https://
boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/32398/starpower.
Street Fighter. Arcade. Developed by Capcom. Capcom, 1987. Multiple plat-
forms. http://www.mobygames.com/game/street-fighter.
Street Fighter X Tekken. PS3. Developed by Capcom and Dimps. Capcom En-
tertainment, 2012. PS Vita, Windows, Xbox 360. http://www.mobygames
.com/game/street-fighter-x-tekken.
StreetWars. Live action game. Designed by Franz Aliquo and Liao Yutai, 2004.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreetWars.
 233 Gameography
Super Mario 64. Nintendo 64. Developed by Nintendo EAD. Nintendo, 1996.
Wii, Wii U. http://www.mobygames.com/game/super-mario-64.
Super Mario Bros. NES. Developed by Nintendo and Systems Research & De-
velopment. Nintendo, 1985. Arcade, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 3DS,
Wii, Wii U. http://www.mobygames.com/game/super-mario-bros.
Super Smash Bros. Nintendo 64. Developed by HAL Laboratory. Nintendo,
1999. Wii. http://www.mobygames.com/game/super-smash-bros.
Tekken. Arcade. Developed by Namco Limited. Namco Limited, 1994. Android,
PlayStation, PS3, PSP, PS Vita. http://www.mobygames.com/game/tekken.
Tom Clancy’s The Division. PS4. Developed by Ubisoft Massive. Ubisoft, 2016.
Windows, Xbox One. http://www.mobygames.com/game/tom-clancys
-the-division.
Tomb Raider. PS3. Developed by Crystal Dynamics. Square Enix, 2013. Linux,
Macintosh, Windows, Xbox 360. http://www.mobygames.com/game/tomb
-raider__.
Ultima Online. Windows. Developed by ORIGIN Systems. Electronic Arts,
1997. http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/ultima-online.
Uncharted (series). The first game was developed by Naughty Dog. Sony Com-
puter Entertainment America, 2007. http://www.mobygames.com/game
-group/uncharted-series.
Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. PS3. Developed by Naughty Dog. Sony Com-
puter Entertainment America, 2011. http://www.mobygames.com/game/
ps3/uncharted-3-drakes-deception.
The Walking Dead: The Game. iOS. Developed by Telltale. Telltale, 2012. An-
droid, PS3, Xbox 360. http://www.mobygames.com/game/walking-dead
-episode-1-a-new-day.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. PS4. Developed by CD Projekt RED. CD Projekt,
2015. Windows, Xbox One. http://www.mobygames.com/game/witcher-3
-wild-hunt.
World of Warcraft. Windows. Developed by Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard
Entertainment, 2004. http://www.mobygames.com/game/world-of-warcraft.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown. iOS and Xbox 360. Developed by Firaxis Games.
2K Games, 2012. Android, Linux, Macintosh, PS3, Windows. http://www
.mobygames.com/game/xcom-enemy-unknown.
XCOM 2. PS4. Developed by Firaxis Games. Feral Interactive, 2016. Linux,
Macintosh, Windows, Xbox One. http://www.mobygames.com/game/
xcom-2.
Yahtzee. Dice game. Designed by Edwin S. Lowe. Milton Bradley, 1956. https://
boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2243/yahtzee.
This page deliberately left blank
INDEX

#1ReasonToBe, 73 103–4, 126, 128–29. See also

2K Sports, 106. See also NBA 2K meritocracy
4Chan, 81, 204n65 Ascension, 103
100 People: A World Portrait, assemblage, 65–68
184n18 Atari, 1, 130, 138, 144
avatars, 5, 17, 23, 27, 56, 71, 79,
AAA games, 2, 26, 78, 165, 176 105, 114–15
academics, 1, 4, 15, 38, 41, 63, 75,
79, 89, 157; GamerGate attacks Badass Digest, 71
on, 81, 83–84 Bakhtanians, Aris, 76
Activision, 130, 138 Baldwin, Adam, 81
Adobe, 83 Barclay’s Premier League, 152
affirmative action, 158 Bartle, Richard, 3, 51, 153, 178
ageism, 49, 194n74 Bartlett, Monica Y., 177
Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Adwale, 149 baseball, 75, 145, 147–48, 150–51,
Alexander, Leigh, 16, 69, 78, 82–3, 219n41. See also Major League
86, 101–2, 161, 164, 166 Baseball
Amazon, 37 basketball, 76, 146, 148–53, 178
American dream, 10, 13, 30, 88, 117 shot mapping, 148. See also
analytics, 148–49 National Basketball Association
Android, 92 BBC, 86
Anthropy, Anna, 51–52, 54–55 Beck, John, 46
arcades, 1, 19, 48, 54, 67, 92, 138, Begy, Jason, 173, 174,
177 Benard, Stephen, 56
aristocracy, 31, 33, 40, 45, 93, Bell, Daniel, 12, 41–45, 107, 193n43

235
Index 236
Bernake, Ben, 49, 53 Clash Royale, 3–4, 95, 97, 127–30, 209n7
Bethesda, 22 class, 3, 8–12, 14, 19, 32–33, 39–40,
BioShock, 2 43, 45–46, 50, 55, 60, 80, 89, 104,
BioShock’s Infinite, 134, 170 117, 151, 157, 191n90, 210n24
BioWare, 131–32 classism, 14, 43
Black Lives Matter, 11, 30 CNN, 86
blackness, 18. See also race Cobbett, Richard, 166
Blair, Tony, 38 co-creativity, 65–68
Blizzard, 34–35, 37, 46, 94–95 code, 2, 15, 23, 34, 73, 139, 144, 146,
board games, 20, 22 159
Bogost, Ian, 66 Colbert, Stephen, 86; The Colbert
Borderlands, 106 Report, 87
Borderlands 2, 77, 176 Cold War, 165
Best Friends Forever mode, 77 collectible card games (CCGs), 96,
Breen, Richard, 46 102–3, 107, 127
Brexit, 11 Connell, R. W., 80
buffs, 96 Consalvo, Mia, 81, 84, 173–74
Bully, 21 consoles, 1, 20, 36, 54, 92–93, 99–
Burill, Derrick, 80 100, 158, 171–72, 174, 190n70
business culture, 37 conventions, 64, 72, 75; sexual
violence at, 73–74
Candy Crush, 20, 101 Cook, Serve, Delicious, 21
Capcom, 75–76 Cooper, Hollander, 167, 168
Cart Life, 164–65 cost of games, 19, 40, 53–55, 90, 93,
Castilla, Emilio, 56 100, 102–3, 107, 124, 127–28,
Castronova, Edward, 107, 108 158
casual games, 19, 105–7, 159, 171–72 Counter-Strike, 75
Chambers, Becky, 157 Cow Clicker, 99
characters, 6, 17–19, 25–27, 77–79, Cox, Raymond, 130–31
103–4, 107, 116–17, 124–26, Cracked, 81
169–70; non-playable, 17, 23–24, Croft, Lara, 103–4
118 Cross, Katharine, 81, 84
cheating, 46–47, 97, 155 Cross Assault: sexual violence at,
Chess, Shira: The Playful Is Political 75–77
fishbowl panel, 84 Cyclops, 146
Chief Pat, 3–4
China, 29–34, 44–45, 154, 190n2 Dallas Mavericks, 149
Chu, Arthur, 6, 16 Dames Making Games, 159
Civilization, 21 DARPA, 84
Clash of Clans, 1, 95, 127 Day, Felicia, 86
 237 Index
Depression Quest, 80 England, 27, 146, 152. See also Great
DeSteno, David, 177 Britain; United Kingdom
Destiny, 4, 20, 106, 109 English Football Association, 146
DeWall, Nathan, 177 equality, 3, 11–13, 15, 44–45, 60,
Diablo, 101 86, 88–89, 94, 107–8, 209n7; of
Dickwolf, 74 opportunity vs. results, 42–43.
Die Gute Fabrik, 173 See also inequality
Digdon, Nancy, 177 eSports, 3, 56, 58, 75, 122, 143, 149,
Digital Games Research Association 219n35
(DiGRA), 83, 89, 205n82; The EVE Online, 59
Playful Is Political fishbowl EverQuest, 3, 107, 109, 111
panel, 84 EVE University, 59
disability, 79
discrimination, 56–58, 79, 99 Facebook, 20, 171, 173
Ditum, Nathan, 18 failure, 10, 30, 38–39, 43–44, 50,
diversity, 83, 161; conferences about, 56–60, 87–88, 94, 99, 117, 134,
15, 84; developers and, 4–5, 14, 136,–39, 150–51
48, 51, 124; in education, 50, 84, fairness, 3–4, 6, 12–13, 33, 41, 43, 45,
143, 156–60; in games, 18–19, 49, 53, 57, 60, 93–102, 106–8,
53, 73, 141–42, 159; players and, 135, 142, 153–54, 157
20–21, 58, 79, 82, 122, 158, 178. FarmVille, 20, 94, 99, 171
See also race Farrell, Henry, 30
The Division, 4 Fashion Story, 21
Dominion, 103 Fat, Ugly, or Slutty, 15
Donkey Kong, 177 Faunasphere, 173–74
Douthat, Ross, 157 Federal Bureau of Investigation
doxxing, 84, 86 (FBI), 88
Dragon Age II, 131 feminism, 81, 84
Drake, Sir Francis, 5, 104 Ferguson, MO, 67
FIFA, 1–2, 21, 44, 95, 107, 144
Edidin, Rachel, 74 FIFA 14, 115
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, 22–24 FIFA 16, 17
Electronic Arts (EA), 106, 190n70 FIFA 17, 27, 114, 190n70
EA Sports, 107; Ultimate Team, 107 FIFA World Cup, 146, 150
Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), Film Crit Hulk, 16, 82
73–74 Final Fantasy, 26, 111
Electronic Frontier Foundation, Final Fantasy XI Online, 109
87–88 Fine Young Capitalists, 204n65
Elman, Benjamin, 32 first-person shooters, 34, 46, 78–79,
Elo systems, 118–21, 212n12 106, 164
Index 238
football (American), 76, 86, 144, 179–80, 203n62. See also Opera-
147–48, 151. See also National tion Disrespectful Nod
Football League gamers, 5, 16, 25–26, 46, 48, 53, 59,
Fox, Alan, 190n8 63, 65–66, 69, 29, 76, 97–98, 118,
Frank, Jenn, 72, 81 124, 134, 136, 148, 150, 154, 171,
Frank, Robert H., 49–50, 57, 177 180, 183n3; antiviolence activism
Freedman, Josh, 156 of, 79; limits of concept, 20–21,
free-to-play games, 40, 96, 100, 124, 25, 67–68; violence of, 2, 16, 44,
127–28, 158 71, 74, 80–90, 179–80, 204n65.
Froome, Chris, 152 See also players
Fullbright Company, 169 Gamers against Bigotry, 79
fun, 36, 52, 68, 87, 98, 107, 119, 121, Gamerscore, 34, 130–31
129–30, 134, 166, 175, 178 game studies, 26, 38, 61, 65–67
game tutorials, 52
Gaimer8: misogynist attacks on Gardner, Jack, 203n62
Felicia Day, 86 Gawker, 83
Gamasutra, 83, 88 Gearbox Software, 77
game design, 2–7, 13–14, 19, 21–29, Geguri, 46–47
33–36, 40, 43–44, 64, 67–69, 77, gender, 9, 13–20, 45, 57–58, 73,
92, 107, 134, 145, 154, 173–75; 78–79; among game designers,
meritocracy and, 10, 51–61, 4, 48; among players, 19, 24, 80,
89–110, 113–14, 117–18, 122–30, 82, 85, 173. See also feminism;
133, 136–38, 143, 146, 148–49, masculinity; misogyny
155, 161, 164, 167–72, 176–77, General Electric, 37
180; toxicity and, 37, 70–72, genre, 4, 20, 43, 52–53, 55–56, 66,
75, 78–79, 90, 121–26, 129–30, 106, 111, 114–15, 117, 124,
138–39, 143–44, 153, 176, 180, 127, 130, 163, 168–72. See also
204n65 individual genres
game designers, 7, 17, 22–24, 51–54, George, Paul, 152
58, 67–68, 72, 77–78, 95, 98, Germany, 146, 152
100–1, 103, 109, 112, 117, 123, “girlfriend mode,” 77–78
137, 141, 145, 148, 155, 166, 170, Girls Make Games, 159
176–79; gender demographics Girls Who Code, 159
of, 4, 48; racial demographics of, GitHub, 15
18–19 Gjoni, Eron, 80–81
Game Developers Conference: 2013 Glu Mobile, 105
International Game Developer’s Golding, Dan, 82
Association party, 73 Goldthorpe, John, 46
Gameranx, 59 Gollop, Julian, 154
GamerGate, 2, 16, 44, 80–90, Gone Home, 20, 169–71, 177
 239 Index
Goodwin, Joel, 131 Hofmeier, Richard, 164
Grand Theft Auto (GTA), 21, 79, 115, Holloway, Kenneth, 31
117; Chinatown Wars, 116; III, homophobia, 15, 49. See also doxxing;
5–6, 115–16; IV, 116, 164; San jerks; trolls; violence
Andreas, 116; V, 116; Vice City, 116 Houston Rockets, 149
gratitude, 177–78 Hudson, Laura, 135, 161
Gray, Kishonna, 19, 79
Grayso, Nathan, 36–37 Hurtado, Aida, 47
Great Britain, 12, 38. See also
England; United Kingdom ideology, 2, 6, 8, 10–14, 25, 29–30,
Greer, Emily, 85 34, 41, 44, 50–51, 55–58, 61, 64,
Grey, Kishonna, 19 67, 74, 88–89, 91, 108, 110, 120,
“the grind,” 35, 40, 68, 94, 109, 121, 124, 142. See also meritocracy
153 IGN, 76, 154, 165
Guardian, 72, 89 IGXE, 107
Guinness World Records, 130 Independent Games Festival Awards,
Guodian Chu Slips, 30–32, 190n2 164
Guthrie, Robert, 40 India, 44
inequality, 18, 30–31, 43, 45, 120
Halo Online, 100 in games, 38, 94, 107–10, 124, 126,
Hamilton, Kirk, 172 136–39; meritocracy and, 12–13,
Handrahan, Matthew, 4 30–31, 33, 41, 44, 47–51, 53,
Haney, Craig, 47 57–59, 133, 142; structural, 3, 8,
Harper, Todd, 58, 66, 75, 77 10–14, 22, 28, 53, 60, 85, 88, 95,
Harvey, David, 192n33 125, 152, 169, 219n39. See also
hate speech, 15–17, 20, 79 equality
Hawk-Eye, 146 Intel, 83, 88
Hayes, Christopher, 39, 45, 47, 53, International Game Developers
88–89 Association (IGDA): 2013 game
Hearthstone, 94, 95 Developers Conference party, 73
Hemingway, John, 77 Developer Satisfaction Survey, 4
Hepler, Jennifer, 132–33 iOS, 92
Hernandez, Patricia, 34, 36 #IStandWithTauriq, 19
Herrnstein, R.J., 41–42, 44
higher education, 1, 8, 11, 14, 28, 41, James, Vivian, 204n65
50, 143, 155, 159–61, 178; attacks jerks, 69, 71, 77, 83, 123, 160, 163,
on academics, 81, 83–84, 89; 176. See also ageism; classism;
race and, 4, 50, 156–58. See also GamerGate; misogyny; racism;
academics; affirmative action toxicity; trolls; violence
Hodapp, Eli, 129 Johann Sebastian Joust, 173
Index 240
Johnson, Dustin, 147 leveling systems, 2, 6, 27–28, 44, 69,
Johnston, Casey, 83 92, 106–10, 112
journalism, 2, 4, 6, 16, 18, 52, 72–73, Levine, Ken, 134
81–83, 87, 89, 101, 134–36, 158, Levitas, Ruth, 12
173, 179, 204n71 liberalism, 41–42
Journey, 194 Littler, Jo, 12, 50, 59
Juul, Jesper, 38–39, 94, 111 Lizard Square, 71
Lockwood Publishing, 48
Kaplan, Jeff, 35, 37 loot, 101, 106, 113
Khoo, Robert, 74 Lost, 149
Killer Instinct, 73, 201n28 Lowe, Zach, 148
Kim Kardashian: Hollywood (KKH), LRN2PLAY NOOB, 59
2, 21, 26, 105, 111, 171
Kluwe, Chris, 86 Madden, John, 144
Koble, Amy, 177 Madden NFL, 20–21, 95, 107, 130,
Kocurek, Carly, 19, 48, 54, 67 144, 148
Kohler, Chris, 97–98 Mafia Wars, 171
Kolvenbach, Peter-Hans, 180 Magic: The Gathering, 102
Kongregate, 85 Major, Brenda, 45, 56–57, 177
Konno, Hideki, 98 Major League Baseball (MLB):
Korea, 58 Advanced Media, 146; PITCHf/x
Korean eSports Association (KeSPA), tracking system, 145
58 Mario Kart 64, 97; blue/spiny shell,
Koster, Raph, 52, 54, 151 97–98, 148; Wii, 98. See also
Kotaku, 35, 36, 81, 172 Super Mario Bros.
Krahulik, Mike, 74 Mario Party, 97, 155; 8, 98; 10, 154;
Kuchera, Ben, 87 Chump Charity, 98
Marvel Mighty Heroes, 124–26
labor, 26, 40, 68–69, 94, 105, 112–13, Fury’s Files, 124
153 Marvel Puzzle Quest, 95
The Last of Us, 170 Mascherano, Javier, 151
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, masculinity, 11, 17, 80, 138, 153
87 Mass Effect 3, 132
leaderboards, 40, 56, 125, 130–131, massively multiplayer online game
138, 170–71, 177 (MMOG), 109, 111–12, 15,
League of Legends (LoL), 69, 118–21, 117, 173; competitive raiding,
123–24, 153, 178, 219n35; Player 113, 120, 164; dragon kill points
Behavior team, 70, 117; World (DKP), 113–14
Championships, 122 McAllister, Ken, 66
Lees, Matt, 89 McCoy, Shannon, 45, 56–57, 177
 241 Index
McElroy, Justin, 165 multiplayer online battle arena
McLuhan, Marshall, 65 (MOBA), 69, 95, 117, 121, 127–28
McNamee, Stephen, 44, 50, 58 Myers, Maddy, 77
meritocracy, 3, 7–15, 24–50, 85,
87–90, 120, 122–133, 141–43, 146, Narcisse, Evan, 18
178, 183, 190n8, 193n56; Chinese narrative, 2, 5–7, 18, 20–21, 23,
history of, 29–33, 44, 190n2; in 26–29, 53, 60–61, 64, 79, 90–93,
game design, 5–6, 21–22, 51–68, 132, 143, 160, 164, 176, 180;
75–80, 91–114, 136–38, 176–77; in meritocratic, 10, 26, 103–10,
game narratives, 103–10, 114–18, 114–18, 163–73
163–73; gamer identity and, 20; NASA, 161
in higher education, 143, 155–60; National Basketball Association
in sports, 143–55, 160–61; toxicity (NBA), 76, 115, 146, 148–49;
and, 138–44, 161, 180; “the meta,” All-Stars, 152, 164
95, 148. See also theorycraft National Football League (NFL), 86,
Metacritic, 165, 167 109, 144–45, 147, 151
Microsoft, 73, 130–31 National Suicide Prevention Lifeline,
Miller, Greg, 167 80
Miller, Robert, 44, 50, 58 NBA 2K, 2, 21, 144; 13, 115; 16, 114
Minecraft: prison servers, 40 NBC News, 73
misogyny, 14–16, 43–44, 49, 72, NCAA, 150, 153, 178
76, 78, 85–88, 179–80, 193n43. NeoGAF, 87
See also doxxing; GamerGate; nerfs, 96
“girlfriend mode”; jerks; Neurath, Walter, 41
Operation Digging DiGRA; New Statesman, 165
Operation Disrespectful Nod; Newsweek, 86
sexual violence; toxicity; trolls; New York City, 11, 116
violence New York Times, 76, 86
Mitchell, Billy, 151 Ninja, 173
Miyamoto, Shigeru, 56, 134–35 Nintendo, 1, 56, 77, 86, 97–98
mobile games, 1, 20, 92, 95, 99, 101, No Man’s Sky, 172
124, 158–59, 171 Not in the Kitchen Anymore, 15
Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine, 178
Moneyball, 148 Offworld, 161
Monopoly, 60, 122, 177 Olympics, 153
Monroe, Nick, 59–60 Operation Digging DiGRA, 84. See
Moosa, Tauriq, 18–19 also DiGRA
Mortensen, Torill, 84 Operation Disrespectful Nod, 83
Mountain, 174–175 O’Reilly, David, 174
MUD1, 3, 34, 51, 153 Overwatch, 4, 34–38, 46–47, 120
Index 242
Pac-Man, 151 Potanin, Robin, 4, 19, 32, 48
Pakozdi, Miranda, 76 Princeton University, 49
Papers, Please, 165–66
Parkin, Simon, 108 Quinn, Zoë, 72, 80, 86, 204n65;
pay-to-win games, 40, 96, 100, 124, “5 Things I Learned as the
128 Internet’s Most Hated Person,”
PC games, 1, 20, 36, 69, 92, 93, 99, 81
165, 171, 178
Penguin, 41 race, 6, 8–12, 14–15, 20, 23, 56, 58,
Penny Arcade, 74, 81 79; in higher education, 50,
Penny Arcade Expo (PAX), 73; 84, 143, 156–60; among game
Enforcers, 74 designers, 4, 48, 58; among
perfect game, 150–51 players, 18–19, 24, 58, 75, 79–80,
Persona 4 Golden, 21 82, 85, 89, 122, 180, 194n67. See
Pew Research Center, 16 also affirmative action; blackness;
Phillips, Whitney, 7, 37, 180 diversity; whiteness
Piff, Paul, 60, 163, 177 racism, 15, 19, 43, 49, 56, 75, 79, 179,
The Pioneer Trail, 105 194n67. See also doxxing; jerks;
Pixelles, 159 toxicity; trolls; violence
Plato, 30 ranking systems, 3, 34–40, 118–22,
players, 2–6, 22–23, 25, 34–40, 124–25, 127, 129, 131, 137,
44, 46–47, 66–67, 91, 111–39, 212n12. See also stack ranking
141–42, 145–55, 157, 159, Rea, Jared, 76
177–80, 197n115, 209n7, 212n12, Read, Max, 83
213n27; gamer identity and, Ready at Dawn, 48
20–21, 68; gender and, 15–16, 19, Red Dead Redemption, 21
24, 46–49, 71, 74–80, 82, 85, 89, reddit, 36, 86
173; meritocracy and, 7, 9, 13, representation, 24, 53, 66, 91, 104,
26–28, 33, 51–61, 63–64, 88–89, 145, 153–54, 170, 172, 178;
92–110, 160, 163–76, 197n115; gendered, 17–19, 73; racialized,
race and, 18–19, 24, 58, 75, 79, 18–19, 79, 157. See also avatars
82, 89, 122, 194n67; toxicity Restaurant Story, 5
and, 69–71, 74–75, 144. See also rhetorical analysis, 25, 63–66, 68, 90,
gamers 93, 139, 161, 180
PlayStation, 1 Riendeau, Danielle, 170
Plimpton, George, 144 Riot Games, 69–70, 120, 122–24,
Pokémon Go, 101 178; Ranked Restrictions, 121;
Pong, 144 Team Player Behavior, 118; The
Pope, Lucas, 165, 166 Tribunal, 118
Populous, 21 Risk, 122
 243 Index
Rock, Paper, Shotgun, 165, 178 Souls, 134; Dark Souls II, 134;
Rocket League, 175 Dark Souls III, 134; Demon’s
role-playing games, 3, 20, 68, 106–7, Souls, 134
111 Space Invaders, 177
Romano, Aja, 46 Splatoon, 175
sports, 75, 79–80, 95–96, 120, 122,
Sally’s Spa, 21 150–55, 158, 160–61, 175,
Sampat, Elizabeth, 74 177–78, 219n39; analytics,
Sarkeesian, Anita, 80, 86–87 148–49; meritocracy in, 28,
Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, 16, 143–55, 160–61; replay systems,
72, 81 144–47, 149; television coverage,
Saunders, Peter, 12, 41, 42, 43 122, 146, 152
Seattle Seahawks, 147 sports games, 79, 97, 106–7, 114–15,
Serrels, Mark, 175 143–44, 147–48, 164, 209n7; “My
Shaw, Adrienne, 53, 67–69, 81; The Player” option, 26–27. See also
Playful Is Political fishbowl eSports
panel, 84 stack ranking, 37
Sicart, Miguel, 209n7 standardized tests, 14, 53–54, 109,
Sierra, Katherine, 139 157
Silverman, Mark, 113–14 Starcraft, 58
Simon, Bart, 113–14 Stardom: Hollywood, 105
Sirlin, David, 145 StarPower, 60
skill, 2–6, 73, 159–61, 166, 168, Star Wars, 111; Galaxies, 52; The
171–72, 178, 193n43, 200n28, Old Republic, 132
209n7, 212n12 Steam: Greenlight program, 80
achievement and, 130–36 Street Fighter, 2, 75, 95
judging, 111–40 Street Fighter X Tekken, 75
meritocracy and, 9, 11–14, 24–33, StreetWars, 101, 102
35–39, 41–61, 63–64, 68, 75, Sundborg, Steven, 185n18
85, 88–110, 141–42, 146–51, Super Bowl, 147
163, 176–77; versus luck, 40, 53, Supercell, 3, 95, 96, 127, 129–30
53–54, 92, 151–55, 177 Super Mario 64, 97, 134; Bros., 101.
skill transfer, 43, 51–52, 55, 108, 169 See also Mario Kart
skill trees, 77–78 Super Smash Bros., 95, 98
Smedly, John, 71
soccer, 17, 27, 75, 146–47, 150–52 Taylor, Nicholas T., 75
solitaire, 20, 94 Taylor, T. L., 75
Something Awful, 81 Tekken, 75, 76
Sony Online Entertainment, 71 television, 14, 22, 99, 133, 149, 161,
Souls: Bloodborne, 135–36; Dark 169; sports coverage, 122, 146, 152
Index 244
Telltale, 167, 169 U.S. Congress, 88
tennis, 144, 146, 150, 154 U.S. Department of Justice, 88
thatgamecompany, 174 U.S. Federal Reserve, 49
theorycraft, 148, 150. See also “the U.S. Supreme Court, 67
meta”
Time magazine, 86 TheVine, 87
Todd, Andrew, 71 violence, 1, 6, 19–20, 24, 71–72,
Tomb Raider, 103–4 117–18, 129, 132, 139, 175; bul-
Totilo, Stephen, 101 lying, 83; at gaming conventions,
Touch Arcade, 129, 168 73–74; sexual violence, 2, 14–16,
Tour de France, 152 73–90, 179. See also ageism;
toxicity, 10, 15, 36, 38, 61, 69–90, classism; doxxing; GamerGate;
118, 120, 133, 138–40, 160, hate speech; homophobia; jerks;
163–64, 178–79; game design misogyny; Operation Digging
and, 37, 121–26, 129–30, 138–39, DiGRA; Operation Disrespectful
143–44, 153, 176, 180, 204n65; Nod; racism; toxicity; trolls
meritocracy and, 128, 138–44, Voorhees, Gerald, 66
161, 180. See also ageism; clas- Vox, 86
sism; GamerGate; homophobia;
jerks; misogyny; racism; trolls; Walker, John, 166
violence The Walking Dead: The Game,
trolls, 7, 37, 118, 120, 180. See also 167–69
ageism; classism; GamerGate; Walschots, Natalie Zina, 87
homophobia; jerks; misogyny; Washington Post, 86
racism; toxicity; violence Weerasuriya, Ru, 48
Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, 16, whiteness, 6, 8, 10–11, 14, 23–24, 56,
72, 81 58, 75, 80, 82, 85, 89, 157, 180;
Trubshaw, Roy, 3, 153 among game designers, 4, 18–19,
Trump, Donald, 10–11 48. See also race
Trump Organization, 11 winning, 3–4, 6, 8, 11, 15, 26–27,
Twitch.tv, 76 34, 38, 40, 43, 49, 56, 69, 72, 75,
Twitter, 19, 71, 81, 83–84, 88, 132 81, 92, 95–98, 100, 102, 109–10,
113, 117–122, 124, 126–29, 133,
Ubisoft, 4, 53 136–137, 145–49, 151–53, 161,
UEFA Champions League, 150 163–64, 170, 176–77
Ultima Online, 3, 52 Wired, 97
Uncharted, 5; 3: Drake’s Deception, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, 18
104 Witkowski, Emma, 75
United Kingdom, 29–30. See also World of Warcraft (WoW), 1–3, 20,
England; Great Britain 107, 109–13, 117, 137, 164
USA Basketball, 152 Wu, Brianna, 72, 86, 88
 245 Index
Xbox, 1; 360, 55, 190n70; One, 73; Young, Michael, 11–12, 29, 35,
Live, 131 38–41, 45, 91, 93, 180, 190n8;
XCOM: Enemy Unknown, 154–55 The Rise of the Meritocracy, 33–34
YouTube, 3, 179
Yakuza, 5
Yahtzee, 94 Zagal, Jose, 84
Young, Cy, 150 Zynga, 105
Christopher A. Paul is associate professor of communication at
Seattle University. He is author of Wordplay and the Discourse of
Video Games: Analyzing Words, Design, and Play.