By Monica Radu
I’m a sociologist, so I like to think I know a thing or two about culture. I teach about culture. I write about culture. I talk with students about cultural differences, and why we should be careful about judging ways of life that are different from our own.
Then my sons started playing video games. Suddenly, there was an entire culture operating inside my own home that I knew absolutely nothing about. Minecraft. Roblox. Fortnite. At first, these were simply names of games to me. I knew Minecraft was the one with the blocks. Roblox was…well, I wasn’t entirely sure what Roblox was. And Fortnite involved a lot of jumping around and apparently some dancing. I was an outsider. But slowly, I started learning.
I learned the terminology and discovered that Roblox isn’t really one game at all, but a platform filled with different games and experiences. I started figuring out which ones my kids liked and which ones everyone seemed to be talking about. And somewhere along the way, I also learned that there were YouTubers who built enormous audiences around playing these games. And after enough exposure, I did something I never expected to do: I developed preferences. For the record, Foltyn is my favorite Roblox YouTuber. (Sorry, Caylus).
Recently, I was talking with a friend of mine who, like me, is a mom and a sociologist. Our conversation had actually started with sociology. We were talking about teaching concepts like cultural relativism and ethnocentrism. And then, somehow, we started talking about Roblox. At some point, I had to stop and laugh. How did we get here? Two moms who don’t play video games were having an actual conversation about our favorite Roblox YouTubers. But the more we talked, the more I realized that our conversation hadn’t actually moved as far away from sociology as I thought.
Culture Is Closer Than We Think
When we hear the word culture, we often think about large groups of people. We might think about nationality, ethnicity, religion, language, food, traditions, or customs. Those are all important parts of culture, but sociologists use the concept more broadly.
Culture includes the shared beliefs, values, norms, language, practices, knowledge, and objects that help shape the way members of a group understand and navigate their world. And groups don’t have to be countries or societies to develop cultures of their own.
There are workplace cultures, sports cultures, college cultures, regional cultures, fandoms, and countless other subcultures that exist within a larger society. A subculture is a group that shares distinctive norms, values, interests, practices, or ways of communicating while still participating in the broader culture around it. Gaming communities are a great example. Spend enough time around people who play Minecraft, Roblox, or Fortnite, and it becomes obvious that they are participating in communities. There are expectations about how people should behave. There are trends that spread from player to player. There are well-known creators and personalities. There are debates over which games are good, which updates are terrible, and what everyone should be playing next.
A popular Roblox game like Steal a Brainrot has its own shared meanings and references that make sense to insiders but may be confusing to everyone else. The name itself probably sounds completely ridiculous if you’ve never encountered it. But people who play it know the characters, strategies, terminology, and unwritten rules surrounding the game. There are even status distinctions. Knowing more than someone else, mastering a difficult part of a game, owning certain virtual items, or discovering something before everyone else can carry social meaning within the group. In other words, there are norms, values, language, status, and a shared body of knowledge.
That sounds an awful lot like culture.
“It’s Just a Video Game”
This is where my conversation with my friend came back to cultural relativism. Cultural relativism asks us to understand a culture on its own terms rather than immediately evaluating it according to the standards of our own culture. Its opposite, ethnocentrism, occurs when we use our own culture as the standard against which we judge others. We tend to see our own ways of doing things as normal, sensible, or better, while practices that are unfamiliar to us can seem strange, unnecessary, or inferior. Usually, when I teach these concepts, students encounter examples involving cultures that are much more obviously different from one another. But the same basic tendency can show up much closer to home.
Think about how easy it is for an adult to look at a child playing Roblox and say, “It’s just a game.” Why do they care so much? Why does it matter which character they have? Why are they watching someone else play a video game instead of just playing it themselves? Why are they using words I don’t understand?
Some of it can seem ridiculous. But that’s exactly the point: we’re looking at it from the outside. Once I started paying attention to these communities because they mattered to my kids, some of the things that had seemed silly started making more sense. Cultural relativism doesn’t require us to adopt every practice we encounter. It asks us to try to understand what something means to the people participating in it.
And to my kids, these communities mean something.
Learning the Language
Sociologists distinguish between material culture and nonmaterial culture. Material culture includes the physical objects and technologies associated with a culture. In gaming culture, that might include gaming consoles, controllers, computers, headsets, and other technology. Nonmaterial culture is the less visible side of culture—the shared understandings that influence how people think, communicate, and behave.
This is where gaming culture gets especially interesting. You can buy a gaming console. You cannot buy an understanding of what everyone is talking about. That knowledge has to be learned. This process is called socialization, the lifelong process through which we learn the culture of the groups and societies around us.
We tend to think of socialization as a process in which children learn from adults. Parents teach children manners. Teachers teach classroom expectations. Families pass along traditions and values. But socialization doesn’t stop when we reach adulthood, and it doesn’t always flow from adults to children. Sometimes your child is the cultural expert.
My oldest son even took the next logical step and created a Roblox account for me. Observation was no longer sufficient. It was time for participant observation. I use that term somewhat jokingly, but there is something sociologically interesting about actually entering a space instead of simply watching it from the outside. Once I tried playing, I had a slightly better appreciation for what my kids were doing, what they had to learn, and why certain accomplishments mattered to them. I still wasn’t particularly good at it. But I understood a little more.
Who Gets to Decide What Matters?
There is another reason I think gaming culture deserves our attention. Adults have a long history of dismissing young people’s interests as trivial. The music is too loud. The clothes look ridiculous. The slang makes no sense (e.g., aura, cooked, noob, admin abuse, and bacon hair). They’re spending too much time on whatever new technology has appeared. Gaming can easily fall into the same category.
Of course, that doesn’t mean adults shouldn’t set boundaries or think critically about screen time, online safety, spending, or the content children encounter. Understanding a culture doesn’t require us to stop being parents. But there is a difference between setting boundaries and assuming that something has no value simply because we don’t value it.
For millions of young people, gaming communities are spaces where they interact with friends, develop shared interests, learn new skills, encounter trends, create things, compete, cooperate, and participate in something larger than themselves. It also makes me wonder how many cultures and subcultures we overlook simply because we aren’t members of them.
I love that my kids have reminded me of something I teach my students all the time: culture isn’t something that exists only somewhere else. It’s happening all around us. Sometimes it is passed down through generations. Sometimes it develops among people who share a religion, language, occupation, or hometown. It can also develop among people who have never met one another in person but know the same games, watch the same creators, and use the same language. And it can be happening right in your living room while your child is playing Roblox and saying words you have to ask him to explain.
The interesting part is what happens when we become curious instead of dismissive.
What communities are you part of that might have their own culture? What language, norms, values, or shared knowledge would an outsider have to learn to understand your group? And what is one culture or subculture you’ve never really taken seriously simply because you weren’t part of it?
Understanding another culture doesn’t always require traveling very far. Sometimes, it simply requires being curious enough to enter a world that isn’t our own and open-minded enough to recognize that what seems strange or meaningless to us may make perfect sense to the people who belong there. In other words, it requires us to think a little more like sociologists.
