I watched Ellen DeGeneres play Guitar Hero III, on what looked like 360 (I can’t actually tell). This is, more so than the countless stories about how much people want a Wii, proof of how mainstream and not niche games have become.

This isn’t just a bland story about how everyone wants a Wii and they are hard to find. Ellen is using GH3 to entertain her audience. Yes, we are in the middle of a writers’ strike and that could be a reason for this but still. She is talking about a game in the way I talk about games I’m excited about. She might be fooling me with her acting abilities, but she really seem to be excited about it. Guitar Hero has quickly become common and well known. I’ve been playing in my dorm and girls will walk by and talk about how much they like that game. This is a future I thought I would never see come to pass when I was little.

When I was younger, I always thought, “If everyone would just give games a chance, they would like them too!” Finally, this seems to be happening. Everyone in my family, from my 80ish grandfather to my younger sister (who still has a better Wii Bowling score than I do), has played some Wii. This, matched with amazingly quick mainstreaming of music games (Guitar Hero, Rock Band, DDR, SingStar), seem to be acting as a “gateway drug” into gaming. This is where my dream takes a dive.

These really aren’t getting people into serious gaming. My mom enjoys a good round of Wii bowling but won’t ever move beyond that. I left my Wii at the house for a while and it was clearly a Wii Sports machine, and nothing else. There is a higher quantity of easily accessible games now, which makes it seems like more people are getting into the hobby.

This is by far the most obvious in Wii game sales. The system is flying off the shelves but the only title that has been on NPD top 10 for more than 2 months is Wii Play, and I’m pretty sure it’s because it comes with an extra Wiimote. These aren’t acting as a gateway at all, they are just leading to more of the same. I really thought Super Mario Galaxy would act as a bridge to the next level up in gaming, but it hasn’t seemed to really.

This is sounding like I’m not down with more casual things, which is very untrue. Rock Band is, by far, one of my favorite games of the year. Nothing is better than some drinks, some friends and some Rock Band. But for anyone who bought a system just for that, probably won’t do much else. Games seem to act as board games to a lot of people. You pull it out every once and a while when there are people over, but other than that, it sits around, sad and lonely.

This doesn’t affect me at all, I still play enough for a small country. I’m also rocking some stereotypes, I know plenty of dudes who don’t play games and girls who do. I just think it’s interesting that all these new members of the ever growing gaming community are still cautiously sitting on the edges instead of diving further in. But this is still closer to my dream than I ever thought we’d get, and that makes me happy.