Sure it is - food, clothing, architecture, design. What else am I missing? Moreover, when taking this into account how does it change the original post’s point?
As mentioned in a different post, he completely missed video games. For example, Pokémon is the highest-grossing media franchise in the world. Many game companies are headquartered in Japan such as Nintendo, Sony, and Square Enix. So when taking that into account, it absolutely changes the original post's point. He also mentioned how he's not really into video games (I don't really count age as a factor for this anymore because video games have been around for a couple of decades already).
The more interesting question out of this particular discussion, though, is this: are video games part of culture? I absolutely agree that it is, but the fact that neither you nor the original post brought it up tells me that it is not for a certain percentage of the HN crowd here.
Back in the late '90s - early 2000s the "Cahiers du Cinema" were beginning to treat them like culture, if I'm not mistaken they used to have a relatively small (but important, given the context) "chronique" in each issue talking about a specific game. Then came a "reactionary" backlash, as is typical with French cultural institutions, the directorship of the magazine got changed and there were no more "chroniques" about video games and Michael Jackson. I think Les Inrocks might still give the video-games world a fair representation but to be honest I haven't read them in a long time.
In the Anglo world a magazine like Sight&Sound just ignores video-games almost completely, or that's what they seem to have been doing since I first started reading them (10+ years ago). More generalist media institutions like The Economist, the Financial Times (both of these I try to read pretty constantly), NY Times or the Guardian don't seem to allocate too much space to video games reviews in their Arts&Culture pages, or at least I don't remember having read too many of them (if any, to be honest).
And I do know that video-games have been available for a few decades now, but the thing is that they've become quite compartmentalised from society's point view. More exactly if you like video games or if you're into video games most probably that means that you're the kind of person that is spending tens of hours per month (week?) hooked to a PC or a game-console, ignoring the outside world, hence the outside society. Culture, by definition, was meant to provide some "glue" to society, to embrace it, so to speak, today's video-games (or most of them, anyway) run counter to all that.
>And I do know that video-games have been available for a few decades now, but the thing is that they've become quite compartmentalised from society's point view. More exactly if you like video games or if you're into video games most probably that means that you're the kind of person that is spending tens of hours per month (week?) hooked to a PC or a game-console, ignoring the outside world, hence the outside society. Culture, by definition, was meant to provide some "glue" to society, to embrace it, so to speak, today's video-games (or most of them, anyway) run counter to all that.
Culture has various definitions that it can be interpreted by but by your comments, your views on culture appear to be that relevant to the youth of the mid to late 20th century but are much less relevant to the youth of today. The culture around video games is more dynamic and popular compared to that of cinema which has serious issues drawing eyeballs outside of the repetitive blockbuster films. There's a reason why the CEO of Netflix was more concerned about the threat from video games to their product.
