trunkage said:
'Control of gaming culture' is not something possible. Its emergent - the Invisible Hand. But there are many stakeholders. Lots of people have already pointed out some. Here are some more:
Jack Thompson, and similar pundits - while they didn't actually change much, they forced gamers to defend themselves
Females in games - I don't know exactly how it happened but in the 90s females were actively discouraged from gaming and it worked. I'd also put the mobile game phenomenon beside the break in this discouragement. Females didn't play games as much, and trying to catch up is hard. I'm trying to teach my daughter and she has trouble with inputs, particularly with 3D. There is a far greater barrier to entry now than 30 years ago.
TV/Video - the rise of esports and trying to represent that on TV has had its challenges. But heaps of money comes in so it'll keep going. Obviously, streaming and YouTube are making an impact too.
I wouldn't teach anyone to play specific game genere.
I have more femine interests/tastes in adventure and puzzle games than most males (I enjoy them). On the other hand I detest shooters, driving games and sports games bore me to tears (which have predominantly male audience). I love RPG games, tactical and strategy games, like but I am bad at arcade style games, completely fail at rhytmic games - which is sort of mind boggling because i.e. Furi is all about getting into the proper rythm and I do alright with that.
I had a friend who would react with motion sickness to even sudo 3D (he threw up trying to play Hexen...).
My daughter's favourite toy is a hammer and she runs smashing things up proclaiming she 'fixed it'. She loves Don't starve (mainly chopping down trees and smashing up rocks), though I had a troubling time explaining why daddy needed to 'give wolves a stick' (ended up just training beefalo's on them further on) and am very cautious to not let her see the shadowy side of it. My son is not interested in computer games at all.
My own sister loved 'Dune II', 'x-com Terror from the deep' and 'Pharaoh: Cleopatra' when we were young (would not let me sleep since she played in same room till late at night) but unlike me she mostly stopped gaming (she's over 40 now).
What I mean by all of that is that taste in gaming is very individual and may change in time. I would like to note one IMPORTANT thing: it is highly untrue and devisive to claim that girls were shunned in 80s and 90s in gaming. All people who were playing computer games were stygmatized and shunned by the peers who did not play games (hell, by 'society' = mass media in general).
What is also notable is that long term passive agression towards and shunning of individuals that don't fit in is prevalent among teen girls (they just grow up faster and tend to end up creating toxic coteries proving one another how much of an adult they already are), so yes girl gamers had a harder time fighting off onslaught of non-gamers but not due to lack of acceptance on male gamers or developers side.
I can agree tho, to that particular era (80-90s) had fewer (if none at all) games in generes that are usually preferred by girls/women but that has been fixed by free market at this point.
Also there's little to no thing as 'gaming culture'. People playing Witcher, Total War, LoL, Bayonetta, CoD, TSW, Madden, Fire emblem, Senran Kagura or Rance have little in common with one another. Unless they happen to enjoy and actively play several generes. There are few people that play all of the 'good games', if only due to available time. Lumping everyoine into some sort of homogyneous 'gaming culture' bin is simply dishonest. I mean would you really lump in Basketball fans, with Golf fans, Bowling fans, Formula 1 fans, Soccer fans, Alpine skiing, Ice skating and Chess fans and claim they create their own culture because they sit/stand/cheer so obviously do exact same thing, right?