I still haven't watched the Boogie video, but I want to maybe go a bit more indepth on what I feel the current situation is.
Video Games are absolutely oversaturated, and we have huge problems with the various media. This is constantly being made clear through stuff like #GamerGate and even titles such as SimCity.
The video game industry is one of the largest industries on the entire planet. It's generating billions of dollars of sales not just through the games themselves, but in unrelated merchandise, development applications, licenses etc. Basically, the money is there, and we only seeing a rise in the amount of profit that studios are taking on.
The problem is awareness. It's kind of like domestic abuse. I would argue that examples of domestic abuse are just as common, if not less than what they would have been in the past. The difference is that due to the rise of communication technology, we are seeing more people aware of the issues, and bringing notice to examples.
In video games, due to the VAST increase in social media and livestreaming applications, more people are becoming aware of what is going on within the industry. This means that more examples are being exemplified in a brighter light, and so with more attention, much larger opinions are being formed.
Because of the huge success stories this industry showcases (or at least claims, there's so many studios that fail without so much as a whisper), many more people are jumping in, trying to take a bite of the success pie. What happens is that these people are not trained, at least not in principles. What they tend to do is design from experience, over designing from principle. For example, look at any Kickstarter that failed. What's the main problem? The ideas sound like generic, boring replicas of things we already have.
A lot of games are just this. Poorly designed or poorly executed, taking ideas from things that succeeded, hoping to raise the same amount of popularity and cash. That's what most of these "game designers" want, deep down.
Slowly coming out of that tangential rant, the problem is that games have become so accessible, just like movie making and blogging, and so anybody is free to try out making games, but a lot of these people don't have it within them to actually try and be good at making games, rather believing that because they can move a box in Unity, they know what makes games fun.
Games journalism is a bit weird, since it's not real journalism. This is made clear. It never was from the start. Real journalists with the proper degrees and ethics want to be dealing with big issues. Unfortunately, our society does not see video games as "big" and "important" yet, despite the numbers indicating that they are slowly dominating society. I don't really want to get too indepth on journalism, though, because #GamerGate reactions are doing a good job for me. The point is, until games journalism blends with mainstream journalism, the standards that are required to keep the industry "pure" will not be there.
To reiterate, the big problem is exposure. It's something that we didn't have much off back in the 80s and 90s, but now that everybody can have a say, and that information can be passed around instantly, it doesn't take much for a small issue to become massive. We absolutely have problems that are causing this industry its credibility and its status as an "art form", but I feel that we are not on par with the original games crash.
The original games crash was a product of consumers completely not understanding what games were since they were a highly niche portion of the product market. Nintendo had to market games as toys for them to be successful again. Nowadays, more educated people are coming forward and giving better examples of what games can do, and what games are. I've already said what I think games are; teaching devices, and therefore works of art. Ultimately, though, we need a better line of communication that allows us to bring this knowledge forward to the mainstream audience.
