That
headline up there is a question I hear all the time.
No matter
how big the gaming industry’s revenues get; no matter how much a hit title
becomes part of the pop culture lexicon, people (often non-gamers or people
from large media companies) want to know when gaming will be accepted as a
mainstream form of entertainment.
My answer
is always the same. As Baby Boomers get older and Generation X begins taking
over the boardrooms and governments, you’ll see attitudes toward video games
begin to shift. And that shift may be starting to take place now.
Kotaku
has a nice write up of a luncheon hosted by Mike Gallagher, president of the
Entertainment Software Association, which lobbies for the video game industry
in Washington and is the parent company of E3.
Gallagher talks about his
perception of President Obama’s attitude toward gaming (generally positive),
but the story’s most interesting nugget was a throwaway sentence at the very
end of the story.
"For the first time we have a console in the White
House," says Gallagher. "We understand the president has a Wii and
we're very excited about that. Having a degree of exposure to the technology is
very, very positive."
Ain’t
that the truth? Obama may or may not be a gamer himself, but we’re creeping up
on an era when the leader of the free world spent parts of his childhood
dropping quarters in a Pac Man machine and has played at least a few levels of
“Grand Theft Auto”.
And that, I believe, is when we’ll see gaming acknowledged
as an entertainment medium far and wide, instead of a slightly estranged
cousin.
