A primordial soup of exploding trends and memes: TikTok’s wild world of video games

From pastiches of stilted old animations to trash-talking pubescents meeting their match, TikTok's gaming zone is an often maddening place, full of energy, attitude - and space skullduggery

Gaming culture has lived online since the internet became a thing, so it is no surprise that TikTok is now a primordial soup of video game memes. The time-honoured greatest games of all time" magazine feature lives on as clip compilations soundtracked by thrice-remixed SoundCloud rap. Streamers post highlights from their live play, from unlikely kills to spectacular rage-quit explosions. Kids post skits that make fun of their parents' dismissive attitude to games. Cosplayers dress up as game characters and jump on the latest dance craze. Trends explode for a week then disappear, like that month in 2020 when teenagers were posting clips of themselves studying to Mario Kart music.

Gaming is totally native to the under-21s who power most of TikTok's content, so music, sound effects and in-jokes from video games permeate pretty much everything. Beware, though, because TikTok's audience is so extremely young, if you've been playing games for longer than about 10 years, browsing will make you feel like Methuselah. I saw one compilation of old video games that are still fun today" composed entirely of things that came out when I was in my 20s.

There are some exceptionally bad opinions expressed in this ever-evolving morass of short videos, and a distressing number of entries in the disappointingly sexist girlfriend tries to distract boyfriend from playing his video games" genre, but there's good stuff too: Shelbyrenaeyt, a 24-year-old Fortnite streamer, posts painfully amusing (or just straight-up painful) clips of all the pubescent boys she encounters in-game trying and failing to trash-talk her.