It's amusing, the gaming culture has grown to be so broad yet this discussion here is just what a friend of mine and I were arguing of the other day. Everything is all love it or hate it. The game either gets an 8, 9 or 10 and MUST BE BOUGHT GAME OF THE YEAR OMFG!!!, or is 5-7 "dude it's not worth the disc it was burned on". It is absolutely ridiculous that we've lost any sense of in between.
Yet when it comes to gamers as a whole, I find they've broken into many groups. There's the "hardcore", and then there's the "mainstream". These can each be broken down further, where you have hardcore gamers with a stick up their ass and look at anything like Halo as being absolute garbage despite any argument against. They are so full of themselves that any game which doesn't approach their ridiculous standards is trash. Then there are those that are extremely critical but play a lot of games anyway. Then there are those that simply love games. Holy crap, who knew?
Until the Wii, the mainstream has been the dirty frat boy demographic. I feel I should emphasize this since so many people are, well, short-sighted. The whooping howling frat boy demographic did not begin with Halo. They've always been there. The only difference is now they are actually calling themselves "hardcore gamers" instead of beating kids up for following that label.
Before Halo, they played Counter-Strike. Before Counter-Strike they played Mortal Kombat. Before that they played Mario, just like everyone else. But no matter what their standards were driven by the same values that forces them to see Michael Bay's Transformers. A lack of sophistication. They dress and talk like they are on MTV and play for the competition, not the artistic integrity.
There is no one thing that brought them into the mainstream. As stated, you can trace it as early as the Genesis trying to be cooler for an older audience and allowing blood in Mortal Kombat. It could be viewed with Counter-Strike, which is, at my best guess, the origin of tea-bagging (for all I know it started with Quake 2 or Unreal Tournament, though. Then again, those games had people exploding to bits, didn't they?). You could look at it as Sony's advertising the Playstation as an entertainment device for "cool teens" rather than a games console.
Either way, the gaming industry has always sought to grab that mainstream appeal. In the 90's people tried to have a million and one fuzzy animals that ripped off Mario and Sonic both. Then it was a constant ripping off of Mario 64. Now it's a ton of shooters copying Halo. It's never existed with artistic integrity at the fore front.
But you know what's great? The Nintendo Wii. All those competitive controller jockeys are unhappy that games are being made for grandma and kid sister, even though such moves will only push the industry forward. There will always be developers looking to push for artistic integrity. We'll always have the System Shocks, Assassin's Creeds and Psychonauts of the games industry. But by having everyone try to find success in the widest of mainstream audiences, we get something we desperately need.
Variety.
This is the major problem that Russ Pitts is bringing up in his article. We want gaming to be precisely how we want it. We don't want to change the games industry to resemble television or Hollywood. We want it to remain independent forever, despite demanding so much technology and budgets out of developers.
Gamers need to just shut up and accept their place. Just as the number of movie buffs are minimal compared to the mainstream that just goes to see movies for the Hell of it, the number of gamers that actually care about design and plot are minimal in games. But you know what? That doesn't mean our hobby will be lost. It just means there will be a lot more types of games out there. So what if a lot of them don't appeal to you? There will be something for you as well.
Just shut up and enjoy it.
