"Game culture" by its definition, makes impossible what it wants to seek. Have you ever heard of "book culture"? "Film culture"?

By putting it all into a big, one-size-fits-all box, you limit it. You make it all a variant of adolescent pong. You don't take it for real.

Makes perfect sense to me -- if you accept that there are such things as HipHop culture, Indie Rock culture, etc. The only difference is that those subcultures are one level down the hierarchy of generalization from "Music Culture".

However, the music industry has a range of products that are _much_ more heterogenous than the video game industry -- mostly because of the wide range of successful independent music and smaller "niche" publishers. How crap would music be if it was limited to the output of Warner/EMI/Sony/Universal?

If there were the gaming equivalent of Def Jux, Arts&Crafts, etc. then perhaps gaming culture would be less generic. Or, perhaps I've got it backwards and the existence of subculture-specific labels is a product of the audience's differentiation rather than a cause. Or both things arise simultaneously.

Frankly it's a bit annoying that we don't have decent indie labels yet. With the amount of money involved in the industry you'd think it would be obvious to try..

Sure, there is hip-hop culture. Or rock culture. But you don't see "music culture".

The music equivalent to "game culture" is "music culture" (NOT hip-hop culture).

My point is, "game culture" is too broad. You can't put the entirety of games into one box. If you do, you are homogenizing games - putting them into a cage.

"Game culture" is probably incredibly broad. At the one end is "Pong", but if you really do it justice it goes all the way over to ares like military, medicine, humanities, and so on.

Did you even read my post?

Games ARE much more homogeneous than music or movies: if music was limited to the output of Warner/EMI/Sony/Universal there WOULD be "Music Culture", or if you prefer: all genres/subcultures would collapse to a single one: Top 40.

This is analogous to the current condition in the world of video games; the end result is very little diversity.

There is no "Music Culture" because there is enough musical diversity and difference between various music to give rise to (or maybe even require) subcultures. That is _NOT_ the case with games. Look on the shelf of EBGames and tell me how much diversity you find compared to what's available in to a good record store. Even a crap record store like HMV has orders of magnitude more diversity (in terms of both number of individual titles, as well as number of genres or "types" of title).

Music was able to spawn multiple subcultures because it contained a diverse range of content which appealed to a diverse range of people who shared specific tastes. Games are designed to appeal to "everyone", which by definition means they must all fit into the same category/genre. Hence we're up one level of cultural specialization compared to music.

Perhaps some games are skewed more towards a young or a mature audience, but mostly they are generic enough in terms of aesthetic to be accessible to anyone. Imagine what music would be like if it had to appeal to everyone! It's actually pretty easy -- just turn on the radio.

Games are more homogenous? That reveals more about you than games. If they are homogenous it's because game developers have made them homogenous.

Have you ever ventured beyond the comfortable boundaries of console games? Ever played a complex wargame which can stimulate discussion of geopolitics? Ever play a roleplaying game where the objective wasn't to vacuum up tons of junk ("treasure") but instead to actually get involved in a sophisticated and subtle plot?

If you think all games are the same then you are narrow minded. (But I wouldn't be surprised - the whole f*cking game industry is myopic like that.)