Gaming Culture

Gaming culture cannot really be defined in simple terms.  At first glance it seems simple enough; a bunch of dudes sitting around a console or their computers just playing their favorite games.  Probably nerds, likely do not spend a whole lot of time at the gym or playing sports.

These days, this really is not the case.  There are more casual gamers than ever; higher sales for games like Call of Duty than there have ever been for games before.  The term casual gamer is even up for debate with more and more people getting further involved into what you might even call transmedia storytelling.

Gaming today involves much more depth, from forums and pieces of different sites dedicated to everyone’s different favorite game, to break downs of every game you have ever played and heat maps for where you most commonly die, or perhaps spend your time camping like an asshole.  Even the “casual gamer” seems to be involved of these parts of gaming today.

Gaming has even gotten to the point where “E-sports” are getting bigger and bigger all the time (as much as I hate that term).  Thousands of people are watching streams every day, listeing to the banter of their favorite players for hours, just hoping to learn a few tricks or pieces of advice.  I myself am definitely guilty of this.  This would be my favorite player in LoL right now, and my favorite stream to watch.

Dan Dinh

I  have also had my fair share of gaming experience.  I was once one of the best players in the world at a game called NFL Street, which was a bit like NFL Blitz, but not quite as ridiculous.  One of my favorite games I ever played was Halo 2, in which I was in a group that was top 3 in the world for a time.  Now I don’t spend quite so much time at one game, though a majority of my time is spent playing League of Legends, my current favorite.  In terms of Richard Bartle's breakdown, I would place myself somewhere between the achiever and the socializer.

Gaming itself has taken more of a turn toward casual gaming.  From the WII and Kinect to the perks in Call of Duty, they all tend to lean toward accessibility to the lesser-skilled and less-experienced player.  Not to say this is necessarily bad, as there is clearly still room to be more experienced, more skilled, and a better player overall.  What it does mean, however, is that the games being made are geared more toward this group of casual gamers as it grows larger.

Games are less often being made for the honor of being groundbreaking or industry changing, and more often are being made as closely to the most recent success.  One of the current examples of this would be, once again, and sorry for beating a dead horse, but the Call of Duty franchise.  Nobody would argue there are significant changes between Call of Duty 4 and the current game, Modern Warfare 3, however there is argument over how much this matters.

There is no doubt this is the greatest strategy for making money, as this has been shown in the sales of these types of games in the recent years, but is it “good” for gaming?  I myself miss the days of games like Ghost Recon, Rainbow 6, and other shooters that have been pushed out to make way for the types of shooters we have now, the only types of shooters we have anymore (first person Call of Duty-ish shooters).

In the end, how much do we care as a gaming community?  Is it stupid of me to think gaming companies should make these games just because some portion of us might like them, selfish even?  Or is it more a fact that these are the most popular games because they are the only ones being made, similar to how one might argue it isn’t that people want to eat unhealthy, but it is what is most available to them?  I would like to believe the latter.