Gaming Isn’t Just an Industry. It’s a Way of Life

Any brand seeking to be relevant in the current cultural landscape must understand what it means to be a gamer.

Even those of us who don’t identify as gamers can feel it: video games are a worldwide phenomenon fast becoming a part of everyday life. The industry is already larger than the music and movie industry combined, with revenues of $120 billion in 2019; some analysts believe that figure could grow to almost 300 billion by 2025. Increasingly, the gamer is no longer a single type of person (stereotypically, a boy in his basement): in the “casual gaming” category, 40% of gamers are female. Everyone is a gamer, and gaming is everywhere.

When anything becomes a phenomenon of such scale, brands in all sectors need to pay attention. Many have scrambled to make investments in mostly traditional forms of advertising, now grafted onto the gaming environment: product placement, in-game sponsorships, and celebrity partnerships. And such measures are a start. But if brands are to truly engage the gamer on her turf and her terms, they can’t simply import the forms of marketing and advertising that have been developed on older platforms. Rather, brands will have to deeply understand what we at ReD Associates call the “gaming ethos”––and to devise ways of showing up for gamers that speak their language.

From a subculture serving boys in their basements to a cultural force that touches all types. Some 40% of casual gamers are women.

ReD Associates has recently conducted several studies related to Generation Z, digital behavior, and technology use; inevitably, the “gaming ethos” has been a large area of focus. Our research has uncovered at least three key ways in which we see gaming changing human behavior, both on and off the screen.

1 – Gaming is changing socialization

We used to speak of “real life,” as distinct from the virtual world of gaming. But how does this binary hold up when people’s “real life” milestones are themselves occurring in virtual space? By this stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us have witnessed such milestones –– weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, funerals –– occurring in virtual spaces like Zoom. It shouldn’t come as a great surprise to learn, then, than a university graduation was recently held inside a video game. Enterprising students at UC Berkeley created a digital replica of the campus in the game Minecraft, dubbing their Lego-like virtual campus “Blockeley.”

But the gaming ethos does more than just simulate IRL interactions; it’s also creating entirely new social codes and modes of communication. Take Fortnite Battle Royale, one of the most successful multi-player games of all time, with 350 million registered players as of May 2020. In a time when physical forms of public space are less available, the arenas of Fortnite become a kind of digital agora. 

To liken a video game to a public space may seem absurd, until you listen to the people who actually play the game. Fortnite’s fans, speaking of social interaction in the game, sound not unlike the great urban theorist Jane Jacobs. Players describe an “intimacy” with the strangers they are collaborating with, the “joy” and “spontaneity” typically associated with a summer festival. Fortnite fans also describe a sense of social abundance: a constant availability of companions. Feelings of community, belonging, and collaboration are available 24/7, from anywhere with an internet connection.

The question for any organization becomes: How does “gaming socialization” relate to what your brand is about, and what does that suggest about how your brand can appear in a way that is in tune with the wavelengths of social gaming? And any business that is social at its core will have to understand these new and emerging forms of public life, in order to better support these behaviors as they evolve across physical and digital realms.

2 – Gaming is changing self-expression 

Something strange has happened to the style icon. The icons of eras past could be summed up in one indelible image: Marilyn Monroe always looked like Marilyn Monroe; Tom Cruise always looked like Tom Cruise.

But somewhere over the last decade or so, we have come to accept that our new style icons are continually transforming themselves. One day Lady Gaga is wearing a regal corset; the next, a dress of stitched-together Kermit the Frogs. A new generation of pop star––people like Katy Perry, Grimes, and others––are best defined not by how they look, but how often their look changes.

The Sims FreePlay – EA Games

Fantastical self-transformation has long been core to video games, which offered a means of transcending traditional gender and beauty norms well before that was part of popular discourse. It is likely no coincidence that gaming’s push into the mainstream has coincided with a broader push for the rights of people to express themselves how they wish, including reassigning or redefining their gender.

It is less costly and risky to do anything in a digital world than in the physical world, which is one reason we see a kind of “identity prototyping” occurring in gaming worlds. In ReD’s recent research, we have seen this experimentation with identity occur not just in gaming worlds, but in all digital spaces. For instance, in India, we recently met a young woman who had borrowed a series of friends and relatives Facebook accounts to experiment with self-expression, only gradually building up the confidence and sense of identity to form her own account under her own name. Among countless people we have met across many studies, experimentation with digital identity often preceded the affirming of that identity in the physical world.

In an era when identity itself is shifting at a rapid cadence, what does that mean for a brand’s identity, and how it is expressed digitally? For a given brand, would experimentation in self-expression be welcomed or deplored? How can a brand’s identity be fluid to some degree, while retaining an essence of itself? More broadly, brands will need to keep a pulse on emerging forms of self-expression, as well as the tools deemed most powerful to deliver on them, if they want to remain a relevant part of their customers’ quest for authentic self-actualization.

3 – Gaming is changing concepts of value

In the physical world, what is scarce is often valuable. (This explains, among other things, conspicuous consumption, or the practice of buying luxury goods largely to signal wealth and status.) But what is valuable in a gaming environment? Gaming economies have proven to be distinct from those in the physical world––as the recent example of the so-called “loot box” reveals. 

A “loot box” is an item gamers can purchase within a game. Shell out a few extra dollars, and you can buy yourself new weapons, characters, or abilities, all giving you a competitive edge in play.

If a gaming economy were like any other, the loot box system would have been successful, or at least accepted with resignation. Instead, game developers found, the loot box was widely and loudly reviled (and even sometimes declared illegal by governments). Why? Gamers felt the system to be unfair, in a way that was contrary to the gaming ethos. Status shouldn’t derive from real-world wealth, gamers decided, but rather from dedication and skill applied to the game.

Faced with a loss in revenue from loot boxes, many companies pivoted instead into systems that allow players to buy into progression tiers that reward their time and skill. In Fortnite, for example, players can buy a “Battlepass” that rewards them with cosmetic enhancements––but only after winning a certain number of matches. It’s something like paying a membership fee to a competitive tennis league, then proudly displaying your trophy.

What does it mean for a brand to compete for attention, then, in a marketplace where value is assigned in idiosyncratic ways? And how can a brand align itself with the more meritocratic forms of status preferred by the gamer? More broadly, understanding new forms of status and prestige that are emerging in games could be the key for companies that seek to produce premium offerings both in gaming worlds and the physical one.

An Emerging, Complex Phenomenon

All major organizations need to better understand what we are calling the “gaming ethos,” and we encourage them to make explorations of gaming a feature of both qualitative and quantitative research in the future. For organizations not yet ready to delve into a deep dive of how gaming affects their consumers, ReD leaves you with a few high-level takeaways: 

Top-down control is impossible

The gaming environment is a fluid and dynamic one, where content and symbols –including branding – are actively reinterpreted in ways that escape the control of an individual creator. Successful marketers will need to move away from linear, hierarchical and transaction focused messages directed to individual consumers and instead actively engage and form part of a gaming culture that is social and dynamic in its essence. 

Everyone’s in it together

Some cultural theorists believe that gaming platforms might be dissolving boundaries between production and consumption. While gamers are consumers of hardware and software, they are also collective cultural producers who breathe life into the product. Brands will need to grapple with this ambiguity, even if it means there may no longer be designated spaces for advertising or content. 

Creativity is collective

The gamer of course loves a sense of play, which means that originality and creative content will hold the greatest appeal. The gaming ethos values humorous and collaborative content that challenges the notion of individual exceptionalism and genius. The gamer is skeptical of traditional forms of stardom and celebrity -- which means brands may need to anticipate a shift away from the prevailing model of influencers over the past decade.

Contributing writers: David Zax, Sandra Cariglio, Lynda Hammes, Jake McAuliffe