[-empyre-] culture, counter-culture and hardcore Farmville players

[Julian Raul Kücklich]

Am 30.11.2010 14:04, schrieb Gabriel Menotti:
> Hence, is gaming culture going mainstream in the same way that punk
> rock did? Does all this casual gaming represent the commodification of
> its dynamics and values?
>
> But wasn’t punk rock defined exactly by its technical crudeness? And
> aren’t arcade parlours commercial venues in the first place?

Interesting point. It's probably not very useful to compare gaming 
culture to something like punk rock, because punk rock was based on an 
anti-aesthetic which deliberately positioned itself against the 
mainstream. Gaming culture was never positioned against anything else, 
although it might have been antagonized by practitioners in other media. 
What we see happening now is that "hardcore" gamers bemoan the 
"sell-out" of games through increased accessibility and less demanding 
gameplay, as typified by games such as FarmVille. So vis-a-vis 
established gaming culture, social games are the new punk rock: easy to 
produce, with much more emphasis on "spreadability" than gameplay, and 
reaching out to audiences who would never pay 60 euros for a AAA console 
game.

Julian.

dr julian raul kuecklich

http://playability.de