Going Native: Last Week I Went Bowling

I wanted to write a series on a random thought I had not so long ago with regard to the anthropological term called, "going native."

Now, "going native" is a tricky thing. The most basic definition I can find is:

The term for this is "going native" - where the researcher ceases to balance the roles of participant and observer and, instead, simply participates like any other group member. A researcher who "goes native" effectively stops being a researcher...

In essence, a researcher who has gone native no longer has the ability to see what it was they were effectively studying and they begin to participate in the group they were studying. They make movies about this sort of thing. Lawrence of Arabia was a good one, any movie where a cop becomes a drug addict and forgets they were a cop; The Salton Sea is a decent example of it as well.

In any case, after the events of Modern Warfare 2 (F.A.G.S. and "No Russian"), I realized that the idea of going native is quite actively at work in the gaming industry. Starting here, I wanted to do a few posts on it. This first one is one such attempt to get at this idea without just saying it.

Last week I went bowling.

Why does this matter? Well, I realized something that I think a lot of us forget when we’re writing or talking about video games. Sure, we hear and talk a lot about casual vs hardcore and narrative vs mechanics (I can’t use ludology – it’s just not a useful term to me as it isn’t 'really' the study of play…it is the study of video games. But hey, if it’ll sell books and school programs, let them use it).

Let me tell you a story.
So, Kristen and I were in Tiffin, Ohio, my hometown. The local bowling alley, heritage lanes (formerly gay lanes) has long been the hangout for the locals. My hometown is something of a northwest industrial town insomuch that most of it closed down when deindustrialization began to claim cities like mine. I can remember one day everything was great, it was the 80s and everything was totally awesome. The next morning, everyone was down, everyone was angry, and no one had a job. Being a boy of 30 now, back then all I really remember is from a kids point of view.

Anyway, deindustrialization, bowling, gay lanes.

It was a free-for-all. My brother, his girlfriend, myself, my girlfriend, my mom, and my dad. We didn’t give a damn about bowling. It was something we all used to do, it was a novelty. But, like all novelties, it gets to be pretty well remembered with time. Novelty, you see, is something like a fine wine. Bury it, stick a bottle in the cellar, forget about it and one day you pull it out and find not only is it worth the price you originally paid, it’s actually worth more than that, and it’s better than we remember…for a time. Like all bottles of wine, it gets empty, we drink too much, and suddenly, we wake up the next day and remember why we didn’t ever really like drinking in the first place.

Next to us was a group of local folk, probably people that still worked for the local factory. For these guys, that novelty never really got placed in the cellar. That novelty never really was a novelty at all, it was a lifeblood, a reason for living. Like all things we find that not everyone can appreciate something in the past, it must be celebrated in the present. Appreciation comes in the weeklong buildup to the weekend of wine drinking, or in this case…bowling.
It is here that I must leave this metaphor and reveal its purpose.

For us, for gamers, we are those people who look forward to bowling every weekend. We build it up each week for a weekend of serious, ‘hardcore’ gaming. We’re the same as those locals, mullets, tattoos, beer, and all. The world has moved on without us. There never really was a ‘casual revolution’ only a point in time whereupon the rest of the world reminded us that most people don’t play the same thing we are. No, what we’ve been doing is perfecting our bowling techniques.

We can almost all bowl 300s these days. I mean, have you seen how many polygons we can make our machines display at once? It’s almost as if we’re at the precipice of the uncanny valley. We’ve conquered this mountain.

Why is this important?
It’s important to realize that most people do not play video games. While we can say that they do, what we mean is that they play things like solitare, Farmville, or browser games like elf bowling. What we call ‘the casual revolution’ was an attempt to get other people to join us at the bowling alley. The interesting thing is that these days we see a lot of grumbling coming from the ‘locals’. The bowling alley is crowded now with a bunch of people throwing balls down alleys that were populated by the same type of person until very recently.

When I was at the bowling alley, the same locals took to being more boisterous than I’m sure they ever were when left alone. Slowly, we lost our places at the tables near the alley. Slowly, we lost our ability to have fun. Slowly, their behavior became too obnoxious for us to really put up wit. Eventually, they were left to bowl by themselves until the game shut down. While I’m sure that they were happy, I can tell you that we probably won’t be bowling again for another few years. We need to let the novelty age to perfection.

Plain English
In the fewest words possible, I will attempt to explain what I mean. The gaming industry has been inclusive since the end of the SNES era . The casual revolution is an attempt to bring the games we’ve all been playing casually for years and the games that the industry has produced for years for the inclusive crowd, together in an attempt to create a much larger, ‘game industry.’ We are seeing signs of success for the massive resistance the inclusive group began the day the casual revolution started. However, the thing that seems to be unspoken, is that casual games have been more of a success in terms of ‘players’ than the ‘hardcore’ gamer scene could imagine. In the end, non-gamers do not want to think about the video games as the inclusive group has called them. They want to play tetris.