ABC News posted a very interesting article titled From Geek to Chic: Record Sales Signal Video Games’ Arrival regarding the video game industry and how, to put it simply, gaming has arrived. Even if the article details the high significance the gaming industry brings in revenue annually, the most interesting piece of the article was the following;
"But perhaps the biggest factor in the industry’s success during 2006 wasn’t the glossy hardware or the cutting-edge games but instead a subtle shift in the once-geeky public perception of the gamer persona. Consumers just don’t feel so strange about buying or playing video games anymore."
Keyphrase: the once-geeky public perception of the gamer persona
It’s an interesting thing to believe that being a gamer is now socially acceptable within American society where videogamers are stereotypically viewed as anti-social, bad hygene, poor healthy, geeky people who speak of nothing more than videogames whereas in Japan, and recently S. Korea and perhaps even China, gaming has become ingrained in its culture and is acceptable. With the rise of professional gaming and pro-gamers serving as icons, it may just start to become socially acceptable.
This doesn’t mean, though, that the average person, or casual gamer for the sake of semantics, will care about where you’re ranked in the Top 10 on the Halo 2 leaderboards, you doing a 10hr rush from start to finish in Valkyrie Profile, or whether or not you can execute dream cancels seamlessly in King of Fighters XI. There’s a time and place for everything I suppose.
