First, more money floating around an industry means more will (and I hate to say this) "trickle down" to people at the bottom of the food chain; a few of those big budget producer types do remember their roots. The Weinsteins throw money at avant-garde directors when no one else is willing to finance them. SOE, god love 'em, buys MMOGs only a mother could love and gives them a place to clean up and try again. It's not exactly philanthropic, but big guys will subsidize little guys because when the little guys win awards, they thank the big guys in front of everyone.
Secondly, it gives us something to scoff at, to ridicule, to point at as an example of what not to do. Honestly, we're already there. Most of us were building Katamaris months before the big gaming press got wise. We look at Katamari Damacy and Uplink and Fate and wonder why EA can't get on the ball, and when it's obvious they never will, we laugh at the people who walk into Gamestop on Madden's release day. Madden is just too mass market to be good, right? We've shifted to "indie rocker" out of divisive instinct. And you know what? Indie rockers are pretty cool. Indie gamers will be, too.
Hey! There's our new niche. Rather than hiding in basements and having same-sex LAN parties, we'll gather in non-Starbucks coffee houses wearing black leather and Mario t-shirts, using our XPS laptops' WiFi to chat in IRC with a group of people on the other side of the country doing the exact same thing. We'll prattle on about the philosophy of the next Matrix game while telling the groupies at the next table how, like, close we are to the house band, man. There will be DS2's in every pocket, and mobile game playing phones will ring out the underwater theme from the first Mario Bros. when someone gets a phone call.
It'll be grand.
Where We'll Be
No matter how successfully the 360 and its future inceptions draw us into the mainstream, there will still be purists in the culture willing to preserve whatever history we've written for ourselves. Perhaps they'll just be the next human generation of punks, kids who borrow their gamer parents' machines of antiquity to play Fallout or Myst or any of those other throwbacks to times when games were games rife with a cultural ethos that long since evaporated from big budget titles. They'll be the first historians of the gaming age.
Our relics are in the shape of 5.25" floppies and aggressive message boards. Only after our children's inspection into our past will we ever be truly aware of what legacy we left behind, and what that legacy did to shape how the world has fun.
Joe Blancato is a Contributing Editor for The Escapist Magazine, in addition to being the Founder of waterthread.org.
