More Thoughts On Video Games, Competition, Success, And Housing
When is "work harder" a truth, and when is it an insult?
I wrote recently about a “thing that sounds like it’s about housing but isn’t”: the discourse over video games in the fighting genre, which is known for being tricky to master, and the debates between people who are determined to get good or already good, and the people who just want some casual matches without being obliterated.
The themes here struck me as very similar to the themes in housing debates, especially inter-generation housing debates: the online gamer’s “Git gud” is the boomer’s “Just work harder and don’t buy avocado toast,” the preternaturally good gamers are the homeowners and gatekeepers, etc.
Obviously, the analogy breaks down, because you can play a video game offline, or play a different video game, or a different genre of game, and the stakes are pretty low. “I want to play online matches on this specific video game and not get obliterated by crazy good players” isn’t the same sentiment as “I want to be able to afford a home with normal salary/savings in a reasonable amount of time.”
But what I want to come back to a little bit here is the idea that (some people’s) success can be bad for everyone else. Is that true? I feel like I’m validating the idea that young people are just entitled or socialists or whatever when I say that, but I can kind of see it.
You can see a video game, going with the initial example, as something that’s there for everyone, at least in theory. When a handful of players become preternaturally good, such that you can no longer count on having a shot on winning every match without also being preternaturally good, in a sense these player have wrongly privatized a public good by being too good. Who says I shouldn’t be able to fire up the online mode and just have some fun?
(Mario Kart is a neat counterexample, while we’re talking video games and “socialism”—when you’re doing really badly in Mario Kart, the game showers you in powerful items to help you pull ahead, and when you’re in first place, you get almost no power-up items at all. Mario Kart groks progressive taxation and redistribution!)
It’s the same kind of thought I’ve had about the inflation of prices for theme parks and wineries and things. On some level that feels like a public problem. As long as there are enough people with too much money, those prices will inflate because those people will pay the inflated price—simple economics—and the majority of less-wealthy people will lose reasonable access to the thing.
And then there are the people really good at a job, who force up the expected standard. I guess it’s kind of like “What right do you have to be so good at this?” That one crazy-good person is a threat to everyone else’s decent middling mediocrity. Doesn’t a humane society need room for mediocrity?
Of course, there’s also a certain insecurity or lack of confidence in such a sentiment. Most people are good at something, and the answer is to be good at what you’re good at and let other people be good at what they’re good at. Nothing good comes of seeking equality or fairness by tearing other people down.
But, when are you simply tearing other people down, and when are you fixing an actual inequality that needs fixing? Getting angry at a coworker for being “too good” and raising the expected standard of performance in the company is obviously a kind of laziness (or maybe it isn’t laziness, and the company is just too intense for you, but the answer is still to look for a different job).
The “rich people ruining erstwhile middle-class entertainment experiences” is a tougher one. The answer isn’t to just have fewer rich people. But the logic of competition and free enterprise is that you charge what your customers will pay. How do you preserve an affordable Disney trip or California wine country trip in the face of a globalized world getting richer? What if you can’t? Is saying “just find another place to visit” the same as saying “git gud,” or it just true?
What if it’s a kind of trick our brains play on us, this feeling that wonderful things that used to be cheap and abundant are being lost and squeezed out and colonized by the rich? Maybe at heart that’s premised on a mix of rose-colored glasses and Malthusian misanthropy. Maybe we need to get better at gratitude and appreciation.
So you can see how this feels like housing discourse: “work harder,” “move somewhere else,” the costs of growth, etc. I know this is a little all over the place, but what I’m trying to think through here is why housing is different, and why it isn’t entitled to want to be able to live somewhere.
I think we’ve kind of lost that, and it seems to me we think of housing the same way we think about the video games or the scarce vacation destinations: as prizes you have to earn, or go without. In other words, we think of homes, neighborhoods, towns, and cities as consumer goods at all different market segments, rather than as shared, civic places that nobody owns and that should almost by definition be open to a big cross-section of society.
There, that’s the conclusion: a lot of the problems with the way we talk and think about housing come down to a missing civic attitude, a misunderstanding of what a community is, and application of consumer thinking to something that is much more than that. We’ve forgotten what a city, in the broad and general sense, is.
What do you think?
Related Reading:
No Housing Please, We’re a Community
More on Housing and Generational Divides
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When it comes to different eras, prices aren't always the important variable. Many things were relatively expensive in the 50s. Travel and restaurants have always been fairly expensive. The important variable is income. Before 1980 ordinary jobs paid a lot better than they do now, so ordinary workers could afford more of the relatively expensive things.
Two big exceptions: housing and medical care are WILDLY expensive now by every possible comparison. For those two necessities, price IS the variable.
I feel like this also ties into the previous things you've written about the low end of the market disappearing. There used to be local amusement parks that were mostly patronized be people who lived nearby or who happened to be passing through. These places are mostly gone now.
I think a part of what caused their demise is that, in an era when everyone has a internet-connected smart phone, we demand a higher level of entertainment than we used to. The kind of amusement park that consists of a couple of wacky rides and a petting zoo may just not be enticing enough to convince people to leave the house these days.
So, we end up with high-end theme parks like Disney World, some more mid-tier places like Six Flags, but nothing on the low end.