Did Video Games Get Tamer After 9/11?

I've been thinking about something strange when it comes to video games.

Did video games get... tamer after 9/11?

Now, before anyone thinks I'm about to claim that video games became wholesome after September 11, 2001, let me be clear:

Fucking obviously not.

Video games have remained violent.

They've remained sexual.

They've remained disturbing.

They've remained controversial.

They've remained bizarre.

There have been games released since 9/11 that are absolutely fucking insane.

Games have depicted war, terrorism, murder, torture, mass destruction, genocide, drugs, sex, horror, psychological trauma, and all kinds of other fucked-up shit.

So I'm not saying video games stopped pushing boundaries.

What I'm talking about is something much harder to define.

A feeling.

A difference in the overall creative atmosphere.

Because when I look at a lot of games from before 9/11, particularly games from the 1980s and 1990s, there is sometimes a sense of creative recklessness that I don't feel quite as strongly in the mainstream gaming industry today.

There was a willingness to make some weird fucking shit.

Games could be bizarre.

Games could be ugly.

Games could be crude.

Games could be ridiculous.

Games could be incredibly violent.

Games could be experimental.

And sometimes they could be completely fucking stupid.

But there was something about the willingness to just try things.

The gaming industry was still young.

Developers were figuring out what video games could even be.

There weren't necessarily established formulas for everything.

And that gave creators room to experiment.

You could have a game that was a platformer.

Or a fighting game.

Or a racing game.

Or a first-person shooter.

But you could also have some bizarre hybrid that probably wouldn't get greenlit by a major publisher today.

You could make something incredibly niche.

You could make something incredibly weird.

You could make something that probably wouldn't appeal to everyone.

And sometimes it worked.

Sometimes it didn't.

But there was room to fail.

Then 9/11 happened.

Again, I'm not saying 9/11 single-handedly transformed the video game industry.

That would be far too simplistic.

The industry was already changing.

Graphics were improving.

Consoles were becoming more powerful.

Online gaming was growing.

The PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube generation was arriving.

And the video game industry was becoming increasingly profitable.

But 9/11 changed the cultural environment in which games existed.

War became a much more immediate subject.

Terrorism became a much more immediate subject.

Images of collapsing buildings, airplanes, mass casualties, and military operations carried a different emotional weight.

And video games had to exist within that new reality.

You could no longer look at certain imagery quite the same way.

And some games responded directly to that shift.

Military shooters became increasingly prominent.

The industry discovered that modern warfare could be an incredibly marketable setting.

But something interesting happened.

War could be portrayed more realistically while simultaneously becoming incredibly formulaic.

You could have games depicting enormous destruction while still feeling like carefully constructed entertainment products.

You could have cities being destroyed on screen while the overall experience remained highly controlled.

You could have terrorism as a plot device without necessarily exploring the deeper political or human implications.

Again, that's not inherently bad.

Video games are entertainment.

They don't all need to be profound political statements.

But it contributes to that strange feeling I have about modern gaming.

Games can technically do more than ever.

Yet the mainstream industry sometimes feels more cautious than the industry of decades ago.

And that's a weird contradiction.

Because video games are now an enormous global business.

Billions of dollars are involved.

Major publishers spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing individual games.

Marketing budgets can be enormous.

Games are expected to sell millions of copies.

And when that much money is involved, risk becomes expensive.

Why make something completely fucking bizarre when you can make the next installment of a franchise that already makes billions?

Why create a strange new intellectual property when you can make another superhero game?

Another military shooter?

Another open-world game?

Another remake?

Another remaster?

Another sequel?

Another live-service game?

Another game with a battle pass?

Again, none of these things are automatically bad.

I've enjoyed plenty of sequels.

I've enjoyed remakes.

I've enjoyed mainstream games.

I've enjoyed big-budget games.

But eventually you start noticing the patterns.

And that's where the feeling of "tame" comes from.

Not necessarily tame in content.

Tame in creativity.

A game can have incredibly graphic violence and still feel creatively safe.

A game can contain horrifying imagery and still feel predictable.

A game can have a mature rating and still be designed around the safest possible commercial formula.

Being violent isn't necessarily being transgressive.

Being explicit isn't necessarily being daring.

Being controversial isn't necessarily being innovative.

And I think that's an important distinction.

Some of the strangest games I've ever encountered aren't necessarily the most violent ones.

They're the games where someone had an idea that made me wonder:

"Who the hell thought this would work?"

That's the kind of weirdness I love.

And there was plenty of that in older gaming.

You had games that seemed to exist because somebody simply thought an idea sounded cool.

Sometimes that idea was ridiculous.

Sometimes it was brilliant.

Sometimes it was both.

You had bizarre mascot characters.

Weird experimental games.

Strange Japanese titles.

Cult classics.

Games that mixed genres that probably shouldn't have been mixed.

Games with bizarre plots.

Games with incredibly strange mechanics.

Games that seemed like they were made by people who had absolutely no concern for whether the concept would become the next billion-dollar franchise.

And I miss that.

I miss the feeling of opening a game and having no idea what the fuck I'm about to experience.

The internet has changed that too.

Today, before a game even comes out, we can know practically everything about it.

Trailers.

Gameplay demonstrations.

Developer interviews.

Leaks.

Datamines.

Reviews.

Previews.

Social-media discussions.

Reddit threads.

YouTube essays.

TikTok clips.

By the time you actually play the game, you've sometimes already seen half of it.

And developers know this.

They know their games are going to be dissected.

They know every controversial decision will be discussed.

They know every character design will be debated.

They know every gameplay mechanic will be analyzed.

They know every joke could become a viral controversy.

They know everything can be clipped and taken out of context.

And that creates another incentive to be careful.

There's also the issue of corporate ownership.

Gaming has become increasingly consolidated.

Huge publishers own enormous collections of intellectual property.

Successful franchises are treated like assets.

Characters are brands.

Games are ecosystems.

Players are customers who can potentially spend money long after the initial purchase.

And suddenly the game isn't just a game.

It's downloadable content.

It's microtransactions.

It's cosmetics.

It's expansions.

It's a subscription.

It's a battle pass.

It's merchandise.

It's a movie adaptation.

It's a television adaptation.

It's a fucking cinematic universe.

And when a franchise becomes that valuable, you probably don't want someone taking a giant creative risk with it.

You want something recognizable.

Something marketable.

Something safe enough to make its money back.

And that's where I think some of the old weirdness gets lost.

A bizarre little game can be difficult to monetize.

A strange experimental concept can be difficult to explain to investors.

A game that appeals to only a few hundred thousand people may be considered a failure even if those people absolutely fucking love it.

Meanwhile, another sequel can sell millions simply because people already know what it is.

That's capitalism.

I get it.

But as a gamer, I still miss the weird shit.

And thankfully, it hasn't disappeared.

Not even close.

Indie games have become one of the greatest places to find that kind of creativity.

Small developers can make games that major publishers would never touch.

They can experiment.

They can make strange mechanics.

They can tell bizarre stories.

They can create games that are deliberately uncomfortable.

They can make something incredibly niche.

They can make something that would be impossible to justify as a $200 million blockbuster.

And some of the most interesting games of the past couple of decades have come from that space.

So maybe the weirdness didn't disappear.

Maybe it moved.

Maybe the mainstream gaming industry became more cautious while independent developers inherited the role of making the strange shit.

And honestly?

I'm okay with that.

Because I don't need every game to be weird.

Sometimes I want the giant blockbuster.

Sometimes I want the polished AAA experience.

Sometimes I want to shoot fictional terrorists in an absurdly cinematic military campaign.

Sometimes I want to run around an enormous open world.

Sometimes I want a stupid fucking sports game.

But sometimes I want something completely different.

Something experimental.

Something bizarre.

Something that doesn't feel like it was designed by a committee.

Something that makes me ask:

"What the fuck am I playing?"

That's part of the magic of video games.

They're an incredibly flexible medium.

They can be art.

They can be entertainment.

They can be storytelling.

They can be puzzles.

They can be simulations.

They can be experiments.

They can be toys.

They can be social spaces.

They can be completely fucking ridiculous.

And I don't want that flexibility to disappear beneath an endless pile of established franchises.

Maybe 9/11 contributed to the change I'm noticing.

Maybe it didn't.

Maybe I'm connecting two things that aren't actually connected.

Maybe the real culprit is simply that video games grew up.

The industry got bigger.

The budgets got bigger.

The audiences got bigger.

The stakes got bigger.

And when everything gets bigger, taking risks becomes harder.

There was a time when a strange game could simply be a strange game.

Now, a major game can have hundreds or even thousands of people working on it.

Millions of dollars invested.

Years of development.

Massive marketing campaigns.

Corporate executives.

Shareholders.

Licensing agreements.

International releases.

And suddenly "let's make something fucking weird" isn't quite as easy.

But I still think we need people willing to say it.

Because video games are at their best when somebody takes a risk.

Not every risk works.

Not every experiment succeeds.

Some games are going to be fucking terrible.

That's okay.

I'd rather have ten weird games, nine of which suck, than have ten games that all feel like slightly different versions of the same safe formula.

I want developers to fail sometimes.

I want them to try something stupid.

I want them to make something that doesn't make sense.

I want them to create a mechanic that nobody has seen before.

I want them to combine genres that shouldn't work together.

I want them to make games that aren't designed solely around maximizing engagement.

I want games to occasionally feel like someone's bizarre personal vision.

That's what makes a medium interesting.

And maybe that's the biggest difference I'm sensing between gaming then and gaming now.

It's not that games became less violent.

They didn't.

It's not that they became less mature.

They didn't.

It's not that they stopped being controversial.

They certainly didn't.

It's that the mainstream became more professional.

More corporate.

More predictable.

More calculated.

More expensive.

And sometimes, professionalism comes at the expense of weirdness.

But the weirdness is still there.

It's in the indie scene.

It's in obscure Japanese games.

It's in experimental projects.

It's in fan-made games.

It's in mods.

It's in tiny studios.

It's in some random developer making something nobody expected.

And that's encouraging.

Because it means the spirit isn't dead.

The weird shit survived.

It just found somewhere else to live.

So did video games get tamer after 9/11?

Maybe.

Maybe that's nostalgia talking.

Maybe it's the changing economics of the industry.

Maybe it's technological evolution.

Maybe it's the rise of online gaming and social media.

Maybe it's the increasing commercialization of gaming.

Maybe it's all of those things.

But I do think the overall atmosphere changed.

And whether 9/11 was a major part of that change or simply one piece of a much larger cultural transformation, it's fascinating to think about.

Because we have more powerful hardware than ever.

More creative tools than ever.

More ways to distribute games than ever.

More people making games than ever.

And yet sometimes the mainstream still feels like it's afraid to take a real fucking risk.

So here's to the developers who still do.

The weirdos.

The experimenters.

The people making games that shouldn't work.

The people making games that are too strange for the mainstream.

The people who aren't afraid to hear:

"That's fucking weird."

And respond:

"Yeah. That's the point."

Because gaming doesn't need to be safe all the time.

It needs room to be strange.

It needs room to fail.

It needs room to experiment.

It needs room to surprise us.

And most importantly, it needs room for someone to make something completely fucking insane.