And they look like me
At the age of 21, in one of the many little rural mountain towns called home to no one but rich snowbirds and retirees, I took the job that would put me in hospitality forever. An inescapable mood followed me from job to job the whole time, that something in the background was broken.
I spent my twenties around these towns, driving an hour from cheaper, poorer areas to serve drinks or sling food. I knew what the word “gentrification” sounded like, but I learned what it looked like well before I could say it. Sometimes it’s just a feeling of how long something nobody uses gets to stick around; how long you can stand still before being bulldozed.
Gentrification is one of the great people-driven wars. We can stack up the invisible markets with the free-hands, tell them that proselytizing parable about how markets work, or remember that people tell them what to do. This is not a “vote with your dollar” incentive, it’s “knowing that sometimes your neighbor wishes he could buy your house and you in it.”
We’ll coat a gas station in stucco if we think it’ll help sell something. Convince the out-of-townees it fits in with the absolutely-100 year old pueblo townhouses. Put a statue out front and say it’s local culture. There’s probably a Disneyland in every state now.
Tourist towns are built and born out of gentrification. If the rows of town-cottages with plumbing more recent than the early 90’s doesn’t clue you in, will it be when the gas stations get new bathrooms? That the travelers and unhoused seem to be showing up a lot less?
Tourist towns are only friendly as long as the travelers have Instagram accounts.
Tourism. That dirty word I keep thinking about so much. Built on this idea that, ultimately, everything can be a product. A vacation experience. A destination. Your backyard. When you’re selling a product you target the middle-class. Make it just expensive enough that the sane buyer can’t say no. If you can’t sell them culture directly, sell them the idea of looking at it from a hotel balcony.
Some time around 2013 (allegedly), little neighborhoods all over the East Coast started to glow with that yuppie twinkle, like Christmas Lights coming on in September. Skylines changed and little houses got stripped down and replaced. Make sure to greet the neighbors when they step out of their Corporate Designed House™. The Developers are stomping and growling next door where there used to be that alleyway – “we could put a Bodega here,” they say.
By the time construction fences go up and signs advertising New Student Housing are thrown out on the corner, it’s often already too late.
The glow stuck around for the 2010’s. We all saw the rise of the celebrity investor. Well, fuck, we saw the rise of the influencer, and what is an influencer but a yuppie put in front of a camera? The investors stuck around, always seeing new opportunities in social media or bitcoin or one thing or another. Old tourist towns became new tourist towns; Mexican art villages got moved north of the border in the form of drywall and stucco.
With hunger in their eyes, the investor-class turned towards rural America for more towns to carve up. It turned towards cities that’d surprisingly fought back the dogs of Venture Capital, stuck their feet in the door, and hollered “hello.”
Everything becomes fertile ground for more snowbirds and vacationers; RVers and Van Lifers doing their best to live respectfully outside of town, because the locals need someone to serve beer but are getting up there in age.
Lots of Regular Tourists flock into these little resort towns too. During the coldest months of the year, anywhere over 75° sounds like paradise. People with time off from being a Dentist or a Plastic Surgeon or one of those careers with four figure hobbies and a free subscription of Overland Magazine.
I look towards the horizon and see a bunch of dirty apes crowding around a monolith. Any time it’s not a furry convention and people start self-identifying with the animals you should know there’s gonna be trouble. At first it was just the apes, then the lions. Now a whole goddamned animal kingdom is popping up.
NFT’s came into the picture earlier this year and seem to be driven mostly by pyramid-scheme levels of dedication. These tokens can’t be funged, so the saying goes. A one way ticket to finally owning your identity on the internet. Bought by the kind of people that never realize you don’t buy an identity, you create one.
When I say the yuppie brains look like Christmas lights, I don’t mean the kind you take down by the first of the year. Nobody has grandparents around to tell them about all the gremlins that’ll ruin the holidays if their decorations are still up around February 5th…but I digress. It’s hard to keep a little folklore going over the noise of all this constant construction.
NFT’s are going to change things. Not even by doing anything but just because nobody will be able to ever stop talking about them. Once the million-dollar game companies got a hold of the idea, all bets were off.
Flash forward a few months and we see the new digital gentrifiers look exactly like what we expect: a bunch of sad dudes in oversized pullovers, snapbacks and Timbs. The new gentrifying culture is all the rich-kids who didn’t get to become Doctors or Dentists; kids who’ve shuffled into day-trading their parents' money, putting all that wealth and know-how into disrupting the marketplace of novelty Hawaiin shirts sold in malls.
“The Future is NFT’s,” so many Twitter accounts proudly exclaimed. Enough of them were talking that when the tigers in charge of publishing videogames heard, they immediately locked onto all the noise. Big Corporate Gaming: the sun-rotted and leathery-skinned uncle of Pure Independent Gaming.
Ubisoft is the first to really commit to the bit and go all in, offering players unique NFT items to express themselves digitally in their latest and greatest Ghost Recon title.
Thinkpieces started rolling in. I was going to do one per word, but how does a whole paragraph of thinkpieces look? All thinkpieces, all from websites that look like wipeout tracks. Wipeout is a dystopian racing game where every part of civic life is advertising. We might be living in a dystopian racing game where every part of civic life is advertising. What is the future of NFT’s in videogames?
Every one of those articles goes through a landmine-field of “You Can Play VIDEOGAMES To Work...For Other People.” You already can’t own a videogame now unless you’re among the three people left with a disc drive, so why not start really owning the digital world?! It just makes sense from a buyer and investors perspective: players should be able to pump as much money into video games they want to! We’re not stealing from anyone, it’s play to earn!
Ubisoft is the first, but they aren’t alone. All of the big plexi-glass eyed corporations are waking up to the money hunger, and there’s an army of the so-called-middle-class out there pumping their money into vacation homes, resort towns, and spa visits just so they can say they did. If the poorest of us can smell it on you, well, so can they: what’s another avenue for you to spend money?
You’re creating value. You’re gonna be a superstar. You may never see it or know it, but just keep buying Ethereum in your videogames. Buy another NFT and raise the price however much you see fit – there’s always going to be some sucker out there to buy it! Not like you. You’re an entrepreneur.
What else draws these middle-classes to our neighborhoods? When there’s no more room in hell, the yuppies walk the earth. Dead eyed at invite-only yacht-parties, making sure every one of us poor souls sees where the money is gonna take them. Exclusivity and luxury, the two damn things the poor can’t see the importance of buying.
As much as videogames have entrenched themselves as a middle-class sport with various low-brow entry points, thus far they’ve avoided serious class cash flow issues. Consoles keep releasing games after the newcomers come out. Software (mostly) stays optimized for older computers.
For those of us still out there running hardware a decade past “next-gen,” there’s (hopefully) always going to be the various abandonware websites letting old generations show videogames to new ones in emulation’s little corner of the world.
Like all of these desert towns that pop up full of expensive Yoga studios and stuccoed Circle K’s (so the tourist knows they’re somewhere with real authentic history), the new money is all in videogames. What if you’ve got a stable base of poor players around to always make sure there’s an item in the game they can’t afford? Well you’ve got a digital ski-slope, where your only worry are the pesky locals showing up.
NFT’s could be a digital frontier for the Ubisoft’s of the world, perpetually slow on the take or at least to hear the cries of the public. Like DRM or Storefront Exclusives or even the halcyon days of DLC nickel-and-diming, there will be an attempt to guarantee us that this is all in our best interest.
Will the future of the whole industry start to carve itself up to look more like the little ski-resort towns in the southwest? Filled up with all of this trash, sanded down, and covered in stucco to feel more authentic? The easy paranoia of our day and age won’t break it down, they’ll just keep jacking up the price until we can’t afford to complain. Make something expensive enough, and the rich will fall over their checkbooks just so no one else can have it.
When videogames push out the locals – all of the little studios and communities that have been here; when they start to treat games that share NFT’s as the real Accredited Videogames; when the game awards have Geoff Keighley proudly declaring the most ethical NFT games of the year; will people start leaving? The restaurants and bars empty of workers, the desperate droning of the middle-class filling the air like so much static.
My relationship to videogames is not at question here. There are enough video games I could play every day until I die. I’m already living in the digital world, but the promises of the metaverse are all encompassing.
The biggest promise is the ability to finally, finally see something you can’t afford on a computer screen. It’s not about the scrap of digital real estate - it’s a reminder that people out there have more than you; all of the real world’s hardware and economic disparity finally realizing they can have a digital analogue; a gentrified internet the skibirds can call home.
DEEP HELL SKELETON is a creature of Writing and Website. They have resistance to poison and can be found at "deep-hell.com" or, you guessed it, @DEEPHELLDOTCOM
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