The video game industry has become one of the most lucrative sectors of the entertainment business. As this report from the Economist points out, its $56bn of sales in 2010 were twice those of the recorded music industry, and a quarter more than the magazine industry. One game, Call of Duty: Black Ops, achieved sales of $650m in just five days.
Reading this report reminded us of this excellent article by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books from 2009, in which he discusses video games' lack of visibility in the wider culture:
There is no other medium that produces so pure a cultural segregation as video games, so clean-cut a division between the audience and the non-audience. Books, films, TV, dance, theatre, music, painting, photography, sculpture, all have publics which either are or aren’t interested in them, but at least know that these forms exist ... They are all part of our current cultural discourse. Video games aren’t. Video games have people who play them, and a wider public for whom they simply don’t exist.
Lanchester goes on to discuss some of the complexity and artistry found in games, including a profile of the Walt Disney of video games, Shigeru Miyamoto.
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