US video game industry revenue

It is a curious fact, and one that ought to trouble us more than it does, that the amount of money Americans spent on pretend swords and digital dragon slaying between 2009 and 2021 moved in almost perfect lockstep with the amount of money Chinese consumers spent on real objects they may or may not have needed during a single day in November. The correlation is 0.972, which is to say these two phenomena are practically twins separated at birth and raised on opposite sides of the world by people who have never met. One suspects the universe is playing a joke on our species, and we are only just now finding the punchline written on a spreadsheet.

What actually binds these together, almost certainly, is the most tedious force in economics: global GDP growth and the rising disposable income of the world's two largest economies. Between 2009 and 2021, both the US and China experienced substantial increases in consumer spending power, and both video games and Singles Day shopping were beneficiaries of this tide. Consider that US video game revenue grew from about 20.4 billion dollars in 2009 to 36.4 billion in 2021, while Alibaba's Singles Day sales expanded from roughly 9.3 billion yuan to over 540 billion yuan in the same period—both curves climbing like synchronized swimmers. These weren't separate phenomena at all; they were two different populations discovering they had disposable income at approximately the same moment in history, and spending it on the things their respective cultures had made available.

And so we are left with the rather humbling realisation that correlation coefficients are less like windows onto truth and more like mirrors held up at certain angles—they show us what we want to see, which is usually just our own tendency to see patterns in the dark. The video game and shopping data are less connected than they are both connected to a much larger story about economic expansion, and had we been clever we might have simply asked that question from the start. But we weren't. We saw the numbers climb together and felt briefly like we understood something. We didn't.