WHILE musing on a couple of different articles this week I’ve been struck by a cultural difficulty in writing a gaming column for a national newspaper.

If I was writing online for a primarily gamer audience my use of language, assumptions and even names would reflect a shared understanding of the topics at hand.

Take “the all-powerful Notch” for example. Almost all regular gamers would know what, or rather who, I meant.

And they would recognise Notch as his name, rather than his “real” moniker — Markus Persson, creator of Minecraft, the world’s most successful indie game.

Similarly acronyms such as FPS (first-person shooter), RTS (real-time strategy) and MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) are thrown around as easily as “360 no-scope” — a feat of FPS shooting in which you don’t zoom in while jumping and turning in a circle while still managing to kill your opponent … this is really difficult.

A parallel in terms of the production of such insider-only language might be sport, where the rules and mass communication of a consumer pastimes are based on idiosyncratic logics.

Football has had a century to build norms in which threatening songs at the stadium are considered little more than jokey banter, Roo is apparently not something you find in Australia and 3-4-1-2 is a way for people to stand in formation rather than a pin code. Offside!

Unlike football, however, there is a near-total lack of crossover where it comes to mainstream publications talking about video games and therefore a chasm of misunderstanding about what gaming is, who gamers are.

If you aren’t one then imagine your typical gamer. Are they male? A bit pimply? Don’t get out much? We all have our prejudices.

But what if I told you that the gaming audience for proper AAA titles (another code, think “blockbuster movie”) is 31 per cent women while football match attendance is only around 15 per cent female. And that 44 per cent of British citizens game as against 26 per cent of the population who attend league football in any given year? Or that the average age of a gamer is 31.

Or how about if I said that gaming presenter Pewdiepie, bafflingly the most popular personality on YouTube, has 32 million subscribers and five million views a day — an equivalent audience to this year’s Pride of Britain Awards.

Given such statistics, why do stereotypes persist? Why does the language of gaming remain so esoteric, L33t1sT, to non-gamers where even someone avowedly uninterested in football can probably say what a number 10 does?

The phenomenon of gaming being simultaneously mainstream and not seems to be partly media-driven, partly generational and partly through its lack of physicality — it’s hard to connect with stilled people lit blue by their monitors, let alone to bouncing screen sprites exhibiting behaviours that can often, infamously, be shockingly violent.

Television and print media are run primarily by wealthy, busy people who are on the other side of what has become a sharp generational leap between “before” and “after” broadband, “before” and “after” abundant home processing power.

As a result, coverage in these outlets lags behind, focusing on ideas and elements that are understandable to middle-aged managers, such as crowds of people for major new hardware releases.

The vast swell of conversation, interaction and mass response to events in the gaming world meanwhile is passed by and often moves too fast for such large corporate entities to react in any case.

Traditional media being the self-reinforcing beast that it is, gaming is also largely off the agenda because everyone else leaves it off their agendas and, unlike football, therefore doesn’t get a nightly segment on BBC news or the Culture Show despite being more than pervasive enough to qualify for significant coverage.

What makes this phenomenon fascinating from a class angle is how the normal mechanics of co-option, where capitalist groups ruthlessly exploit every angle of any emerging culture, are partially suspended in this case.

Specifically in the arena of explaining, expanding and exploiting uptake of games media within more traditional spheres, existing elites have made palpably little effort to engage.

A desultory column in major newspapers or a late-night segment on a TV tech show is the usual extent of coverage.

So gaming culture has built itself in circumstances where it is simultaneously in near isolation from millions, while being perfectly mainstream for millions more in a uniquely connected way through pervasively online social norms.

Gaming has formed its own elites and media from scratch in ways which have bypassed most of the rules imposed on traditional groups — something which politics is yet to fully deal with and which has, due to its relatively youthful, neoliberal-dominated background, in many ways left an extraordinarily regressive mark.

For those able to connect to it, the digital generation finds gaming culture everywhere. For the analogue generation, it’s nowhere. Which makes the task of explaining this vast webscape, it’s baffling tropes and rules of the road, a very difficult exercise.