On The Next Big Thing

Although my idea of a video game is still something along the lines of Space Invaders or Pitfall (remember Pitfall?  I made up a whole backstory about that little pixelated guy), I found this gaming article in Slate interesting.  Here's an excerpt:

While gaming feels too much like a boys' club for my liking, the goal of  'trying to make more games that appeal to women' is problematic. The television shows that attain not just ratings but cultural admiration—like Mad Men—aren't usually created with gender targets, but with the goal of telling a story that captures the nuances of human experience. I would guess women like Mad Men just as much as men do, even though the values of the show's characters are overwhelmingly sexist. Similarly, I don't think gaming will broaden its audience by focusing on subject matter so much as execution and intention—the why that Hecker asks developers to consider in his talk.

After reading that, I stumbled on similar sentiments from The Guardian concerning Harry Potter:

As is often the case with cultural phenomena, it seems to have helped that Potter defied the conventional wisdom of the time. A focus group would surely have concluded – as the eight publishers who turned down the original manuscript presumably did – that there was no modern market for stories about a bespectacled wimp at a boarding school. But within a decade he was a billion-dollar brand.

The lesson here seems to be that, like life from the Primordial Stew, culture should be allowed to bubble-up from whatever pool it was born in.  Attempts to manipulate audiences by manufacturing cultural phenomena may succeed but they will not endure.  For me, this is another reminder that real shifts in mass consciousness should be regarded as gifts from the gods.  We can teach ourselves to receive them but we cannot create them.