Never try to be all things to all people. It won’t work. At best, a student columnist notices your vanilla creation and gets stroppy about it. At worst, you erode the foundations upon which a rich franchise has been built with care over the past five years. The desire to appeal to a broader audience by easing up on some of the more obviously niche content isn’t unique to games of course – sales and readership figures are the unapologetic lords of the media jungle – but the prolonged identity crisis sucking at the heels of the games industry lends these matters special relevance.

After reviewing Dead Space 3 no fewer than three times in the past week, it began to get inside my head. I should have anticipated this; Dead Space is, after all, the poster boy of the survival horror genre, that happy place where resource management meets psychological stress. But my discomfort didn’t stem from jump-scares; I didn’t baulk at the grisly business of dismemberment, or panic as the undead hordes started to swarm. I recoiled at the cash-grab, the appeal to the everyman that dispenses with terror in favour of the spiritless sure-seller.

And this is an interesting conflict, because I have always argued for the central place of ‘casual’ gamers and the diversity that they bring to the stagnant waters of gaming’s core genres. I’ve been known to write columns about it. Yet the quest for mass appeal has in fact stimulated the slide into homogeny – horror has been kept on the leash lest it threatens to scare someone.

Perhaps air-headed ideology has put me out of touch with the gaming community. Maybe my demands that games be both broad in appeal and diverse in content belong to some other plane of reality.  During a heated argument on YouTube – admittedly not an achievement in itself – I was assured by a very angry gentleman that dumbing down (I’m paraphrasing) is undoubtedly a good thing. He informed me that he wanted games to be mainstream, and those seeking horror should simply turn up the difficulty.

But there is a difference between mainstream and monotone. There is a tendency for veterans and outsiders alike to speak of games as a singular mode of entertainment, rather than the glorious patchwork of genres and sub-genres that make up a medium. As a collective enterprise, gaming should hold something for every conceivable demographic, but individually a game must find its niche. Sporadically appending game mechanics that have proved popular elsewhere is nonsensical. Marketing survival horror at the casual explorer is like adapting Schindler’s List for a pantomime.

Read Angus' last column here: http://www.varsity.co.uk/culture/5625