Culture Clash

(June 2003)

The Deplorable Word

Who defines our “Mainstream?”

“Games were considered a sideline novelty and have only recently been revealed as the passageway for the future of the human race.”
-- Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

For reasons inexplicable, games intended for the “mainstream” have come to be identified not by those who make, talk about, or play games, but by a segment of the public which plays very few games and whose ignorance of the medium often perceives literal shovelware as the best our industry has to offer. This is done with the tacit acceptance of the industry, despite its vested interest in telling the world that games are not for outsiders, computer geeks, or obese schoolchildren alone. Yet with every animal hunting title sold at Wal-Mart, with every gender-locked fashion designer game “for little girls,” with every arcade classics compendium, the industry is turning a blind eye to the slandering of our medium by allowing the lowest and the least to be called “mainstream” gaming.

Developers naturally gravitate toward surefire titles, but seem too influenced by the purchases of a market segment that should have very little clout in design decisions: a segment that genuinely believes Deer Hunter, Barbie Fashion Designer, and play-at-home game shows to be “mainstream” and therefore successful. “Mainstream” would be better defined by high quality, top-selling games with broad consumptive appeal: DOOM, Civilization, Resident Evil, Heroes of Might and Magic. All these games sell well and appeal to large audiences. Successful games such as The Sims are enjoyed by casual and serious gamers alike, and therefore should define mainstream gaming.

The Medium of the Video Game (UT Press, Mark J.P. Wolf, Ed.) notes that “after appearing as a novelty and then developing into a toy, the video game took only a little over a decade or so to grow into an item of mass consumption.” This matches the trend for film and television in all ways except the time frame – consumers tend to accept new media faster now than before – but film and TV “mainstream” is more clearly defined and of higher quality, because the mainstream is defined by the creators of the respective media. Game developers would do well to identify and heavily market the mainstream on their own, rather than allowing a non-gaming press and the “limited gamer” segment to define it for them.

96% of parents see gaming as a valued addition to their children’s lives. Despite such encouraging reports, claims persist alleging danger to young people posed by games – in many cases, the claims come from the selfsame parents who depend on video games to shut their kids up just as parents of the previous generation depended on Disney videos. Incorrect assumptions about the “mainstream,” what is appropriate for whom, fuels the fire of these attacks. Good parents wouldn’t allow their child to listen to an Eminem CD at eight years old; Eminem makes no secret of the fact that his music isn’t for kids. But he is mainstream for his market segment (not all music) because the music industry defined and marketed him as such. Gaming also needs to delineate market segments rather than gleefully pounding out horrifically violent titles and acting shocked when those titles, despite massive sales, are seen as a threat to the mainstream of electronic gaming.

The non-gaming press, in its exploratory forays into talk about gaming, tends to separate “mainstream” players from “power gamers” – apparently a difference between buying one game a year versus fifteen. Gamers who spend most of their money and time supporting their hobby are shoved to the back of the proverbial school bus while eMachines-owning Deer Hunters are considered the mainstream gamer, because the non-gaming press is currently defining gaming mainstream. While this is in part the result of a misguided view from a non-gaming press, founded on the not-implausible logic that Deer Hunter-style games are more accessible to limited gamers than Morrowind is, the argument fails when one realizes that were the industry defining its own market segments, “limited gamers” would never be considered as an option for the consumptive mainstream.

The solution must come in the form of development decisions made by game developers. Developers who wish to design games for large audience segments should examine previous successes and make judicious design decisions based on them (developers who wish to develop niche products are, of course, free to ignore market segmentation; not everything can or should be mainstream). Instead of assuming that Scrabble 3 and K-Mart checkout lines are the best way to break into the mainstream, developers should look instead to the powerful marketing forces behind Enter the Matrix and Tomb Raider, the adroit design and high sales numbers of Halo and Max Payne. These games should define our mainstream, because these are the games that were made by mainstream developers for mainstream gamers – individuals who spend a large percentage of their time and income on the medium.

As always, the magnitude of obligation lands squarely on the shoulders of game developers – not only must they now develop good games, they must make shrewd design and marketing decisions in order to realign world perception of what is mainstream gaming and what is shovel gaming. Though I am loathe to assign any more homework to the already burdened developer community, the skin crawls when one considers the alternative: store shelves creaking under the weight of naught but Intellivision Classics CDs and Wheel of Fortune tie-in games.