[thom]

I don’t think the counter examples people are already posting here undermine the fact that these are some of the dominant forces in gaming. Every cultural medium behaves this way (if I wanted to bore everybody I would add “once it’s co-opted by capital”).

Ultimately all you can ask yourself is whether it’s still possible to have new and transformative experiences with games (or art or film or TV) and for the most part the answer is still yes. I was surprised the author pointed to what appears to be a pretty straight Robotron clone with vampires as an example of newness that was quickly absorbed into game design memetics. Perhaps that indicates that given a long enough timeframe things can be forgotten and rediscovered, instead of being constantly mined into oblivion.