Don't you just love it when experts and professionals start playing Dr. Freud with gamers?  Of course you do.

The New York Times took another crack at deconstructing the gaming industry, reflecting on the people behind the controllers and keyboards.  With Nintendo's toy-party-family-casual Wii console and Guitar Hero III hogging the spotlight, journalist Sean Schiesel suggests that the industry as a whole has matured, meaning "hard-core gamers and the old-school critics who represent them" no longer dominate the market.

Schiesel explains that gamers and game critics used to be closely aligned so there usually isn't much of a divide between either group's opinions, unlike other forms of media where critics and audiences don't often see eye to eye. 

In his article, he claims that this is no longer the case.  His gives a few examples like Bioshock, God of War II, Mass Effect, and the Orange Box as video game masterpieces, then goes on to point out that none of those games made top ten sales lists despite stellar critic reviews.  On the other hand, Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 are doing amazingly well.

Nine of the top ten of 2007 were multiplayer games, with the exception of Assassin's Creed, and Schiesel believes this is because gamers, as a whole, are no longer as interested in single player games no matter how perfect they are:

"Back in the living room, Nintendo’s revolutionary Wii system has helped forge a new audience for gaming among families, women and older people, who had been turned off by the complex, violent and solitary adventures that once dominated the market.

.... If new acceptance by the masses is one pillar of gaming’s future, gaming’s emergence as a social phenomenon is the other. Hard-core gamers are still willing to spend 30 hours playing alone through a single-player story line, but most people want more human contact in their entertainment."

That's why games like WoW has 10 million subscribers, he adds, and Nintendo dominates the market.  When I saw Super Mario Galaxy, though, its stellar multiplayer option isn't what popped to mind. 

Mr. Schiesel certainly simplifies things quite a bit in his article, making a clear distinction between multiplayer and single player when the line between two is often blurred.  There may be bigger things at work here than the man realizes.