The video game and how it is worshiped

Think of a farm that has an orchard, where fruits are planted and harvested. It is possible to say that this same farm is specialized in fruit cultivation, because there is a person responsible for keeping them healthy for a future harvest. From these harvested fruits, seeds are extracted and new trees can be planted, forming a cycle.

Similarly, this happens with the video game as a marketing product. There is a culture about games and the farmer responsible for maintaining it is the player himself. Just as cinema or music attracts fanatics who form their own tribes and have unique characteristics and practices that define them, so does the video game player.

The so-called culture is defined in this way. The video game transmits specific symbols that are interpreted by the players and that transform these same symbols into others. The image has a unique power and is capable of causing such a commotion in a group of individuals.

The use of the term tribe as mentioned earlier was no accident. Marshall McLuhan, in “The Gutenberg Galaxy”, 1962, coined the term global village, which refers to the way technology allows national barriers to be broken and the whole world to interact with each other as a village. specific, it can refer to the tribe of players, since the video game is capable of promoting this with global multiplayer systems that foster interaction between the actors.

These same players , in addition to simply playing games, produce content related to the video game and that sustain this culture more and more alive. Fanfics appear to expand the universe of characters who are idolized in the same way as an actor in the cinema or a singer in the music business. This cult is what strengthens the video game as a medium. McLuhan himself considers this an important factor in social change: “Cinema, radio and television place certain personalities in a new plane of existence. They exist not so much in themselves, but as types of collective life felt and perceived through a mass medium. L’il Abner, Bob Hope, Donald Duck and Marilyn Monroe become points of collective awareness and communication for an entire society ”