Magazine Sorting

I was browsing through the magazine section of the B. Dalton bookstore at Union Station the other day, when I decided to look for the video game magazines. Going down the aisles, I first checked the "Arts" section; there were no video game publications among the photography and painting magazines there. Then I checked the "Entertainment" section; no video game magazines among the movie and music rags in that aisle. Finally, I find a wide selection of video game publications in the "Computer" section, right next to magazines like PC World and Mac Shopper.



Now, I'm not surprised that the "Arts" section didn't have any video game mags. While I do think that video games are art, there are no publications currently in print that fully treat them as such. Surely the audience for magazines like GamePro doesn't overlap much with that for serious art magazines like Found.



But this day and age, I find it hard to justify not putting the gaming mags in the "Entertainment" section. Video games represent a multi-billion dollar industry that millions of people use as their primary medium of entertainment. While the audience for games is not quite as wide as that for movies or popular music, it is growing quickly as those who grew up with them become the ones who control the household finances. In a way, setting video games aside from other entertainment is an insult to anyone who finds them entertaining.



Putting video games in the "Computer" section may seem innocuous, but it is indicative of the way our hobby is perceived by the mainstream media outlets (like bookstores). By putting gaming magazines next to technical computer journals and consumer-oriented buyer's guides, the store sends a buyer a subtle message that video games are either (a) an overly complex medium only suited for nerdy, technically-oriented, individuals or (b) merely a consumer product with no artistic merit, to be bargained on based on technical merits like a computer. While the writing in many magazines only perpetuates these stereotypes, I think that there are enough obvious differences between computer and video game magazines to seperate their sections.



Many bookstores put video game magazines in a seperate gaming section, along with publications like Scrye, Dragon and, ocassionally, non-gaming mags like Wizard. This distinction has some merit because the audience for video games and tabletop/role-playing games has a large overlap, but it also casts games as mere diversions seperate from the more serious entertainment in the "Entertainment" section.



I'm not sure what the solution to this problem is, or even that it is a real problem worthy of a solution more obvious than waiting for society to accept video games as entertainment more readily. It's just something that caught my attention that I thought I'd bring up.