The Cure for Hipsters
Here’s a truism: if you know what a hipster is, then you are a hipster. The simple fact that you know the term, and that it triggers associations and accessories and a loop of Pitchfork Best New Music picks, has damned you to own it. You bit the apple. And so new references, slang and memes slip into your head. A guy in line points to an Asian girl and says, “hipster grifter,” and you choose not to laugh. You know five ways to use the word “bro,” only one of them sincere. Bands you hear fall into an ironic hierarchy based on who’ll admit to not listening to them anymore. You become a petri dish for memes.
Has this wonderful plague finally hit gaming?
Yesterday at GameSetWatch, the ever-vigilent Simon Carless turned his gaze on a particular tumblr blog named RPGs be broke. The work of a young man (?) who says he looks like this -
- it boasts the random thoughts and witty crit of a hardcore gamer and RPG fan who affects a hilarious and appealing naivete about every piece of gaming news that crosses his desk.
Carless naturally thinks it’s an act. His write-up: “Extremely funny blog on game journalism from someone who is writing in a style below their IQ.” I think it’s an act too. On Twitter, they’ve pegged it as a riff on the hipster blog, Hipster Runoff. But more telling, the author didn’t even bother to make up his own name - what does that tell you?
RPGs Be Broke - and how I hate not having a better handle to latch onto - is funny. He’s funny especially if you’re a game journo, and if you can imagine a young gamer having such a passionate spittake over inside baseball stuff like Stephen Totilo’s move from MTV to Kotaku. But I doubt it’ll last, for one reason: gamers aren’t hipsters. And hipster culture doesn’t work in the gamesphere.
Let’s start with the obvious. Gamers are not hip. Gamers accumulate knowledge; hipsters move through it, consuming and relinquishing it daily. Gamers accumulate years’ worth of garbage and trivia, and never let it go. They are still making Portal jokes. A hipster is judged by what’s now; gamers, by what they were playing in 1993.
Hipsters are insiders, or at least, outsiders who know they’ve found something better. But gamers are outsiders, period. The entire social pyramid of gamer culture respects that those who were the most fantastic, bedevilled jock-bait in school shall rise again - and nobody else will care. The coolest people in gaming are cool in a deliciously left-brained context. I think Alice Taylor is impossibly cool, and she makes games that teach science. Writing “ne1″ just can’t place against that.
But beyond these A and B comparisons lies a more crucial point: irony. Hipsters bleed irony. And gamers don’t need it at all.
It is true that many people who write in “snark quotes” have an unbearably facile grasp of irony. And many gamers understand the concept of irony intuitively and intellectually, and not just when they shout, “Nice going” to the one guy left in a Left 4 Dead game who actually made it out alive.
But hipsterism, buried as it is in style, highly values irony. Irony is the way they keep score on whether a thing is relevant. Gamers just use numbers.
You can see it in our tastemakers. I can’t tell you who’s the most important to music fans - if it’s a specific music blog, or Hipster Runoff, or if people still read Pitchfork? - but within the gaming community, I can tell you exactly who our thought leaders are. It’s Gabe and Tycho at Penny Arcade. You cannot possibly dispute it. Even the other popular, aesthetically alternative blog personalities such as Shawn Elliott, or the guy with the hair at Kotaku, deliver mere b-list versions of what Penny Arcade has nailed. In one comic strip and a blog post, they can unfailingly report the temperature of the gaming industry.
They succeed for two reasons. First, all they write about are the games that came out this week and what they think of them. This is all that anybody cares about. It’s why RPGs be broke will never spike traffic with weird jokes about folks like Ian Bogost.
But the greater appeal of Penny Arcade is its almost Christ-like inclusiveness. Gabe and Tycho promote sportsmanship and inclusiveness, and have a genuinely mean word for almost nobody, aside from sacrificial strawmen like Jack Thompson or Uwe Boll. Here’s a thought experiment: read a few posts at Penny Arcade, and then read a few posts of Hipster Runoff. The night doesn’t meet the day. Penny Arcade’s Gabe and Tycho love games and love gamers, and they are dorks and love it. And the community that reads them values cooperation and even sportsmanship, because without them, there is no game.
The Penny Arcade Expo looks like this:
A Hipster Runoff conference would look like this:
To be clear, I don’t mean to say gamers have formed a benevolent, Quaker-like community. For just one small thing, many gamers cannot deal with girls, at all. And I’m also not coming down against the hipsters. They have better parties and music.
But otherwise? The attitudes don’t mix. RPGs be broke may give the games press a new edge. It may awaken a higher level of self-awareness, and that could be useful. But I don’t think it marks an invasion. Even the gamers who know the word “hipster” cannot be called hip, by any yardstick you choose.
In fact, playing videogames may prove to be the only known cure for that terrible, terrible disease. Where’s my “Nobel Prize”?
21/04/2009 at 10:24 pm Permalink
LOL.
22/04/2009 at 5:04 am Permalink
I’m from an older generation that refers to these people as “the kids,” as in, “This is what the kids are into now?”
22/04/2009 at 6:06 am Permalink
The problem with hipsters is that in addition to how self-awareness makes you one, they are not really a culture per se. If anything, they represent the concept of anti-culture. I agree with the Penny Arcade analogy so far as they are active about including people BUT their connection with hipsters comes from their indulgence in the obscure.
A hipster consumes culture on the basis of discovering it, of artificially being a minority and thus validating one’s tastes by constantly engaging with the new constantly. Games have always been susceptible to hipsterdom because they are just now actually becoming popular in the mainstream. Even then, if it isn’t Wii Sports, you’re officially dealing with an obscure product ANY time you talk about a game.
With the indie scene exploding (Have you played Judith? Oh…so amazing) and 3 consoles generating exclusive content, the field of gaming is ripe for hipsters to invade. If anything, the hardcore gamer is already the cultural equivalent of a hipster. They prefer difficult, hard to endure games. They play games to a level far beyond what the average person does.
Same thing, different labels.
22/04/2009 at 8:39 am Permalink
L.B. Jeffries hit it square on the head. Both are more similar than we think, often relying on the race to be more “in the know” than the person next to you. And you can be a hipster in any subculture. Although the term often refers to the “listen to indie rock while sporting the latest fashion” stereotype, it is rather generic. The gaming community can be just as exclusive as it is inclusive, as are many forms of subculture like comic books, anime, skateboarding, etc. You can find hipsters (in a sense) among them. It really depends on how one defines “mainstream.”
I see just as much uncivil discussion and vitriol in Game Life comments as I do when reading Pitchfork inspired blogs. It’s just that the so-called hipsters are more adept with a thesaurus.
22/04/2009 at 10:38 am Permalink
a hipster walks into a bar
he says:
“this place sucks. there are too many hipsters here.”
22/04/2009 at 4:12 pm Permalink
L.B. and Chris McDougall - The stereotypical gamers and hipsters are both obsessives. But two things set them apart: timeliness, and taste. Hipsters - and here I have to loop in Nick Sylvester’s essay on HipsterRunoff, which argues this point much better than I have - pay attention to how time affects what they enjoy. They’re sensitive to relevance, hype, and backlash, and they outgrow something new every day. Gamers are more likely to be enthusiasts, and as Nintendo proves, they don’t outgrow anything.
Then there’s taste. I point you to Ian Cohen’s review of the new Asher Roth, where the challenge of covering a popular white frat-rapper for Pitchfork sends him into a pop culture minefield.
(And by the way, to all you Pitchfork writers out there or upthread, cough cough, all jokes about Pitchfork are meant with love. And you’ve pointed me right more often than Penny Arcade.)
Toups - I know, right?
L.B. - Yep, played Judith. I didn’t get the same “wow” as you, but I need to replay it to see if there’s more to the modern-day timeline than I thought.
22/04/2009 at 8:45 pm Permalink
I’m afraid I don’t fall in line with Sylvester’s definition of the hipster as an exercise in nihilism. Rob Horning at Popmatters, who runs Marginal Utility and mostly writes about internet economies, has an interesting take on the hipster. On precise point:
“The hipster, then, is the boogeyman who keeps us from becoming too settled in our identity, keeps us moving forward into new fashions, keep us consuming more “creatively” and discovering new things that haven’t become lame and hipster.”
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/the-death-of-the-hipster-panel/
They are connected with gamers precisely because of the pursuit of the identity. Gamers are always buying new crap, studying the latest incoming game, and arguing about what they’re going to buy next. How is the gamer not connected with hype, backlash, and outgrowing things? People whine about Halo 3 all the time because of backlash. People raved about Killzone 2 because of hype. All that Nintendo has proved is that when gamers don’t have something new shoved in their faces they will turn on you in a second.
Gah, I’m in war mode right now and it’s unhealthy. Sorry…definitions of what a hipster is are varying and usually revolve around whatever the person can identify that isn’t them.
22/04/2009 at 8:46 pm Permalink
Also, the Judith thing was a wee bit of sarcasm. Just meant it as a reference to something obscure that will be forgotten relatively quickly.
22/04/2009 at 9:11 pm Permalink
L.B. - Something about my blog sure brings out the spit and vinegar in you lately. I feel bad about it. Tomorrow’s post will just be pictures of law students chilling on the beach. Bring a .. martini. And re: Judith - Ha, got it. And agreed.
23/04/2009 at 6:56 am Permalink
Don’t think he didn’t notice yooou.
01/09/2009 at 10:14 am Permalink
I guess this post is a few months old now, but I missed it at the time. I just wanted to point out that the blog in question is (or was — I don’t know if it’s still going) written by Leigh Alexander, a well-known games journalist and, if her Twitter is anything to go by, real-life Brooklyn “hipster”.