I don't know how you could think this unless you mean something like esports gaming. Gaming has been mainstream for quite some time, as early as the late 80's I'd say, complete with tv show, toy, and movie tie ins. PC gaming was a little less prevalent, they cost a lot more than consoles of the era.
A couple years out of college, I actually did start a casual game company. Ended up giving up on it because by then I didn't really keep up with or care much about the gaming industry, but not before launching a website that hosted ~100 or so games, and getting some initial users. Most of our traffic came from the Northeast Corridor of the U.S. during the hours of 9 AM - 6 PM EST weekdays.
I recently took a glance around the gaming world. It's amazing how much it's changed. There are more AAA titles than you could possible know about. There are massively-multiplayer F2P games that people spend hundreds of dollars on. People will actually pay to watch other people play games, and there are folks who make full-time livings streaming games on Twitch.
It's different than it was in the 80s. Almost all the kids I grew up with had Nintendos or PCs, but it was a kids thing. Those kids are adults now, and they have disposable income (though not necessarily a lot of it), and the idea of climbing the corporate ladder is becoming less and less attractive to many people because corporations have made a habit of pulling the ladder out from under you just as you're halfway up. So people put the minimum amount of effort needed to not get fired into their jobs, and they spend their competitive energies in one of thousands of different games on their nights, weekends, and occasionally (if server logs are to be believed) workdays.
It's probably bad for the competitiveness of the American economy, but it's been great for the gaming industry.
The way I see it, advancing in one's career is about gaining more and more skills and experience to merit a higher paycheck, which is a proxy for the value one provides to their employers and the market in general. The proxy is definitely not perfect, but it's the best one we have.
So under this view a career is inherently meaningless, at least if you are willing to attribute meaning to people providing value to one another, which I definitely do. I don't think that video gaming (at least on one's own) is as meaningful for society.
Under the view of the grandparent, the metric/proxy of salary has become so utterly meaningless because of modern day business behavior that it is no longer a meaningful thing to pursue (or never was).
I personally also have some problems with your view. According to you a corporated lawyer earning $500/hour by drafting contracts is 50x as valuable to society as someone earning $10/hour caring for disabled people, which I think is very untrue. What "the market" values and what we as people should value only has a partial correlation.
Another example, a lot of people value their family and children above all else, while having children leads to almost zero reward from "the market".
Salaries are in essence what we are willing to pay one another for each other's time and effort. In your example, people are willing to pay a person 50 times as much for drafting a contract than for taking care of a disabled person. I don't see anything inherently wrong with this. There could be various reasons explaining this disparity, ranging from a lack of availability of people who can do that, to that job potentially being more difficult in some ways, and probably also down to it being more important in some ways, e.g. directly affecting the lives of thousands of people. Whatever the reasons are, the people who choose to pay the fee were probably unable to negotiate a lower fee for a similar level of work.
On the other hand, the question of "what we should value" is much more amorphous and I'd be interested to hear of ideas on how to model and practically implement that, if you have any. There only alternative frameworks I'm familiar with are communism, with its well known share of problems and "time banks" which I've seen working decently well at a local level, but don't tend to scale.
As recently as 15 years ago, a "game console" (home or portable) was mostly something upper-middle-class children owned. 10 years ago, we all got smartphones, and those smartphones got app stores, and suddenly everyone owned a game console (whether they wanted to or not), with a constant stream of games—often free games—coming out for it.
Mario got a movie in the 80s. Pokemon got Thanksgiving day floats in the 90s. But in neither of those cases was everyone playing; everyone was just aware of the brand (mostly because their kids were playing.)
Meanwhile, if you union the sets of people who have played just Candy Crush, Minecraft, and Fortnite at this point, it's probably something like half the global population. Gaming really did "blow up" in the last decade.
This doesn't strike me as a useful definition of mainstream.
I live in Vietnam and I guarantee you that no one here could tell you a single thing about baseball, The Beatles, or Elvis.
Hell, just go to Australia/UK and no one will be able to explain baseball to you. Just like you can go to the US and no one understands cricket even though nearly 1 billion people (albeit primarily in the ex-British Commonwealth) do.
In any case, your claims about the video game market 15 years ago (in 2003) aren't accurate. In 2003 videogames in the US sold 240 million units. 54% of American households bought a new videogame -- that's far from "mostly something upper-middle-class children owned".
15 years ago 32% of households were already playing video games on a mobile device (phone, PDA, handheld game system). 35% of parents said they played video games. 69% of households said they played computer & video games.
15 years ago 2/3rd of Americans played video games. It was already mainstream. Sure, it has gotten MORE popular since then. But that doesn't mean it wasn't mainstream.
For a preview of what video games being "mainstream" looks like: South Korea. It's not unthinkable we could get there in the west.
as reference, according to wiktionary, mainstream is Used or accepted broadly rather than by small portions of a population or market. I think that definition can encompass 40,000,000 households owning consoles.
Wii Sports (12 years old) sold 80 million copies. That's more than any album ever.
Individual videogames regularly sell more than MUSIC and have done so for well over a decade.
I don't know what definition of mainstream there is where something sells 80 million copies and still isn't mainstream.
Super Mario Bros sold over 40 million copies.
Both of those games are 30 years old. Wii Sports was not even close to being one of the first mainstream games.
The original Pokemon games sold over 30 million copies, inspired a massive worldwide TV show, and that was over 20 years ago.
It wasnt mainstream in the 90’ies which is where i predicted that one say you would be able to score girls by being a famous gamer.
I'm pretty sure this was different in the 80s.
http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/12/15/who-plays-video-games-...
(contemporary example: Taylor Swift is decidedly mainstream. Does everyone listen to Taylor Swift? No. At best half of teens and twenty-somethings and drops off going through olders. Does everyone know someone who listens to Taylor Swift? Pretty much.)
No. Unless you're talking about a country other than the US, this is absolutely incorrect.
Original Playstation sold more than 40,000,000 units in the U.S., and in the same console generation N64 sold another 20,000,000. On the portable front, the original Gameboy & Color version, beginning in 1989, sold more than 40,000,000 units. Keep in mind, there were only about 80,000,000 households.
There are not 40,000,000 upper-middle class households in the US. For reference, the original gameboy cost $90, roughly $180 in today's money. This is not out of reach for even poorer households. In today's dollars, even if you draw the "upper middle" line relatively low at about $100k for a family of 3, there's only about 30 million households at that level, and 16 million of them don't even have kids.
I'm not debating that video games have become even more popular in recent years, but they were mainstream long before that. "Mainstream" doesn't mean "everyone". The simple wiktionary definition is simply "Used or accepted broadly rather than by small portions of a population or market." I'd be hard pressed to say that millions upon millions of console owners isn't "used broadly".
My point with that statement was more about the image than the reality. Go back to 2002, and ask a legislator—or any childless 40-year-old—"who plays video games." That's the answer they'd give. Yuppies. Children of yuppies. (Then the XBOX hit and it became "college-student yuppies and urban youth." No market shift happened in reality; it was just advertising causing a change in perceived image of gaming as a hobby.)
> households
I really think "households" is a bad way to measure anything about gaming, because the particular way that gaming wasn't mainstream in the 1970s-2000s (besides older people just never having experienced it) was that it was incredibly male-coded.
In 2003, a girl sitting around playing GBA games was still considered to be doing something "tomboyish." It wasn't until the release of the Nintendo DS in 2004 that there was any large-scale availability of games specifically targeted at female demographics. All the home consoles were advertised at boys, and mostly had games for boys (that being the explicit localization strategy of the American branches of Nintendo and Sega through the 90s; it began changing by the early 2000s partly due to the influence of Sony, partly the diminishment of Sega, and partly the reining-in of NoA by Nintendo Japan.)
PC games were more gender-neutral (because PCs weren't advertised at kids to begin with, but in homes as a side-effect of parental usage), but AAA releases targeted at girls were still few and far between. There was... The Sims? That's all I can think of. When I ask the women I know about the games they played in that era—of their own volition, rather than because someone handed them a controller—the only other one they tend to name is Myst. Oh, and DDR, but DDR seemingly wasn't really "a video game" in their minds, in the sense that made them think of themselves as "the type of person who plays video games."
And maybe girls around you didn't play videogames, but they certainly did where I was, about as much, but maybe a little less. you're assumptions here are simply wrong.
No it's not. "Pop culture" (or "mainstream"-ness) must reach even "a member of the elite class", to be pop culture. The point at which something becomes "pop culture", is precisely the point at which it becomes equally likely that you've heard of it, no matter which demographics you're a part of. If there's even one demographic (like busy rich old white men) that can still be completely isolated from a thing's "reach", then that thing is not pop culture yet.
If all 20-year-olds know about something, but all 40-year-olds do not know about that thing, then that thing is not "pop culture" (or "mainstream", either-or.)
On the other hand, if 10% of ten-year-old boys and eighty-year-old women and plumbers and astrophysicists and farmers and investment bankers have all heard of the thing, then it is "pop culture."
Try that criterion out. It really does work:
• Beanie Babies? Pop culture.
• Pogs? Not really pop culture. They were a fad, but they died out before they reached universal intelligibility.
• The movie Titanic? Pop culture.
• The movie The Matrix? Not quite pop culture. My grandma hasn't seen it. Yours probably hasn't either.
• Pokemon in general? Not pop culture.
• Pikachu in particular? Pop culture. (Thus the recent movie.)
• Snoopy? Pop culture. Americana, even. ("Americana" being a word meaning "pop culture, but pretty much only in America, so we've latched onto it as a thing that reminds us of America.")
• Hello Kitty? Pop culture elsewhere, but not-so-much in America, despite what certain stylists like to think.
It is by this same criteria that I claim that "video games up to 2003" were not—as an abstract gestalt—part of pop culture, and that "video games starting in 2004"—as an abstract gestalt—were part of pop culture. They went from being "Hello Kitty" to being "Snoopy"; from being "The Matrix" to being "Titanic"; from being "Pogs" to being "Beanie Babies."
And I hate to be insulting but I can’t imagine you being an adult. I’m fairly certain every adult here knew who sonic and Mario were and none of us would be so ignorant as to say gaming only went mainstream in the last fifteen years.
Your "insult" literally corroborates what I'm saying. Until within the last 15 years, we weren't adults. The "adults" of then very likely did not know who sonic and Mario were, even if their kids did. Now that we're adults, adults know who sonic and mario are. And so do our kids. And maybe some of our parents. That's the point.
Please don't start of comments on HN calling people "son", then claim to "hate to be insulting", then proceed to insult people. None of that was necessary to make your points.
What we’re seeing that’s new is the confluence of a few things that have led to game playing becoming a mainstream career and the existence of game players that are celebrities as a result.
The other trend I see is that more ubiquitous access to the internet means more kids hang out with their friends in games as a means to socialise. But this was by no means a niche thing in 2008 there was just a higher barrier to entry. For example XBox Live debuted in 2002.
Might be a bit early for 13.
The magic of twitch (and league of legends, and a few more) is that this is indeed a very price-sensitive crowd, but one that is willing to engage in a steady stream of frequent capex-style microtransactions while refusing to touch opex/subscription-based models.
I don't even have netflix or spotify or any subscription service, but I find it worth my $5/month to support the one streamer I enjoy tuning in to whenever I want some background entertainment while doing things around the house, and I think that's not an uncommon usecase.
It's also about personal connection with a community, which is something that was lacking on the internet after the era of forums died out.
This is accurately the current state of affairs, but these are presented like conclusions you make on an industry that's a half century old at least. Gaming was a tiny niche not 15 years ago. It's entered the mainstream less than 10 years ago. It surpassed the film industry not 2 years ago in revenue. Pirated games almost had more volume than official sales in the 90s. All these things have changed, and are still changing.
The games and games-adjacent industry is changing at a blinding speed. Maybe it'll turn into a steaming junkpile like the mobile app market. But maybe it won't. Kids are growing up with games normalized. Everyone is digital, and games are on anything digital. Incumbents that don't keep up will definitely dwindle in their influence. Big players trying to break into the industry have failed to understand the changes. Everyone said similar things when Twitch had a $2B acquisition by Amazon. I think it was underpriced, they are doing incredibly well. Price-averse? There are people literally throwing (digital) money at streamers just for fun, or to troll them, or to get their message announced on stream, or any number of random antics a streamer sets up. But really only in the last year.
A rapidly changing industry is all about timing, and Xfire was sadly too soon, internet multiplayer gaming was not the mainstream and internet/tech infrastructure for it was not as mature either. No-one can tell these things in the present, but I think now is as good a time as any for Discord to do well.
I think the industry and market, if not Discord itself (which has good execution for a fertile market), is still being seriously underestimated.