Room to Reflect
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This gets to the second part of the book that is instructive for this essay: the deep integration of meritocratic tenets into games. I believe video games are now an actualized meritocracy, where players are consistently exposed to design and narrative features that are predicated on celebrating a combination of skill and hard work. Although meritocracy may seem both timeless and good, it’s actually a relatively recent phenomenon that dates to the 1950s. The author, Michael Young, who popularized the term did so in a critique, intending for us to reject it largely because it ignored structural factors. As merit was more widely celebrated by technocrats, Young wrote about how he believed we were on the wrong path, one that only seemed right because it celebrates those of us at the top, teaching us to think about how we earned it, rather than consider the advantages and lucky breaks that helped us get to where we are. Research on merit and the benefits of structural advantages have shown the ideology turns people into jerks, systematically ignores issues of privilege, and that it has so infiltrated the way that we think that meritocratic cues prompt us to defend the status quo.