People were genuinely talking about whether PC gaming might be dead.
The Xbox 360 had yet to launch and the Wii was still under wraps.
Games (and gamers) were still desperately struggling for cultural legitimacy.
Smartphones did not exist.
YouTube was not a thing (seriously, it launched properly in November 2005).
There have been hundreds of significant changes, big and small, technological and cultural.
The 10 things below, for me, are the most important.
In August 2005, I got a job as a staff writer on a print magazine in the UK.
“Just read Gamespot’s preview and work from that,” my editor told me.
(I’m happy to say the editorial standards at Kotaku UK are rather different.)
This is no indictment on that particular magazine.
I’ve written before abouthow games media has changed, especially in the past five years.
When I started out, games journalism was reviews, news and previews and that was about it.
Anyone doing anything other than these things was considered a fringe operator.
The explosion of the games media has brought its challenges.
When I started out, we were the gatekeepers to information about games.
Now we have to be something more interesting than that.
I’ve personally really enjoyed this challenge.
It’s been a lot of fun.
But it’s the Japanese B-games that I miss the most.
I moved to Japan in 2008, just in time to catch the tail end of arcade culture there.
Hollywood script-writers and voice actors were hired for everything.
Linear narratives involving big explosions became the norm.
A lot of this, I think, is a result of liberating developers from the technological arms race.
Games have emerged from an identity crisis.
Beyond: Two Souls, especially, feels like an anachronism.
To name a few off the top of my head: Telltale’s The Walking Dead.
The Last of Us.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
There used to be a lot of restrictions placed upon games, both by wider culture and by publishers.
Games can’t deal with emotions.
They had to be action-packed.
You had to be shooting something.
Games that prioritise story don’t sell.
Games are inherently frivolous.
Even as gamers, we had low expectations for sophistication in these areas.
Now those expectations are higher and, in truth, some developers are struggling with that.
you’re able to’t get away with B-movie writing, boring characters and gender stereotyping any more.
A vast component of this change is the waning power of publishers.
More recently, Kickstarter has given players themselves the power to decide whether or not a game gets made.
That’s come with its own problems, but it has transformed the market for smaller games.
I have always been a console gamer, so this change has been especially apparent to me.
Losing focus on Xbox Live Arcade was one of Microsoft’s biggest mistakes during the Xbox 360 era.
It could have dominated this market.
It’s made video games so much more interesting, especially on console.
Meanwhile, publishers now have so much less power than they used to.
The most successful ones are adapting to this new reality.
‘Oh, but women are all playing on smartphones and Facebook!’
We must acceptthe data.
We should be celebrating the data.
I could not be happier about this.
I went to an all-girls school, and playing games was “not for girls” back then.
It’s not just the gender split either.
Almost 90 per cent of kids in the UK play games.
Older people play games.
Families play games together.
Now there is none.
That shut him up.
This conversation sticks in my memory because it felt so unusual at the time.
It used to be thatevery conversation I had about video games went like this.
There could be no discussing video games without first justifying the entire concept of a video game.
I’m not delusional; I know there’s still a way to go.
But games are more a part of mainstream culture now than they have been ever before.
I was the butt of every joke at family gatherings.
Thank God we don’t have to talk about that one any more.
It has become self-evident that games can be art.
They can be anything they want to be.
It sold in its millions and millions.
It was a bona fide huge-scale cultural phenomenon.
There was some media handwringing about its violence, but most of the conversation was about its cultural value.
This represented a massive change in how people look at video games.
We no longer have idiots like Jack Thompson trying to ban video games altogether.
In America, they are now protected under the First Amendment, a decision that was made in 2011.
It is generally accepted that video games are not ruining children’s minds.
All of this is progress.
The explosion of mobile gaming has not had much of an effect on my personal gaming habits.
But it has had an enormous impact on the business of video games.
Mobile gaming may yet burn out too, but I don’t think it’s a fad.
Phones and tablets define the gaming habits of millions of people.
That genie won’t go back in the bottle.
What fixed this was digital distribution, and specifically Steam.
Valve began to dominate the entire PC gaming market in what seemed like an extraordinarily short space of time.
The lack of retail focus on PC gaming simply didn’t matter anymore.
But there is no doubt it is astronomical.
But it has already achieved an extraordinary amount.
If I could sum all of it up in one point, it would be this.
It’s also put them in contact with each other.
Kickstarter has gone as far as turning players into investors.
Theoretically they can now do all of that themselves.
With this has come an explosion in both the volume and creativity of games.
Games can be anything the want to be, and can find their audience.
It’s been a great 10 years in video games.
I hope I’m still here in another 10.
This story originally appeared on Kotaku UK.
Republished with permission.Masthead image, modification of Pop Chart Labgaming evolution poster.
