A common thread: The identity of social networking, gaming or otherwise

So I’ve been surfing - one could say perusing - my pageflake for awhile and i’ve noticed that over the last few weeks it’s been pinging more than a few links regarding the gaming community online.  One was about mytopia that I profiled in the previous post. Another was about world of warcraft - really nothing more than a treatment of its large community, but still interesting nonetheless in that it spoke to the idea as if something new.  Is it really that curious, that unknown - I almost want to say foreign - that gamers are so widespread and have banded together to form groups in the games they play? 

I can see it now - the main stream media looking at video games as just another statistic, something that 53% of Americans (and only 21% of Women) have done before, and so we have Diamond Phillips or whatever his name is from Dateline NBC come on to do an expose on the topic.

 Is that really accurate?  I don’t think so.  Sure gaming was considered outside the mainstream culture in the 90’s (and even then I would argue the early to mid 90’s, not the late 90s), but with the advent of the internet and applications like Xbox Live that clique has gotten quite the lot bigger.  So then, how can we say with such baited breath that perhaps gaming has hit the primetime, that its now come from the shadows and become something that we can recognize as “well, we all do it”?  I don’t think we can.  I think it’s just the mainstream media being its usual “public discourse/awareness” self and realizing “oh, hey - i don’t think we’ve done an article on this for quite some time.  Go, quick, write a little this-that-and-the-other-thing and give it to us in 15 minutes.”  Granted, that’s a bit facetious, but the point remains that such surprises, if not the overall hesitancy in the media to recognize the gaming culture as a standard issue and not something new, are absurd.  Give us our time in the light, if you so want, and move on.  There’s nothing to see here - except, of course, for a few hundred million users. 

Perhaps you want to do an expose about it?  I can give you my number.

Summary of a Zotero Source: Steven Kent’s “The First Quarter” »« Mytopia: the union of casual gaming with social networking