"Who owns culture and who decides?"

Fans, followers and consumers. People who enjoy an activity/product and repeatedly take part in this. There are many things like this that aren't widely experienced enough to have and affect on society. They are not connected enough with other parts of life within that culture, so even though people enjoy these things they remain smaller sub-sections, sub-cultures. Does gaming stretch beyond that? And who decides...
Can the people within the culture declare it to be so or does it depend on an outside view. For gaming would that mean someone who had never played a game or experienced them in any form. Would they be able to understand/see the level of enjoyment that gamers experience, what that world might mean to some people and the work and care by designers that create the games. There are so many sides to the gaming world and not all of them would agree with each other so who is allowed to decide if it is a culture. If someone was to look at everything that games have ever affected and studied this would they be able to give an accurate definition of the culture of gaming, just from looking at articles, books, videos and any other secondary media. I think that it would require a more hands on approach.

"One way to document cultural heritage and "freeze" it, at least at the moment of capturing it on camera, and thus preserving that moment, is to use digital video. As with text and image "collecting," the ethical dilemma in conducting folkloristic visual recording is determining what is to be recorded, and what approach the fieldworker might take. Since the story does not exist without performance, performance is more significant than the story alone. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett noted, "Repertoire is passed on through performance. This is different from recording and preserving the repertoire as documentation in an archive" (2004:60). A list is not relevant without the people whose cultural knowledge is catalogued. "It is not easy," she notes, " to treat such manifestations as proxies for persons, even with the recording technologies that can separate performances from performers and consign the repertoire to the archive" (2004:60)."Spring 2008 by Sherman, Sharon R http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3732/is_200804/ai_n31109720/pg_6/?tag=content;col1



To me it seems that what's being said here is that it is better to view a culture in it's active form than through secondary media such as film or books. I think that it is important to preserve past cultures and not forget where our current cultures and societies have evolved from, so we should be documenting and studying these cultures, but definitely remain aware of the difference between primary and secondary experience.
Quite often people I know who don't have much contact with the gaming world are much more interested when watching a game being played that just hearing about it.