Video Games - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 19

2 VideoGames
A Subcultural Industry
Mikolaj Dymek
This chapter will analyse and explore the video game industry as a subcul-
tural industry . It will discuss how the notion of subcultural production is a
novel and rewarding perspective on the cultural industry of video games. In
this chapter the notion of video games as an intrinsic form of mass media,
and its numerous industrial/aesthetic strategies and forms, will be ques-
tioned and analysed.
Much has been written and said within the game industry, game media
and academic game research about the inevitable journey for the game
medium from obscurity to mainstream culture—an almost deterministic
belief in the evolution of video gaming from the esoteric to the ubiquitous,
from niche to pandemic, from periphery to centre, from isolated experi-
mental media to universal mass media. In other words, a coming of age for
the video game medium, and a purported propagation of its aesthetics from
the gamer avant-garde to the yet to be convinced masses.
This particular assumption of infi nite expansion of every dimension of
the video game phenomenon permeates almost all types of video game-
related thought throughout industry, academia and press (Gartner 2011).
This study posits the video game industry as a subcultural industry because
this provides a more rewarding perspective on the dynamics of the video
game industry. The subcultural perspective in many aspects opposes the
tenets of the infi nite expansion narrative. To analyse this issue this study
will begin by defi ning what a subculture is, followed by an exploration of
the subcultural notion applied to the video game phenomenon. This will be
achieved by framing the issue from three perspectives: industry, medium
and consumers. Then follows a look at the infi nite expansion narrative—
what type of challenges is the game industry confronted with if it is to
continue expanding and becoming a truly mass-cultural form of media
expression? It will be showed that many of the cultural attributes of the
traditional video game subculture are not adequately fl exible to adapt to a
mainstream majority culture—particularly not when considering many of
the new casual/social gaming content strategies proposed as the future of
the game medium and saviour of the creatively ailing video game industry.