The intro to my book

People ask me what I do for a living, and then get confused when I tell them. For the last four or so years, I have worked as a poor suffering anthropologist studying native videogame culture, and how it works. This has meant traveling to as many gamer locations as I can, interviewing people, helping out at conventions, and writing down what I saw and heard. Most people get confused at the term anthropologist. I decided it would be best to introduce the thoughts, and ideas of what I study, and why, along with any terms that may confuse people.

It’s usually a bit weird because the person doesn’t even know what anthropology is. Then I get asked why videogames? I have to answer that we need to cover the mundane and ordinary to properly understand what is considered foreign today. Videogames are an emerging culture that covers peoples all over the world, and somehow unites them. This has created a lot of work, and some amazing moments for me.

The first term you need to know is Anthropology. It’s ok to not know what it is. When I first began studying I didn’t know it existed, or that there were people like me. I just had some questions, and decided to go study it. An anthropologist studies culture, and how it works. They do this by looking at the languages, and how they move and change over time. They look at the remains of buildings, and utensils to figure out how a missing culture did things. Some look at skeletons, and see if there is any changes between peoples. Then we have people who go into the culture itself, and ask questions directly. Within all of that is anthropology. The entire job is to study the culture, and then try to explain it to people who have never experienced it.

This was really easy over a century ago when no one had contact outside of a small circle of friends and family. Much of anthropology was explaining the foreign cultures to people who viewed themselves as the dominant people of the world. Whether it was true or not isn’t important, they believed it, and made the world out to be them and the lesser peoples. Studying these cultures meant taking them into hotels and asking questions for hours, sometimes without consent. It took a lot of work for them to go into the culture itself and live with the peoples may work. Then it took more work to not view these people as subhuman or evil.

Eventually though, the people began to prove themselves to be intelligent, and worthy of being fellow humans. Then they lived in the dominant cultures, and found the people to not be as intelligent or great as said. Imagine a young Indian lawyer walking through the streets of 19th century London, and seeing the crime and filth of the roads. He was told these people were great and important, and higher up than him. Instead, they seemed ordinary, and had their own caste systems that were just as awful as his own. If someone told him that the English Empire was greater than him, he would have a hard time believing it because he could see the mistruth right in front of him.

Today, making a culture foreign is very difficult. You can friend just about anyone from any country on Facebook. You can read blogs about life and how it is doing from places you are told are foreign. It doesn’t come as a shock to see that they play videogames, or have jokes, or political problems. The foreign culture that may be greater, or worse than you is now average. You can see it, you can talk with people in it, and even get to know it without leaving your house.

With the internet, facebook, and other stuff it becomes a lot easier to find culture, and meet culture, and get to know them. This has led to an interesting problem for those that study culture. The first is we only studied foreign cultures, so there aren’t a lot of ethnologies -books about culture- on the ordinary man. The second happens when the natives of those foreign cultures begin to study and write about it from their perspective.

The other thing I study is intercultural history, which means looking at what happens when cultures meet, or theorizing that they did meet. It’s not hard to do when you are at a university with a very large supply of cultures going to it. I could stand at a corner, and just listen to people talking to each other, and figure out things. Going to the school cafeteria meant sitting next to several cultures, and asking questions without anyone realizing what I was doing.

For example, a phillipino showed me how there were spanish words in his native language. He picked up a fork, and said it was called a tenedor. We continued talking, and found there were words from all over the pacific ocean in his language. Each word represented a meeting at some time or other between these cultures. The Spanish words made sense to him, because the Spanish took over the Phillipines. The other words did not, because there was no cultural knowledge of it happening.

Using archaeological records, and other sources, it was found that potatoes -but not the kind you know- traveled from South America, to the Phillipines in SouthEast Asia. In the same study, I found out there were chicken bones in archaeological digs in Chile. The people had some contact, and trade between each other. It gets greater when you realize the Phillipino culture is based on being dominated by others, yet in many oral histories there were people traveling the pacific with the other islanders. The people we see today, have not always been the dominated ones.

In your mind, that sounds amazing, and I bet you want to study things like this. This is when we get to the first problem. In a class on Korean history, my professor described a ceremony called a gut. It’s where a person becomes a shaman, or speaker with spirits. The entire thing reminded me of a very personal time when my sister went to the hospital and nearly died. When she was recovering, we responded and acted to her problems in the same ways the Koreans would treat a shaman going through a gut. My family is very German.

When I went to research it, I came to a very weird problem. All of the ethnologies were about Korean guts, and Wiccan beliefs, but no traditional knowledge on German spiritual culture. There is no doubt by historians that trade and cultural knowledge traveled all over the Eurasian continent. The problem is getting into specifics. Koreans and Wiccans are foreign, but common cultural traits of the average man are not. I’m sure the wiccans and others like them would love to see some ethnologies on the traditional German beliefs, but we don’t get them. We do get historical papers on the spiritual beliefs from various times, but they are not asking the same questions the anthropologists are asking. It becomes difficult to even do a cultural comparison.

This is where the second problem comes in, the foreign cultures are not as foreign as they once were. People would talk about the lands of the Pacific as if it was next to impossible to get to them, and the explanations for the beliefs of the people were based on the idea that they were foreign. Of course the ancient deity Maui created a rock, its just another foreign and weird belief by those Polynesians.

The subject is different when you have professors, friends, and neighbors from all of those weird cultures. The arcade I worked at had people from every culture in the Pacific. Even when they didn’t look like it, they did. When my professors talked about a culture, they were actually from it, or grew up around it. As soon as we got into subjects they didn’t know, it became different. For example, I had to explain the concept of Two Spirits in actual Native American Tribal culture is not how it was portrayed in the assigned book. The same thing happened when the Hmong culture came up, and another student talked about it better.

The instant you take out the explanation that the foreign people do foreign things, it means changing the way things are explained. Which then brings up the cultures themselves trying to show how their culture works. So that means getting people from those cultures, doing ethnologies about it.

Now imagine trying to sell this idea. In several universities, it was difficult to get natives to do this. At the University of Hawaii Manoa the professors noticed that the majority of their anthropology students were white, and looking to study Pacific cultures. When asked, the natives said it seemed like a white person major, and they weren’t allowed in.

This is where the concept of Native Anthropology comes in. A person studies their own culture, and talks about it from the point of view inside it. The foreign becomes common. It was aimed at Native Pacific cultures, but applies to any culture you can think of. If you grew up in suburban Michigan, talk about it. Talk about the traditions and ideas you have, and where they may come from. This will let people study intercultural history much easier.

Anthropology needs the people looking in, and the people looking out to get a better picture of the many cultures in this world. It’s great. The problem then comes up about how to talk with them? And what about emergent cultures? This is where Videogames come in.

Like I said, I worked at an arcade with multiple cultures around me. The common subject among us was videogames, and the bowling machine breaking down. I was trained as a tech for the bowling machine, but it was falling apart faster than I could understand it. Videogames as a theme became common for us. As we talked, the conversation would come up on how it would be treated within the various cultures that came in. I had people that didn’t know what a Wii was, to people that could rewire our entire network. We treated arcade machines like they were some kind of magical device that brought joy and happiness to us.

You would be surprised to know this, but most cultures out there have videogames. I could go into a reservation, and talk about the latest game with ease. As a friend put it, she talked about some professional wrestling stuff with guys, and eventually got invited to a tribal members only event. Videogames acted as a way to break the ice. It is also a great way to do things, and let the culture around you relax. They want to play Halo, and cultural stuff comes out because that’s just life to them.

Videogames has become something that opens up cultures, but also more. As you start looking, you will find that these games are creating a culture unto itself. I’ve been to conventions for comic books, and all I had to mention was the classic free to play arcade in a room, and people went in. Parents would talk to their children about the games as if it was some great cultural thing to see it. Many people begin to relax, and act like they are home, because to them the videogame is their culture.

Think about it, 50 years ago videogames did not exist. There were cultures that fed into it like the engineering and computer cultures from universities like MIT. Then we have board game culture that opened up new ideas from JRR Tolkien’s work. I have done research, and the best I can tell, there has always been a place for games within a culture. The idea of arcades is old, but the term itself has been around about 200 years.

This culture emerges from the others, and uses the cultures to become something interesting no matter where you are. For an example, arcades in England had gambling machines, while American arcades did not. Pachinko machines in Japan are telling stories based on where your ball drops, and old men and women spend hours every day watching these stories.

We are passing on the ideals, and cultural figures onto our children, and creating this new culture. It helps people predict what will happen with the outer culture based on the videogamers response. At the same time, this culture has gone through struggles, propaganda, nationalism, religious beliefs, and others all within the ideals of the culture itself. No one was talking about it, because they didn’t realize what it meant.

When I showed what I was studying to my university professor, he pointed out that I grew up with videogames, and its culture. I was a native of it. I could go into this culture, and be considered normal and accepted without really thinking about it. I was using it to study other cultures, but I hadn’t realized the truth. It was only when I decided to aim my skills at videogames that it all began to show.

It’s a very different type of work than the one imagined a hundred years ago. I have friended many of the people I have met on facebook, and keep up with them easily. There are jokes, and ideas told all the time. I tell them what I am up to, and how I am viewing things, and they often have deeper insights. At the same time, I have to use the training of anthropology to look at things. For example, arcade collectors are a lost tribe, thought to have disappeared. Instead, it thrives and is doing well.

For the last few years, I have studied videogame culture from a nativistic point of view. I have looked at the forums, the comments, the locations, and the ideals. I have witnessed the great meme wars, and the changes in perspective of what a game actually is. It has been fascinating. So yes, I am an anthropologist who studies videogames, I do it to help my study of other things, but also because I love it. Every convention I work at, I feel a sense of home when I am there. I recognize games, and get excited to play them. I get to study history, culture, and the world all while trying to set a high score on Joust.

It sounds weird at first, but this is needed work. We can’t study just the foreign things anymore, because they don’t exist like that. To do our studies we need the ordinary, and the long lost tribe. We need to friend them on facebook, and chat on forums about things. I love it, and am ready to talk about it with anyone who starts asking questions.

This book is entirely compiled notes, and some thoughts, from the many conventions and locations I studied at. When I first began, I wondered why games were so dark. I worked at an arcade, and observed who my customers were, and how to improve the area. I went to other locations where gamers hung out, and interviewed the folks. Oddly enough, one of them believed I couldn’t sell games without darkness. I looked at games at every angle I could, during this same time I grabbed books on the history of videogames. Eventually I decided to write about it for a class. The first section of this book is from that research.

After graduating from University, I moved to Spokane to be closer to my family. It’s an interesting thing being in a family of traveling people. When people asked where my parents lived, I honestly couldn’t give an answer. I had seen them three times while I was in university and that was it. With my newfound knowledge, I went to every geeky location I could find. There were malls, game stores, comic shops, and tech stores. I traveled to as many as I could find, and tried to see what they did. Then I wrote a quick ethnology about them, and posted it and pictures onto my facebook page.

During this time, Arcade Dreams,  a facebook page began to post cool shots of arcade games from collectors and others. I liked it so much, I interviewed the owner. He lived in Scotland, and all his connections were in Great Britain. I wanted to know more about the culture of arcade collectors, so I went onto a common forum called UKVaC, and asked for help. To my surprise, there were collectors who lived near me.

I contacted the collectors in Seattle -a four hour drive from my place- and was told they would have a meeting for the big collectors convention that same week. With very little to my name, and not knowing what I was doing, I arranged to stay at a friend’s place. My expectations were that it was a small group of dedicated people with a with games each. I was in for a big shock because there were more organizers than what I expected for the entirety of the collectors.

They opened up some cool stuff for me, like the Emerald City Comic Con, and the reality of how big gaming really is in this part of the country. At the NorthWest Pinball and Arcade Show, I found fliers for the Seattle Retro Gaming Expo, and the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. SRGE happened a few weeks after NWPAS, and I had to struggle to get enough money to do it all. My friend let me use his house, but he lived an hour away from the conventions.

At PRGE, I found out something, I had become good at moving arcade machines. When I had just learned the very basics of arcade repair, I thought I was a small drop compared to the medics at NWPAS. They can rebuild machines entirely. But there was no one else, so I was suddenly taking charge, and making sure things worked.

After that I decided to go to these shows, year after year, and write about it. There were hard times, like when my sister needed brain surgery, or I tried to volunteer at the Hugos. There were times I wanted to give up, and was told I was mad for doing this. But I did it, and this book details what I saw and heard.

When compiling this book, I was amazed at everything I did. I had forgotten the theories and ideas I had written for my anthropology class. The pictures from the first visits to the conventions revealed people that I know pretty well now. We are friends on facebook, and keep each other updated on stuff. It isn’t some long lost group no one has met, these people are average. You could pass right by them and not realize it.

In your hands, most likely by way of phone, is the notes and ideas from locations I have been to. There are questions about women in conventions, and how the conventions work. You will also find overviews of games played, and how interviews went. It is basically a data dump of my adventures so you can know where I am coming from.

The book after this will be about online stuff, and theories from research. This is to help break it up a bit. You will find out an overview of gamergate as it comes in a cultural context, and also ideas like how games persuade you to play them. There will be interviews with people online, and other stuff.

So enjoy, and make sure to check out the cool gaming locations nearby.