Getting Inside the So-Called Myths of Gaming

Some of the things you know about the videogame industry are wrong. Not all of them, but more than you’d think.

Some myths are pretty darn nifty, like Hercules, who punched the Nemean Lion to death and then made a snazzy cape out of him, or Thor, who tooled around Midgard beating up trolls and dragons with a magic hammer. Videogame myths, on the other hand, are rather lackluster by comparison, and rather than casting us as heroes, make us seem like weird troglodytes that at any moment might go on a murderous rampage. Thankfully, our myths are more easily debunked, and in Issue 286 of The Escapist, C J Davies takes some of the biggest myths of gaming and busts them wide open.

Myth: Casual Gaming Is Killing “Real” Gaming

A prevalent industry gripe at the moment is that “casual gaming” – say, Facebook games or the relatively lightweight motion-control japes that form most Wii content – is getting so popular that it will annihilate more serious or “core” gaming. And just when people were starting to treat the medium with a bit of respect, too.

Again, it all boils down to interpretation. What is “casual”? What isn’t? Wii Fit might be the best-selling game ever, but let’s not overlook something like the recent [i]Red Dead Redemption[i] – an intense, complex and profound work that has sold by the bucketload to become one of the year’s biggest hits. Is it possible that casual gaming might be a distinct market sector in itself, and will no more affect “real” gaming than Dan Brown has affected the sale of Dostoevsky novels?

Whether it’s the idea that games make you violent, or that videogames are a boys only club, each one gets shot down in short order. You can read more about it Davies’ article, Videogame Myths Debunked