Is there anything more repellent than becoming mainstream? You spend your whole life carefully curating your hobbies and tastes to make sure that they tread the thin line between "good" and "popular", and then suddenly people start liking a thing that you like. Don't they know that you got there first? Don't they know that them liking it makes you not like it? Don't they know that your opinion and good favour is all they need to get by!?
Anyway, video games are becoming mainstream and obviously that's a terrible thing. You used to turn up to a midnight launch and it would just be you, your mum (who drove you there) and a large sweaty man who you would later learn was getting the collector's edition because he wanted the lifesize statue of the game's protagonist's torso. Now you turn up for the release of Shootman III: Shoot Them All and it's all children and fans and women, and you have to leave because none of them recognise your cosplay. It's OBVIOUSLY Wing Commander Endjapes, who was written out of the second game for not being muscley enough. Fakers.
The past few days have been full of video game-related news stories in the actual mainstream news: BBC Three covered a League of Legends tournament, an orchestra performed a Legend of Zelda symphony on Stephen Colbert's The Late Show, and BBC News and The Independent both covered stories ranging from Star Wars Battlefront's season pass details to whether or not Xur is going to sell the gun everyone wants in Destiny.
Absolutely disgusting
And it's all just disgusting, isn't it? Stick to your stories about Jeremy Corbyn's hair and leave our video games alone. If video games become mainstream, we'll have to deal with people on the tube asking which our favourite Persona game is when we're just trying to have a quiet game on our way to work. We'll have to face our parents being proud of us for levelling up our Pokemon without resorting to Rare Candies. Worst of all, we'll have to deal with the INDIGNITY of seeing people walking around town with video game slogans emblazoned across their unworthy chests. Video games are sacred, you'll want to scream. Bet you don't even know who Gordon Freeman is, you great big pretender!
And breathe. Okay, look: video games are going the way films did. The way music, books, and podcasts did. They'll start off all niche and excellent, because they're yours and you don't have to share. Lovely. But people start to hear about them. Who's telling them?! They'll stagger in hordes towards GAME, picking up Dark Souls, engaging with the staff, enjoying your hobby. The TV will start to talk about it. The news will start to cover it. It will start making money, and use that money to make more games.
Many of the games will be sequels, because have you seen what Hollywood is doing lately? But many more of the games will appeal to - ugh - new demographics. We'll get more indies, more mobile games, more text adventures, more people to play with online. They'll make games that appeal to different people, giving us a wider choice of things to play. We can talk more freely about our hobbies in wider circles, and more people will understand and join in. And maybe - just maybe - all those people will dilute all the bad bits of gaming, and make it a nicer, safer, more inclusive place to be.
Don't you hate it when something becomes mainstream?
