Why Do We Care About Mainstream Controversy?
With all the outrage over the ‘No Russian’ mission in Modern Warfare 2, such as this embarrassing piece on Fox News, I wanted to briefly discuss the gaming community’s obsession with mainstream controversy. Why do we feel the need to defend ourselves from these criticisms?
News flash: gamers are no longer a minority. The videogame industry is one of the largest entertainment earners in the world. Videogames are no longer for children and teens. Most people play in one form or another. With the exception of Germany and Australia, very little of the ‘Western World’ has any history of media censorship.
What is everybody worried about? Just ignore it, videogames aren’t going anywhere.
Everybody plays
Everybody plays videogames. 68% of households in the US play games. There are over 100 million next generation consoles in households today. Over 20% of the Japanese population has a Nintendo DS of some kind. The average age of a videogamer is now 35. That’s higher than the average age of person alive on the planet today. If you take only the developed world which is the market for these games, the average gamer is rapidly looking more and more like the average.
Videogames are on pace to earn $20-21 billion in the US this year alone, and this is the worst year in a long time. That’s more than film. That’s almost as much as literature. That’s more than each of the major sports leagues see in ticket sales.
The real controversy with this Prince of Persia image is that Jake Gyllenhall has a shirt on
Videogames aren’t rock music in its infancy. They aren’t Dungeons and Dragons. They’re huge and growing faster than almost anything else. Short of guaranteeing that every Call of Duty player is going to go on a murderous rampage, I see no chance of the videogame sales structure changing in the near future. And even then, it would be a judgment call.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 sold 7 million units in its first 24 hours, and it was the largest entertainment launch of all time. Millions of people lined up at midnight in the US alone to purchase it on a Monday night. Healthcare legislation rallies can only muster fractions of that, in the daytime, on a weekend, and that’s the President’s top priority.
You’re never going to please everybody, all the time. The more popular something is, the more criticism it’s going to attract. It’s no coincidence that all major game controversies are associated with the highest selling games. There are far more offensive games than GTA 3’s hot coffee outrage, or Modern Warfare. Nobody cares.
Dante's Inferno to the EXTREME! Virgil is very controversial
Videogames aren’t treated differently by regulators compared to other forms of media. Germans don’t allow extensive violence, or Nazi themed images, but that’s not just in videogames. Australia’s limitation with videogames comes with 15+ being their highest age rating scheme, not with some specific reservation about games particularly. We’re not fighting for the right to buy videogames, unless you want to buy them when underage.
Just ignore the commentators, and the controversy. People criticizing videogames and linking them to violence are the minority. They’re fighting availability of the most popular and fastest growing entertainment form in the world. It’s a losing battle.
