There’s a clever little image that often floats around social media. Effectively, it portrays the life of a meme, starting off as an in-joke among some internet users, getting popular, and then finally getting taken over by a brand. The pay-off of the joke is that by the time the brands get involved, the meme is no longer funny.
It works because the concept is transferable to any type of online culture – memes, jokes, slang, people – that become unfashionable as soon as they become involved with corporations.
Now, it’s a bit of a stretch to extend this allegory to Hollywood’s current passion for making gaming-related movies and television shows, but there are, nonetheless, questions worth asking about what this projection (literally) of gaming worlds to the mainstream means for the cultures that underpins those games.
Ostensibly, there is no threat – in the traditional sense, anyway – but for some gamers, it will seem that this newfound interest in their cultures and sub-cultures will have an impact. The danger is this: Hollywood won’t kill gaming culture, but it may flatten it, repackage it, and sell it back with the edges sanded off.
Gaming culture has changed
The evolution of gaming culture has been interesting over the last couple of decades. It’s clearly flourished, yet arguably it remains misunderstood by the mainstream media.
We’ve seen countless articles from publications like Forbes, The Guardian, the New York Times, and others, trying to explain the phenomenon – both praising and criticizing it – without fully grasping how that culture works. It’s now much broader and multi-faceted than it is given credit for.
Perhaps that’s inevitable. After all, gaming culture isn’t a monolith. Gamers can use a nickname generator, assume an identity, and then enter into a variety of different worlds, from hypercompetitive esports to meme-fueled sandbox chaos.
It’s fragmented and contradictory, and it can even be seen as self-regulating through its own unwritten codes. That complexity of what happens in games – see the feedback to the prospect of Elden Ring, for example – doesn’t always translate to a screenplay.
The question of gate-keeping
On paper, the fear is that Hollywood does what it has done to comic books, churning out endless loops of content. Does it help comic books that dozens of Marvel movies have been made? Sure, it can lead to people having an interest in the genre, but it also raises the question of cultural gatekeeping.
In short, as we mentioned previously about brands getting in on memes when something once niche becomes mainstream, it often changes who feels like it “belongs.”
Hardcore communities worry, sometimes with good reason, that the mass-market version of their culture will erase the nuance, the lore, and the in-jokes. Imagine someone, for example, only knowing Cyberpunk 2077 through Edgerunners or League of Legends through Arcane and thinking that’s the full story.
Hollywood isn’t malicious—it’s opportunistic. It sees gaming’s economic might and wants a piece. But in doing so, it can reduce the culture to set dressing, flattening vibrant, player-driven worlds into consumable, crowd-tested content.
In the worst cases, it becomes less about what games mean and more about how they look. Gaming culture will survive, but it may be changed irrevocably.
