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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."
From the article:
It's this kind of wording, thinking, angle of viewing the world (i.e., highly interdependent ecosystem that is the natural consequence of historical starting conditions., wtf?) that illustrates the niche characteristic of the gaming community. Not many others think of interdependent ecosystems (especially talking about games), nor natural consequences of historical starting conditions.
I have some loves in my life: classical music; bicycling and bicycle racing; and ping pong (yeah, I know, table tennis... and for the record I have a 1600+ rating in table tennis).
All of these loves I often wondered why the rest of the world didn't see with my passion. I got busy with committees, tournaments, advertising, evangelizing, etc. To no avail. For the longest time I didn't "get it". But maybe older and wiser I do -- all loves are not for all people. Maybe that's what makes it such a cool world.
Games is a niche world. It's a pretty cool world, but it's a niche world. It's a challenging world, but it's a niche world. I've mastered many games, but never owned any (other than what came for free with a computer).
Good luck to the gaming community, but I don't think the issue is making gaming attractive to the universe, gaming looks like gaming, people know what it is. A different selling approach may show a momentary blip in the usage and participation in games, maybe even an increase of some demographics, but the equilibrium is pretty close today to what it will probably likely be later. That's not a bad thing, it's just a thing.
Oh, and as not to be flamed for singling out games... consider: (as some other niche markets unlikely to garner larger markets)
These are all interesting in their own right, just unlikely to become world dominant.
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.
Last I heard, gaming was a multi-billion dollar industry. That leads me to believe that there are more people buying games than "geeks", and that the industry is not fueled by hardcore gamers trying to amuse each other at the expense of someone who doesn't fall into that category. I know plenty of people who are neither geeks or gamers who buy consoles and the like.
Right, because no one is buying those X-Box 360s or Playstations. They're just sitting in the store unsold. It's so sad.
I can't believe this wanker referred to the Tragedy of Commons. Comparing anything to the ToC practically screams "I want to be an important thinker! Really I do! Please! I am serious! I have Big Thoughts!"
Gaming is already huge. Show me ten males under the age of 21. How many of them have never played a computer game? Zero. How many do not own a PC with games on it or a console? Perhaps one. Yeah, games are so not mainstream, right...
Granted, there are some games that are not mainstream - but tactical simulations, the Operational Art of War, play-by-email Diplomacy, etc. are never going to appeal to a wide audience.
If we could get out of our cultural rut and design games that appealed to them, we could make money.
So go do it already, instead of sitting around getting high with your high school buddies philosophizing ad nauseum about the "decline of the gaming industry".
Biggest. Wanker. Ever.
Advice: on VPS providers
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.