People who game as a hobby or even as a profession are called gamers. There is obviously a number of subcultures within the gaming community, but there is one, in particular, that seems to have been relegated to the back burner of the gaming world. It is one of the original groups of gamers. It is, for the most part, those of us who knew what it was like before video games were popular, or even widely available. The ones who grew up satisfied with a stick and a hill of dirt. Imagination was completely necessary and prerequisite to fun. Personally I used to get locked out of the house from breakfast to lunch, lunch to dinner during the summer, and I roamed the entire surrounding county, forests, hills, river and all, completely unsupervised from the time I was old enough to ride a bike. When video games came along, we were easily amused, we enjoyed hours, days, even years of going through the same missions over and over in different and more difficult ways. We CREATED challenges when the game became too easy. It was this group that inspired games, like Halo, Gears of War, command and conquer, age of empires, etc. Easily some of the best rated games of all time, Destiny, in its original form, was the dream of a guy who grew up without video games, it's depth, it's story, it's growth and style all reminiscent of those, "okay now the woods are full of ghost soldiers" moments of pure imaginative fun. Then, the growing presence of another culture began to shift things. This group has grown up with Halo being a classic..instead of groundbreaking. They grew up seeing video games as a sport, rather than an extension of leisurely play. They grew up with a sort of inherent value placed on their ability to "keep up" in video games. It became a different space. Not some place to ignore the world's problems, or your limitations anymore. It became more hostile, more greedy, and people started to covet things in video games, as well as berate and belittle eachother for skill level or whatever other thing is popular at the time. I don't profess to know which one better funds game companies, nor do I think either culture is right or wrong. But when we think progress, for the sake of progress, we tend to favor the younger, more intense gaming culture. I believe that we need to take a look back at the roots of gaming, and get some balance between the constant "beat the Joneses " style progress and game development we have been seeing, and the grunt birthday party/splocket racing of the days of old.