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http://www.npr.org/2011/01/31/133371941/th...-gamers?ps=cprs

Grabbing dinner just before an ice storm hit home the other night, I heard a story on NPR about a gamer's club at New York University, and the focus of the story was Final Fantasy XIII.

I'm not exactly sure what the point of the story, was, though. It seems that the players they interviewed honestly thought that they were true subculture gamers, operating below the radar of the games industry as a whole, evidenced by this quote:

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Your Madden [Football] gamers or Call of Duty gamers, they're a bit more mainstream. They're your frat boys in college

I have to wonder, does anyone out there actually think that Final Fantasy in any way exists as an under-the-radar game franchise? Do you feel like you're not in the mainstream when you play a Final Fantasy game? Or is there a break in the series, where one is mainstream only if they've been playing just the most recent editions of the series, but playing the older games makes you a different kind of gamer?

For my money, I feel that this story is pretty misleading based on what I've seen of Final Fantasy gamers. No way to know if it's poor reporting, or if they simply chose to interview a group that gave a bad face to Final Fantasy fans, or some measure of both.

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

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Final Fantasy not mainstream? Since when?


Honestly, NPR, I expect better of you guys.

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"When we think there's no hope left, we keep looking until we find some!" - Claire Farron

It's not a subculture, it's just not the current most mainstream stereotype of gamers.

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Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

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FFXIII was made FOR the mainstream, surely. Designed to rope Squeenix in some new gamers rather than just the old guard.

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Quote (Rangers51 @ 2nd February 2011 13:51)

I have to wonder, does anyone out there actually think that Final Fantasy in any way exists as an under-the-radar game franchise? Do you feel like you're not in the mainstream when you play a Final Fantasy game? Or is there a break in the series, where one is mainstream only if they've been playing just the most recent editions of the series, but playing the older games makes you a different kind of gamer?

I don't think of Final Fantasy as being in the least bit under-the-radar.

With your second and third questions, I'll answer them simultaneously: I don't feel mainstream when I play pre-PS2 FF, and do when I play any others (actually, FF7 fits in here as well), but I don't particularly acknowledge these conceptions.

I think this is an interesting question. I have to also rule against the case made by the interview, though it seems to be complex.

You can't call the Final Fantasy series, or Final Fantasy XIII, in any way under-the-radar. According to an article I just read on CNBC's website, it was the fourth highest-selling game of 2010. That's not under the radar, though admittedly a majority of those copies were sold in Japan.

I think a couple different factors play into FF being termed 'subculture.' First of all, you have the very nature of the game: it's a single player, without the online interactment that defines the player's experience in games like CoD or Halo. Without that level of interaction between players, there is inherently less chatter about the game itself. This doesn't mean that people aren't playing it or that people are talking about it.

I think that part of it is one's definition of 'subculture.' In gaming, as in books and movies, you often have one or two standouts in a year. It's worth noting that the top selling games each year often sell tripple what FFXIII did. Just because FFXIII the overwhelming standout does not mean that it wasn't an important game or that Final Fantasy is an under-the-radar genre. Comparatively, the movie Inception was the fifth highest grossing film of the year. Just because it wasn't at the top didn't make it any less notable. If you consider anything below the major one or two hits of the season to be a subculture, then this choice of vocabulary would be correct. If not, you've made a big understatement.

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Currently Playing : Final Fantasy V
Most Recently Beat : Elder Scrolls: Skyrim
Favorite Game : Final Fantasy X

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For what it's worth, while the best-selling Madden's worldwide numbers (2005, 6.17 million copies) are about equal to FF13's (6.22 million), Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has more than tripled it, selling 21.2 million copies worldwide. To someone who is obviously using college metaphors, it gets even more stark, since Madden and CoD don't have the Japan numbers to back it up.

Looking at US alone:
CoD: MW2 (13.21 million)
Madden 2005 (6.03 million)
Final Fantasy 13 (2.26 million)

I can see where somebody might draw the conclusion. That said, the average player of CoD or Madden is still going to know what FF is.

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Not gonna lie, I didn't really like the way that article was written at all. It reads as if the writer had a decent idea, but couldn't articulate it just right. It looks like he got some terrible quotes and really stretched them to make the quotes fit into what he wants. The article looks jumbled between explaining Final Fantasy XIII and using vague quotes that don't exactly hit the idea home.

Is FF XIII's plot really "Too intricate to even begin to explain"? Is that the best he could have written? The point of a writer is to make things clear, not clarify that the road ahead is too dangerous to travel on.

Ok, I know I'm being ridiculously picky. It's just when I read something and it doesn't quite read right, it bothers me haha.


Anyway, in response to the point of the article, it's hard to say. Gamers aren't exactly black and white, and I don't feel like they ever were. One Final Fantasy fan might also be the top Call of Duty shooter. One Spider Solitaire fiend might also be a Halo junkie. All of those may or may not be anime fans-- dubbed only. Or not.

I honestly think if you're gonna split up gamers, you need to make the distinction even with Final Fantasies-- the ones who "Liked 7 and X-2, but never got around to playing the others," and the more old school guys who liked more than just those. I know several people (usually girls) who loved Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy VII.

I dunno. It just felt like FFVII-- and anything thereafter appealed to more casual gamers, whereas before it was mostly fantasy junkies.

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I guess if you look at it from the more abstract jrpg versus the overwhelming popularity of your Call of Duty or annual Madden titles, it might appear to be a bit of a step away from the mainstream for your average or casual gamers, or anyone not familiar with what could be considered the 'canon' of video game titles. Considering the marketing that went along with Final Fantasy XIII, I'd hardly call it an underground title though!

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Okay, but there was a goat!

Quote (Rangers51 @ 2nd February 2011 22:51)

I have to wonder, does anyone out there actually think that Final Fantasy in any way exists as an under-the-radar game franchise? Do you feel like you're not in the mainstream when you play a Final Fantasy game? Or is there a break in the series, where one is mainstream only if they've been playing just the most recent editions of the series, but playing the older games makes you a different kind of gamer?

I don't think these interviewees are a good source. The reporting seems fine unless they've cut a lot out. The point seems to be to introduce people to gaming, which I think is unnecessary if anything.

Quote

Gamer Richard Rodriguez describes it as lots of metal and robots in a Victorian city.

That is really not a great summary of the FFXIII world. It's not even close. I can understand people having different interpretations or emphasis, but that is so far off it seems like he's just seen a trailer or played the beginning.

I don't see Final Fantasy as maintstream myself. I think mainstream is something that gets the most media coverage and word of mouth. I'd admit to somebody that I'm playing Modern Warfare or Fifa but there's only a few people I'd tell about my crippling addiction to Final Fantasy games. Maybe that's just me.

If we're talking about dedicated FF players, or even RPG players in general, that's even less mainstream for the same reason. The key factor is 'under-the-radar' like you said.

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Quote (RelmArrowney @ 3rd February 2011 00:15)

Is FF XIII's plot really "Too intricate to even begin to explain"?

Yes. The word "bollocks" is technically a foreign term, increasing overall complexity of explanation.

In gaming terms, it's mainstream. In general terms, it's not. As a marker of the jRPG in gaming, the FF series stands out. As a marker for videogames in entertainment in general, Modern Warfare and FPS games generally stand out in the west, making the RPG as a whole somewhat non-mainstream as a general entertainment form.

But really, if it's "under the radar", a C-130 Hercules must be nigh invisible on the scopes they use as a comparison for radar readings.

This post has been edited by Del S on 3rd February 2011 01:28

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Quote (Del S @ 3rd February 2011 02:27)

But really, if it's "under the radar", a C-130 Hercules must be nigh invisible on the scopes they use as a comparison for radar readings.

The games might not be but I think the players and the fans are. I forgot to make this point clearer at the end of my post before.

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Scepticism, that dry rot of the intellect, had not left one entire idea in his mind.

Me on the Starcraft.

Its players are not a "subculture" of gaming as much as they are a different "general subculture"--the games, especially the more recent ones, have a fanbase that overlaps more with animé fans and the like rather than Call-of-Duty- and Halo-types.

Both gaming and animé are "subcultures" of the mainstream. However, they're on the same level of...subcultural depth, if you will. It's just that, with the gigantic size of the gaming fandom these days, they're not likely to be two crowds that hang out together much.

(For what it's worth, that's one nice thing about combo sites like the TV Tropes forum that have large enough scope of content to bring people together but are still small enough to force people with diverse interests to connect (unlike GameFAQs).)

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Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

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Quote (Glenn Magus Harvey @ 3rd February 2011 12:10)

(For what it's worth, that's one nice thing about combo sites like the TV Tropes forum that have large enough scope of content to bring people together but are still small enough to force people with diverse interests to connect (unlike GameFAQs).)

Well, for my two cents, that's one of the reasons that I don't go to TV Tropes and won't ever participate in their community. But obviously, that's just me.

With regards to Neal's comparison, I like that a lot. I will admit, that even playing games in what is considered to be the same gaming genre as Call of Duty or Madden (I mainly use my PC for FPS games, and I've recently put FIFA 10 back in my 360, where it will probably stay for a while), I would also bristle at being lumped in with hardcore Madden players, or hardcore CoD players. This is simply because I don't like the image that those groups seem to have both inside and outside of the gaming community as a whole, and in the light of those numbers Neal posted, I can really understand why people like them (and to an extent, me) would have that kind of "us vs. them" attitude about their games.

It still makes less sense to me now than it used to, but hey - if these are really college-aged kids, perhaps they really never were part of the time when Final Fantasy really was further underground than it is now. However, a lot of you guys are around that age, and I don't see that kind of sentiment around here, but maybe that's simply because regardless of age, you didn't stick to PSX-and-later games - I think that probably has a lot to do with the attitudes in that report.

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

well i suppose they arent as hyped as they used to be like they arent even advertised now but theyre far from underground

Quote (Rangers51 @ 3rd February 2011 14:05)

It still makes less sense to me now than it used to, but hey - if these are really college-aged kids, perhaps they really never were part of the time when Final Fantasy really was further underground than it is now.

There is little in the world that makes me feel older than the idea that there are Final Fantasy fans who missed out on the 90s.

That being said, the idea of Final Fantasy as underground strikes an odd chord with me. Even when I was 6 years old and the first game was just coming out, the gaming magazines I read (Nintendo Power, natch) blitzed me with the games. I got an NP-produced player's guide of FFI (and Dragon Warrior!), IV was featured on the cover of a 1991 issue and got a huge writeup, both NP and GamePro gave VI absolutely glowing reviews, and I kept picking them up because I was a sucker for swords and magic as a kid. It never even occurred to me that people would think the series was 'underground' and that most gamers go more for FPS games.

It seems to me that the idea of subcultural video games is a recent phenomenon: in the 90s all genres seemed to be created equal, at least in terms of the attention that they got, and at least from personal experience it's certainly true that I and my friends growing up played just about every genre out there. It's only now that video game culture is 'legitimized' that these boundaries have been drawn up (not that I'm free from sin...hell, these days I have to make a distinction between JRPG and WRPG). It's an interesting thing to watch from the outside looking in, and will probably make an interesting chapter once the Big History of Electronic Games comes out. And these days I can see some games/developers/genres as 'underground' I suppose (Ico? Clover Studios? Homebrew games?). But Final Fantasy as counter-culture? Still sounds odd to me.

This post has been edited by trismegistus on 3rd February 2011 20:30

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Not to re-hash any previous points too much, (all of which were more or less fair in their assessments,) but just to mention by the way what a couple of people touched on to varying degrees:

Quote ( RelmArrowney)

...honestly think if you're gonna split up gamers, you need to make the distinction even with Final Fantasies-- the ones who "Liked 7 and X-2, but never got around to playing the others," and the more old school guys who liked more than just those. I know several people (usually girls) who loved Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy VII.

I dunno. It just felt like FFVII-- and anything thereafter appealed to more casual gamers, whereas before it was mostly fantasy junkies.

Quoted for agreement. Just to elaborate though, I talk to a good number of people about video games, and overwhelmingly, when I ask these people if they like Final Fantasy, they can't tell me enough about how much they do... VII and beyond. For the most part they've "never played the earlier ones.". I don't mention this to sound like a snobby elitist, but just to point it out. While I have met some 2D-fans in my time, for the most part, the FF fans I typically come across are 3Dera children (I mean that metaphorically. Naturally, I've met people running quite the diverse number line of ages).

I mean, is FF mainstream? Not totally, but I'd hardly call it underground. It's still, along with most niche Japanese-American hybrid cultural archetypes, the sort of thing I can see a kid getting called weird for, but I suspect he'd have more friends who share his interests in this day and age than I did. I would, however, relegate the series before VI to a subcultural status- namely, a subculture of the Final Fantasy culture. I liked what GMH said about "depths" of subculture, and, in addition to agreeing with his points about FF and Anime now overlapping to some degree, would like to apply similar conceptual scaling to my elaboration here.

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The idea of culture as it's known in the social sense seems to be a manner of natural segregation of shared ideas, interests, beliefs, facts, items and experiences. Video games and all their related franchises are in essence, different schools of art, music, animation, figureheads, mythology, icons, challenges, skills, rules, methodologies, gadgets and merchandising so I believe it acts almost as if they're cultures in their own right. I can't know about everything and even if I could, I wouldn't necessarily like it enough to bother myself with the unnecessarily endeavor, which are both characteristics which cause me to be selective. This makes it so that within my region, which constitutes a culture of its own, there are naturally going to be times where I won't relate to others when our interests clash.

I believe the concept of using the word culture spawns from the thought that one's ability to transmit any given culture is limited by their ability to share that culture's attributes, such as communicative skills or estrangement. It creates isolating factors called cultural barriers that allow an almost encapsulated ecosphere in which only a limited amount of societal traits are known and hence can grow. The concept of a subculture henceforth is the idea that within one's own cultural ecosphere, the same phenomena can happen in a smaller scale with smaller groups due to a small variety of similar isolating factors. When one culture exists encapsulated within another, then it would be a subset of that culture, hence it'd logically be a subculture.

I think one of the primary mistake this NPR piece makes is the common one of thinking of a culture in too much of a traditional sense, which would've been that the top-level of specific individual culture automatically has to be at the national level. While this would've been naturally true in the past it was because the difficulty of travel distance created was a primary causation or allowance of most cultural barriers. However modern day vehicular advancements make travel almost trivial, while marketing efforts and telecommunication technologies allow for facilitated and possibly even instantaneous international communications, allowing us to share and disseminate information with anybody anywhere given that we know how to contact and communicate with them. This makes the transmission of ideas, facts, beliefs, interests and even items worldwide a relatively easy feat to perform, even allowing some things that would've otherwise faded into obscurity their own commune. This for the existence of near independently generated, less contaminated culture, possibly even made up of things that would've otherwise gone unnoticed by the local regional culture.

As an example, I believe some of you would take note of Cave Story's web accelerated popularity: It's an intricately handcrafted independent game made solely through the arduous efforts of a single man going under the psudeonym of Studio Pixel. Without the internet acting as a medium of transmission Studio Pixel normatively wouldn't have enough capacitive outreach to capture the interest of his intended audience, possibly even within his home nation of japan but with the internet, the game has become a bit of a worldwide cult classic video game hit.

Possible spoilers: highlight to view

I would've mentioned Touhou which while not quite freeware, did quite similarly but figured you guys would find Cave Story more endearing.

Also while a degree of obscurity is required for the formation of a culture, I don't think it's so much the degree of obscurity which creates a subculture, so much as a degree level of nestling the obscurity into a group. Final Fantasy fans would be a subset of CRPG fans, who're in turn a subset of CRPG players who're in turn a subset of Video Game Players so-on and so-forth. You don't have to be a a Final Fantasy fan to be a CRPG Player or Video Game Player but you have to be both Video Game Player and a CRPG player to be a Final Fantasy Fan. Hence the Final Fantasy fandom is a subculture of both Video Game players and CRPG players.

All that being said, it's time to answer the questions:

Quote (R51)

have to wonder, does anyone out there actually think that Final Fantasy in any way exists as an under-the-radar game franchise?

As a video game franchise, you say? No, not unless you compare it to something especially phenomenal like the Super Mario series or Pacman. I think another part of the issue with the NPR article is that since video games are likely outside the scope of their typical interests, they haven't spent much time studying video game culture. They appear to have a only a casually peripheral awareness of what's going on with the marketplace and its trends, maybe gleaning it while casually enjoying other news media, otherwise they might've noticed that Final Fantasy's actually pretty on par with Call of Duty in terms of overall popularity, albeit that might change with the way Square-Enix's stocks and sales are plummeting as of late. Some under-the-radar video games I'd consider noteworthy include the Touhou series which, like Cave Story has amazingly rapid growth for what it is or The Battle for Wesnoth which I believe currently holds the title of most popular Linux compatible game.

You might not be able to spot the faults without part of the fandom but both Touhou and Wesnoth have also had brief touches with mainstream media if any of you guys are interested in seeing even more out of whack news articles: This review for Wesnoth isn't half bad in my opinion, but still a little underresearched for such an in depth game, while CNN's Bad Apple report totally skirts over all the relevant details with misinformation and misses the chance to touch upon a much larger, influential phenomenon. I guess the moral of the story believe everything you read in the newspaper kiddies. ;-) Well, at least part of it anyway, interestingly the coverage tends to gets worse as it reaches higher extents of mainstream.

Quote (R51)

Do you feel like you're not in the mainstream when you play a Final Fantasy game?

While this statement may seem contrary to what I said above, this is actually where I feel the piece has some merit. The Final Fantasy franchise may be a bad example of an obscure video game but because the video game market itself is somewhat limited. It would seem to me that while Video Games have expanded out beyond their former kiddy nerd target demographic into something that's more mainstream, that those around me scarcely have any interest in them at all. Yes I realize that the game industry makes more money in gross sales than the movie industry does but it might not mean much since the selling price is much higher per unit and has lots of peripheral costs. Those around me are scarcely interested in any of them. What might be the most popular game in the series, Final Fantasy VII can hardly be compared to the success and widespread cultural influence of a great film classic such as The God Father and I'm guessing as far as fantasy-fiction goes that the Harry Potter novels far outstripped the popularity of all Final Fantasy games with half the installments in half the time and may remain more popular for some time to come, even in spite of the fact that Final Fantasy is still ongoing while Harry Potter is officially over.

I think there are a number of reasons for this like the relatively newish nature of the medium and the prerequisite ability to adapt to multiple user interfaces both graphical and mechanical. However perhaps most relevantly is that video games are a very costly sort of media. You need to be relatively well off to enjoy them since they require a multiplicity of electronic appliances to even run the media which costs approximately 2-5 times as much as any other on average due to the developmental costs of an interactive environment. A book you can just pick up and read

Quote (R51)

Or is there a break in the series, where one is mainstream only if they've been playing just the most recent editions of the series, but playing the older games makes you a different kind of gamer?

Kinda, it's a divide of interests: The words "Classic" and/or "retro" come to mind (I prefer the former myself by the way, it's more classy ) and we have an entirely different outlook upon the gaming industry. We love that rapidly antiquated pixely look, obviously synthesized music and 2 dimensional gameplay that so many others would think of with a usual sort of disdain as being something that's "outdated." I mean let's face it, video games weren't considered a mainstream form of media in english speaking nations before the Playstation and N64 heralded the dawn of live rendered graphics. The general public doesn't like it as much so the cultural aspects don't permeate or thrive in their consciousness. It creates a sense of ridicule which is worsened by the fact that video games are a relatively new media, so we have few friends amongst people who're similarly persecuted for being old fashioned; They haven't had much as much of a chance to grow as older media formats so our interests are still in the hazing period of being considered relatively uncultured and illegitimate and when they are, they'll be far beyond the pixel stage.

This post has been edited by Tonepoet on 19th February 2011 13:14

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Role reversal at its finest.