The Generational Shift

The Generational Shift

Video and PC games as an entertainment medium is still young compared to most others. Indeed the industry is only 30 years old or so depending on what history you read. Nevertheless the industry has grown substantially. Video games used to be thought of only as a toy but now games have multi-million dollar budgets with storylines, acting and special effects that are beginning to rival Hollywood movies. Certainly the sales of certain games have reached millions of copies.

Having said that, coverage of games in the mass media is only now beginning to reach that of movies, TV and music. Some encouraging news on that front included having The New York Times' Seth Schiesel author an E3 blog from the Times's web site, complete with video. The Washington Post send a mini-army of reporters, including Mike Musgrove, to cover E3 and they constantly updated the Post's web site with their own blog. Both outlets also covered the expo for their print newspapers as well

So when will we see video games covered in the same breath as TV or movies? CNN's Chris Morris told us, "I think there will have to be a generational shift. Right now, the people who run networks (and, for that matter, Congress and other major pieces of our life) are Baby Boomers, who didn’t grow up playing video games. As people who are currently in their mid-30s and younger assume those positions of power, you’ll probably see more widespread coverage. But will gaming news ever be as popular as TV news? No way. A side note here, also… consoles will likely continue to grab a more sizable portion of the gaming news spotlight, since they have a lower price point and wider distribution as pure gaming machines."

Schiesel is a bit more optimistic, saying that the New York Times is trying to overcome that kind of age gap. "My editors are looking past that. They are smart enough to cover what they don't know." He adds that as times change people in power will have grown up with games in their lives, saying, "One day there will be a President of the US who will have played video games." Schiesel also feels that this change could benefit people who want to cover the game industry as more and more media outlets decide to give regular coverage to games. "Hopefully we can create a lot of jobs for journalists."

Snider, however, feels that newspapers may not get to that point. "I’m not sure games will ever have equal coverage in the newspaper. However, online, where space is not an issue, is where games will actually get more coverage than traditional entertainment pursuits because of the interactive nature of games." Grossman adds, "I think there's a bit of a wait-and-see attitude with games, as to where they'll ultimately wind up in the culture - whether they'll be more of a storytelling medium or something more analogous to a sport, or something else. I don't think they have to end up in the same category as TV shows and movies, etc. -- it's not a perfect fit. We love games, we cover them, but - at the risk of sounding defensive -- we're not entirely sure what to make of them yet. And I think we're not alone in that."

One media outlet that has done little to no coverage of the video game industry for the past few years has been, ironically, Entertainment Weekly. The magazine did a cover story on the industry a few years ago and did a feature on the launch of Halo 2 in 2004 but for the most part coverage of the industry has been few and far between. EW, for example, failed to cover E3 last month for its print magazine, relegating coverage of the expo to some blog posts on the "Popwatch" section of the EW.com web site.

So why is a magazine that is arguably the biggest print mag covering pop culture in the US ignoring video games? As Kim told us, "A good question. It's not as if we unaware of video games and their very real significance as both a pop cultural and economic force. Without giving away too much, we've discovered that game coverage is just not that important to our particular readership. And reader scores bear this out., “ Kim added, “There seems to be a public perception that console gaming is a pasttime of the chronically adolescent or the perpetually stoned-that it is an artless product served up to a largely unsophisticated audience. And perhaps there is some truth to that. Another reason is pretty obvious: gaming is not a star-driven business. Movies, music, TV shows-they all have very public faces. Even books have their celebrity authors. People have heard of J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown and Tom Clancy. But Will Wright? Hideo Kojima? Cliff Bleszinski? Not so much."