What is pop culture? It means a lot of different things to different people. If you’re a lazy slug and rely on Wikipedia for all of your answers in life, then popular culture is defined as:
the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the late 20th and early 21st century.
In fact it’s not a bad definition but it only scratches at the surface. For me, pop culture is an ever-changing landscape of what’s appealing to the masses at any given point in time. Part of the mystery of pop culture is that society’s needs and wants change and are in a constant state of flux. A phenomenon that is called a part of pop culture today might not have even entered the greater public consciousness if it had taken place a month earlier or later.
You can find pop culture everywhere, in TV, film, books, and even in games. It can be found in nearly all media.
Pop Culture is increasingly found in video games. Of course, you’ll find references to current events in all sorts of games, including console games, but it’s more and more prevalent in games for kids, such as Poptropica, Poptropica SOS Island, and Club Penguin or littered throughout game aggregation sites like MiniClip, where mini-games can be created and published on a variety of topics. Sometimes it’s only a day or two (or less!) between the time something hits the popular culture radar before it appears somewhere online as a game.