Mass Market, The Holy Grail of Gaming

[Edi]

Fairly on target. One good comparison is games to books. Reading books is okay in most people's opinion. So what's the difference between a game and a book?

The biggest one, essentially, is that many, many games are very much like books, only you get to interact with the story, you get to DECIDE (up to a point) where the story goes and how it gets there. It's mentally stimulating, it's great and it may allow one to expand one's horizons. And it often has eye-candy too.

When one starts looking at the book market, there's the usual division to crime, romance, horror, science fiction, fantasy, non-fiction etc and even lots of subcategories in many of those. And quite often the mainstream opinion on people who read fantasy and science fiction books is that they are pathetic nerds and there is somehow a stigma on that activity.

Generally it boils down to that, put bluntly, the people who look down on gaming and in the case of books, fantasy and science fiction, are morons. These are the idiots who can barely manage one working synapse and even that one works only erratically. These are the people who have no imagination, who wish to have everything spoon-fed to them in bite-sized pieces, preferably pre-chewed. Their lack of imagination tends to lead to them disapproving of anyone who has an imagination and uses it.

With games, much as with books, trying to pander to this mindless mob of boneheads is a stupid decision, because reading and gaming are both at some level intellectual pursuits and there are so many more less intellectual pursuits to snatch that mob's attention. Such pandering will also alienate a lot of the people who would be a much better target audience. That pandering wants to hit the lowest common denominator, the problem is that the lowest one is found in other fields.

I would also hazard a guess that the problem may be exacerbated in the US by the prevailing attitude of anti-intellectualism. Even in complex issues that require years of education to understand, it is not uncommon to find people from completely different walks of life professing their opinion as fact and if the actual experts on the subject disagree with them, their objections are disregarded in favor of asinine gut feelings and such experts are often even looked down upon unless they tell the mob what the mob wants to hear.

Good luck trying to conquer THAT market with a pursuit that is at its heart intellectual on several levels.