Bridging an Industry Divided

Within the video games industry, there has been a divide between game designers, video game critics, and video game players (gamers). There is a great need within the industry to bridge this divide. Traditionally, a video game critic or video game journalist’s job is to provide an avenue for gamers to feel like their voices will be heard. As the community moved to social media, the divide between consumers, critics and creators of content began to change. With the ability to instantly share personal opinions online, the gaming community has evolved into a disharmony of clashing ideas. While video game journalists and public relations try to mitigate this and use it to fuel the industry, over the past few years the community has become self destructive by igniting controversy over real life social issues.

The video game community is blessed with many things that make it a unique marketplace of ideas. Its members are multicultural, have no set racial, economic, sexual, or age, and have a common vocabulary with shared interests. The medium has no barrier of entry and is even accessible to children, but it is also ripe with intellectual potential and is heavily scrutinized by academics, especially in educational and behavioral science. Games themselves are inherently built upon mathematical logic and systems, yet have incredible emotional power through their narratives. These traits help to create a wide variety of different thinkers working and engaging in the gaming community. The video game industry has the potential to bring about social change, if only the people in it can work together to better their own environment.

There is a distrust of video game press and specific journalists and bloggers over their agenda. By examining their arguments and distancing the person from their work, my goal is to help the public gain more insight into aspects of gaming and the gaming community that they often overlook in their mission to play and enjoy games on their own terms. I understand that most gamers aren’t interested in building a better community for everyone, and some gamers think the issues are annoyances making it harder for them to hear about and enjoy the games they want to see, but my goal is to help out anyone who’s willing to engage intellectually and constructively about these topics and share what they have to say.

My goal is to create resources for people within the video game community can gather information with an eye towards resolving conflicts. As part of this process, I want to teach people about other resources that are out there and help foster more respect between the critics and the community. By examining relationships between different groups in the industry and why people play video games, I hope to teach readers the joy of being part of the video game community.