![]() And so, they've really grown from out of the basement into, sort of, a mainstream form, where now you see anybody and everybody in the New York subway playing games, in the same way that you see people reading books and listening to music.Īnd so, what that has done to the industry, I think, has quite a dramatic shift, but for all intents and purposes, the games industry always was mainstream focused, they sort of just lost track of it because of the shifting economics and the incredible costs that would come with developing for newer hardware generations and so on. For the longest time it was always defined by a very narrowly delineated audience, it was especially younger men 18- to 34 year olds, you know, playing shooter games or role playing games in their parent's basement covered in Cheetos dust, right so, that's, sort of, the stereotype. So, the catchphrase is everyone's a gamer now. So, the big affordance over the last few years has been that games are mainstream. One of the things I think about when you look at video games is what we think of as gamers has really changed over these past 15, 20 years.ĭreunen: Correct. So, I think it's a radically different configuration between the traditional patterns of consumption around entertainment. And so, it's a whole new dialogue between, on the one hand, an entertainment industry that is large and growing, at the same time, this audience of hundreds of millions of people that all want to somehow participate in their Fortnite universe and their Pokemon GO universe and leave their own mark. We're no longer just passively sitting on the couch, we're building things together with the creators. And this has been, sort of, the catch phrase for the last 10 years, right? Gaming is big, it's growing, what's going on? But I think it's more interesting that, you know, as audiences shift to new forms of entertainment, both on a consumptive, but also productive measure, right, as we now start to see gamers have become much more direct impact on the type of games that they play and, you know, contributing to those games by building things. When you compare video games to other forms of entertainment today, like TV, film, and music, where does the video game industry stack up?ĭreunen: Compared to other forms of entertainment, the games industry is now $150 billion or so in consumer spending, so that makes it a multiple of music and movies combined even. And when you look over the past 20 years, this growth that we've seen in the video game industry has really been massive. But it's always been a passion of mine, I just didn't realize, up until 20 years ago, you could actually pursue those. ![]() And then once that happened, the business kind of came on its own terms. So, as I started to set up my little academic tents, that turned out to be a good decision. in the time right before the internet bubble burst, and so, I ended up going into academia as a result, and in there I had one of the most interesting aspects of all things media entertainment, it was gaming, wildly uncovered, underreported on, you know, there was no research or anything on it. It was really a fool's errand for me, personally, I came to the U.S. ![]() ![]() Before we dive into the substance of your book, how did you first get involved in video games?ĭreunen: That's a good question. ![]() Sciple: Great to have you on the podcast. ![]()
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