This was written sort of in response to the talk by Jesse Schell's "mindblowing talk on the future of games." Many people have been picking up on the fact that he isn't really clear about whom should be doing this creation of making all aspects of a person's life an achievement system. My take on it is that people are doing it, not game designers. His intent seems to have been that game designers need to take control of the development of games in order to stop his 'new world' from happening. In thinking about this, I wanted to take a journey through trying to piece together some thoughts on this idea using the famous Georg Simmel dialectic metaphor. We have to be either or, in all things. 2 and only 2. And in all things, both sides want to be fully realized while at the same time the person wants neither to be fully realized. What ends up happening is an uneasy balance, a strife, tension in the human spirit. It is this spirit that makes us yearn for a world in which it does not exist, again, a dialectic.
For a while now, there has been this dialectic going on within the gamers mind. On one side you have legitimacy as an entertainment medium. Surely, given the amount of money spent on said medium means that it is a bonafied industry of entertainment! On the other, is the side that struggles with the fact that the only way we could be a legitimate entertainment medium is to generate and show media in similar ways that other entertainment media has; legitimacy would be selling out. As with all dialectics, each side of this string seeks to head into the infinite void. Each side seeks full realization. Each side balances the whole while inbetween, the members of the video game “industry” struggle with it.
However, this dialectic is not too dissimilar to each other entertainment media’s rise to legitimacy. We can say with little uncertainty that the mode through which each medium’s rise came through the form of technological progress. The world we live in, the time we find ourselves in, is very unlike the world each of these media created. Georg Simmel, writing in the late 1800s or early 1900s stated of society that it was our material culture that has changed, not our culture itself. In fact, most times, the non-material culture declined as material culture progressed.
Simmel wrote these things just before a great tidal wave of development came into our lives. While our material culture has changed a tremendous amount since Simmel wrote On Culture, it is through this idea that we must park ourselves. For, while the infinite progress of our ways proceeds ever toward the horizon, there is something happening to our culture that has an impact on the very dialectic that video games is trying to cope with, nurture, loathe.
Video games were the result of a romanticized hacker culture during the original stages of the cold war. Early video games were hacks of display technology that, while perhaps not consciously, were meant to show just how much more advanced than the soviets we were. Afterall, wouldn’t a society that made toys out of their technology created to watch rockets and nuclear devices be a superior society? A more advanced society?
Like all good ideas worth making money off of, someone did. Atari, Colecovision, Intellivision, Vectrex, and many others exploded onto a scene that the world had not quite prepared for. This suddenly cheap and exciting, formerly outrageously expensive technology was purchased by every household that could scrape together the money for it. However, like good ideas worth making money off of, too many people tried to…and the idea, the blossoming industry, fizzled out. It seems as though society decided to write video games off and place them in the same realm as the nerdy scientist. American culture, it decided, was done with video games.
While this destruction of the fad was short lived, while american culture found itself duped by the entertainment system developed by Nintendo, American perception, american fear of the computer was growing. In America, fear, ignorance of the computer is still the most uttered phrase. “I don’t know nothing about this machine.” “I swear this thing hates me.” “Whatever, I’m not a computer nerd.”
These same people bought a playstation, bought an xbox, bought a wii, and while they can hook them up to their television and connect to the itnernet, it still isn’t a PC, so it’s ok.
Video games are stuck here. Connected to a PC, video games are the devil, connected to a telvision through a dedicated console and video games are ok. The dialectic here is no longer legitimacy through culturally prescribed means vs monetary ones, it is now trying to overcome 30 years worth of stigma based on a general hatred of technology.
American culture is tired of progress. It is tired of having to figure out new things when the old ones worked just fine. Here to, is a dialectic. The want of progress with the want of staying still for a while.
Video games can’t gain legitimacy through the old ways of tauting technological prowess and amazing graphical features, or total number of polygons on screen. While we struggle with this as people, before we turn on the game, it somehow goes away when a new video game comes out and the main character’s breasts jiggle on screen when you shake the controller.
If video games want legitimacy, it will have to be through another mode, another means. If you’ve made it through this, you are probably thinking I’m going to say facebook games.
Facebook games are a breakthrough for video games but, like the original video games, too many developers, too many products, and the consumer will simply walk away.
No, to achieve legitimacy, it is going to require a synthesis of methods and modes most of us couldn’t possibly imagine. To struggle for this synthesis goes against the very idea that video games were founded on. Each time something like facebook games happen, there is an enormous backlash from game makers and gamers alike. “They just aren’t games.” They’re stupid.”
We sit now in a new development project. Technology is quickly being replaced with user configuration. The human mind is the new development project. Is it time for video games to get an actual second chance at bonified legitimacy?
We’ll just have to see.
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