when skyrim was released nearly everyone was playing it. even the jocks and popular kids who play football and sports and are obsessed with blops.

Why does a game like skyrim not fall in the sterotypical "oh nerdz dungeons and dragons! durrr."

The demographic of people who played the game shocked me to be quite honest.

People are slightly evolving maybe.

Slightly.

Look how popular "The Avengers" are too. Or Lord of the Rings. Both were pretty fringe at one point.

As a hipster I hate to say it, our old lifestyle of gaming is becoming much more mainstream.

Is probable because the game was made to be "accessible". Had it been ala D&D or Daggerfall, with stats and whatnot, then they wouldn't have touched it with a 9 inch pole.

First thing a hipster does is to assert that they are not a hipster. That they were doing this way before it was cool. But by asserting that you are a hipster, it makes you appear not a hipster. You've gone deeper.

I agree with this. I look back at all the old RP games I've enjoyed and many of them would not be touched by today's gamers because the systems were too "complex" for the average person to want to get into, thus labeling it as nerdy.

I don't know about that. Oblivion had a lot of those rpg trappings, and I've met some seemingly unlikely fans of that game. They were excited to hear about Skyrim because they were already fans.

I know one guy who still thinks it's geeky, but yet... he's a big fan of Fallout. So it's mostly a genre thing to him. But for most part, I'd say Bethesda probably deserves genuine credit for making games that are appealing to many people.

Being a nerd is quite trendy these days. Don't worry they'll all be off onto the next fad or thing to be seen doing soon enough. For those of us who have been gamers for decades the popularity of gaming has been a positive and a negative. But heck, you take the rough with the smooth right?

If I was like the other Hipsters how hipster would I be? Answer: not enough

Oblivion take them. Every miserable last one of them! - Jarl Balgruuf about the mainstreaming of our old gaming lifestyle qq-

One of my buddies thinks I'm a massive nerd for liking TES when he loves LOTR. Madness. If Skyrim is nerdy then every single-player game is nerdy.

Well...

1: Nerdy things are becoming mainstream. I saw one of the Star Wars movies airing on Spike TV of all places! Y'know... the channel that's cop car chases, "Manswers", explosions 24/7?

2: Video Games are mainstream. This is mostly seen with WoW and, more importantly, Call of Duty and similar-style games.

3: The teaser trailer for Skyrim? Epic music, terrifying dragons, a VIKING-LIKE PERSON SHOUTING A DRAGON TO DEATH! That's stuff you usually see in things like action movies. Furthermore, Skyrim, of all the ES titles, is more "accessable" to FPS players than traditional RPGs.

4: Most people equate RPGs to the steriotypical idea of D&D. Skyrim does NOT fit that mold. The teasers/ads pretty much enforced this.

Personally I don't care what other people think. I know what I like and that's all that matters to me.

Fantasy has become more mainstream. It used to be war movies and action movies and shoot-em-up shows and games. Now there is a huge boom of fantasy and comic book hero fiction. People are actually READING more (imagine that!) and many popular books have been fantasy lately. It's trends. Plus Oblivion became pretty well known throughout its lifetime so Skyrim was being much more closely watched. And it isn't the lack of stats or any of that stuff. It is that it marketed itself right, it became associated with mainstream. It's a crowd mentality folks; you just have to get the shift started and the rest will take care of itself.