EMILY KWONG, HOST:
What makes more money than the music industry and the film industry combined? The answer is found in the click of a mouse, the flick of a thumbstick. I'm talking about video games. Last year, the video game industry generated around $190 billion in revenue, according to outlets that track it.
So how did this medium go from the arcade into a global juggernaut? That is the subject of a new podcast series called Hidden Levels, which is a collaboration between 99% Invisible and Endless Thread from member station WBUR in Boston. And Ben Brock Johnson is here. He's the creator of Hidden Levels and the co-host of Endless Thread. Hi, Ben.
BEN BROCK JOHNSON, BYLINE: Hi, Emily. You can be player one. I'll be player two.
KWONG: Ready player two. Let's go.
JOHNSON: All right.
KWONG: Your series is so fantastic. It covers so many interesting things. It's six episodes, and one of them is all about the history of the joystick because its origins have nothing to do with gaming, turns out.
JOHNSON: Yeah, this was a really fun episode. The joystick is born in the early 1900s. It has a somewhat murky origin. It gets introduced into the aviation industry first to better control some of the first airplanes.
KWONG: That makes sense.
JOHNSON: Yeah, but then the joystick gets incorporated and really perfected by the video game industry starting in the 70s as a tool that has become the way to extend our bodies via machine. It's just used everywhere now. Here's Jared Keller. He's a longtime technology journalist who we talked to for this story.
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JARED KELLER: There is no more intuitive optimized system for delicate, precise control of remotely operated technology than the joystick.
JOHNSON: So eventually, the joystick gets folded back into the real world to, again, influence and impact different industries in meaningful ways - from controlling large machines, like cranes, to military applications. You know, joysticks are now common when controlling tanks and even drones.
KWONG: Yeah. I think that was one of the most interesting threads that you all followed in this series, is simply the fact that there is a close relationship between the video game industry and the military. So tell us about the video game called America's Army. We learn in the show that that was developed by the military and available to the public.
JOHNSON: Yeah you may have heard the phrase first-person shooter, Emily. I know you play video games too, so you know this well. This is a genre of video game in recent decades where you're playing the game from a first-person perspective, of course, and you're shooting a gun. Call Of Duty is an example. But America's Army was a different game. It was released in 2002, as the war on terror begins. The U.S. military made America's Army kind of as a crucial tool of recruitment and teaching. The game wasn't just shooting. It taught other skills and concepts too. Here's somebody we interviewed, TJ Bulcher, who started playing at age 13, and he's talking about the part of the game that is actually not the shooting part.
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TJ BULCHER: They make you watch basically a slideshow in game on the steps to do first aid and what your role as a medic should be in combat.
UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR #1: Shock may be caused by severe injury or blood loss and disrupts the normal flow of blood through the body, leading...
BULCHER: Depending on how well you did, it could take anywhere from a half hour to an hour if you failed the test and had to retake it and rewatch it.
UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR #2: This is just pathetic, soldier.
KWONG: Wow, this is training, military training in a soft way.
JOHNSON: Yeah, absolutely, and it worked. Bulcher, the person you hear from there, went on to join the Marine Corps.
KWONG: Whoa.
JOHNSON: But the story is, of course, much bigger than the game America's Army, which had a two-decade run, really. Our episode looks at recruitment now, which has been happening more kind of indirectly in the es\ports arena of competitive video game playing and on streaming platforms like Twitch, you know, where the military is reaching kids at really young ages, as young as 12 years old, and that's something that's come under scrutiny from Congress and child advocacy groups.
It's part of this ongoing evolution where our military has realized that when it comes to training future soldiers through information and influence, the private video game industry, the pipeline of ex-military to gaming consultants, for instance, are doing a pretty good job all by themselves. And that's why you know, the game America's Army, which was one of the most popular games of its kind in the world at one point, eventually gets shuttered because it's not needed anymore.
KWONG: Some of the social circles that have arisen around video games have drawn criticism. There's the fact that some of these online spaces can get kind of toxic if there's no moderation, if there's no sense of community care or accountability. But you didn't just talk about that in the show. You also wanted to examine some of the positive aspects of gaming. Why was that important to you?
JOHNSON: You know, I think it's like a tool. It's like anything else. An idea that I wanted to explore from the beginning of this series was whether video games could have lasting impact on identity. We have a producer, Frannie Monahan, who spoke with Sien Rivera, a psychotherapist who works with LGBTQ youth in South Carolina. And Rivera described how a person they were working with found a safe space for her own identity in the video game The Sims.
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SIEN RIVERA: Little by little, she herself started to try out different things that her avatar did - different types of makeup, different types of clothing - until she settled into this style that was much more her rather than a preconceived notion of masculinity or femininity.
KWONG: I'm so taken with that because at the core of gaming is play, and play is how you can discover yourself. And it reminds me of this game called Life Is Strange: True Colors. The character in that game can fall in love with either a man or a woman, and it was a way that I explored and ultimately found my own bisexuality because I could...
JOHNSON: Wow.
KWONG: ...Fall in love with both, and they both were great storylines equally, and the game really allowed me that. So you're saying that games can be places where people can grapple with real-world things. They're not just escapism.
JOHNSON: Absolutely. And that's - wow, that's such a meaningful example, you know, and why representation is so importan - right? - in these spaces. I think games are really - you know, ultimately, they're a reflection of us - right? - and our...
KWONG: Yeah.
JOHNSON: ...Own capacity for building things or destroying things and everything in between. Not only are video games huge, they're also impacting our world in ways that we don't really realize and appreciate.
KWONG: Hidden Levels is a six-part series on how video games are reshaping our world. You can look for it in the podcast feeds of 99% Invisible or Endless Thread from WBUR. Co-host Ben Brock Johnson, thank you so much for talking to us.
JOHNSON: Thank you, Emily. I'll see you in the video game lobby.
KWONG: Yeah, we'll press start together. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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