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How To Move Games Beyond Geek Culture
The Lost Garden offers up a post theorizing how to break out of the circle of games by gamers for gamers. The current self-delusional state of mind, the author posits, is why the industry is having problems attracting parts of the mainstream audience. From the article: "We need take a step back and introduce some systems thinking to understand the dynamics of the industry. If we blame the publishers or the programmers or the consumers or the designers as individuals, we gain little understanding of the issue and manage to create a lot of denial, hand wringing and hurt feelings. The truth is that most individual actors in our industry are doing what they think is best. The result may be a degenerate system, but the individuals are operating with a clean conscience. There is absolutely no paradox here. Ultimately, I'm not concerned by individuals doing their jobs poorly. My concern is that they are fixating on an insignificantly tiny market when a much larger one awaits. By blindly devoting their efforts toward the current market, we starve the market expansion process."
That has changed.
In just overheard conversations from some of the younger generation of gamers, playing games is no longer the stigma it used to be. Kids talk about games openly. They bring Gameboys to school and play them openly during breaks. And while there will always be the too-cool for that groups, it's no longer just the geeks wearing glasses.
Just look at the growth of the gaming industry. Geeks are everywhere, true, but there's not enough of us to support the huge market that exists now. Others are buying and playing games.
It's only going to grow as home internet connectivity is approaching ubiquious. While gaming with friends used to be limited to those in your neighborhood, or those whose parents could bring them over on occassions, now it can be done both in person, and online, and peer pressure and the "do what they're doing" adolescent mentality will cause it to grow further.
I think there are plenty of people out there who are not gamers for reasons other than "they don't want to play games", and could very well be brought into gaming.
My dad, for example... I recall back when all me and my brother had was our Atari 2600, and later our NES... we would play all the time... and ocasionally when my dad had some time he would play with us. Now with the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube, the games and controls are too complicated for him, so he rarely tries playing games... but im sure he would like to sit down and play a game with me sometimes.
This is one of the reasons im looking forward to the Nintendo Revolution... the control sounds very intuitive, and im hoping they will have some simple, fun games, that dont take a lot of hard work to get good at, or advance in...
My hand touched her hand. Her hand touched her boob. By the transitive property, I got some boob! Algebra is awesome!
Instead of making vanilla "mainstream" stuff in an attempt to appeal to as many people as possible (as seems to be the impression here), it would be better to bring the focus in and look for niches of people who would play a videogame if it catered to their interests. Like Guitar Heroes (a game the blog writer mentions often). There are a lot of people who'd love to experience rocking out on a stage in an auditorium but who have no desire to shoot hookers or aliens or pwn noobs. I'm probably what the demographicists would label 'hardcore', so why should I care? Because I don't want to play hardcore games. Above all else I want to experience games that are fun, and some of those games probably lie well outside what the marketers are willing to push to the hardcore crowd.