Video Games - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 35

Warcraft with (excessive?) use of wizardry, fantasy aesthetics and asocial
connotations (due to the avatar society) might deter an outsider, but once
s/he becomes interested s/he zealously expresses his/her loyalty to the new-
found community by fully embracing all the attributes and proudly display-
ing them to the outside world. This mechanism can be observed frequently
in cases of subculture and countercultures. It reinforces and solidifi es the
initial attributes, values and preferences of the subculture. Many gamers
see themselves as an avant-garde of a artistic movement that will spread to
the rest of society—it is only a question of time before everybody will play
video games. However, is this assumption of infi nite expansion plausible?
Will the hardcore gamer aesthetics of today be embraced by mainstream
society similarly to its embrace of literature, music and fi lm? Why hasn't
society already embraced it?
POST-HARDCORE ERA: THE RISE OF THE SUBCULTURAL
The hardcore versus casual gamer polemic is purportedly dead as the expan-
sion of the video game medium has transformed it into a truly mass-market
and mass-cultural medium. Is this actually the case, as claimed by infi nite
expansion advocates? Has the hardcore subculture relented its power over
the industry and medium and transferred it to the “casual gamer”? This
chapter has provided many questions and not necessarily straightforward
answers. Most of the answers have a common denominator, though: sub-
culture . Many of the characteristics, challenges and salient issues of the
contemporary game industry and markets can be traced to the notion of
the subcultural. The main contribution of the subcultural perspective is
that video gaming is not necessarily seen as a mass-cultural phenomenon
(as some claim) or eventually as such in the future, but rather treated as
an isolated and parallel “world within a world”—instead of “eventually
everywhere” it is “already everywhere, but isolated”. Video games are truly
everywhere, on every device and in practically every country in the world.
The game medium in its current shape has probably already reached its
limits of expansion—but what exactly is holding it back from becoming a
truly mass-cultural medium on par with fi lm, music, drama and literature?
Proponents of the infi nite expansion perspective would claim that the game
medium is inhibited by its avant-garde status — prejudice and misinterpre-
tations by unappreciative older generations that will disappear as soon as
the “Nintendo generation” becomes more established in society.
The subcultural perspective claims that the expansion of the medium is
impeded by subcultural mechanisms. The broadly defi ned gaming subcul-
ture is creating a substantial yet exclusive community of gamers and devel-
opers that are increasingly isolating themselves and, most importantly,
excluding the majority of society/market from the video game medium.
The post-hardcore era is creating an isolated “media silo” for the game