Editorial:Digital Natives

From Wikia Gaming

by user Mister savage

It appears that I’m not alone in believing that this online console business is going to be huge - a recent BBC article seems to make the same conclusion (although other aspects of the story seem overly bleak).  I know people don’t follow these links very often, but it’s worth a read.

I, and every other 20-30-something out there, are part of the first generation of digital natives.  We have never known a time without some form of digital entertainment.  Even if you didn’t get hold of one of these new fangled computers, they were there, somewhere, and relatively easy to get a hold of.  You could go to the arcade.  Or a rich friend owned an Atari.  Particularly for people like me, in their mid twenties, we are people completely comfortable with this medium.

So what does that mean?  Like any generation, we will want to express ourselves.  And doesn’t this mean that there is one more medium open to us?  One that we will begin to reinvent?

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying games should, or will, turn into a very serious and challenging form of expression.  Some games might, but that isn’t my point.  My point is that when the time comes for the CEO’s of todays big companies to step down, their replacements will have grown up with games, rather than being the ones who invented them.  Will this be a new lease of life, or renaissance?

When it comes to this kind of stuff, I know as much as the next guy.  But something about that BBC article made me want to say that an industry as big as this one, that has earned its status through being supremely adaptable (if not original), is not simply going to stagnate; or at least, not for a long while.  What is at stake is currently a combined global revenue of around fifteen and a half billion dollars.  You’d be surprised at what new innovations and business models will arise to keep that kind of money coming in.

Maybe I’m just an optimist.  But then again, this whole industry was based on optimism.