games are culture—shared, social culture—you just need better friends and coworkers.

I do observe it applying to video games in many circles. This is more true for social (cooperative or competitive) games and in game-adjacent social contexts like Twitch streaming, but it's also applicable to recognizing references and plot beats from widely-known classics or having similar experiences over particular moments or levels, even in single-player. Pokémon, Final Fantasy, Minecraft…

> Same applies to books and musics, to a lesser degree to magazines/news media. For some reason, it mostly doesn't apply to videogames

It absolutely does, but apparently not for your peer group.

> It's weird because TV is also culture. Game of Thrones isn't just some random piece of personal, single-player entertainment: it was, and is, an important cultural phenomenon for at least half of the planet. > > That's what makes the dynamics so weird: it's not just, or even primarily, about your personal entertainment - there are social aspects involved, from wanting to belong with your peer group (e.g. talk about latest GoT episode with your cow-orkers at the water cooler)

OTOH if you don't have that in common with other people, you just talk about other things. It is the same thing with soccer for example which is the #1 subject around coffee machines for men (and now increasingly women).

Yes. However, attention is finite, the intersection of topics any one in the group is willing to talk about is narrow, and my point is that TV shows occupy significant fraction of it - that's why they have this weird dynamic where seemingly extraneous entertainment product is treated by many as basic human right. Because in some sense, it is: it's a big component of the shared experience, which itself is the glue that holds society together.

> OTOH if you don't have that in common with other people, you just talk about other things.

What, you mean like babies and mortgages and bills and restaurants and health problems and gossip? I mean I can enjoy talking about those as well to an extent, but at times I like to change it up a bit.

For a lot of people I know, that's all I really have in common with them, besides geek shit. There was like a solid 45 minutes of me sitting quietly at a New Year's Eve party recently, because everyone else started going into all the Marvel and Star Wars TV shows they watched, of which I've mostly skipped (except Loki and a couple seasons of Mandalorian).

For the people who don't even have interests in geek shit, it seems like they're often very limited to the other topics above (or the other topics plus sports if they're into those). At least the people I've encountered.

It's not like I don't have other interests. I have a lot of creative interests, like making games, and writing, and (very amateur) photography, and music. But a lot of adults don't bother with that stuff (or don't bother anymore, at least), and mostly just consume the creative output of others.

Game of Thrones was a massive outlier in its cultural impact, especially for a TV show. Many games have as much or more cultural impact than many TV shows or movies, probably more on average - even than major shows. And among children, it's almost entirely the opposite.