I had the chance to stumble on this answer on quora that discussed in long detail how computer gaming had metastasized from a minority group activity to a majority group activity and the social implications there in.
The summation can be found here:
[..] appeals to people who feel alienated by the changing face of gaming, people who feel criticized when they’ve been the minority, people who want to keep gaming the way it was, people who are already prone to assuming conspiracies, and people who feel as if they’re being disenfranchised by the changes in society being carried out in gaming. It has been timely, in the sense that it is happening during a particularly pessimistic period in game journalism (see all the “gaming is dead” articles) and during a period where there’s an active series of cultural debates occurring on the role of gaming in culture.
Working at Zynga in the period 2009->2011 and seeing the abrupt transformation of gaming to a mainstream activity was disorienting. Making games that everyone played was not the experience I had with games. Games were a niche activity that some people did, not everyone. .
Many people who were involved in gaming hated Zynga because we were building games they didn’t like. I am not a game desiger, and I am not an expert in the art of gaming and I do know Mark Skaggs (FarmVille and CityVille and Red Alert) and Brian Reynolds (FrontierVille and CivII) and they built some products that millions loved.
And what they showed was that there was this vast untapped market desire for games that was unanticipated.
For a while, many folks in the industry looked at the games we built and said – these are not games. And then some folks people looked at the games we built, and said: I can do better. And much better games that targeted the markets Zynga had shown existed emerged.
The wold of gaming is very different from the world I grew up in. And that’s a good thing …
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