That Bad Bloomberg Piece Rules Actually

A response to Tyler Cowen’s Bloomberg Opinion article: “How Gaming Will Change Humanity As We Know It.”

I woke up, as many of us did, to this article from Bloomberg Opinion not only going through the ol’ Twitter timeline but in fact trending. And I have to say, it fuckin sent me, y’all. I am over the moon about this piece. I’ve been giggling to myself for a solid six hours.

What a treat we’ve all been given, a rare look into the worldview of a libertarian economist as it applies to an aspect of the culture he clearly isn’t super familiar with – just exquisite. We don’t get many of these kinds of bad takes, and right off the bat we are intimately aware that this article is neither written for gamers or for people who have any desire to understand games.

This article was written by Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University. Cowen is a libertarian, the author of books like “Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero” and “Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World.”

He’s been a Bloomberg Opinion columnist since 2016 and recently has held forth on such issues as “A woke CIA will make America safer” and “If the Pentagon takes UFOs seriously, so should markets.” Foreign Policy Magazine opined in 2011 that Cowen could “[find] markets in anything,” which bodes interesting for our chance encounter with him today.

There’s an instinctual urge to go line-by-line through this article and attack it on the finer details, but I’m not gonna do that.

Cowen is arguing that games are going to change two aspects of our society: culture, and regulation. At first, there doesn’t seem to be much of a connection, but specifically Cowen is focused on the disruptive nature of games, and it is in this disruption that we find the bulk of our connective tissue.

That being said, he doesn’t really seem to be in conversation with any academic or popular discourses around games in either the specific areas of social life he wants to address, or in general, and this ends up hurting his overall argument.

He asserts that unlike movies, books, or music, video games are unique in that they are “self-contained worlds,” disconnected from ongoing dialogues between other cultural products like music, television and cinema, literature and the visual arts.

Specifically he says, “Literature, music, cinema and the visual arts provide a common body of knowledge that intellectual elites are expected to be conversant with. Knowing one part of that canon usually helps you master the other parts; Verdi drew upon Shakespeare, who influenced Orson Welles, and so on.” Games, he says, don’t do this.^[1]*they absolutely do this Instead, games are each of them isolated bubbles of pure action that require time and a specialized skill set to master, which is unheard of when it comes to film, music, literature or visual art.^[2]**I’m being absolutely facetious here, I’m sorry, I’m trying to keep the snittiness to a minimum

Of course, he reassures us – the fact^[3]***it’s not a fact that games are completely divorced from broader conversations about art, music, literature and cinema isn’t a bad thing; after all, games make lots of money and have “enriched many millions of lives.” Games are simply too immersive and digital to be part of these other cultural categories, especially when the “fundamental appeal of gaming has more to do with performance and focus.”^[4]****nobody tell him about dancing, painting or theatre Besides, these other cultural forms – whose industries still make billions upon billions of dollars in revenue even during a pandemic – are suffering and in fact steadily on the decline.

“Are there many books today that get the attention and discussion that, say, the Harry Potter series did at the turn of the century? Even when the pandemic passes, will art exhibits have the same influence they once did?” Don’t laugh, it’s not funny!

To pause here for just a second in between the first and second prong of Cowen’s argument, there’s a lot of conflation going on in this piece. It is never clear whether he is referring to game production or consumption, so we have no real frame of reference to come back to when he makes claims like “the closed, world-building, proprietary structure of the gaming enterprise” is part of what makes gaming unique in the way he claims.

Additionally, making and playing games require different literacies entirely, but with the triple-A space and indie spaces firing on all cylinders over the past few years, it’s wild to me that anyone could suggest that games are not in conversation with other aspects of culture. Whatever you might think about games otherwise, this is simply not the take.

In fact, I would argue that suggesting thus is an indication that the suggester hasn’t bothered to play any games – which is of course one of the problems they’re suggesting in the first place, that “most of today’s cultural experts know very little about gaming, and they get on just fine.” Cowen certainly fits that mold right now.

And speaking of playing^[5]*****Writing on the chalkboard: “I will not relitigate difficulty discourse, I will not relitigate difficulty discourse…” games, there are different specialized skillsets for engaging with games, that much is true, but most of these skills are merely entry points to the different kinds of games out there. You might argue that it requires “a lot of time and attention” to learn how to use a controller or mouse-keyboard to play a given game, but unless you’re specifically playing a specific type of game for competition, whether in Esports or speedrunning, it doesn’t really follow that this dramatically effects gaming such that it completely separates it from other cultural forms.

In order to listen to music, you need a specific periphery – speakers or headphones of some kind – to do so. In order to watch a movie, you need some kind of screen through which to view it. In order to read a book, you need to be in possession of the book in some fashion. None of these cultural forms – gaming included – are stuck in a vacuum. And all of these forms require some base form of literacy – “specialized consumption,” if you will – for consumers to engage with them on any level. This isn’t to argue that these cultural forms are therefore “closed systems,” but rather that the presence of special peripheries and knowledge bases do not represent or indicate the degree to which these cultural forms are or are not in conversation with each other.

One last thing, before we move on: I’ve seen some takes suggesting that Cowen’s take is explicitly stating that games are culturally meaningless or that they’re bad. For all of its other faults, this isn’t really the case. He’s arguing that games are both good and actually extremely significant for… all the erroneous reasons he laid out. And it’s here you can kind of tell which audience he’s addressing – it’s not gamers or cultural critics, who I get the sense Cowen doesn’t really have the patience for,^[6]******likewise but rather moderate-libertarian readers of Bloomberg who heard about Mark Zuckerberg’s demonic utterance of the word “Metaverse” and have no idea what that could possibly mean. This is likely why he doesn’t seem to bother with the academic literature or popular discourses covering the topics he’s covering. You would think, at the very least, he’d refer to Jane McGonigal’s book Reality is Broken, which covers similar ground, but what are you going to do? The cat’s out of the bag, the horses are out of the stable, and we have to engage with what’s there to engage with.

Which leads us to our second argument prong: gaming’s impact on regulation. Let’s take a second to go get a glass of water and run to the restroom, maybe stretch our legs, enjoy some fresh air.

Here I genuinely wish Cowen had spent time reading the existing work scholars have done on in-game economies, because there are legitimately interesting discussions taking place on the economic relationship between players and game makers, the concept of playbor, how various game economies are structured and how their impact is felt, and so on. Hell, just visit r/DestinyTheGame to hear an avalanche of player opinions on Destiny 2‘s economy alone.

Instead, we get this: “The self-contained nature of games also means they will be breaking down government regulation. Plenty of trading already takes place in games — involving currencies, markets, prices and contracts. Game creators and players set and enforce the rules, and it is harder for government regulators to play a central role.”

Sigh.

This just… isn’t true, and you (seriously) don’t have to invoke the specter of China to find concrete examples of states moderating and regulating game economies. Japan, Belgium and the Netherlands all have laws regulating the sale of lootboxes and other microtransactions, and they made adherence super simple: either modify the game to comply, or don’t sell it here. The UK doesn’t have a law on the books yet, but the House of Lords did rule that they thought lootboxes amounted to gambling, and recommended regulation for them.

But Cowen is a libertarian, which means here that he’s looking at any potential uses of gaming to subvert the state when it comes things like market speculation. Some of the possibilities he brings up are, frankly, kind of goofy and – again – if he was in any way connected to academic or popular gaming discourse he would know that shit like cryptocurrencies and NFTs are a touchy subject in this industry, rather than an occasion for excitement.

Still, without any evidence in his corner to back this up, Cowen asserts that games are going to outrun regulators and become the site of a libertarian countercurrency renaissance. The “Source: Dude Trust Me” on this is that assertion he made in the cultural prong of his argument: that games are “self-contained worlds.” He writes, “Until now, human institutions and structures have depended on relatively open and overlapping networks of ideas. Gaming is carving up and privatizing those spaces. This shift is the big trend that hardly anyone — outside of gaming and crypto — is noticing.”

So, I’m currently sitting here struggling to figure out what he’s talking about, in general. Is it the prevalence of games-as-a-service? Open world sandboxes? MMORPGs? The mobile game space? Indie games? AAA games? Subscription services? Game streaming? Fucking game engines? All of the above? None of the above? Where are these privatized spaces forming? Is this a trend he’s actually been studying or did he just hear about Fortnite wanting to be a metaverse? There are a lot of questions not only left on the table but completely ignored by this piece, and it’s frustrating!

The post ends on this rather ominous note: “Whether or not you belong to the world of gaming, it is coming for your worlds. I hope you are ready.” And I think it’s this line that led folks to believe that Cowen was insinuating that gaming was bad – again, dude absolutely wants something that’s going to fuck with financial regulations – but more than anything else, I again can only read this as being directed at a very specific non-gamer and non-critic audience who not only reads Bloomberg Opinion, but does so regularly to the point of subscribing to it. It’s an audience that largely will not care that he’s wrong on the details – the vibe is what counts, the affirmation that gaming, which Cowen freely admits he doesn’t really care about on a cultural level, can be used for (his specific) libertarian ends, is what matters here.

All I can really say is that the vision of the world Cowen puts forward when it comes to video games is nothing new. It’s the world as seen through the VR goggles of Ernest Cline and Neal Stephenson. It’s the laziest form of the arguments made by Jane McGonigal in Reality is Broken, and a PR whitewashing of the cautionary tales in Gamer Theory and Capital Is Dead, by McKenzie Wark. It’s opportunistic and brazen and nobody’s really falling for it. And I think, perversely, what bothers me most is that it’s utterly unconvincing. I’ve heard better libertarian arguments from drunk jackbags at punk parties. Cowen is a decorated economics professor who allegedly, when not teaching, studies the economics of culture. There should be more here, but there isn’t.

When Roger Ebert was asked if video games were art, he finally said, “I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn’t seen. Yet I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so. Some opinions are best kept to yourself.” Tyler Cowen came in like a puritan on the Mayflower talking about a cultural field he doesn’t seem to know very much about, ignoring the existing conversations on the ground, to assert with little evidence that the cultural product he’s brand new to will fulfill his ideological goals. Maybe he should have listened to Ebert more.