Mainstream Media Thinks Games Need To Grow Up
I have been playing video games since my siblings and I were given a Nintendo for Christmas over twenty years ago. Much of my life has revolved around the medium and it has grown from a novelty, to a hobby, to a study, and now much of my work revolves around video games. Maybe I'm too close to the culture to fully understand this, but so many people still can't grasp how video games have evolved over the past thirty years. Take for instance this article I read earlier today from Canada's Globe and Mail Newspaper.
Written by Blaine Kyllo, the very first sentence asks when video games will finally grow up. The rest of the article takes a nice turn into thought provoking territory thanks in large part to Kyllo getting comments from Newsweek's N'Gai Croal and Electric Playground's Victor Lucas. Each are able to offer their own unique insights into Kyllo's question. From Lucas' down to earth response:
"We don't care if you don't get it any more," he says from the set of his show, now a daily magazine that airs on Citytv and G4TechTV. "It's not a niche market, it's a universal, global market and there's a lot of fun that people are missing out on if they're not playing games."
To Croal's academic approach to the subject of a maturing medium:
Croal says that we're still trying to understand how games do what they do, how "the procedural rhetoric of play works and how you can use that to elicit emotions from people who play games." To say nothing of provoking thought.
I do agree with Croal that the way in which games are discussed is changing but still has a long way to go. Even Kyllo point's out that responses from gamers to reviews or news that they don't agree with can often times turn hostile. I think if I had to sum it up into a sound byte I would say that in order for games to fully mature, the consumers must also mature along side it. As long as games are seen by the majority of the world as ways to waste time, they simply will not accept discussions that say otherwise. Maybe we should just listen Lucas and not care if other people don't get it. Does gaming really need to become even more mainstream?
When will video games grow up? Wrong question, experts say [Globe and Mail]
TheDoctor
Posted to Miscellany, Video Games on 9 September 2008
· Comments (3)
Other stuff like this: academic, culture, gamers, growing up, industry
Here's my bit of wisdom for the games industry in general, the games media, and my fellow gamers:
If you want to be treated like an adult, then f**king act like one. ^_^
You have to understand, we as a whole are sending certain signals to the rest of the world who may not understand and respect us. If we truly want them to understand and respect us then we must also show that side of ourselves that deserve understanding and respect.
And how are we gonna do that when almost everything we put out and play involves things like anatomically impossible women with huge breasts and dressed as pre-pubescent schoolgirls (if not wearing next to nothing), males who can do nothing more than shoot and blow things up and kill as many people as possible for points, war simulators, and sickeningly cute fetal looking characters?
There is definitely more than enough room for those things I listed in gamedom, just as there is more than enough room for such things as socially responsible themed games, intelligently mature content that explores human issues, and other things that show that we can be good responsible globally aware citizens.
Unfortunately this is difficult to achieve, especially with the rampant juvenile hedonism in the games industry and among games enthusiasts.
Games are an immature medium which are marketed overwhelmingly to males aged around 12-28. If this fact isn't painfully obvious to you when you walk into a Gamestop and look around at the box art, then you are blind. Games do need to grow up, and we shouldn't be offended by this observation. On the other hand, we have every right to be offended by someone who concludes that because someone plays games, that person must be immature. That is what is called prejudice.
What do games need to do to grow up? The first obvious answer to that is that they need to broaden their subject matter so that everything isn't about guns and fantasy. But I think more importantly, games need to discover new styles of gameplay, especially styles that do not focus on a theme of destruction. The "experimental game" community is probably the most important progressive force I can think of in this regard. Most of the experimental games coming out are pretty boring, but this is because they are the first steps in a new direction.
I wonder if a large part of the difficulty in finding people who want to make new types of games is that the people who have a programmer's mind are men who are mostly interested in guns and/or science. Does a new system need to be created in which someone can be a "game director" without actually knowing how to implement design? I don't know.
I don't believe the idea that "gamers need to grow up" though. People are who they are and they like what they like, and it's unrealistic to think they will change. As new types of games start coming out, the audience will gradually arrive to meet it.
I really think that people need to take note of the games that actually do venture beyond the initial concepts of amazing graphics or simple, yet fun gameplay for truly immersive and complex concepts. I think the actual publishers are too focused on trying to get as much money as possible and whore out franchises without ever even attempting to delve into original ideas that would probably cause the entire industry to evolve slowly. It's great when we see games like Bioshock, FFXII, and GTA4 that make strides in their storytelling come out, but for every one of those, there's a bajillion + 1 Manhunts.
It's also somewhat of an unfair parallel since there are also a LOT of crap in other forms of entertainment (*coughSUMMERBLOCKBUSTERScough*) that are guilty of it just as often. I suppose people do tend to notice that there are those directors and producers that you can latch on when you wish to depend on a well developed storyline, which is probably what gaming is really lacking, aside from a few, and that entire indie movement is really helping to present some new perspectives into games in general.