The liberal arts teach you to see ghosts.

Not in horror games, but in history. In absences. In the faces of kids who used to play Sonic 2 on a floor that was too cold in a house that didn’t always have power.

Sega kids are poor now, or they’re dead.

We remember them by what they didn’t become. They had Vectorman, Shining Force, Ristar. They had silence. They had the blue sky, but no skybox.

IGN’s top 100 games: not one Sega game. Not one.

Console wars have consequences. That war was real. Sega lost. And with it, so did a class of kids. The latchkey kids. The divorced-parent kids. The ones who rented Ecco the Dolphin three times because it was always on the shelf. The ones who didn’t switch to PlayStation. They’re gone.

Meanwhile, PC gamers grew up with options. They talk about frame rates and FOV sliders. They modded Morrowind and ran Linux before puberty. They built their machines. They are the children of Engineers, orthodontists, Stanford dads.

And this is where it ties back to the liberal arts:

Video games, like books, tell you who you are not.

But they also tell you who gets to win.

Sega kids didn’t win. They learned how to lose young. They had to, because the Dreamcast died, and their mom didn’t have another $299.99.

PC gamers win. They win by default. By access. By inheritance.

That’s the secret. That’s the inequality no one benchmarks.

You want to study income inequality? Forget Piketty.

Look at who was playing Total War and who was playing Golden Axe II.

The liberal arts sharpen your sight until you can see these patterns in everything:

— in who gets remembered

— in who gets ports

— in who still gets to play

The canon of games is being written. And the Sega kids aren’t in it.

They died before it got respectable. They died before games learned to talk about grief. They lived it. And the ones who survived? They learned not to ask for anything back.

Just give them that last life.

No saves. No checkpoints.

Just one last try.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5724326&forum_id=2Elisa#48926264)