Who Gets to Be a Gamer? How Video Games Shape Identity and Belonging

For years, video games have been blamed for laziness, addiction, and wasted potential. But what if that’s not the full story?

In this episode, we sit down with Dr. M. Coopilton, a video game educator, researcher, and creator of Kai Unearthed, to explore how gaming shapes identity, community, and belonging in ways most people overlook.

We unpack why immersive games and online communities can feel more meaningful than real life, how players can find a sense of mastery and self-expression, and why the gamer identity is expanding as Black, brown, queer, and marginalized communities claim their space in gaming.

If you’ve ever been told gaming is a waste of time, or that gaming spaces weren’t meant for you, this conversation might change the way you see gaming entirely.

Kai Unearthed is available to download for free on the Epic Games Store.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Games are set up that way. They're like mind parts where you can learn through failure. You have to fall flat on your face over and over again and get back up and try again and again and again and again. But we're not trained to do that. We're not taught to do that in school in the workplace, right?

SPEAKER_00 0:15

What's up, world? Welcome to Browing Pains, where we have the conversations that live somewhere between your therapist's office and the group chat. I'm Carlos, theater kid turned self-proclaimed corporate puppy.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

And I'm Chad, a licensed marriage and family therapist, but my friends call me Papa Chad.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

Whether you're emotionally avoidant, anxious, or just straight up awkward, pull up a chair, make yourself comfortable, you're in the right place.

SPEAKER_01 0:43

Quick reminder: this podcast is not a substitute for professional mental health care. If you're struggling or know someone who is, please reach out to a licensed mental health professional.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

What's up, bros? Don't let me still like Spongebob. Welcome back to episode six of season two. We're going to be discussing video games. Because for decades, video games have been blamed for laziness, addiction, and even violence. But what if gaming isn't the problem? What if it's the outlet? This week we're talking about why so many men turn to video games to cope, to find purpose, and to experience a sense of progress missing from their real lives. We have joining us Dr. M. Cupleton, a game designer, researcher, and educator who studies how people learn, grow, and develop a sense of identity through video games and play. They're currently an assistant professor of liberal studies at Cal State Northridge.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

Dr. Cupleton has spent over a decade as a teacher and researcher studying, learning, and development, especially critical digital literacy, sustainability, and climate change education.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

I'm excited to have this conversation. Today we'll be chatting with them about how gaming can provide something many people, especially young men, struggle to find elsewhere. Competence, a purpose, and a sense of progress. And with that, we introduce vignette number 004 behind the screen.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

Tyler is 23 years old and lives at home with his mom. She leaves early for work and comes home tired. Tyler's usually waking up when she walks in the door. He doesn't think he has a problem. I just don't see the point, he says, when she asks about getting a full-time job, grinding 9-5 so I can afford a life I don't even want. He does DoorDash when he needs money, enough to stay afloat, enough to tell himself he's not stuck. Most nights he's up until three or four in the morning, headset on, playing with the same group of guys. They strategize, compete, win, lose, run it back. People say gaming is isolating, but Tyler doesn't feel alone. His team relies on him. He's ranked, he's improving, there's progression, there's purpose. It feels real in a way, the rest of life doesn't. When he thinks about the future people expect, stable job, mortgage, routine, he feels nothing, no excitement, just a quiet sense of resignation. What he doesn't say is that when he's not playing, everything feels muted, directionless, like he's waiting for something to start. In the game, he feels focused, necessary, alive. So when the match ends, he doesn't log off. He cues up again, he's not trying to escape his life. He just hasn't found one out there that feels better than the one on his screen.

SPEAKER_00 4:14

All right, and we're now joined with Dr. M. Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_02 4:20

I'm really excited to be here.

SPEAKER_00 4:22

Yeah, I'm excited for you to be here because uh as I mentioned earlier, both of you are not only close friends, but also part of my chosen family. So it's just it's really cool that we can have this conversation together.

SPEAKER_01 4:33

Before we jump into the vignette, if it's okay if I ask, it's just like what has been our experiences with video games growing up? Yeah, I played growing up.

SPEAKER_02 4:42

Um I loved world building in all forms as a as a child and young adult. I love love to build imaginary worlds. So I'd love to do that in digital games as well, you know, SimCity, games like that. I wanted to be a game designer when I was a middle school student. And you know, things have come a long way now, and you know, the barrier of entry to game design has gone down a lot. So I'm coming back now as a game designer to what I wanted to do as a middle middle school student. So my inner 13-year-old is is absolutely thrilled that this is a life I'm living living now.

SPEAKER_00 5:14

So this is what you wanted to do as a 13-year-old, and and you you found your way back. So can you tell us a little bit about how that happened and how that came to be?

SPEAKER_02 5:23

In my 20s, I was a high school teacher. I was working with young people who had been basically pushed out of the public schools. You know, they were trying to finish up their credits before they aged out um at 21 and, you know, get a get a high school diploma. Um I realized that my students were gamer intellectuals. I mean, you know, some of them, for example, were Assassin's Creed fans and they were really um, you know, really into playing Assassin's Creed at that time. And they had all these complex analyses and really thoughtful takes on those games. And um, you know, these were students who, you know, the public school system had in some cases dismissed as as illiterate or not capable of developing complex literacy skills. And but when I saw them interpreting games, I saw a very high degree of literacy, of digital literacy, game literacy. And, you know, I built on that as a teacher. So I would ask them to, you know, write um a fan fiction narrative set in the cinematic universe of Assassin's Creed or, you know, begin to develop the story for a sea uh for a sequel or you know, a new game in the series. And they did that. I mean, you know, people writing, you know, 10-page, you know, complex fiction stories of you know, an Assassin's Creed game set in um, you know, the countries that their that their parents had migrated from. Very, very politically sophisticated and culturally sophisticated work. So I I said to myself, there's something here. I need to take this seriously. Like, I need to take video games seriously, I need to take gamers seriously. This is very serious intellectual dynamics happening. So I I started, you know, getting back into gaming and studying games. And then I started designing games too, mostly actually starting with theater games. Uh so Carlos, you know, um, um, my partner is uh is a theater practitioner. You all did theater together. And so her and I were uh we're designing theater games and facilitating theater games together uh with young people. I, you know, I learned a lot of that from her and I got really into improv and sort of in-person playful imagination and you know, invited my students to do that. And we did things like practicing how to communicate about difficult, you know, topics or how to navigate conflicts. And this, we found that this helped create a classroom environment where people were more prepared to deal with conflict when it came up. And this was something I was very committed to as an abolitionist educator. I, you know, was trying to figure out ways to navigate conflict through, you know, transformative and restorative practices that don't involve, you know, punishment and don't involve calling someone's PO or, you know, do not involve calling the police, you know, so very like deal with the conflict in the communal space. And we found that games helped helped us all develop the skills needed, needed to do that better. So that world, I became I started to become obsessed with imagining that world. I mean, it was just such a wonderful way to maintain hope in the face of a lot of difficult challenges as a teacher and activist and you know, worker and person in the world.

SPEAKER_01 8:22

And I mean, I want to go back to when you were talking about and relating this to the vignette too, with this idea that like that's not how I envision gamers, right? Like you, when you were talking about your students with doing the Assassin's Creed and talking, the way they were able to engage with material in the classroom through video games is quite incredible. I mean, I I I had no idea that people are thinking that critically about video games, and even in the vignette, like his mom, you know, just basically views it as him just wasting time. And, you know, you're you're kind of flipping that on its head.

SPEAKER_02 9:06

There's a couple of things we can we can say about this. Maybe I'll summarize a few and then we can we can kind of unpack it and get into it um more depth. So I mean, one is that that this this vignette, there are people like this, right? There are gamers like this, but this person is not, is probably not the average representative gamer in 2026. Gaming has become so popular now that the vast majority of people, especially the vast majority of young people, engage with digital games in some in some form, right? So people are, you know, the vast majority of gamers are not spending all night in their mom's basement playing games and like sleeping in. I mean, people are playing games on their phones while they take the train to work. You know, they're going and playing basketball with their friends and then also playing, you know, uh playing games on, you know, on a console or a PC with their friends. It's interwoven with people's lives at a level that is it's just it's everywhere now, right? So it's it's sort of how music or TV or film is everywhere, right? I mean, we wouldn't say that someone who, you know, in enjoys music, a music enjoyer is a musicer, right? But we say someone who enjoys games is a gamer. There's so many different kinds of gamers now. There's sort of a there's space in in that world for many, many different people, right? But but that being said, there are people who do have the experience of this young man in the vignette. And so it is important that we talk about these kinds of experiences of somebody who is working in a gig economy job, you know, DoorDash and um, you know, living with his mom and getting into really hardcore uh competitive gaming with, you know, with his friends and really trying to level up and get better at it and and you know, is getting better at it and finds some satisfaction in that, but then people around him don't don't understand what he's doing or are judging. That is real, that is a real experience. So we I think we can talk about what people can do when they if they find themselves in that situation, or what people can do if somebody in their life is in that situation, you know, how can we how can we move forward from there?

SPEAKER_01 11:11

Yeah, thank you for setting that stage. I mean, a big part of what we like to do here, I believe, is try to deconstruct, right? And so I'm definitely interested in hearing more about your perspective about how you think this guy got here. Yeah, yeah. And so like you talked a little bit about like the gamer and how that was developed, and maybe he latched on to that. I don't know. Like, what do you think were some of the reasons, knowing like the gaming culture and the historical background? Like, how is it that we have this trope that this guy has fallen into?

SPEAKER_02 11:46

I think there's two ways that I could answer that. So psychologically and then maybe sociologically. Let's start, let's start psychologically. Let's think about this, you know, where this this young man might be coming from. Like what, what, what is what is this taking care of for him, right? What is this this pattern of gaming taken care of for him? My guess is that playing in this way is probably a way that he finds the way that he discovers what he's capable of. Right. This is this is something that human beings want to and need to do. We want, we're constantly learning. We love to learn, right? I mean, it's easy that this can sometimes be suppressed or dulled by bad experiences with school or the workplace. But I really, I as a as a learning scientist, I really do believe that, you know, learning is a fundamentally pleasurable activity. It's something that humans seek, right? I mean, we our minds want to see what we're capable of in the world. They our minds want to see how the world responds when we do things, right? And certainly this is this is associated with how a lot of people understand masculinity, also, right? I mean, wanting to wanting to get better at things and, you know, really um challenge, like a lot of men want to challenge themselves, right? They wanna they want to get better at something, and that's an important part of their identity. So, what do we do then when we live in a society where work and school often don't provide the environment necessary to really find out what you're capable of? Wow. You know, we live in a capitalist society where the skills that that that matter to this society are only the ones that are marketable and slable on a market that is in crisis, that's in some ways, you know, um very chaotic and maybe in some ways shrinking. And a lot of people's jobs are being replaced by AI and robots and things like that, automation. This has been going on even before AI, all the way back through the 20th century. I mean, for a young man, you know, who's 23, right? Like this character we imagined, right? Entering the workforce, that's a very rough situation, right? I mean, there's in many areas, there's in many areas of the world, including in the US, there's chronic unemployment for young people that age. People are graduating school and um, you know, having trouble finding jobs. Uh so there's a question of even if he even can find a job, right? Beyond DoorDash and sort of casualized um gig work, right? Yeah. So there's a question of does he even have the motivation to seek one if everybody around him is being denied access to that? But if you even if he were to find one, is that job going to be using all of the skills that he has? Is it going to be challenging him to learn? Is it going to be a space where he becomes he feels like he's becoming a better person, more competent, you know, a place where his brilliance can shine? Probably not, right? Under under a capitalist society, probably not. I mean, most jobs don't allow that kind of self-expression. There's a lot of alienation, right? Where you just do what your boss tells you to do and make money for a corporation. And that's not a particularly satisfying way to live a life. I mean, people, you know, feel like they're they're selling their hours of their lives away to these companies and getting nothing in return. So I empathize with this young man when he's saying that that that life doesn't hold a lot of allure for him. It's not intriguing. He's not, he's not imagining greatness or, you know, future of excellence through working a nine to five job if if he even has access to one. And then we could talk about how school, excuse me, how school, you know, is set up to prepare people for this kind of economy and this kind of job market. So a lot of the assignments are not, are not, you know, spaces where people can, they're not spaces where people playfully explore what they're capable of. That's not what school, that's not how school is designed, right? So school is is often very disengaging. And I've seen this with many of my students who have been disengaged with school. And my job has been to try to try to re-engage them as an educator. So I've had to rethink what school is. I've had to teach in ways that are not traditional, right? Most schools are set up as a factory to produce future workers for a factory like, you know, network, networked, you know, machinery of the economy. So that's that's what these young folks are facing, right? And I I empathize with them where they're saying, that's not, that's not what I want, right? And then in contrast, you know, when he, when this young man, you know, logs on with his friends to a you know online multiplayer game and they they build a team and they they excel and they get better and they and this is important, they learn from their mistakes. It's a space where I noticed that in the vignette, it's a space where they they they lose together, then they learn from that, they get better, and then they win. Right. And how often do we get a chance to do that in school or at work? Wow. How often are we are we rewarded for failing well, learning from it, getting back up, trying it again, and seeing what we're capable of? That's not the message that we usually get in work or school. I mean, it's especially, you know, now there's so much eugenesis type thinking out there where it's like, you know, young people have to prove that they're among the chosen who can get one of these good jobs, right? They have to prove that very early. They're pressured to prove that very early, that they are somehow chosen or superior or whatever bullshit, right? That, you know, metric that they're being judged by. Yeah. Just like, you know, these eugenicists used to breed horses and they would like push them to the breaking point, their legs were breaking, you know, to see, see who could, you know, which horse could run the fastest. And then that horse had potential. So that was good, that horse would be invested in, and you know, um, you know, and that that kind of thinking was applied to the education system and the the workplace in many ways. And it increasingly is all this conversation about eugenics, is even there in startup culture, right? Like startups in Silicon Valley have to prove themselves early and then they get investment capital. So, I mean, that kind of mindset, it's so much pressure, and that's not actually how people learn. People learn through making mistakes in the lower stakes environment and then and then, you know, learning from that and then preparing and then doing the next thing that's harder. And it's a, it's a, it's a sequential process, which is how games are designed, right? Games are set up that way. They're like mind parts where you can learn through failure and you know, and and you can get better and better, but the rest of society is not designed that way. So it makes sense that people would move, you know, move into gaming. Incidentally, um, as a game designer, that's how we make games too. I mean, we make a rough prototype. We don't try to demonstrate our potential early on as if we're like trying to, you know, audition for American Idol or, you know, say we're part of the chosen or whatever. That's not what we do. We make something that's rough. We don't know if it's gonna work or not. Often it doesn't. We learn from that failure. Then we iterate, we make a new version, we do that again, we go through that over and over again. It's so humbling. You have to fall flat on your face over and over again and get back up and try again and again and again and again. But we're not trained to do that. We're not taught to do that in school in the workplace, right? I mean, even though that actually is what creates great games and great technology in general, but we're not taught to do that, right? Usually. So it makes sense this young man finds solace and joy. I mean, joy particularly, right? I mean, I understand joy to be with this sort of delight at finding what we're capable of together, right? So it sounds like he's experiencing joy, and that's hard to come by these days. So I love that for him.

SPEAKER_01 19:06

Just such a breath of fresh air to think about this guy is not a loser. No. It's just like he is trying his best in a in a world that is not set up to be able to let everybody succeed to their own fullest potentials and their own end games. And typically, this machinist factory building culture that we have is to be able to build someone else's dream and not about creating some of yours. I don't think anybody is talking about this level of introspection and the psychology behind video games about why gamers are doing it. And so it was just so great to hear.

SPEAKER_00 19:50

It's so relatable. I mean, I think for me, I I think back to when I was 23 and, you know, like freshly graduated from from college and just feeling directionless and lost and and feeling feeling a sense of hopelessness too, right? Of like just not like uncertainty, I would say, not sure what the next five years would look like. And it's scary, and it's scary to not feel like one, like you don't have any sort of support or anywhere to turn to. And then two, I don't think we're we're a lot of the time we're we're set up to to be able to, like you said, learn and and iterate and grow and and try new things and and to fall flat on our face without having any sort of repercussions. That's not how life is set up. Yeah. I'm curious to hear more about if there are any differences between the population that you worked with, you know, when you first started, maybe 10 years ago or so, to now, right? Like it's I think it's a very it's a very different time right now. And then it's also a different generation, right? Like where I'm I'm assuming you're you work with uh mostly Gen Z students, right?

SPEAKER_02 21:02

It's a good question. There's more of an interest now in designing games. So I'm I'm supporting, you know, young people in making their own games. Also, more of society is now gamified. So these workplaces that in schools that don't really allow us to explore, playfully explore our full potential, haven't figured out how they're they haven't transformed themselves to support us in expressing our full potential, right? But instead, they try to motivate us to stay engaged by sort of adding on like cheap tricks from game design, you know, like imitating video games, like you know, having a leaderboard or, you know, um badges or you know, that kind of thing. And this isn't, it's not always bad. Sometimes that can be good. I mean, I don't want to discount it. There's some really interesting work happening in gamification in certain fields. But I think a lot of young people look at this and say, this is pretty corny. Like I, you know, I'm being asked to, you know, it's like the classic thing, you know, you're working a working class job, and then you know, instead of giving you a raise, the bottom. Get you a pizza party and you know a certificate of recognition for the you know best worker or whatever. You know, it's just like come on.

SPEAKER_01 22:07

You know, like get your lame ass out of here.

SPEAKER_02 22:12

Let's have a union contract instead. Like I don't get caught. You know, like so I think a lot of young people are looking at this and they're saying, okay, this is they're critical of it. So I think, you know, maybe um there's more of an interest in developing game design skills to think about how you can change the game or break the game or play a different game. You know, this question of how do you stop playing someone else's game when you've sort of been forced into it without your consent, right? I mean, that's a I think that that's coming up more now now. Um social media is still gamified, right? So it's just that thing I was saying earlier, games and the rest of society are intertwining. So you see now also with Gen Z, you see a lot of gamer um concepts and and you know, jargon and and words being you know used in different ways, right? So I see, you know, I hear young people saying, I don't want to be an MPC. I want to have main character energy. I'm not trying to be an NPC in someone else's story, right? Like to this young man that sounds like the young man in the in the vignette, he doesn't want to be an NPC in someone else's story. He's he logs in with his friends, he has main character energy. He wants to, right? You know, he wants to express, he wants to be the protagonist of his story, right? So I hear that with my current students now, college students, you know, um, a lot of that kind of thing. Um, they look at roles that they've been assigned as sort of this MPC, you know, right, sort of AI robotic role that they're expected to um to play, you know. I mean, it's so interesting because so many professors are like, oh my God, they're using ChatGPT to cheat. And, you know, there's there are valid concerns about that. Um, but I think we need to be asking, well, okay, even before ChatGPT existed, right? Why is college or why is school training people often to act in a robotic way? Yeah. Like the fact that ChatGPT can mirror easily these tasks, you know, well, it's partially because humans were expected for a long time, for many generations previously already, were expected to act like NPCs, like robots.

SPEAKER_01 24:09

That is crazy. Oh my God. That is blowing my mind right now. That's wild. That is crazy. AI is sucking the benefits of our ability as humans to be able to make us be good NPCs, and then they're just like regurgitating that information for us.

SPEAKER_02 24:30

Yep.

unknown 24:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:34

Yeah, pr pretty much. So, I mean, you know, I'm very empathetic with my students when they're, you know, they're being questioned so much of, you know, why are you using AI? And that some of them do use AI in problematic ways. And we have conversations about that. We try to shift that. I'm not advocating AI here. There's all kinds of problems with it, right? I mean, environmental, ethical, there's racist biases. But I'm just saying, like, you know, educators need to look at our institutions and our society and say, well, maybe people wouldn't be using AI to cheat if school were more engaging, right? I mean, maybe if they you wouldn't hire a robot to do push-ups for you to get stronger in the gym, right? But our classrooms don't feel like a gym. You should feel like a mind gym. It should be like, okay, I'm gonna get, I want to get better at this through doing a hard thing, right? I get to practice and practice, and and you know, or maybe if you know, maybe it feels like a video game. I'm gonna do I'm gonna grind and get better and learn, right? You wouldn't outsource ChatGPT to play a video game for you. You're gonna play it yourself because you want to get better, right? Well, if our classrooms felt more like that, maybe more people would go to class instead of instead of playing video games or then having ChatGPT do their homework for them.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

Is that fair to make that comparison then that the video games can be seen as a gym for your mind?

SPEAKER_02 25:49

I I would want to broaden it out because not everybody's, you know, not everyone's a gym bro, right? I mean not everyone's a gym bro. Jim G, uh game literacy scholar, he said um games are like mind parks. They're curated spaces that are set up in a way that the human brain likes to learn.

SPEAKER_01 26:07

Basically, what you're saying is society has set up Tyler in this vignette to basically think that like society's whack as shit. And like we should just have more fun and be able to express myself a hell of a lot better in this video game.

SPEAKER_02 26:25

Yeah. So we could talk about what is it, what does it mean to change that then, right? How do you not get stuck in Tyler's situation? I mean, at some level, the broader society would have to change. We would need very drastic social change, right? I mean, we would need a situation where, you know, you're not spending all your time working for somebody else for working for a corporation for someone else's street, right? School and work, all that would have to change. Maybe we don't need to be working so so much, you know, um, to produce things that are destroying the planet. I mean, maybe we can have a shorter work week or, you know, um, people talking even about wanting to abolish work. I mean, there's always going to be hard things we need to do together to survive climate change. And, you know, we're gonna have to put in effort. But but again, people put people will put in effort when it's meaningful, right? Do you see that? I mean, Tyler is putting in all this effort to play these games and get better at them. People put effort into effort in in, you know, in romantic relationships when, you know, they really love somebody, right? I mean, people will put in effort for their community to make it better, right? So maybe we need a society that's more like that, right? Rather than the one we're in right now. Now, of course, you know, Tyler has to live long enough to see that if it happens, right? So we could we could say, what advice will we give to Tyler to, you know, now to, you know, you know, next Tuesday, right? For what, you know, maybe, maybe there are some choices he could make that could that could be better in the meantime. I mean, I guess I would say to him, there's nothing wrong with your gaming. Like it's it's great for all the reasons we're talking about. Can you take some of that vibe that you find gaming and can you apply that in other parts of your life? So you're you're you're finding what you're capable of. You're seeking, you're on a journey to find what you're capable of with your friends in this game, right? How else can you do that? Maybe, maybe it's finding what you're capable of, helping out your mom around the house. Maybe you and your mom could have a conversation. How could we improve our living situation, right? Maybe, maybe, you know, you go on go on YouTube, watch some DIY videos, figure something out, right? Or learn to cook something really, really, really, you know, wonderful that you want to share with her, right? I mean, that kind of thing, right? I mean, that can all be play, right? That could be playful. You can apply a gamer mindset to that. And that's not some gamified cheap trick thing with a leaderboard. That's that's real play. I mean, this is ancient, that's play is an ancient technology that all of our ancestors did, right? I mean, we can recover that, right? Online and offline. So, you know, maybe get together with your friends and you know, go go on an adventure, right? Go explore the city or the woods or the beach or something, right? See what else you're capable of. Because you probably are capable of a lot more than just winning this game.

unknown 29:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:00

So let's see, like, that's just one game that you're gonna play in your life. So, how else could you play? How can you play well?

SPEAKER_00 29:09

I did wanna circle back to the the whole issue around identity, right? And I think from my understanding, was that when um video games first became popular, it was more about this like very sort of white male, like that was the the target audience were were white males. And I think that speaking from from personal experience, I feel like it was not very common for people of color at that time, I would say in the in the 90s, to to have that sort of luxury. I I would say that video games felt like a luxury, right?

SPEAKER_03 29:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:46

And how that that's clearly shifted uh over the years.

SPEAKER_01 29:52

Well, then I think you were also talking about just like when video games were starting to design, like the marketing strategy was also centered around people like white men who have expendable income. And maybe that is actually from a sociological lens, maybe that is why people view video games as lazy, is because they view video games as a leisure activity. But now games have pushed past all of that leisure activity stuff, and now it's about engagement and challenging yourself and doing all this stuff. And maybe back then it was just about a leisure thing, but it's much more than that now. Those are both really good points.

SPEAKER_02 30:26

Yeah. Yeah, this is everything you just said is true. That like in the 90s, the main gaming companies around console gaming, particularly, marketed those consoles as luxury items to middle class white men with you know with with expendable income, right? And it was it was seen as a leisure. But I think there's two two caveats there. One is that consoles have not always not been the only form of gaming, right? There's arcades, there's other, you know, there's other forms of gaming, there's PC gaming. And then two, in all of that, there's there always, all the way through the history of video games, there has been particip there has been substantial participation from people of color. It just has been marginalized by the dominant sort of marketing strategies of the game industry in the 90s. Black game designers and hardware designers have, you know, helped shape the formation of video games, right? I mean, you know, Gerald Lawson, you know, made the first controller with a cartridge, or Muriel Tramis, you know, innovated some of the early narrative point-un-click adventure games um in the 90s. Um, there's always been contributions from people of color. And there's, you know, folks like Trey Andrea Rushworm and Kashana Gray who have really documented these histories of like the role of people of color in in gaming. I think that that's important to say Asian people have been majorly involved in, you know, the development of video games. I mean, you know, Nintendo's a Japanese, you know, company, and um some of the iconic characters, you know, Mario, you know, um, came from, you know, a Japanese cultural context, right? So, but then even companies like Nintendo, though, were still marketing in the 90s to middle class white men. So it's so just because it there's people color involved doesn't necessarily mean that it's still right, that it's like not reproducing some form of you know institutional racism, right? So it's like that's that's a um that's a that's a reality. And then this relates to what we were talking about, you know, we we sort of touched on at the beginning and we said we're gonna come back to, right? Is that um that the gamer identity itself was so historically tied to this marketing decision of these console companies to market to white men, so the gamer identity for a period of time became associated with white men and in sort of mainstream culture and particularly, like you said, with leisure activity. But in any case, now because the cost of production for a lot of this hardware and software is going down, and um, and also particularly with the rise of mobile games, so the vast majority of people have access to cell phone, right? So people are playing mobile games. So now um, you know, there are very vibrant black and white next folks and indigenous folks are claiming, you know, claiming their space within the gamer identity. So then that's and then there's a backlash against that from um, you know, fascist groups and you know, groups that um imagined some mythic past where only white men were gamers. And again, that was never that was never real. That was that was just a market, that was just a marketing fantasy. But there's you know, people color were always involved in games, but then they'll sometimes organize, you know, harassment campaigns against people of color and against women, like gamers or game developers. And again, Katronic Race documented ways that, you know, black gamers have resisted that or coped with that um through supporting each other, um, you know, with with you know affinity groups and things like that. And even game, you know, game developers like Gamergate, you know, there's been a couple iterations now. There's there's some things going on now that are similar to that. But Gamergate was a targeted harassment campaign against, you know, women, women developers, game developers, um, mob groups online trying to like push women out of the game industry through death threats and you know sexual violence.

SPEAKER_01 33:59

It's creating this like um this like violence and this inner anger in men that I see a lot in the room too, not maybe so much with video game clients, um, but just like this like a fear of like identity like intrusion, you know, and it's like, no, this is my this is my gamer thing, right? And that also maybe um you know shadows them and keeps them in a box and not able to feel like you know they can fully express themselves and and so also welcome everybody into the gaming world too.

SPEAKER_02 34:32

And I'm like, bro, why are you upset that your thing is popular? Right. Like you're cool now. Are you mad, bro? Like you're cool, like just like come to terms with the fact that you're cool, like you're cool, like people want to do what you do. Yeah, you don't have to be like special and separate from everybody else to have fun.

SPEAKER_01 34:53

But that's the thing, is like I think you touched on it earlier, like the psychology of men and in the society is that we are only valued if we are viewed as special. And so if this one thing that I feel special with and I'm performing as is being, in my perception, being taken away from me, then I'm gonna get angry. Right. And it's like we need to change that. Your value is not tied to your ability to be special. You are already valuable for being who you are. And I'm sorry that you live in a society that doesn't actually show that to you. 100%.

SPEAKER_02 35:26

100%. Yeah, that that that that's yeah, that's so real, especially when some of these young men are like feeling like they're losing or they're not, they're not like living up to what they were supposed to or whatever. Um so then they yeah, they lash out, right? They lash out at people of color for for this and scapegoat or they scapegoat queer people for it or whatever it might be. And it's just it's your boss. It's not any of us, it's your boss, right? It's like it's not, it's not Latino people, it's not black people, it's not queer people, it's your boss, it's it's it's Wall Street, it's it's billionaires, yeah. It's billionaires, just these tech moguls that are replacing you with AI. They're the people who are making your life hard, not us.

SPEAKER_01 36:00

It's our political environment. And so, yeah, no wonder you're getting angry because you don't feel that there's a real way that you were actually succeeding, and you had a little solace, you had a little reprieve, and now your space is getting getting a little uh taken over and and and also shared, not taken over, let's reframe that a little bit. Your space is being shared, um, and you don't like it. And so you're getting a little getting a little angry there, buddy. Yeah, tough shit, Tyler. Get used to it. Better buckle up and deal with it. Or or or like I said, or I think psychologically, like from a mental health perspective, like we just know that like connection um builds help healthier, happier lives, right? And so you said um high quality online connection is better than low quality in-person connection. And so I think we need to challenge people like Tyler to get out there and find high quality in-person connection so that you're not stuck and isolated and and feeling like you're in your mom's basement or whatever. It's like yeah, there is opportunities out there for you to have that high quality connection. You you might have to build it though. You might have to build it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:15

I think I want to clarify that a little bit. That it in in my experience, high, you know, high quality in-person connection is better than high quality online connection, right? But high quality online connection is better than low quality in-person connection. Right, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 37:29

Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_02 37:30

So yeah, so ultimately, like we were saying earlier, we I'd recommend to Tyler, see, you know, go touch some grass, go play, go play with, go, go, like take your gamer mindset. You know, you don't have to hide that you're a gamer, right? Take everything you learn from that and like bring it into bring it into other things, right? Bring it into going on an adventure with your friends at IRL, right? Like it's there's a lot, that's a big world, there's a lot to explore, and you know, you're capable of it, right? You're worthy of it, right? Yeah, that's what I would say.

SPEAKER_00 37:57

I think this is uh the perfect place for for you to plug Kai Unearth. You know, if you if you'd like to give some more information about the work that you've been doing and and what's coming down the pipeline for you.

SPEAKER_02 38:09

So Kai Unearthed is available for free on Steam in the Epic Game Store and niche.io. It's a branching narrative game with open world exploration, psychedelic scavenger hunt dynamics. And it comes with a meditative journal as well, an analog journal that you can write in and meditate with as you play. As you play in the game, you can journal as well? Uh-huh. Oh, wow. The game prompts you to journal, and the journal prompts you to play the game. So we're trying to market it also to people who don't consider themselves gamers, but like meditative journaling and like therapy and like meditation and mindfulness, and you know, um, to show, to show to them what games can do, right? Games, you know, I I've done research on mindful gaming and you know, I've worked with teams on games for mindfulness and stuff. So we, you know, we're drawing from that and and how we designed this. And, you know, you can really take it at your own pace. We we did we did that intentionally. So it there's heavy material in there, right? Am I dealing with you know institutional racism and you and Tempest are like hanging out in like the reclaimed runes of a youth jail, former juvie, right? That's now overgrown with, you know, like, you know, with with plants and mushrooms and everything. And you're, you know, you're it's so it's heavy, right? I mean, you're imagining there's a moment where like, you know, you you encounter an image of like the George Floyd rebellion in 2020, right? You know, a police station burning. I mean, it's intense, right? So we we created this, we try to create this space where people could pause and reflect and take it at their own pace, and it's all very consent-based, right? I mean, you can decide what you want to do and what you don't want to do and things like that in the game. There's lots of choices and options.

SPEAKER_01 39:32

So thank you so much for bringing your breath of fresh air to this conversation and probably all the spaces that you do. I mean, you know, when when we think about what you could be doing with your interests in games, you could just be laying over and just allowing these big corporations to continue to explode and take over. And here you are, challenging spaces, challenging our listeners, challenging ourselves to um think about not only ourselves, but about how we potentially are overjudging and pathologizing others for games. And um just what an incredible perspective and experience that I think that you're providing to many people. So thank you so much for sharing that.

SPEAKER_02 40:17

You can find more um of my work at mcoupelton.com. There's a portfolio of um games I've made and worked on video games, analog games. There's some talks. I gave a talk at the Game Developer Conference, one of the main industry conferences um that's linked on there as well about how people imagine you know black liberation and liberated futures based on some work I did with black colleagues around Enough for Futures game jam. There's things like that. So, you know, things that people could could you know implement in the classroom if you're an educator or um ideas you might be able to draw from as a game designer. Um, or if you know you're a gamer and you want to understand your how you play better, you know, some of the research articles on there might be interesting. And keep an eye out for Tempest Unearth, the sequel that's going to be set in Los Angeles. Um, and it's basically a community organizing simulator. Like you practice organizing people who might who you might meet in LA, your neighbors and friends, you practice organizing with them as they try to um survive and do mutual aid and you know liberate the neighborhood from environmental racism. So it's uh yeah, it's related to themes of climate justice, things like that. That'll be out hopefully sometime next year. We're working on it now. Thank you. Thank you so much for engaging conversation around it. I think I I'm really excited, particularly about reaching and connecting with the folks who engage with your your podcast. I think you're doing something really important here, and especially for on this topic, right? I mean, this is exactly the kind of conversation I want to be having. So thank you.

SPEAKER_00 41:47

That was a really cool fucking episode. Holy shit.

SPEAKER_01 41:50

That was wild, dude. Yeah, I mean, almost like low-key envious of their mind, you know, like I think we we get so caught up in our own little worlds, and these companies and our sociopolitical environment does such a good job of keeping our minds small. And and I fall victim to this too, you know, social media or just uh kind of the busyness of day-to-day and just think about the possibilities that are out there. You know, it's just um we need to be reminded of that. I don't know. Those are my those are my concluding thoughts from it. It just was uh incredible.

SPEAKER_00 42:30

Yeah, no, I agreed. And I also just like like you said, they're sort of flipping this this idea of what video games should be or are supposed to be, you know, on it on its head. And something that that came to mind for me was going back to the vignette where Tyler feels and and I think that's a sentiment that we can all relate to, feeling like feeling unworthy, feeling not good enough, you know what I mean? Like feeling just really down on yourself. And so what you know sort of better way to maybe build some skills, build some confidence through through video games, right? And and and maybe being able to see things from a different perspective. And what if Tyler, you know, this 23-year-old DoorDash driver who stays up till 2 a.m. What if they're the next sort of great community organizer, leader? You like you never know, right? And so I think just giving people different outlets and and different um points of view. I think nothing but good can come from that.

SPEAKER_01 43:41

Yeah, so thanks again for joining us. Next episode's theme is on being a workaholic and overworking, and maybe our very own corporate poppy here can can help us shed some light on uh the the corporate culture of workaholicism.

SPEAKER_00 43:57

Do we really want to go there?

SPEAKER_01 43:59

I think we do. I think that's what I'm gonna push you to do, so buckle up, baby.

SPEAKER_00 44:04

Alright, alright. Looking forward to it then. Alright, yeah, thank you again for joining us. And we'll leave you with this question. If you can be anyone you choose to be in a video game, who are you when you log off? Thanks for hanging with us for another episode of Browing Pains. If today's conversation made you laugh, think, or feel a little less alone, share it with a family member, a friend, and anyone else that needs to hear this. We're here to start conversations that matter. Your shares help us reach the people who need to hear them.

SPEAKER_01 44:40

Follow us on Instagram at BrowingPains for video clips and updates. And if you've got a story, question, or a hot take you want us to unpack, slide into our inbox at growing painspod at gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you.

SPEAKER_03 44:56

You mad, bruh?