Commentary
Ray Bradbury, one of America’s finest writers of the 20th century, once described video games as “a waste of time for men with nothing else to do.” Humans with “real brains,” he asserted, don’t waste their time on such trivial activities. Tens of millions of Americans would probably beg to differ. Today, rather incredibly, 214 million Americans are active gamers.
About 50 million of these are children. Video games rewire the brain. In other words, they have the power to change humans. This means they have the power to change human civilization and to change the world as we know it. Moreover, as this piece demonstrates, video games are no longer just a cultural issue, but an international political issue.
As Jorge Huguet, general manager of PlayStation Spain and Portugal, said last year that “since the first generations of gamers, video gaming has become a bit of a cult that goes far beyond the limits of the platforms or consoles.” This “feeling of belonging to a community” elevates gaming “to another level.” Forget Hollywood and the music industry; they simply can’t compete with what gaming offers.
According to Newzoo, a site dedicated to gaming analytics, the number of gamers worldwide is increasing by 5.3 percent year-over-year. There are more than 3 billion gamers worldwide. Think about that for a second. Like the U.S. population, more than one-third of the global population plays video games regularly. Worldwide, this year alone, the gaming industry is expected to bring in $221 billion in revenues; by 2030, this number is expected to jump to a staggering $504 billion. These revenues, rather obviously, will be generated by an increasing number of people joining the aforementioned “cult.”
Gaming is now a political issue. It’s the newest form of soft power, a term coined by political theorist Joseph Nye to describe how countries attempt to shape preferences through appeal and attraction. It’s the opposite of hard power, which employs coercive tactics and brute force. Hard power is all about the stick. Soft power, on the other hand, prefers to use the carrot.
Even if you’re not an avid gamer, you’re probably familiar with “Call of Duty,” one of the most popular games in existence. Some commentators, in possession of hard evidence, have claimed that the most recent edition of the first-person shooter video game is nothing more than a U.S. government PSYOP. The connection between the U.S. national security state and the video game industry appears incredibly strong. Video games are used for military training purposes, so why wouldn’t the U.S. government look to “Call of Duty,” a game with 400 million players, to convey a specific message to young, impressionable consumers? These fans have an insatiable appetite for the franchise.
The gaming industry’s importance hasn’t escaped the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) either. As I’ve shown elsewhere, although the CCP has referred to gaming as “spiritual opium” and has curbed playing time for minors at home, Chinese companies have a huge presence in the international gaming market.
People play computer games at an internet cafe in Beijing on Sept. 10, 2021, days after Chinese officials summoned gaming enterprises, including Tencent and NetEase, the two market leaders in China's multibillion-dollar gaming scene, to discuss further curbs on the industry. Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images
Take Tencent, for example, a Chinese multinational technology company headquartered in Shenzhen. It now owns a 93 percent stake in Riot Games, the American video game developer responsible for “League of Legends,” one of the most popular games of all time. Tencent has also invested in or wholly owns scores of other influential video game companies, including Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft, Platinum Games, FromSoftware, Marvelous Inc., and Epic Games, an American company responsible for “Fortnite,” a ridiculously popular game.
Although traditional console gaming is still popular, new ways to play video games are emerging. The most recent example is cloud gaming, a nascent technology that allows users to stream games from remote servers. In other words, individuals can play games without having to install them. The cloud market is growing at a rapid rate. As analysts at Newzoo have documented, 2021 saw roughly 21.7 million people pay a total of $1.5 billion for cloud gaming services. By 2024, however, “paying users will almost triple (to 58.6 million) while revenues will quadruple (skyrocketing to $6.3 billion).”
It’s no coincidence that China’s cloud computing market is currently the fastest-growing in the world. China Briefing predicts that “the global share of the Chinese public cloud service market will increase from 6.5 percent in 2020 to over 10.5 percent in 2024.”
Alibaba, a Chinese tech colossus with ever-evolving aspirations, has pledged to pump $1 billion into cloud developments between now and 2025. It’s important to note that China’s cloud ambitions are very much global in nature. Three of the most successful international cloud service providers—Jinshan, Tencent, and Alibaba cloud—are Chinese. Interestingly (but not in the least bit surprisingly), the CCP doesn’t permit foreign cloud service providers to operate in China, making it the only country in the world to have such a rule in place. That’s because data is the new oil, and cloud service providers are bottomless oil reservoirs. Worldwide, by 2025, cloud gaming data creation will grow to 163 zettabytes (1 zettabyte = 1 trillion gigabytes), roughly 10 times the amount of data produced in 2017.
Cloud computing is synonymous with ease, but it’s also synonymous with data loss and data leakage. As gaming becomes more advanced, with an increasing number of users embracing wearable devices (such as virtual reality headsets, for example), the data gathered will become even more personal. To think that communist China, a country synonymous with harvesting data, especially the data of Americans, won’t use video games and the cloud to further its nefarious agenda requires a complete suspension of disbelief.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
