The Elements of Video Game Culture

I was playing Street Fighter II at a 7-Eleven when someone stepped up to challenge me.

“Here comes a new challenger!”

The words flashed on the screen. Another player had joined, and within minutes, people were watching.

The game made the match possible. It supplied the fighters, the controls, and the rules. We supplied the rivalry, the audience, the customs, and everything that made that moment matter beyond the screen.

When we describe gaming, we often start with the things companies make and sell: games, consoles, platforms, and hardware. I want to talk about what players make around them. The codes we shared, the challenges we invented, the ways we recognized skilled players, the communities we built, and the reasons people showed up even when they weren't playing.

I see seven connected elements in those experiences: Skill & Mastery, Competition & Challenge, Knowledge & Preservation, Community & Belonging, Spectatorship & Performance, Identity & Expression, and Modding.

Play is the foundation. By itself, play is play. Culture takes shape in what people develop around it—in the skills they pursue, the rules they establish, the knowledge they share, and the ways they express themselves and bring others into the experience.

These aren't separate compartments or a test of who qualifies as a gamer. A single moment can involve several elements. The Street Fighter challenge at the 7-Eleven certainly did. And most of these practices existed long before the industry built features to support them.

I didn’t need a ranked mode or a tournament to care about getting better at a game. I could spend hours practicing a move, finding a better route, understanding an opponent, or figuring out something the game didn’t explain. Getting good was its own reward. Sometimes it was also something other players could see.

I spent many hours trying to master games for competition. A high score gave skill a visible measure. Tetris makes that easy to see: decisions and speed accumulate into a score that other people can try to surpass. But competition is only one reason to pursue mastery. Sometimes I loved a game enough to play it repeatedly and discover techniques I wasn’t even sure the developers intended.

My niece, nephew, and their cousins show another kind of mastery in Minecraft. What they build can demonstrate how well they understand the game and how much they can imagine within it. Their achievement is visible in a creation rather than a score or a victory.

Back in the Xbox 360 era, after my friends and I beat Grand Theft Auto IV, we made our own challenge, the Tiverton Run. Four to six friends would come by on Fridays and Sundays. We would load an endgame save from The Ballad of Gay Tony and take turns attempting the run: earn five stars before leaving the starting street, reach Yusuf Amir’s gold Buzzard at the nearby helipad, fly to the area just outside the airport on the far-right island, steal a car, drive to the edge of the far-left island, and make it back alive to the hideout where we started, with the police in pursuit. We called it Tiverton Rules because I lived on Tiverton. I think we completed the run only twice. The point was not to beat each other. It was to master a challenge we had made for ourselves.

I see Skill & Mastery as the first element because it grows directly from time spent playing. It doesn’t have to mean beating another person. Sometimes it means knowing a game well enough to do something nobody asked you to do—including inventing your own challenge. And once somebody else watches, asks how, or wants to try it, mastery starts connecting to the other elements.

The Tiverton Run had rules and a goal, but no rivalry. That distinction matters. People can compete with one another, or they can challenge themselves together. A game doesn’t need a competitive mode for players to make a competition—or invent a challenge worth repeating.

One of my earliest gaming memories is playing Atari’s Combat at an older cousin’s home. I was young and joined the rotation, though I rarely lasted long against the older players. I remember the phrase “pass the sticks.” My father later brought an Atari home for our family. That language of taking turns stayed with us even after joystick controllers gave way to joypads.

When we later had a ColecoVision, my older sister was Player 1 and I was Player 2. We spent hours alternating turns in Lady Bug, Donkey Kong, and Zaxxon, watching each other and trying to beat one another’s scores. We carried that rhythm into the NES era with Mario games. The console did not need simultaneous multiplayer for competition to be part of the experience.

In arcades, competition became public. At Street Fighter II cabinets, players learned how to handle a line of challengers. “Winner stays, loser pays.” Quarters placed along the monitor rim signaled who was waiting—and that you weren't just a spectator. Those customs set expectations around access to the cabinet: the winner could keep playing, but the people waiting mattered too. The crowd could see who had earned the next turn.

My friends and I found five Street Fighter II locations within biking distance. We traded information about which were crowded and which were quiet. The busy locations offered strong opponents; the empty ones gave us room to practice. We also practiced “saving.” If someone was playing the CPU, another player might put in a quarter and wait until the current player was about to lose before pressing Start. Sometimes the request was simply, “Save me!” Competition and courtesy could happen in the same move.

We didn’t need a ranked queue to decide who had earned the next game. We had quarters on the cabinet, the rule that the winner stayed, and our own ways of giving someone another chance. Multiplayer is something a game supports. Competition and challenge are things players do with it.

A high score made me want to know how someone did it. A secret move made me want to find out the input. Before I could look any of it up online, somebody usually had to tell me—or show me.

Before searchable online guides, information traveled through friends, magazines, and school. I owned the first issue of Nintendo Power. My father, an English teacher, would quiz me on the magazine before allowing me to get the next one. In grade school, a friend received Contra for his birthday on a Tuesday. We struggled with it after school for two days, making it to level three or four before I remembered something in Nintendo Power’s Classified Information section, ran home, found the code, and hurried back to share it.

That Friday, about fourteen kids, including my friend’s younger brothers, played Contra repeatedly at a birthday sleepover. By Monday, the Contra Code had spread through our school. A fact in a magazine had become something kids could pass along, use, and remember together.

Back before games routinely saved your progress, some gave you a password after you completed a level: a sequence of letters and numbers you could enter later to pick up where you'd left off. Those passwords let you resume a game, but knowing them could also signal achievement and expertise. I was proud of being the kid at the playground who knew a lot of game passwords and codes. Knowledge was useful, but it also became part of how other players recognized you.

Sometimes the information was false. An April issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly described a supposedly secret Street Fighter II opponent called Sheng Long. A friend said he had encountered the character. We took him to a nearby bowling alley to show us, but he couldn’t. We later learned that the magazine’s story was an April Fools joke. The memory is about more than a hoax: it shows how gaming knowledge depended on trust, reputation, and the thrill of believing there might be another secret waiting to be found.

Other discoveries were real. I first saw Mortal Kombat at Photon, a laser-tag-style venue, where a Fatality stunned the players and spectators. Later, Liu Kang’s dragon Fatality in Mortal Kombat II made another impression. I searched magazines for finishing moves and memorized the input sequences. But knowing the combination was only half of it. You had to beat someone at the arcade, then enter the sequence in the brief window after the victory—without pausing to check the instructions. Pulling it off in front of people was its own achievement.

At Ford City Mall, I watched skilled players demonstrate big-head and hot-spot codes while playing as the Seattle SuperSonics in NBA Jam Tournament Edition. The machine had been there less than a week, and it was the first place we'd seen it. Ford City wasn't far from Midway's facilities, and we noticed a car with a Sub-Zero-themed license plate. We wondered whether those players were connected with Midway, though we never confirmed it. They shared their codes. We passed them on by word of mouth.

Knowledge also comes from criticism. Electronic Gaming Monthly’s Review Crew offered several reviewers’ perspectives; GamePro used its own categories for graphics, sound, control, and FunFactor. Those magazines judged games in different ways. Reviews remain a way players learn about games, but trust now also forms around YouTube and Twitch reviewers whose tastes align with their audiences. A review can inform a purchase; watching someone play can help a viewer decide whether that person’s judgment is reliable. Professional criticism has not disappeared. The places people seek it and the relationships they build around it have diversified.

Reviews preserve more than a verdict. They capture how a game was understood when it first appeared, before later reputations reshape the conversation. The same is true of physical objects. I kept my original ColecoVision Donkey Kong and Zaxxon cartridges because I thought seeing Nintendo and Sega games on the same console might never happen again. I also kept a Grand Theft Auto: Vice City promotional T-shirt, old magazines, and manuals. I lost many other things while moving during college. Collectors, museums, archivists, and preservationists help keep that material memory alive.

Preserving games also preserves design knowledge. MAME lets people revisit arcade games that might otherwise be forgotten or underexplored. Older designs can inspire new work in mobile, indie, VR, and AAA games. Vintage Sierra PC games and arcade light-gun games are part of that history. I still remember the pump-action shotgun controller in CarnEvil. Time Crisis, with its physical cover pedal, is another reminder that game design can involve the body and the room around the screen.

Even manners are worth remembering. Some forms of arcade courtesy can be harder to see in online spaces, where people can hide behind a screen. Online games also have their own long histories of griefing, cooperation, and community customs. Social rules change with the environments where people play; they are part of the culture players continually negotiate.

Knowledge moves through relationships, and those relationships often outlast any single game. Gaming communities have never been made up only of the people holding controllers.

A childhood friend’s father programmed and collected software and shareware. He bought his son a PC but would not buy a console. His basement became a gaming destination for me. We played Leisure Suit Larry, The Colonel’s Bequest, Police Quest 1–3, Ultima 1–6, Syndicate, Doom, Lemmings, and Crusader: No Remorse. We encountered full commercial games alongside shareware. We also joked that the remake of Leisure Suit Larry 1 counted as the fourth game, since the series famously skipped Larry 4. The games were different, but the basement gave us one place to discover them together.

Game stores became another kind of gathering place. Before working at Software Etc., I was a regular at several gaming stores. Being a regular was how I got hired. Regular customers developed reputations for what they knew about particular games, platforms, genres, and developers. They came to talk, argue, hear about new releases, compare preferences, and predict what might be coming. A store sold games, but it also connected people. It was a human-powered discovery network.

I worked at Software Etc. when Grand Theft Auto III was released. For months, we'd watched its trailers on in-store VHS reels without thinking much of it. It looked fairly generic; the trailers didn't convey the open world or how much freedom the game would give you. When a copy arrived early, another assistant manager and I played it after closing. I was the store’s third key. I remember being struck by how a non-player character reacted when I hit him with a baseball bat. The action registered. I felt a strange mix of guilt and freedom: the game had let me do something unexpected, and it had acknowledged what I did.

I bought the game on release day and became one of the people recommending it most strongly to our regular customers. Those customers told friends; their friends told others. Some people tried GTA III at a friend’s house and then bought it. Some bought PlayStation 2 consoles specifically to play it. I remember the store selling out repeatedly. Discovery happened person to person, and that conversation helped turn a game into something people wanted to join.

At Iowa State University, my dorm room in Friley Hall became an informal gaming room for the floor. We played GoldenEye two-on-two and competed in NFL GameDay, Marvel vs. Capcom, and Tekken. On the door we posted the Weak List. If someone got shut out in a game or series, they had to sign it; signing meant losing the right to talk trash for a while. That rule followed people from one game to another. It belonged to the group, not to any one title.

My freshman roommate on the engineering floor was a PC gamer. We played Unreal Tournament, Quake III, and You Don’t Know Jack. That was when he wasn't absorbed in StarCraft, Warcraft, and Diablo. I had mostly stopped keeping up with PC gaming because graphics-card and sound-card upgrades became too expensive. Our friendship crossed the PC-console divide anyway.

Later, I lived with three roommates. We had two Xbox consoles in our apartment, and two other friends would bring their televisions and consoles over for LAN parties. We often reached the player limit and met at least twice a week, sometimes playing day and night. Moving all that equipment was a commitment. The friendships made it worthwhile.

When we moved online, we brought that same group with us. We planned sessions instead of logging on alone. We played with strangers when they happened to be on our team, but our lasting connections mostly grew through friends of friends. We weren’t gathering primarily to meet strangers; we were gathering to spend time with one another.

Some people at our couch sessions, LAN parties, and online gatherings didn’t play at all. They still came for the jokes, banter, trash talk, personalities, competition, and atmosphere. We still joke that our group could have made millions on Twitch or YouTube if those platforms had existed then. The people who watched were as much a part of those nights as the people holding controllers.

Those people who watched but did not play lead to another element. In arcades, spectatorship was an activity in itself. My friends and I stayed long after we ran out of quarters because watching people play was still worth the trip.

Crowds gathered around difficult games, new releases, intense head-to-head matches, players nobody could beat, and unexpected discoveries. People watched closely and reacted together: oohs and aahs, laughter, cheers when something defied expectations. No one called out advice while watching. The player was the expert and the crowd was waiting for its turn. If the player failed, the postmortem began: “You should’ve done…” The audience had a rhythm of its own—anticipation, reaction, then commentary.

At a grade-school roller-skating event, my sister had an exceptional run on Pole Position II. A crowd gathered as she played. She finished on a single quarter and earned the highest score. A short song played, and an explosion appeared in the distance. We thought it was a glitch. She hadn’t lost, so why couldn’t she select another track? She had not entered a formal tournament. She simply played so well that other people stopped to watch.

In high school, my friend Nick and I sometimes borrowed his mom’s car and drove downtown to the North Pier Mall arcade. We were strong Run and Gun 2 players and regularly beat challengers. Some girls came to the arcade primarily to watch rather than play. We sometimes exchanged phone numbers with them. The arcade offered games, but it also offered a social scene where performance, conversation, and attraction could happen together.

Television carried gaming spectacle beyond the arcade. I watched Video Power and Nick Arcade to see games being played, catch bits of news about newer games, and imagine myself on the show. We all thought we were better than the contestants and cooler than the host. The games were the draw. We wanted to be there playing them.

For me, those shows were more like watching the gaming news shows on YouTube today and less like watching a streamer play a game. News and review shows put the games and the coverage in front of an audience. Watching a review overlaps with Knowledge & Preservation because it informs players; it also belongs to Spectatorship because people watch gaming content together and make judgments about what they see. This differs from following a streamer’s personality or ongoing play, though both forms belong to the wider culture.

A big movie for me as a kid was The Wizard, a movie about video games. It combined competition, cinema, marketing, and audience aspiration. Its presentation of Super Mario Bros. 3 made the game feel like an event. The Nintendo Power Glove also excited kids with an image of what gaming might become, though its actual performance disappointed many of us. I also remember the Power Glove appearing in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, the sixth A Nightmare on Elm Street film. I wonder how many of those gloves Mattel and Nintendo managed to sell?

Streaming did not invent gaming spectatorship. It made it easier for people to watch from anywhere and expanded the audience’s reach. Long before Twitch, YouTube Gaming, and professional esports, people gathered to watch skill, drama, personalities, and the social atmosphere around play.

An audience does more than watch. It notices who is playing. And players have always found ways to show something about themselves through games.

Character creation was not available in the early games I remember, so the character itself—or the choice a game offered—did some of the expressive work. Were you the red character or the blue one in Double Dragon? Were you Mario or Luigi? Which character did you choose in Gauntlet, Golden Axe, Mortal Kombat, or Street Fighter?

In the arcade, identity also came through your demeanor. Were you a trash talker, quiet, or a little of both? Did you tell someone how to do a move, or keep it secret? Gaming merchandise was less varied, so wearing anything game-related sent a simple signal: I game.

My first memory of gaming as a way to express who I was came from high-score boards. Your three-letter initials were your gamer tag. You wanted people to see your name at the top. Someone watching you play might recognize your initials across the leaderboard and realize, “That’s the person who keeps beating my score.” A small marker made a player recognizable even before the player said a word.

Online play made that kind of identity more important because gamers were no longer physically present together. A handle showed how you wanted to appear and helped others recognize you. On PC, players might use a different name for each game: a Dungeons & Dragons-style name in a fantasy MMORPG, perhaps, and a Star Wars or Star Trek reference in a science-fiction game.

Xbox Live established one overarching Gamertag across games. When I made mine, I chose a play on Master Chief because I figured Halo would be the Xbox game I played most. I expected to need a handle for each publisher or game. I didn’t expect the platform identity to be the name people could use to find me across games. That was when identity began to feel like the same person was moving between different worlds.

Platform-wide avatars carried the idea further. I still think the Nintendo and Xbox Avatars were among the clearest attempts to let people put themselves into a virtual place and express themselves as if they were in an arcade. Personalization and persistence let other people see interests and personality without anyone having to explain them.

My Xbox Avatar wore a Michael Jordan Bulls jersey, a White Sox cap, and carried a Gears of War chainsaw Lancer. On first impression, someone might have generalized me as a ball-and-gun gamer from Chicago. The avatar wasn’t just a cartoon stand-in. It was a set of signals I chose and other people could interpret.

Games that have positioned themselves as platforms now provide some of the spaces where this identity can live. Fortnite is one example. Those games are filling a void that platforms left behind. The tools changed—from character choice and arcade initials to persistent gamertags and avatars—but the desire to be recognizable and express something about yourself through gaming has been there from the beginning.

A high-score name leaves a mark on the game. Modding lets players change the game or its playable conditions. Sometimes developers provide the means through cheat codes and creation tools. Other times, skilled players work directly with game files, scripts, or code to make modifications the developers never supplied.

To me, playing was like starring in and directing your own movie. My first encounters with arcade machines were at a movie theater, so the connection came naturally. Modding felt like being on the set behind the camera, adding the design and shaping the world around the performance.

That feeling can start with a small act of creation. I remember typing short art programs from 3-2-1 Contact magazine into an Apple IIe my mother brought home from school. One program drew a red apple with a sky-blue background, the sun overhead, and grass below. Changing the apple to green, turning the background midnight blue, and replacing the sun with a moon was amazing. I never figured out how to add the stars the way I wanted. Those programs were not game mods in the technical sense, but they gave me an early experience of making a computer show something I had shaped.

My first encounters with game mods came through shareware games such as Doom and Wolfenstein. In high school, friends traded levels made by modders they had discovered. Later, I created experiences using tools provided with games: the level editor in Unreal Tournament, Forge in Halo, and the GTA Online Creator. Some modders fix bugs; some remix an experience; some extend it; others transform it into something new. Modding is a range of creative practices, not one level of technical expertise. Counter-Strike, which began as a Half-Life mod, shows how a community-created modification can grow into a distinct game and competitive culture. That origin is part of Counter-Strike’s own history.

With the GTA Online Creator, I made a multiplayer game called Cartel-icopters. Four teams of four started on rooftops, each the same distance from a heavily guarded Cartel Mansion. Their job was to steal a duffle bag and return it to their base for points. Tanks and armed guards defended the mansion. They fired on teams approaching by helicopter, even after players parachuted out. A team could land, steal a car, and approach that way, but the tanks still shot at them.

It was chaos in the best way. The moment a team got the bag away from the mansion, the game changed into a PvP chase after the team carrying it. I had designed the setup and objective; the players created the unfolding story.

I also built an entire game using Grounded’s Playgrounds tools. One to four players began in what seemed to be a dungeon: an oval ring divided into six rooms, each a level filled with enemies and traps that grew harder as they progressed. The rooms included sleeping quarters, a mess hall, and a tactical and weapons room. Signs in the editor revealed that the previous shrunken kids had come from a military academy and called themselves the Lord of the Spiders.

After the last room, players were funneled into the center of the ring. There they realized the dungeon was inside a giant Roman-style colosseum, where they had to fight waves of enemies. Statues of the kids, each in a different pose, filled the arena. Fireworks went off at the end. The story came through both the signs and the spaces. Players moved through the remnants of an academy, then learned what the initiation was for.

For anyone who has wanted to make a game, modding can feel close to that experience. The work varies widely, and it is not the same as professional game development. Not every gamer needs to mod. But it gives players a way to shape experiences that other people can play.

I see these as related forms of modding, though they aren’t technically identical. Cheat codes let players activate changes the developers built into the game, such as God mode or unlimited ammunition. Official editors allow players to create levels, encounters, or entirely new experiences within tools the developers provided. Traditional community mods go further, changing game files, scripts, or code—sometimes even when official tools exist. The common thread is that something about the game or its playable conditions is being modified. Tiverton Rules was different. We changed nothing in GTA IV; we created a challenge using what the game already allowed.

I’ve separated these seven elements to talk about them, but I never experienced them separately.

A high score begins in Skill & Mastery. When someone tries to surpass it, it becomes Competition. When a crowd gathers to watch, it becomes Spectatorship. When the player’s initials recur across the board, the score becomes Identity. When people share the technique that produced it, mastery becomes Knowledge.

The same overlaps appear in creation. A custom level is Modding, but it can also become a test of Skill, a source of Knowledge, a place for Community, and a Performance when others gather to see how it plays. A player-made challenge such as Tiverton Rules can draw on mastery, challenge, community, and spectatorship without changing the software at all.

The line between player and audience moves, too. Friends waiting for a turn may watch, react, joke, and critique. People who never touch a controller may still belong to the community around a game. A group can move online, switch games, and remain together.

That’s why I think of these as elements, not categories that players must fit into. Each one helps describe part of a culture that players have been making together for decades.

Gaming culture does not exist because companies can monetize it. Economic opportunities arise because people already care enough to participate.

Look at Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft. They're different games with different business models, but each has grown into a platform in its own right. Rather than simply offering a game to launch and finish, they provide spaces where players learn techniques, compete, build communities, develop identities, watch what others create, share knowledge, and make new experiences. Many of the seven elements I've been discussing aren't simply happening around these games. The platforms themselves provide ways for players to participate in them.

Creation is central to Roblox. People build experiences for other people to play. Fortnite combines competition and player expression with creative tools, events, and shared spaces. Minecraft gives players the freedom to build, explore, modify, run servers, and invent challenges. In each case, players contribute reasons for other players to keep participating.

The developers built the foundations. The players helped make those foundations into cultural destinations.

The same principle can apply to a platform that connects many different games. Xbox 360 is a good example, and one I experienced firsthand.

I had spent years gaming with friends in arcades, dorm rooms, and LAN parties. Xbox Live gave us ways to carry those relationships between games without gathering in the same room. Our Gamertags made us recognizable. Achievements gave us something to compare and pursue. Friends lists and parties helped us find one another, while Avatars gave us another way to express who we were.

None of those features invented gaming culture. We'd already been competing, sharing knowledge, building identities, and gathering around games. Xbox made many of those practices easier to sustain across different experiences.

The scale of participation was substantial. In November 2012, Microsoft reported that more than 14 million people used Xbox Live worldwide on a single Sunday, accounting for more than 72 million hours of use. Microsoft reported those figures at the time.

My Xbox 360 was also my home entertainment hub. I streamed music from my PC while playing games, and used the console for Netflix and YouTube. I liked those capabilities. They made the console more useful, but they weren't what had drawn me to Xbox or what kept my friends connected.

Xbox made a crucial mistake with the introduction of the Xbox One. Xbox was speaking to a gaming audience that had spent years building identities, friendships, rivalries, and communities through Xbox Live. Yet so much of the presentation emphasized television, movies, and the idea of an all-in-one entertainment system. Xbox's announcement described that emphasis plainly.

Entertainment wasn't the problem. Many gamers like myself were already enjoying it on Xbox 360. The problem was what Xbox chose to lead with, and who it was speaking to.

Pricing, product decisions, competition, and many other factors shaped the generation. But a company should understand what its existing audience values before it decides how to introduce the future of its platform.

Steam offers another example of how a platform can grow by supporting the culture around games.

The Steam that launched in 2003 was not the Steam we know today. It began primarily as a way to distribute and update PC games, then expanded into a much broader place for players to participate. Community features grew over time. The Workshop made player-created content easier to find and share. Discussions, screenshots, guides, reviews, and other tools gave people reasons to engage with games and one another beyond a purchase or a launch. Valve's 2012 Steam Community update and 2013 Steam Guides announcement help show that evolution as it happened.

A player who develops a recognizable identity has something to carry forward. A group that gathers regularly has a reason to return. A guide can help someone master a game. A player-created experience can give a community something new to try. A competition can become something people want to watch. Those activities can help keep players interested long after the initial purchase.

That can benefit a business through discovery, retention, future purchases, and longer relationships with its audience. But the seven elements aren't a checklist that guarantees commercial success. A feature only matters if players find it useful and make something of it. Games, prices, access, timing, and execution still matter.

Gaming media has opportunities here, too. Large gaming media outlets can serve audiences through creator coverage, community reporting, competitive events, preservation, and cultural analysis alongside traditional game news and reviews. Much of that activity already happens across specialist communities and independent channels. The opportunity is to take it seriously as part of gaming, not as a distraction from games.

I’m proposing seven elements because they help me explain what I’ve seen and lived through, not because everyone has to experience gaming the same way. Someone does not need to compete, stream, build, preserve, or modify games to belong. Playing is enough to participate in gaming. The elements help describe what people have built around that play.

I don’t assume these are the only ways to describe gaming culture. Some traditions might deserve an element of their own; others cross several. People from different generations, countries, genres, and communities will bring examples I have not considered.

That is the invitation: Which elements feel right? What is missing? What traditions did your friends or family create around games? What did you do before the industry gave it a name or a feature?

I still think about that Street Fighter II cabinet at the 7-Eleven. The words on the screen announced another player. Everything happening around the cabinet showed me something larger: a game could give people something to gather around, but the gathering was ours.