I've been playing NHL 08 like every day and reading the Hipster Runoff a bunch recently and their take on the whole "alt/authentic/popular/mainstream" complex. Which got me thinking about how video games have become the entertainment option of choice for dudebags over the years.Video games used to be the domain of nerds (ie. virgins) and little kids (also virgins). They used to be creative, very complex (because you have so much time to master the intricacies of Dalsim when you have very five-to-ten friends, don't go to parties and have never interacted with a non-relative of the opposite sex) and usually pretty creative, but only in the way a 35-year old man child can be creative. In the nineties, as video games became less abstract, they started to appeal to more people (non-virgins) and new genres appeared or became predominant; namely sports, fighting and first person shooters. This is where it all started going downhill.
Mortal Kombat is one of the worst games ever made. And yet it was so popular because it was super simple (rewarding button mashing and repetitive jump-kick attack strategies) and had overly-gratuitous amounts of violence in the tackiest lamest possible way. Then came Madden. Then came Road Rage. And so on and so forth until Call of Duty and Halo (whose sequels were some of the most overated games in history).
around the time of the Xbox (and the Playstation), the average gamer became a drunk, slightly intellectually challenged 25 year old fratboy. This kind of person will not play Fallout 3 or Final Fantasy Tactics, or Nights. He's will play Call of Duty 1 to whatever the fuck they're at or Madden. Developpers can't afford to make good games because they cost more than Hollywood movies. GTA 4 is GTA 3. All first person shooters are identical (except Bioshock and Half Life). I'm not even gonna get into EA Sports and the video game industry wetting themselves because they updated the rosters and managed to not make a worse game.
On a side note, when I was looking for an image to illustrate this post, I typed "frat guys video games" in Google. There was an excessive amount of homoerotic (and straight up New Gay City) pictures.
