Some gaming genres are lasting better than others. It’s fair to say that the FPS and RPG formats are at the more highly evolved end of the evolutionary map right now, but along the way there have been some notable dodos. Ideas and formats that – for whatever reason – have simply faded into obscurity or never really achieved any great popularity in the first place. Popular culture’s overlap with gaming culture has a mixed history.
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Given the universal popularity of horse racing it might have been possible to predict that some board room somewhere would have seen a senior executive proposing that his developers get to work on a horse racing game of some description. We’ve all worked for bosses who struggle to understand that the rest of the world thinks differently to the way they do.
Events like the Grand National are undeniably iconic staples of the international sporting calendar but that is not the same as horse racing being in line with the interests, hopes and expectations of the gaming demographic. Sometimes it just defies logic that some games get made in the first place.
Horse racing is a particularly good example of a sporting genre that has failed to find its place in the gaming firmament. This is not to deny that horse racing games have been made, and made quite well.
‘Champion Jocky’ from Tecmo Koeil in 2011 is perhaps the best of breed in what has always been a niche marketplace. But there is an underlying predictability to horse racing that means its appeal is only ever going to appeal to a pre-determined constituency. It’s never going to excite anyone who isn’t already head over heels in love with horse racing.
The same logic appeals to games that centre on similarly narrow interests. Fishing, for example, is another pastime that holds the attention of millions worldwide. But as the basis for a game? The Dovetail Games Fishing simulator is clearly the work of diligent enthusiasts, but aside from the producers themselves and a very narrow range of like-minded souls it is hard to imagine it ever making much of a splash.
What this points to is a wider issue affecting the development of games and game genres. In essence, the early phase of game development saw games created as a way to tap into the interests of pre-existing interest groups. Horse racing and fishing represent precisely this logic. Football and soccer games are also a reflection of this trend, albeit with an important demographic caveat. That is, footballers are seen as cool by millennials in a way that horses and fishes are not. Not everyone has appreciated this simple truth.
What the development of the global games culture suggests, however, is that the gaming universe works according to its own standards of what is – or is not – interesting. Sonic the Hedgehog and Lara Croft – to take two random examples – are neither of them reflective of any wider cultural trend. Rather, they stand as the successful expression of the gaming industry’s tendency to operate according to its own tastes and standards.
The growth of mobile gaming – often framed as a problem for the console industry – is offering consumers ever more choice. But for all that that will always encourage niche developers on the basis that there will be someone out there for whom a fishing game is a must-have, it does nothing to diminish the peculiar logic by which games consumers operate.
It might be possible to imagine a horse racing format that somehow taps into the sort of universal appetite that the most successful games manage to reach, but it is hardly surprising that no one has so far managed to do so.
Gaming culture is not a reflection of popular culture; gaming culture is a form of popular culture in its own right.
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