Video Games - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 29

Industrial and Market Consequences
What type of cultural and industrial consequences does the industry spi-
ral give rise to? Does it contribute to innovation, wider content spectrum
and popularization of the medium in the marketplace and society as a
whole? Or does it contribute to a process of radicalization, dichotomization
and subculturalization of an increasingly esoteric subculture of hardcore
gamers? The answer is, of course, the latter. The hardcore-driven spiral
produces a closed industrial mechanism that reinforces and nurtures the
hardcore gaming subculture. Its infl uence on the industry, market and sub-
culture is extensive.
The predominant consequence is alienated target groups: despite claims
otherwise, the majority of society is excluded from the traditional hardcore
target focus. Women, senior gamers and emerging market are excluded—a
few sporadic titles have managed to successfully attract some of these tar-
get groups (particularly women, who are increasingly attracted by casual/
social gaming, and to a limited extent senior gamers with, e.g. the Brain
Age franchise). Nevertheless, most developing and emerging markets can-
not participate in the global game subculture because the price levels are
beyond their fi nancial reach. Issues of gender asymmetry in the video game
medium and industry have been extensively analysed (Cassell and Jenkins
1998) although progress is made and signifi cantly more girls/women are
playing video games, hardly the same can be said about the video game
industry, which is still thoroughly dominated by men, as shown by research
in the Swedish game industry (Sandqvist 2010).
Alienation leads to a recursive subculturization process. Despite being
a fairly young cultural industry, the game industry has now existed for
more than three decades. Young developers entering the game industry now
weren't even born when the legendary Famicom console was launched by
Nintendo in the 1980s. This new generation has lived in a world of three-
dimensional hardcore video games that have with every console generation
become increasingly esoteric, complex and subcultural—they don't know
any other reality. This contributes to a reinforcing and recursive process
of hardcore subculturization whereby hardcore content attracts people to
decisive industry positions with similar aesthetical preferences, and then in
a rigid and cutthroat genre market is forced to compete and excel with like-
minded competitors. This process also af ects the societal perception of
the video game culture. It is frequently in society and mass media seen as a
antisocial, escapist, stereotypically masculine, violence-obsessed, aestheti-
cally/culturally tasteless and narratively primitive medium. These opinions
have contributed to the cultural codifi cation of the video game medium as
a niche medium , perhaps more suited for frivolous adolescent guys in the
Western world, rather than a truly universal medium with potentially the
same (or bigger?) creative and societal impact as other media forms such as
fi lm or music.