narrowing audiences by catering to them.

I was recently attempting to explain why I don't play many videogames to Angus McQuarrie, a friend of mine who is an avid gamer, and on the cusp of starting out in that industry. His assumption was half right, that I don't play more 'complex' (read, non-nintendo) games because I don't get any gratification from them in the short term.

The reason behind this, though, is that the majority of blockbuster videogames are absolutely incomprehensible to me, in terms of control scheme, and game dynamics. I have pretty good reflexes, and I have an excellent academic understanding of different game dynamics, but I am useless at playing a game aimed at the 'hardcore gamer' well enough to enjoy it. Whenever I attempt to play Halo, or GTA, I get killed a dozen times in the first ten minutes, and then think to myself 'There are things I can do that I will actually enjoy' and go off in search of one of those things.

The game is designed with a curve that appeals to the people the game is marketed to. This is the fairly large segment of people, they are the ones who give the aforementioned game franchises opening weekend tallies that embarrass the biggest blockbuster films. But I, and many others, don't fit into it.

I don't speak videogame. Which is fine, except that the games which become pop culture touchstones are entirely inaccessible to me - I can't draw on past experiences, skills developed in previous iterations, and understanding of how to solve a specific problem with the controls that an avid gamer would know intuitively at this point. This is because gaming has, in part, evolved to meet the need of that specific subset of hardcore gamer - to keep them engaged, the references and experiences they have developed needed to be built upon.

When I try to play a game aimed at the hardcore gamer, it's as though I decided Finnegan's Wake would be an excellent follow up to the initial reading experience of Goodnight Moon.

Comics (the mainstream superhero market) has the same problem. The people who buy comics now are the same ones who were buying them 5 years ago. And, to cater to those consumers, continuity is an appalling mess for anyone not intimately familiar with the characters and history, impossible to delve in to. Even ignoring the tendency for Marvel and DC to directly reference events from the mid 80s, certain that the readership will understand, most flagship titles are now written based on the assumption that the reader at least superficially follows another 5 or more titles, within that company alone.

Both of these markets, the hardcore gamer, and the hardcore comic reader, have inherent limits to their size. Consumers will age, lose interest, decide to move on, and the product is not accessible to a larger group of potential new consumers.

The solution to this problem is to challenge and engage people by creating new experiences, not just further refining old ones, increasing the complexity to flatter those who have developed insider status. Nintendo does this, after falling behind in an attempt to compete by refining it's old experiences, by stepping outside of the conventional control scheme. Many comics publishers are doing the same, creating new worlds and content that doesn't re-hash the same tropes and characters as the mainstream successes.

The problem is, that this process of refining and focusing on a mainstream, hardcore consumers in both mediums has gone on for a long time. Long enough that the scope of the medium is conflated with the mainstream successes. It's very difficult to avoid - when I say comics, you think superheroes, and when I say videogames, you think sci-fi, fantasy, or crime - based characters completing tasks in search of reward or advancement. And of course, when the mainstream products all inhabit that genre-space, all media attention further supports that bias.

In short, developing a relationship with your core audience is great, but the potential fallout is altering your product to the point where it will not appeal to anyone else. If you can't continue a relationship with your current followers, without driving other potential customers away, you're doing something wrong on a very basic level.