Big Ideas: Do gamers mature?

Posted Oct 22nd 2008 2:00PM by Akela Talamasca
Filed under: Culture, Features, Opinion, Meta BD

The gaming industry has been around now for over 35 years and shows no signs of slowing down. Those of us who are old enough to have been there right from the beginning remember when games like Pong, crude as they were at the time, seemed sophisticated and high-tech. Decades later, we maintain a delicate balance between heartfelt nostalgia for the great games of our youth, and eager anticipation for the new, shiny titles of the future.

Many who were virtually reared on video games have grown up to become developers themselves, infusing their passions and predilections for the medium into the games they create. Others have entered the industry another way, becoming game journalists, keeping tabs on what's new with an eye toward a continuously growing history. With all this behind us, then, is it safe to ask if we, as gamers, have matured? What would it mean to be a mature gamer? Does it matter if the art and science of gaming evolves?

While the argument that video games are or are not art continues to rage, for the sake of this article I'm going to lump it in with other artistic endeavors like movies, books, and music. When a new art form appears, it will typically go through several phases on its way to maturity. The initial phase is typically a time of wild experimentation, when the boundaries of what this new medium is and can be are fluid and changing. Eventually, certain defining forms begin to appear, and slowly these forms are refined into specific genres or styles. The novel, for instance, has weathered many decades of attempts to define it before settling into its modern form, which contains genres like science fiction, romance, biography, etc. Certainly there is still a great deal of experimentation to be found in the modern novel, but for the most part the medium as a whole has matured to the point where its boundaries have become well-defined.

On the other hand, a medium like music will likely never approach a state where it will freeze into easy definition. Obviously there are already many genres at hand -- rock, jazz, classical, big band, reggae, electronica, etc. -- but rather than reaching this stage and stopping, new forms of music are being created and discovered all the time. Or, perhaps it's more to the point that due to the fluid nature of the medium, subcategorizing is a fruitless exercise and all music should simply be appreciated for what it is, and not for the facile labels we impose upon it.

So this begs the question: what sort of medium is the video game?

Many of the early video games were relatively simple affairs, with easily-grasped mechanics, a direct objective, and at best, some rudimentary story or plot. As the medium grew, and the hardware available developed in sophistication and power, games themselves became increasingly more complex and multilayered. As games gave their audience more, the audience in turn demanded more of games. We have now reached a point in time where it's difficult to imagine a type of game that can't be made with enough time and effort. Does this mean that we've attained a kind of maturity?

If we look at the definition of maturity as including discernment, then we come away with a mixed bag. While it's true that we now have games that cater to virtually every taste, all this means is that we've traded purity of focus for choice; we haven't seen the apotheosis of any particular game genre. In most ways, the field is still in development, with experimentation still rife among the game developer community. In this, then, the gaming industry resembles the music industry, and of course there's nothing wrong with that.

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Tags: big-ideas, culture, featured, joystiqfeatures, mature, maturity, opinion

3 Comments

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

+Awesome for the Pic of Old Grandma Hard Core

OGHC 4 Life!Posted at 2:10PM on Oct 22nd 2008 by Sam

Look at gamefaqs the imdb of video games. I see less maturity than anywhere else (and I have worked at day camps for kids as young as 5).

But if you flip the coin and look at a workplace in the video game industry you can find maturity scarcely found anywhere else.

And to answer the questions posed beyond your first paragraph, as it is now the video game industry is a cross between the novel industry and music industry. Sure we have the racing, RPG, RTS, platformers, console FPS and then PC FPS . But we also have sub genres that expand or concentrate these genres, Like survival RPG.

Artists in our industry seem to have a willingness to (in the [edited] words of a certain Scroobius Pip) push the boundaries while others try to blow them up, look at Darwinia Super Mario Galaxy, Red Alert 3 and Second Life. Then look at Spore and Wii Sports.

And of course we can't forget to look at the type of games that download squad (a blog with an affiliation of big download) will cover as time wasters. Simple web based games are a playground for developing (please excuse the pun) the artists and designers of our industry a medium not dissimilar to some of the early computers that supported user programming via BASIC.

And of course we mustn't forget that games have been around for about as long as civilization has. With board games like GO and Chess, to war games that developed into games like CTF and Manhunt. And as the video game industry evolves something strange is happening not only are the field games of our childhood becoming hard coded into the genres that we so enjoy (CTF in Halo for example) but the reverse os happening too, I've seen Paintball games based directly off of Counter Strike.

Not only that but for short times in online video games you can witness players bending the rules (and even blowing them up) of the game. The only example that comes to mind is racing in Gate 88.

Gate 88 could be called an Action RTS, it was developed and hosted for free by Jonathan Mak the one who later gave us another genre in the game Audio Surf.

In Gate 88 the user flies around in a ship using similar controls to the game Asteroids, the user can instantly build stationary units like turrets and power generators with the goal of destroying the enemies base. But eventually the gamers got too good at the game to the point whee you would either have a stalemate or a total defeat in a few minutes. But the gamers loved the game and did not want to stop playing, so they developed new games without any scripting or code alterations. One of them was a racing game where the track was made up of units placed on the screen. Then there was another game that involved two players placing multiple units called mass drivers which would push away at high speed enemy units, then the gamers would place time bomb units within range of the mass drivers and try and hit the enemy with the time bomb.

It was not long before Garrys mod for Valves Source engine was developed. A game which was just a sandbox where the users made their own games either with or without scripting.

So not only is the video game industry in a state of flux and in a state of maturity but the end users (listeners in music viewers in visual arts and readers in literature) are participating in creating the art. They don't just experience it but they change and create it.

As an industry we have a long way to go before we reach any kind of maturity, and I suspect that maturity of art may become like nothing before where games become sandbox's which in themselves constantly evolve beyond their original design, designed to evolve beyond their original design.

And us, we are living it making it what we want, journalists, developers, designers, testers...

-Edward@Nardella.caPosted at 11:55AM on Oct 25th 2008 by edward

I'd say gaming is much more in the Movies camp than the Music or Novels camp.

Right now its mostly at the same stage that movies were when Cinecolor and Stereo were big selling points. In the move from static to handycam, the move from black and white to color.

Which means that the focus isn't really on the content yet... its on the technology. It isn't often on telling new stories, but on telling the same story again, but with more polygons and a higher resolution.

Of course, movies still go through that phase occasionally. 1995-2005 was the age of CGI for hte sake of CGI. And maybe again in the future we'll have the same with some form of 3D tech.

But in general, other art forms have settled on their technology, meaning that all the innovation can be focussed on the art itself. Game developers still have to invent their own tech as they go, and gamers seem conditioned to be more worried about the technology than the product.

Maybe in a generation or so technology will have plateaued (as nintendo claims it already has) and we'll get a much wider range of games for different kinds of gamers.Posted at 11:28PM on Oct 26th 2008 by t_m