The Rise of the "Gamers".

• Author: Claassen, Alfred J.
• Position: Reflections

If one is to profoundly understand a society and era, as the sociologist Max Weber superbly taught, one must grasp the character and spirit of their dominant class. (1) A great deal that is central to American society and history since 1965 has been shaped by its new upper class of gamers? (2) I mean by that term a gender-neutral synonym of gamesmen: consummate competitors drawn toward gaming, many of whom cut corners. The gamers' character-based ways of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and acting have been stamped all over the society and history of our time. (3) The most successful executives and professionals dominating all institutions have been gamers during the past half-century. The proto-gamers of the 1960s and the full-fledged ones of the 1970s largely eclipsed the WASP upper class and the paradigm it bore, although that leading class and paradigm continued to moderate the gamers until the early 1990s. As Heraclitus says, "Character ... is destiny" ([ca. 500 BCE] 1948, 32). The central role played by the gamers in the United States has been among the less-understood aspects of all that has occurred since 1965.

The Character of the Gamers

Essential to the gamers is that they possess not only the basic rational self-consciousness and self-control of the middle class but a higher-level version of the same, with which they control the elementary versions. Instead of feeling bound by rules, they flexibly use, modify, or discard them to further their individual goals (Claassen 2007, 32). Unlike the merchants and shopkeepers of early modernity who held inner rules rigidly or the white-collar workers (4) of the national era (1885-1965) who held them while also attuned to others' expectations, the gamers are self-directed but accept no binding rules. By "higher" self-control, I mean self-determination that is one layer more reflexive or aware in certain respects, not that is more worthy or more advanced, all things considered. The gamers' stock-in-trade is provisional, pragmatic policies that further their interests. Utterly immersed in and adapted to markets of all kinds, they analyze everything and hold everything up for grabs. Committed to no particulars, they cannot easily be flustered, but nor are they grounded or anchored.

The gamers arose early in the global era as higher-level, rational self-understanding and self-management became dominant in the character of many of the most able, especially among those entering business and the professions. They began habitually employing their higher self-control to game their careers and fast-forward their ascents. Utterly directed toward excelling at the game, they are highly adept at all things connected with their personal advancement. Systematically pursuing their interests as they understand them, the gamers deftly adjust and fine-tune their performance at school and at work, discipline and position themselves to get into great colleges and universities, maneuver their way into valuable internships, and garner outstanding early jobs. Intensely competitive and savvy, gamers think and talk incessantly about job and investment opportunities throughout their careers. The dexterity of their educational and career moves is one of the keys to their success.

Another key is that they hone their job performances to virtuosity. Highly capable and building upon impressive education and early experience, they specialize, work extremely long hours, and develop formidable repertoires of knowledge and skill. In time they become supremely proficient at what they do. Gamer executives adroitly vary management theories, marketing strategies, and corporate cultures. Those in marketing, advertising, and communications agilely and cleverly use media and public relations to their advantage. Gamer tax attorneys and accountants ingeniously interpret subtleties of law and accounting to solve clients' problems and to build their practices. Drawing upon sophisticated understanding and remarkable entrepreneurialism, gamer executives evince a creative adaptability far greater and more astonishing than any the middle class has known. There have always been unusual business opportunities in liberal societies, but never before have such skills been available with which to exploit them.

Gamer drive pushes forward much more intensely and unremittingly than did middle-class discipline in its heyday, leading to far greater personal income and wealth. so single-mindedly rational and instrumentalist are the gamers that everything largely becomes a matter of economics to them. As they subject themselves to a higher inner despotism, even their manner of speech, with its long and short bursts of rapid, mechanical utterance, betrays the severity of their striving. Management is no longer the low-key, jovial, secure experience it often was at midcentury.

Max Weber ([1905] 1958) judged middle-class discipline as primed by the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism to have been the engine of the West's unparalleled development during the centuries of early capitalism. in its economic aspects, the character of the gamers has been the advanced engine of development helping drive the much more rapid economic growth of the entire world since 1965, but in its noneconomic aspects that character poses major problems, even for growth.

Whether gamers be venture capitalists, politicians, scholars, or intelligence analysts, the inquiry toward which they lean is technical, reflecting their intense instrumentalism. The gamers may know a great deal, but they tend to know things narrowly and calculatedly rather than comprehensively and intuitively. Their penchant for losing themselves in technical detail is partly responsible for the great American intelligence fiascos of recent decades, such as failing to see the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, coming. A prime example of gamer one-sidedness is the character of Mark Zuckerberg as fictionally portrayed in the film The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010). Mitt Romney's brilliance and his uneven sensitivity are quintessentially gamer. However gifted, knowledgeable, and proficient the gamers, their one-sidedness renders them particularly vulnerable to being outflanked by the complexity and elusiveness of human nature.

Realist through and through, the gamers tend to be interested in comparatively little in and of itself-they want results. In their driving ambition, they cashiered the well-intentioned but often loopy idealism of the 1960s for striving. Avoiding and even disparaging the ideal, the gamers appreciate higher education overwhelmingly for the doors it opens and the fungible adaptability, credentials, and connections it bestows, not for its humanistic value. Like most human beings, the gamers project their own mentality onto the actions of others, as in the way they impute everywhere the cynical realism that pervades their own thinking.

More individualistic in many respects than the early bourgeois and vastly more so than the white-collar workers of the 1950s, the gamers take to competition with a relish. They work horrendous hours as latter-day, secular monks, yet the gods to which they are dedicated are no longer spiritual or even societal, but rather their own power, wealth, and prestige. An essential trait of the gamers is one-sided striving for self.

Where peasants wanted only enough for their modest, customary lives, the early middle class wanted a standard of living ample for economic security, and the other-directed organization men and women of the mid-twentieth century wanted indefinitely more for comfort and keeping up with the...