I’m always surprised when anyone ever asks me for advice or directions. 

Anyway – last week a nice bloke very politely asked me for some thoughts about a book they were working on, which sounded like a brilliant project and clearly something which should be published – the problem of course, is that the subject matter is videogames. There’s a popularly held idea that videogames are in some way ‘mainstream’. This is a popularly held myth, mostly perpetuated by my colleagues in the videogame selling industry. In wider consumer culture however, whilst the collective term of ‘videogames’ is recognised as just that – a collective term – any deeper analysis or critical interest is severely limited. I don’t mean that to sound as sniffy as that – this isn’t just about the absence of some kind of developed literacy as an academic college-boy cultural studies problem, but the barriers to participation at a domestic level that such an absence creates. 

Thinking back through my conversations with various commissioning editors over the last few years, I wince remembering some of the pitches I’ve made as the editor perfectly reasonably asks who would buy such a book? The fact remains that whilst the consumption of videogames is on the rise, the public understanding around them – and appetite for content about them is still lagging behind. It’s growing – and that’s brilliant, but just because scenes featuring people playing Wii have started appearing in TV shows that doesn’t mean people want to read about them, or think about them when they’re not playing. I’m still convinced that a lot of this is being driven by the absence of any discernible humanity being shown by the games industry. Until it begins exposing its artists to the world it’s going to remain in a state of cultural participation which is alarmingly retarded considering its age.

At the Save the Videogame show last week (more about this later) this topic came up again – not just are ‘they’ ‘mainstream’, but more importantly, how we will tell? It was a short discussion and the only hallmark we could agree on was that you would know where to go in the book store to find titles about games. Selfishly, this would also really help next time I’m pitching a book.