Discussing gaming in a serious way involves not just talking about the medium of interactive media, but the evolution of media consumption more generally. One of the biggest impediments of gaming is that it has (for various historical reasons) been treated as an offshoot or subordinate to the mainstream cultural zeitgeist - this is much of the reason that the term “gamer” has become an enduring (and problematic) label. We talk about “gamers” and not “TV watchers” or “Mobile phone enthusiasts” because of an enduring belief that those who play video games are different - the label points to an abnormal activity that defines a group of individuals that is considered similarly abnormal.
Ah, but how things have changed! Mostly, anyway. The rise of gaming in the past few decades to the point of marketers being able to confidently state that “everyone is a gamer” reflects not just generational effects where household decision makers are increasingly those who grew up gaming, but the growing cultural acceptance of gaming. The act of playing video games is no longer seen as an artifact of a small sub-culture, but an act of media consumption which someone might indulge in on any given evening, interchangeable with watching a movie or a TV show. And yet, prioritizing our leisure time is a zero-sum game: More things to do certainly does not mean we have more time to do them. Returning to the point above, understanding the rise of gaming is not solely concerned with understanding which consumers are increasingly playing video games, but what are they no longer doing as they are playing them.
Or, in some cases, what parts of their lives are intermediated by the medium of video games. Since some of the biggest ongoing stories in gaming the past few weeks are ones I cannot substantively discuss without jeopardizing a steady paycheck (being a commentator on the industry while working within the industry is a double edged blade), we can look to one of the other big stories in technology to discuss this phenomenon, which you’d have been hard pressed to avoid: The rise (and fall?) of Threads by Meta, and the ongoing clownishness of X (formerly and forever better known as Twitter).
You may be experiencing a creeping feeling that you’ve been misled - why should the words here, those which you have been promised are about gaming/esports/marketing/etc., be concerned with social media? First, as much as the act of video gaming has often (and incorrectly) been ascribed to the mysterious domain of “the youth,” so too has the future of social media platforms. This has raised a larger debate around what do we even mean when discussing “social media,” where games are at the very center of this debate and critical to understanding how we as humans behave through technology. It likewise has bearing on the role that video games play in the lives of consumers on the back of wider adoption and cultural acceptance.
Second, I’ll admit it - this topic is irresistible bait for me. You may be aware that prior to my role in the video game industry I did a stint at both Facebook and Twitter during pivotal times in the trajectory of each organization. I also happen to hold a PhD in Sociology (you know, the science of studying people in groups…groups like social networks) where I wrote my doctoral dissertation about Facebook and Twitter (specifically, how users think about themselves, their “audiences,” and their privacy differentially across the platforms). And here we are, five years later, where Facebook finally made a Twitter in the last few weeks.
So…yeah - Facebook (Threads), X (Twitter), gaming, and social science. I’m damn near obliged to pull these threads together (I’m not sorry).
X Marks the Dope
Love or hate him, the “leadership” of Elon Musk at Twitter can be evenly described as “tumultuous.” Less evenly, I have previously described him as “a man who’s fame and reputation is seemingly outpacing his abilities and, on the back of his expired meme-fueled bluster, has put himself in what is possibly the most public way to have your whole ass exposed to the world.” What was viewed as a victory for “free speech” has mostly just turned into a breathtaking erasure of wealth: While the ad industry has bent over backwards to get the attention of a figure who has loudly signaled little but utter disdain for them, conviction around standards for media held just long enough to pull back tens of millions of dollars in revenue.
Meanwhile, those who in the weeks leading up to Musk’s forced purchase of the platform were salivating at the prospect of finally revealing some New World Order-level conspiracy to “suppress” speech via an algorithm that they discussed with the same reverence and mystery as magic (mostly because they don’t have the expertise to discuss something so complex as anything but), were left wanting for not finding a smoking gun. What’s left is a business on life support, “free speech” freed from an algorithm but caged by the limits of a single man’s ego, and a rehash of an old business idea that Musk won’t let die.
The resulting chaos has led to no end of Twitter-like platforms shooting their shot to supplant the king of “real time” social media: Mastodon, Post, Hive, and Bluesky (the real Twitter 2.0 one would argue, inclusive of the the part-time CEO oversight of the person who created this whole mess, Jack Dorsey) all emerged for a few fleeting moments as safe harbor for disgruntled former Twitter users. None have been able to gain any major traction due to some combination of restricted sign-ups, terrible user onboarding, crashes, or the simple fact that they are all extremely boring without the critical mass of journalist, news organizations, influencers, celebrities, and prodigious shitposters which created the unwholesome stew that made Twitter so intriguing.
That slurry of the best and worst of the internet was Twitter’s moat - the one true point of differentiation versus competitors. Twitter has never put forth a compelling product aside from various iterations of the core feed - the power of the platform was the people on it rather than the technology which underlies it. A point which is perhaps somewhat lost on Musk but very top of mind for the schoolyard bully thirsting for an opportunity to beat him up for lunch money: Mark Zuckerberg.
The Zuck Strikes Back
It has been rumored since as long back as my tenure at Twitter that Facebook has been looking to create a Twitter competitor. While there isn’t much evidence to back up this claim, it is easy enough to believe if only because most major innovations within Facebook apps in the last five to ten years or so have just been rip-offs of features from other apps. When much of your product roadmap is defined by the rearview mirror, the entire competitive landscape becomes your muse.
One can only guess why it has taken this long for a competitive offering to form, but the recent environment was been favorable for any such plans to finally take shape: Twitter has been figuratively breaking with the erosion of its content moat since Musk’s acquisition of the platform (both by his own exile of legitimate news sources and the growing disdain of the celebrity class), while the platform itself was literally breaking down by not working in the most basic way.
Enter Threads, a Twitter knock-off I’d otherwise describe as “shameless” were knock-offs not part of the core Meta product philosophy, that ingeniously leveraged the massive Instagram social graph to jump-start the network. Jump start it did: The fledgling app managed to soar to over 100 million users in under a week, the fastest any app has reached the lofty 9-digit milestone (including recent technology darling ChatGPT). This unprecedented level of success was short lived - outside analysis have claimed that user numbers have dropped as much as 40% in the week following the 100M milestone along with a precipitous drop in time spent on the app.
What happened? On the most basic level, when making a copy-cat product you not only potentially capitalize on the success of a competitive product, but also tend to inherit the problems of that product. Billions of consumers have seen a tweet, and hundreds of millions more have signed up for Twitter in the past above and beyond the ~250M MAU last reported by the platform (reliably, anyway - I trust exactly 0% of the data claiming all-time highs since the platform was taken private). Twitter is a classic example of what product wonks would describe as a “leaky bucket” - the platform attracts a lot of interest but has never managed to crack user onboarding or product fit in a way that would compel users to stay. The fact that Threads still lacks some of the core functionality of Twitter certainly doesn’t help, but all the might of the ~1B Instagram network matters little if users funnel out.
What may be less obvious to product wonks is the fact that the secret to Threads rocket-like start is probably also its biggest problem in the long term. A leaky bucket creates retention issues, but the fact that it runs upstream of how consumers are interacting with social media (and social mediums such as gaming) more generally presents more fundamental problems. Moreover, if you were one of the some 100M perusing Threads in the early days of the app, you’d find that many very online individuals complained that the “vibe” of the platform felt off. Vibes are a hard thing to measure in either a qualitative or quantitative sense, but there is plenty of social theory and research to substantiate why the vibes felt askew to so many.
I’d love to believe this will be my only attempt to conceptualize vibes based in scientific discourse, but I fear it may not be the last. Tune in next week for a crash course in social network theory, the new rhythm of social media, and where/how gaming has potentially evolved from a frivolity to an essential medium for our everyday lives.
To be continued…