Video Games - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 34

are they refl ections of a reality that the game industry is attempting to
shed? Regardless whether this is an accurate depiction of the hardcore gam-
ing culture or not—these issues need to be addressed in order for the game
medium to become a truly universal, neutrally codifi ed and mass-culturally
embraced medium. The big question is though: are virtual farms on Face-
book, or fl ying birds on smartphones, the correct way to address these
issues? These trends are steps in the right direction due to their explosive
popularity—but are they sui cient in terms of artistic innovation, or toler-
able on the business side, to replace the traditional console-driven hardcore
subculture? Regardless of the popularity of Angry Birds or Farmville —true
game afi cionados remain hardcore gamers. They remain the fi nal arbiters
of game medium aesthetics and have substantial infl uence over the image of
the medium and the preferences of moderate to casual gamers.
The most critical issue in relation to the communicational powers of
the video game medium is the underdeveloped expression form—when will
the game industry and the hardcore gaming culture truly acknowledge the
revolutionary communicational powers of the video game medium? The
medium has the power to develop into one of the most profound and rich-
est medium of our societies, yet it is mainly used to simulate alien wars,
street racing and football games. Artistically innovative and powerful
games already exist, but they are as far away from the top ten list as is
possible. Games could be more expressive, captivating and powerful in
terms of communicational powers than literature and fi lm combined . Is the
hardcore subculture yearning for this kind of content, or is it simply satis-
fi ed with the millions of hardcore genre games it already purchases? The
answer to this question constitutes the core of the entire “video games as
subculture” argument: it is (unfortunately) the latter. The overreliance on
this subculture hampers true development of the video game medium. The
hardcore gaming subculture has managed to codify an entire medium with
its own aesthetics, values and preferences—they love it, but the questions is
whether society as a whole can learn to love it too.
Personal Dimension—Gamers as Pioneers
Many advocates of the expansion narrative have a vested and personal inter-
est in legitimizing the medium to the majority culture, but also to present
themselves as pioneering early adopters and members of a new media avant-
garde . These pioneers, belonging to the hardcore subculture, are infl uential
opinion leaders for the rest of the market, but also constitute examples of a
typical subcultural mechanism, which can be summarized as: I'm a Trek-
kie, and I'm proud of it . Essentially this is a social mechanism by which
those attributes of a subculture that are considered pejorative by majority
culture act, for outsiders, as deterrents but transform into a reinforcing
argument for the converted. For instance, the “nerdy” attributes of a mas-
sively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) such as World of