Gaming Cultures

Gaming Cultures

The gaming industry has grown so rapidly and become so widespread over the past years that it has integrated itself into everyday life and become part of our culture. They have thus spread to impact much of our everyday media in today’s society, including television, film, music and even sparked of political and news debated on the subject. They have also spawned a number of fandoms and become a subject to many fads, a short phase of interest, until something else comes along.

Such fads include many iOS games, a good recent fad within the gaming market, is the games called Draw Something by OMGPOP. At the time a good and popular game among the, smart phone population. This game was so popular that Zynga a big rival company of OMGPOP decided to buy out the company for $180million, however literally a few months later, the popularity had completely collapsed. Other games though not fads have been part of everyday culture and sparked of a wider range of the gaming audience, these games include Guitar Hero, which later collapsed spanning a 6 year reign, targeted at music fans, and Wii fit/ Wii Sports, which targeted at sports or people who wanted to get fit. These games not only encouraged a larger audience but encouraged families to get together and have competitions with each other making it a good party based game.

Families are a big part of the gaming cultures we live in today. Aside from the Wii, gaming conventions are a big part of the culture we live in, though not widely accepted within the norm, cosplaying is a widely spread hobby that has both parents and children dressing up as gaming character they aspire to be or they are a fan of. A big member of the gaming and cosplaying culture is the Final Fantasy series, which has gaming fans dress up as their favourite characters from the series, another is World of Warcraft and Pokemon.

World of Warcraft however is also the subject of social gaming, and become a part of a big part of the MMO gaming experience. World of Warcraft is mainly widely known across America whereas another MMO called Starcraft is widely known across Asia particularly South Korea. Though not having played either, you hear this game by spread of mouth through competitions held every once in a while. And particularly in South Korea, where Starcraft is played in Internet cafes where the internet is better than the internet in the players own homes.

From the MMO’s termology and slang has been created that has become part of the norm, such words like “lol” meaning Laugh Out Loud, “gg” and abbreviation of Good Game, and n00b a term meaning new beginner. These words particularly “lol” have become widespread enough that people who don’t generally play games use them. 

Another word “pwned” though a spelling error of the word “owned” has come about to be the subject of fails which have been caught on camera, the word owned meaning to be dominated by a situation or player now a term which results in a painful accident and made to laugh about.