© 2004 UrbisMedia
Much has been made (a lot of it money) of the supremacy of videogames over Hollywood movies. Sales of videogames exceed movie receipts by one third. So we have now evolved (devolved?) from the large screen movie palaces of forty years ago to the claustrophobic multi-plexes of suburbia, to the monitor-sized proscenium of the computer.
This merits a lead because what is usually absent from the adulatory, golly gee, commentary on the rise of videogames is that the environment through which we take our “entertainment” is both an index and an influence in the kind of culture, the kind of life , we are evolving. So, first, being there , is not being there, if you are there booted-up and on-line. Log on to a chat room and you will quickly appreciate that the “communication” is no more that mutual eavesdropping. Log into a videogame and “communication” is interactivity within the programmer’s closed system parameters. In short, the popularity of video games is rooted in the rising acceptance of virtuality . It’s a different life. Become Laura Croft in the Tomb Raiders game and you can have ample breasts and plush lips, and fly through the air dispatching evildoers with high-tech weapons; boot up John Madden Football games and you can be the Joe Montana throwing a game-winning bomb in the Super Bowl.
This segues nicely to the fact that these are video games . The life of the video game is competition, you against the evildoers, you against the games, you against other players. There is a lot of competition in life, but life is not all a game. Good and evil are not that nicely distinguishable, “winning” is usually a vacuous victory, although there are now a few professional video game players who “win” substantial incomes (but somebody, somewhere in Cyberville, must be losing, too.) Is the natural progression for this form of video game to merge with on-line poker?
So what. People are always pretending to be people that they aren’t; people are always competing in some fashion or another with other people. Is this any different from fairy tales, comic books, and movies? Well, there is, but the difference may be disappearing (at least at the commercial level). In the end, aren’t video games just a digitized version of who we reallyare anyway?
But this may take us into an epistemology that gamers may not want to bother with, unless somebody comes up with a game called Kill the Philosopher You Don’t Agree With. That is to say, yes, video games do reflect a certain reality , not the reality, but somebody’s version of reality. A new game advertised on television is set in the Vietnam War, and lets players jump into rice paddies from helicopters and fire their M-16s at the VVV (virtual Viet Cong). Is this a game? Or perhaps a perversion of political values and social sensibilities.
Again, this may seem to have little distinction from the feelings one acquires is seeing a movie like Platoon. But in the video game, you, as player/character , are always the protagonist, and often the subjective camera . Since it is a game, you are “determined” to try to win againstsomebody/something. You are not watching others play out their roles, but participating (interactivity), and this competitive engagement must involve different feelings from mere observation, even if, in movies we are moved to “identify” with certain characters (although they may not behave as we would have them behave if we were controlling their actions with a computer mouse).
So should we be concerned? Or should we get in on the action—and action is another operative feature in the success of video games—and get rich?
As to the first question the jury is still out on a number of concerns: does the prevalent violence in video games translate to the streets? Maybe kids who spend upwards of 50 or 60 hours per week with a mouse in the hand don’t have much time to step outside with an automatic weapon in hand (although the perpetrators of the Columbine killings were reported to be video games aficionados). Maybe those that are logging on to subjective camera anime pornography are doing other things with their hands.
As to the second question the answer will be different for each of us. But it should take into consideration that video games and the virtual world they create do raise a couple of important concerns. We are people of actual physicality and location, in which we interact with people in consequence of real and not “game over” outcomes—realities that we can’t easily click ourselves out of. Therefore we must construct a real society in which cooperation must counterbalance and countervail competition. The video game, of commercial necessity , must define society in terms of action and entertainment value. Games may be sophisticated in terms of technique and visual realism, but they cannot embrace the complexity of society, only extract what are often clichés and stereotypical.
The type of world that video games seem to be creating are increasingly reciprocal with other media , especially motion pictures and cartoons. We already live in an increasingly “virtualized” world . Shows about UFO abductions are made with “dramatic recreations” blended with some real footage, so that the viewer is not quite sure where the real reality and the fake reality leave off or begin. Real “live” cop shows recreate car chases and drug busts with a deliberate, jerky camera “news footage” look of the six o’clock news further blur the line. And, of course, the “game” feature is ubiquitous, as competitors for cash prizes plot against one another and eat bugs on Survivor and its imitators, families destruct before the cameras, and wannabe singers and stand up comics compete on their respective popular shows to be Number One,” the best, the last one standing, the Survivor. And over on the Academy Awards The Lord of the Rings, an aimless pastiche of computer graphics over a narrative desert wins the award for “best picture.”
If the video game designers did not provide the model for this form of “entertainment” they are undoubtedly watching and waiting, their mice at the ready.
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©2004, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 11.20.2004)