it is still incredibly funny to me that gamerstm spent the entirety of the 2000s DEMANDING that games be 'taken seriously as art' and then proceeded to spend the entirety of the 2010s violently, shakingly furious that people actually did so and, y'know, critiqued it like art.
like, I know this isn't a fresh observation by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm still wondering what they thought people did with art. like they just thought 'art' was some kind of blanket-positive label and any value or statement being made by the work was immaterial to how people should see it. 'art is good, ergo, we want our thing to be regarded as art.' but that's, like, never the end of the discussion?
the point of art is to provoke sensation and feeling! art appreciation isn't just going to a museum and looking at pictures and going 'yup, that sure is some Art' and feeling Very Intelligent about yourself, and if you think it is, you're not very good at appreciating it! appreciating art, valuing it, valuing what it says to us, what it means to us, means opening up and exposing your own relationship to it. it means being vulnerable! it means accepting that you exist enmeshed inside a set of symbols and beliefs and cultural values and preferences and biases and aspirations that you carry with you everywhere like a turtle carries its shell! what did you think you were going to GET by demanding games be taken seriously? did you think it was going to be a conveyor belt of endless, effusive praise for an entire medium, and, by association, you, for pointing at it and demanding recognition? if you just wanted people to call you a 'good boy' you can buy it by the session!
that to me is the pernicious, beating heart of this entire phenomenon. it's validation-seeking, but without even the courtesy to come out from behind the curtain. they didn't want games to be art because they wanted to actually care about art, about the process of experiencing art or making art or placing art in its cultural context. what they wanted was second-hand glorification of a set of consumption-defined virtues which hagiographically defines 'being a person who buys lots of games' as an identity value of Worth and Importance in a complete vacuum of cultural meaning. it's the same impulse as 'I must be a good person because of all the sports cars I own' except for even lower stakes and even more diminishing returns. you might as well ask for a hug from Ronald McDonald.
It's becoming more and more clear to me that the history of the Internet is the history of Losers. I don't mean that entirely pejoratively, but rather just that the Internet has always been the refuge of the people that society forgets or considers too weird or lame or just Below Standards to wrap up in to normal social circles.
A lot of it is undiagnosed autism. Like, man is there so much autism on the internet and especially in geek circles, and nobody has any plan to actually treat this festering hill of problems- autism will be to our generation what Leaded Gasoline was the boomers, I think.
Aside from that, Video Games just happen to be the biggest geek circle with- therefore- the largest count of the nerd equivalent of Basic Bros. Video games are like the Sun for which people with no deeper interests but also no social clout to revolve around. So, yeah, like you said, they just crave validation like a man in the Sahara thirsts for water. And to some degree I think that's kind of understandable? The American Male experience is a desert of any kind of emotional validation that isn't tied to weird scams or arbitrary aesthetic things that would have already pulled you out of the Loser's Bracket. So yeah it's just a ton of men who never "grew up" because growing up implies finding a place in society for yourself, and their only peers were other people who wouldn't and couldn't give them what they truly needed. Video games rarely engender a sense of belonging, they tend to be more about competition (speedruns, ranked online matches of any kind, hell, high scores to start with) and competition is a poor substitute for real community.
I think therefore it was kind of inevitable that The Gamers™ would demand their hobby be taken seriously in order to get just some tiny crumb of clout that they would otherwise never have, and then be enraged at the consequences of that. They aren't ready to appreciate art because their life experiences are so truncated and insular.
