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Pizza loving, Mountain Dew drinking, acne-faced boys are often the stereotypes handed out to hardcore video gamers, but Hector Postigo insists the world has it all wrong.

On Wednesday afternoon the University’s Center for Advanced Study presented the lecture Game On! Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Xbox, part of its 2009-2010 series of public events.  Associate Professor from Temple University, Hector Postigo, spent an hour discussing how video games have evolved from their typical audience to incorporate a wide range of diverse players. This now $20 billion a year industry has come a long way from the days of Pong in the mid ’80s.

“The Golden Age of video games happened before rampant capitalism and marketing,” Postigo said.  “Today a person can walk out of a movie theater and go by their local rental store to pick up the game based on the movie.”

Postigo’s lecture focused on the user-generated content that has evolved from the rapidly growing industry.  From user made videos called machinima to modded (modified) forms of popular games, Postigo argued that this content has created a whole new dynamic to today’s society. These forms of expression have shown how consumers have become the creators, going beyond the game’s initial restrictions and often pushing the lifespan of the game much further.

Over the past ten years, Postigo’s felt that the digital rights movement has really challenged the creativeness of this new medium.

“Overprotective copy right laws limit the viability and longevity of the game,” he said. “Everyone loses when a game is blocked.” Often the work put into modifications would cost upwards of millions of dollars for these companies to produce, something that is done for free by the consumer.

The lectured challenged people to see the changes in the medium and how companies are introducing these changes into their current business models. 

As Postigo said: “User Generated Content has required businesses to rethink restrictions on its distribution,” Games such as Sony’s Little Big Planet or Nintendo’s Wii Ware platform encourage this user-generated content to be distributed online without restrictions. The adaption by businesses was the logical progression, according to Postigo, and shows how a co-creator relationship has arisen in today’s video game climate.

      Postigo ended the talk with one final insight: “Modders, machinima makers, and freelance game designers have shown the creative power of the crowd is useful to not only the companies that produce the game, but the social network of the people playing them.”