Last week we embarked on a long/strange journey to contextualize the rise of gaming in the broader media and cultural landscape using recent turbulence among social media platforms as an example (specifically, Twitter/X and Threads/Instagram). For a quick refresh of last week’s analysis: Twitter/X is floundering and the breathtaking rise to precipitous fall of Threads may have less to do with Twitter/X than the circumstances of how the platform gained and lost tens of millions of users in a matter of weeks - by piggy-backing on the immense Instagram network.
This week we’ll take a crack at ~100 years of social science theory and research to explain why the “vibes” on Threads are bad and how the project was potentially set-up for failure from the start. We’ll land on implications for gaming and what virtual social interaction means moving forward by posing a simple question: Was this whole Web 2.0 thing a mistake?
A bold question, but one that has some basis in the scientific discourse. Social networking sites (SNS) close to the dawn of the Web 2.0 era (the early aughts) were fundamentally marketplaces for identity – users both consumed and produced their identity through these media, and the digital flotsam and jetsam of these interactions (digital traces of tastes, personal information, etc.) were monetized by the platforms that enabled these exchanges. As I’ve noted in the past, technology tends to move fairly quickly but human behaviors tend to change slowly. Some problems arose from this fact when (to quote my past work [2017] on this matter) “an increasingly large amount of (formerly) ‘personal’ information and ‘real’ interpersonal interaction between concrete and verifiable identities is freely being disseminated on a globally accessible information platform that does not forget” (recall the digital privacy legislation even just a few years ago was all but nonexistent).
Those of you who took Sociology as an elective in University (likely as an easy “A,” but I promise you that many of the concepts are useful!) may have heard of a guy named Erving Goffman – he put forward a dramaturgical framework (~1959) for interaction which (roughly) noted that we have a “front stage” (i.e. how we behave around others) vs. a “backstage” (i.e. how we behave in private). The problem was that SNS upended this dichotomy, but such is the nature of media more generally, which reorients the “situational geography” of interaction according to Meyrowitz (1986). In the case of SNS, our “backstages” quickly became the stuff of “frontstages,” and at an unknown scale. To compensate, users then fell into what Bellah (2007) more recently described as “cultured individualism,” where individuals curate identity performances to resonate with micro-societies formed to individual tastes - in short, we change how we portray our “backstage as frontstage” to fit with the expectations of our newfound (and seemingly immense) audiences.
The problem is that we’ve always been pretty lousy at conceptualizing our audiences on digital platforms – our “imagined audience” on these platforms (ala early internet researcher Dana Boyd) has been noted to be about a quarter of the actual audience as far back as a decade ago by Bernstein (2013). Misconceptions of quantity of audience came hand-in-hand with misconceptions of quality: When these identity performances for “micro-societies” interact in unexpected ways, say by some breach in digital privacy, user error, or I don’t know…importing an entire pre-existing social network into a different situational geography, you get what Marwick and Boyd coined "contextual collisions.”
The rise of Web 2.0 yielded what Rainie and Wellman (2012) described as “Networked Individuals” – those who employed flexible and fluid forms of contact and identity rather than physical home bases of interaction (which partially explains the decline of physical-location-based outlets of socialization, made most famous by Putman’s “Bowling Alone”). A “contextual collision” is when two or more of these flexible identities are smacked up against each other – the potential for incongruity for a platform like Instagram is particularly high because the glitz and glamor focus of the platform tended to evoke what Manango and colleagues coined “idealized virtual-identities” in 2008 – highly manicured projections focusing on the highlights of life rather than the grimy moment-to-moment components comprising much of the content of Twitter/X and (by copy-cat design) Threads.
In short, the people who we are on Twitter/X are usually not the people who we are on Instagram, and what Threads did was force our Instagram self upon our Twitter/X self. Virtual worlds collided, and the vibes got ick.
As a result, one can view the superpower for Threads (the Instagram-fueled hot-start) as charitably as a band-aid (it doesn’t solve the leaky bucket issue identified last week) or as critically as a swampy foundation that flies in the face of how humans have tried to adapt thousands of years of social interaction habits in the past 20 years or so. Technologists will be debating these points (with perhaps just a little less Sociology) for months or years to come. For our purposes, we’ll consider an alternative explanation - the challenge for platforms like Twitter/X (aside from the abundance of hilariously self-inflicted ones) and Threads is the very fact that we have to manufacture different “idealized virtual-identities” across a multitude of “situation geographies” that clearly don’t always match contexts - this type interaction may not be an awesome fit for humans.
Hear me out, the basic idea is simple - a few years back game designer turned academic turned cultural iconoclast Ian Bogost proposed that maybe we simply were not meant to talk this much, and certainly not with this many people. Emboldened by the current messiness of the social media landscape, he subsequently declared that age to be ending. His argument is that any service relying on networking effects using metrics aligned to “engagement” (posts, connections, etc.) as the principal measure of success will then encourage as much engagement (for health) and sharing (for wealth, via information which could increase the value of advertising offerings) as possible. Users were pushed to create as much content as they could for as many people who would listen to them, with outcomes ranging from the inane (memes, Tik Tok dances, etc.) to deleterious (fake news, conspiracy theories, etc.).
But not everyone is ready for (or wants) the limelight; and even if they do, even fewer are capable of building an audience. This is a very different reality than the optimistic naivete of Zuck’s “law” of information sharing from the early Web 2.0 days, a riff on Moore’s Law stating that the amount of information consumers share would double every year. Zuck’s law never really came to pass, of course - most users have become weary of the digital traces leveraged by these platforms and conversations (paired with regulations) around digital privacy have skyrocketed in the past five years.
On a more basic level, it has long been the case that a relatively small number of individuals create the vast majority of the content consumed on these platforms - as an example, about a quarter of Twitter users produce virtually all the tweets (and it’s likely that the number of “creators” from survey-based methodologies is optimistic). Using the youth as a bellwether for future media consumption, the most popular platforms are those that are more about content consumption/creation than socializing per se: YouTube, Tik Tok, and (arguably) Instagram.
One could attribute the disproportion of those who produce vs. consume content via social media as the differential between a small number of those who both could and would adapt successfully to a given micro-society (or sets of micro-societies) vs. …everyone else. Twitter/X has managed to make this problem worse by twisting the concept of “verification” to prioritize the content of those who pay a fee over those who might create compelling content for a large audience. In doing so, the content moat around Twitter/X is eroding, yet Threads has been unable to capitalize on this shift because it is a product that doesn’t necessarily appeal to those deprioritized-yet-appealing creators of content so much as swapping the situational geography for millions of Instagram users. We find both platforms having problems because of a strained fit with how humans tend to socialize or consume content digitally, the former more so given that traditional forms of socialization don’t fit with the engagement-first monetization models of these platforms.
In short, much of what we believe to be “social networking” in the Web 2.0 world is basically the same lopsided dichotomy between a small number of content producers and a large population of content consumers that has existed since before the dawn of the consumer internet (be it periodicals, radio broadcasts, or television broadcasts) - the only real difference is that the scope of content producers has expanded beyond large organizations with the means to control a smaller amount of media channels. More simply, social media may have never really been about socialization. Or if it had, it certainly is not anymore.
Assuming we find this line of thinking convincing (maybe a big assumption), it begs the question of whether there is a good mold for social interaction via the internet. It may be the case that those technologies which augment our offline tendencies to socialize may be the best paths forward. Messaging apps such as Discord (like AOL Instant Messenger or IRC did before it) would likely qualify as they replicate one-to-one or gathering/party-like conversations in a relatable way. Another example is one that has been in front of our faces the whole time (literally and figuratively).
A study conducted by my team at my day job (not a plug, just a reference) found that those who played video games (of any kind, mobile or otherwise) most preferred to interact with their close friends and family through games (it was third only behind SMS texts and phone calls). More simply, the preferred method of online socialization were not social networks, but video games. In some respects, we shouldn’t be surprised - playing games has almost always been an inherently social activity, video games paired with the age of the internet has merely made it possible to do so when physicality was impossible or inconvenient. Here too, common and relatable offline behaviors of socialization when powered by the internet creates a good experience for online socialization.
Pulling it all together: The recent turmoil in the social media landscape is due to the increasing strain of the existing model of social media with how humans tend to behave with one another, and games continue to rise in cultural relevance not simply because they are an increasingly popular form of entertainment but that they also fulfill other needs where consumers have been left wanting in more recent years - such as means for better virtual socialization. One could carry this argument as far as noting that the “metaverse” might have been the start of the right idea with the wrong guiding principles for this very reason, and Meta/Facebook’s sudden shift in that direction was less of a knee-jerk than a demonstration of a deeper level of understanding about human connectivity than what we assume (though that is an even bigger leap/assumption than even I can make, and I’d wager we’re about as far down this rabbit hole as I can take you in the space of a couple email newsletters).
The more basic takeaway is we often ignore the fact that video games exist in a media ecosystem that is not merely bound by entertainment because the point of games isn’t always merely entertainment - games have meant many things for humans over the years, and so too have their electronic equivalent. This view allows us to not simply view gaming (whether it be from a marketing or technologist standpoint) as a replacement form of entertainment interchangeable with TV or movies, but a more multifaceted component of the everyday lives of consumers. The implication for both marketers and technologists is, once again, that attention directed towards the gaming ecosystem remains bafflingly small relative to cultural, behavioral, and financial impact.
Understanding gaming with reference to the broader media landscape allows for a perspective where we can not only judge the zero-sum game of consumer attention, but why that attention shifts in the first place. Last week’s entry was sub-headed as a discussion on the inevitable evolution of the social part of media - the evolution in question is not that gaming has become more like social media, but that social media has become less social media, and gaming is filling a gap not just in our desire to consume entertainment but to connect with one another.
It took us a few thousand more words than usual (and a significantly higher proportion of academic jargon), but I didn't want to undersell the importance of this point: Gaming is rising in relevance for the simple fact that it is relevant to more things: socialization, better movies/TV, identity play, and (less successfully) even how we work.
As the risk of dramatics: Video games matter, and we are past the point of pretending like they do not.
For my academic wonks, works cited:
Bellah, Robert N. Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swindler, Steven M. Tipton. 2007. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, New Preface Edition. University of California Press.
Bernstein, Michael S. Eytan Baksy. Moira Burke and Brian Karrer. 2013 “Quantifying the Invisible Audience In Social Networks.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Pages 21-30
boyd, danah m., and Nicole B. Ellison. 2007. “Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y.
Manago, Adriana. Michael B. Graham. Patricia Greenfield and Goldie Salimkhan. 2008. “Self-Presentation of Gender on MySpace.” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 29(6). Pages 446-458
Marwick, Alice E. and danah boyd. 2011. “I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience.” New Media Society. Vol 13:114.
Meyrowitz, John. 1986. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. Oxford University Press.
Rainie, Lee and Barry Wellman. 2012. Networked. MIT Press. Kindle Edition
Stringfield, Jonathan. 2017. “Identity and Audience in Social Media,” PhD Diss., (University of Illinois, 2017).