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Comments
Still not sure how you are getting that those will be the next spotlight darlings. People hated DA2 and have mostly forgotten about DA1 by now.
I hope everyone likes the XCOM remake so we get stylish semi tactical turn based strategy with RPG ish elements as the new darling.
Considering Amalur or whatever it was called, I'm pretty sure Skyrim and WoW have more of an effect.
I want 2-d fighting games with sprites instead of 3-D graphics to be next big thing.
The Fighting Game community will forever do their best to be as unappealing to new people though.
Agreed, but there usually is something. It was platformers for much of the 90s, for instance. Although we might be looking at a couple of anomalies. Each of those trends happened a bit after technological advancement in the game industry and after a catalyst game demonstrated what could be done. For instance, 1998 was a pretty big year -- Ocarina of Time, Half-life and so on -- and a lot of current trends could probably be traced back to there as a catalyst for influence.
In fact, I don't think we've had another 1998 in the entire history of gaming.
Well, the Internet gave us MMOs, but that's really about it.
The thing is, media works through fads and oversaturation. It's a sad fact of life and why we have a shitton of shitty blockbuster Michael Bay wanna be movies at the theater, a shitton of annoying supernatural romance books in library and so on. When executives find something they work, they want to keep making more of it in order to turn a profit, thus causing innovative ideas turn into shitty, repetitive ideas.
I think most, if not all of these problems would be solved if people realized their money is an implicit vote and that they should use it carefully.
Yeah, but I don't think most people care about the state of the industry as long as they can get their cheap thrills. That and a lot of people don't do their research beforehand. When I buy some generic platformer, I don't really care that it's derivative as long as I can get more platforming goodness, even though I might complain about the derivativeness afterward.
Well platformers are all basically about running and jumping across things and sometimes hitting or shooting them too.
Like I said, it'd be a solution, but not by any means a viable one. There are a lot of problems in the way media is treated and treats society, but people for a variety of reasons just don't care. Which is a damn shame, if only because I think that media is one of the most important cultural vestiges we can leave for future generations. And well, it'd be pretty sad if my grandson watched Transformers and asked me why did a movie about Megan Fox's ass and some robotic explosions thrown around won enough money to justify two sequels and all I could answer would be, "People were people, yo"
Of course, he'd glare at me forever for saying yo, but you get the idea.
Milos (from the second page),
What you said about using men using female characters for less than positive reasons, reminds me of this chart of player character choices for PSO 2's demo.
Even though over 70% of the characters created were female, I would be pretty surprised if that was anywhere close to the actual proportion of players who are female. I wonder if that pattern is more unique to Japan though, since in my (albeit limited) experience, men using female characters tends to be considered "unmanly" or weird in the U.S.
Juan_Carlos,
Maybe part of the reason why most people do not care as much about media's impact is because they are prone to thinking that media tastes are entirely subjective and so there is no reason to listen to someone when he or she talks about what you mentioned (i.e., the bad version of "haters gonna hate").
I'll be honest, though: I believe that media taste is a subjective value shaped up entirely by preferences. However, there are objective values that in media. And I feel that these often are ignored simply because people don't like thinking about things like these hard enough, for a variety of reasons.
You may be right. I guess in some ways saying "everything is subjective so do what you will" is easier than trying to argue that there are certain concrete things you can actually use to measure media. It seems like the latter approach requires you to have some kind of reasoning that you think can stand outside criticism (i.e., you actually need to have an argument).
Of course, there are probably plenty of problems trying to establish what is and is not an objective value in media, but I agree with you that it at least seems worth it to try to distinguish them from subjective tastes.
@LouieW: I'm interested to see a chart for a western game as well, or at least a group of western gamers.
I actually suspect the pattern in the chart you posted holds for animesque games, such as the MMORPG Eden Eternal, though perhaps not as skewed. However, I do wonder about non-animesque western games with cosmetic gender choices, such as, say, CrimeCraft GangWars.
Allow me to make the bottom part of that comic more accurate: