Video Games Will Save the Future
On cyborgs, Trojan horses, and why everyone loves an apocalypse
This is essay 2 of 6 essays for 1729 Writers Cohort #1. Apply to 1729 today at 1729.com.
Video games are a Trojan Horse for spreading techno-optimism.
Video games have been at the receiving end of innumerable criticisms. Ever since their inception, they have been blamed for everything from bank robberies to (mass) murders to making young men "effeminate." Self-help gurus frame any and all gaming as an addiction to be cured.
Yet, we rarely hear about the benefits of video games, such as faster decision making, improved vision, and even increasing the size of your brain.
Today, I want to talk about something I haven't seen discussed anywhere else: that gaming is the last bastion of techno-optimism in Western culture.
What is Techno-Optimism?
Techno-optimism refers to the idea that technological development has been a net positive for humanity; therefore, technological progress should be pursued. Techno-optimism does not mean that we should naively dismiss the downsides to technology. Legitimate problems exist. That said, technology has done tremendous good. Over the past two hundred years, technology has more than doubled average life expectancy and lifted billions(!) out of starvation and poverty.
Despite these mind-boggling advancements, pessimism is pervasive today. Endless think pieces have been written about how millennials and zoomers are worse off than their parents. Climate doomerism runs rampant. Most young people expect to be worse off than their parents.
The problems are real. But humanity has faced countless problems before, and can do so again. If we want the future to be better than the present, we need a new generation of builders to rise to the many challenges we face.
This is an unpopular sentiment. It's much more fashionable to blow it all off as hopeless, and retreat into apathy.
Part of the blame lies in the stories we tell. Our movies and TV shows are saturated with dystopian dramas that paint the future as a horrifying abyss. But it wasn't always this way.
One way you can describe the collapse of the idea of the future is the collapse of science fiction. Now it’s either about technology that doesn’t work or about technology that’s used in bad ways. The anthology of the top twenty-five sci-fi stories in 1970 was, like, ‘Me and my friend the robot went for a walk on the moon,’ and in 2008 it was, like, ‘The galaxy is run by a fundamentalist Islamic confederacy, and there are people who are hunting planets and killing them for fun.’
-Peter Thiel
People once dreamed about building a better future, but for a number of reasons, those dreams died. It is impossible to build a better future if we cannot imagine one. We need better stories. We need people that are optimistic enough about tech to want to build something better than what we have now.
Fortunately, there's one place where these stories still exist.
"The medium is the message"
The interactive nature of video games naturally influences the sorts of stories that can be told.
Character development is ubiquitous in gaming. In most games, there's a gameplay loop in which the player gains new skills and abilities over time, becoming ever stronger. Within science fiction games, that progress inevitably involves technology.
Even in dystopian sci-fi games often contain a cool-factor that can make tech look more appealing. For example, look at Cyberpunk 2077. The gameplay revolves around upgrading your body to an ever-greater extent, allowing you to perform superhuman feats. It also features esoteric ideas like downloading another person's memories. It's helped share these obscure ideas to people that would never have heard of them otherwise.
Please enjoy this video of Elon Musk fanboying over the video game Deus Ex, a science fiction action roleplaying game in which the player controls a cyborg.
Don't be quick to dismiss the power of stories. You never know who will be inspired by them.
Gaming teaches technical skills
Video games are tech-adjacent. Gaming requires sophisticated hardware and software that is often far more advanced than most consumer tech. Gaming contains a regular upgrading ritual. Every few years, gamers eagerly look forward to moving up to the next generation of consoles, which promise improved graphics, performance, and power. This is most evident in PC gaming. Players frequently build custom computers, a process in which they must educate themselves on the intricacies to computer hardware in order to create a machine that serves their needs. Nowhere in mainstream American society is technological progress celebrated more.
I sometimes joke that coordinating MMO parties before ubiquitous voice chat is the reason I can type over 150 words per minute. Many programmers began their careers with custom video game mods for their favorite games. Investigating and fixing bugs teaches players troubleshooting skills.
These things may seem trivial, but they lay the foundation for acquiring more complex skills technical later in life.
It also teaches financial skills
There's a joke that regularly floats around crypto-Twitter: trading in MMO auction houses was great practice for trading crypto. And it's true! Everything you see in crypto markets - including, most of all, the rampant scams and Ponzi schemes - could be found in RuneScape and World of Warcraft. Every longtime player of those games developed a healthy immune system against scammers.
Video games also normalize the concept of digital currencies. Every game has at least one digital currency, and most have more than one. As a result, players learn about concepts such as exchange rates, inflation, opportunity costs, and investment. These games possess fully-fledged economies that do a better job of teaching economics than most high schools - after all, the best way to learn is by doing.
Online gaming is inherently cosmopolitan
In online games, players encounter and make friends with other players from all over the world. This is a unique feature of gaming. As a kid born in a small, rural town, online gaming was my first exposure to people living in other countries. I used to play a game called RuneScape (which is still going strong!) in which thousands of players came together in a persistent, online world. There, many of the best friends I made were living on the other side of an ocean.
Conversations were not limited to the game. We would stay up late to talk about our lives. Discussions of world events were particularly fascinating. I grew up in the wake of the War in Iraq; it's a distant memory now, but in those days trust in the media was still relatively high. Sure, people knew that some media outlets skewed in one direction and some in the others, but there was still a high degree of consensus about basic facts.
My experience was different.
From my conversations with people spanning multiple continents, I learned at a young age that different actors in the media - including powerful, mainstream media - were not always as objective as we would like to believe. I learned that all is not what it seems.
I also learned that, ultimately, people from far away are not all that different from one another. It's one thing to be subjected to endless lectures on tolerance; it's another thing entirely to spend years working and playing alongside people different from you.
The Path Forward
Ultimately, techno-optimism is a philosophy of the future, and the future belongs to the young. The stories they hear will shape the decisions they make as they come of age. And gaming caters to young people. If we want to spread techno-optimism, gaming is the best place to start.