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."

Comments

It has already happened

[llevity]

I am 27, and have been playing games of some sort since I can remember. Growing up, being a gamer was almost a stigma. It had nerdy connotations. In the school setting, it wasn't something you very often talked about openly. Maybe with a close group of your friends in a private setting, but talking about games at the lunch tables in the cafeteria would likely get you pointed at and laughed at.

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.