Poll: Shooters are becoming mainstream, not video games.

[veloper]

Pretty much. Surprising how people here are willing to argue this.

 

[Inithra]

Is what you are saying this: if one plays shooting games or sports games one will be considered normal by society, and if one plays other types of videogames one will be regarded as a weirdo?

If that's what you're saying I think it's patent nonsense. If some people think of people who play games as odd, or as wasters, I don't think it has anything to do with the type of game they play.

Are you saying this doesn't happen? If so, you are incredibly blinkered.
Granted, the Internet may not be the best place to make this argument, inhabited as it is by a higher than average percentage of people who play videogames, but head out into the physical world and you will encounter it a lot.
Also, your last sentence isn't quite clear. Are you implying that people who negatively stereotype 'gamers' are the ones with the problem, or that 'gamers' bring it on themselves by playing the 'wrong' type of game, or by not adhering to social norms?

 

[CodeOrange]

Anything that has an advert shown twice during every adbreak for a month becomes mainstream. Or anything that is featured to hell on youtube and other social networking sites becomes mainstream. Or hell, even anything that is spammed on /b/ by a niche group of fans to become known by newfags so they can spam it across the internets becomes mainstream. Ponies anyone?
Basically anything that is shown to a mainstream audience becomes mainstream, even if it notoriously sucks.

 

[Durananrananrananran]

Is what you are saying this: if one plays shooting games or sports games one will be considered normal by society, and if one plays other types of videogames one will be regarded as a weirdo?

If that's what you're saying I think it's patent nonsense. If some people think of people who play games as odd, or as wasters, I don't think it has anything to do with the type of game they play.

Are you saying this doesn't happen? If so, you are incredibly blinkered.
Granted, the Internet may not be the best place to make this argument, inhabited as it is by a higher than average percentage of people who play videogames, but head out into the physical world and you will encounter it a lot.
Also, your last sentence isn't quite clear. Are you implying that people who negatively stereotype 'gamers' are the ones with the problem, or that 'gamers' bring it on themselves by playing the 'wrong' type of game, or by not adhering to social norms?

I'm not saying this doesn't happen. What I'm saying is that people who negatively stereotype gamers aren't thinking about the type of games being played. I'm disagreeing with the original poster by saying that the type of game has nothing to do with being looked down upon. I've heard people say things like "all he does is play xbox all day...". I've never heard anyone say "... but he plays shooting games so he's normal", or "... and he plays weird RPG games so he's a weirdo".

Of course, the people who negatively stereotype anyone for what they do in their spare time are the ones with the problem.

 

[IBlackKiteI]

How can only one genre satiate an entire entertainment media culture?

I know, it's like saying all music is rock, or that all films are dramas.
While this may sometimes seem like the case due to their prevalence, it really isn't.

Just because CoD, Battlefield and bunch of look alikes and similar games are popular, it doesn't mean that other genres aren't fucking massive too. There will always be a market and audience for other things anyway. Like how ridiculously popular say, Plants vs Zombies is.
Also, know how with music one genre will be 'the shit' for a while then it becomes overdone and completely dies? That's probably going to happen quite soon with shooters, or at least with the common 'two guns, regenerating health, shootouts within 50m, frag grenades that don't fragment' kind of deal.

 

[Zhukov]

I think a lot of people here are missing the OP's point.

Also, I think the OP has a good point. Telling people that I enjoy playing Sci-fi RPGs would get me a lot more weird looks than saying, "Oh yeah, I like to play Call of Duty after dinner."

But I don't really see it as anything to worry about.

 

[Aardvark Soup]

Some genres are indeed more widely popular than others. Shooters are probably more widely played than RPG's. RPG's ikn turn are more 'meanstream' than Roguelikes.

However, one genre reigns supreme over all these as far as... err... meanstreamness goes: card games, or, more specifically: Solitaire for Windows. There is probably no other video game in existance that is played by so many people.

 

[Smooth Operator]

RPG's are also quite popular these days, mostly due to barely resembling RPG's, hell things got so confused some people started calling CoD and GT5 RPG's.

Then you got music titles, social turds games, platformers(mostly on the Wii), hack&slashers, racing, ...

True on RTS's tho, any decent one is still PC only and that's not where the main crowd is so they don't even have the possibility of going mainstream.