September 30, 2008

 

 

“I’m living out my darkest fantasies… I can talk to an old lady or an old guy and have them be a character and then I can kill them, and you know, really feel like I killed a person. And then I can like, you know, pick up his head and put it on a shelf.  And I look at it and it’s like, I was talking to that person five minuets ago and now I’m not” (Emile Pagliarulo, 2008).  This sounds like incoherent croons of a killer; but in fact, it is a commentary from the lead designer and writer for the most anticipated video game of this year.  Video games, to some, are a silly waste, a violent teacher, and/or a horrible addiction.  If you ask any of the one-twelfth of the world’s population that play, however, games are an experience that life cannot imitate.  Recently, video games have become a bit of a social oxymoron.  Games obliterated entertainment sales records, becoming the highest grossing entertainment industry on earth whilst simultaneously coming under fire and fierce media scrutiny for promoting violence and addiction.  In other words, video games have been given the spotlight and put under the microscope, an impressive feat for something that had humble beginnings on the midways of American carnivals.

 

Carnivals connote care-free sensual experience.  Flicking neon dances around the retinas as seductive cat calls are hailed out from behind rows of missing teeth. “Everybody’s a winner here, step right up.  You sir, you look like you got a strong enough arm to win a prize for the lady”.  Aromas, hanging heavy on the nostrils, waft from sugary food vendors.  Meanwhile the tongue lies in guilty anticipation for exotic treats.  Fingers pluck lightly through a bag of crunchy popcorn before hands seize violently upon the safety bar of a scary ride.  All the senses are hedonistically enthralled.  Here, ancestry of video games twined their roots beneath the carnivals’ soil and soul.  Known then as “arcade games”, ball toss, shooting gallery, and coin operated fortunetellers were popular episodes of carnivals in the 1920s.  The notion of hedonistically evoking the senses during brief episodes is what arcade and video games pantomime: recreational escapism.  The spirit of the carnival, then, became imbued into future generations of arcade and video games.

 

The 1930s saw the creation of the pinball machine, and what a machine!  Originally made of wood and steel, they contained nothing electronic.  All the moving parts were either independently free floating, or manually operated.  They certainly didn’t have the flash or pizzazz of later varieties.  Those bristling boxes of colour and motion didn’t arrive until the 1950s.  The pinball machines, even the earlier metal and fibre versions, were an important design muse for all future video game hardware.  Drawing upon the carnival influence, these sense-evoking entertainment consoles became self-contained units.

 

Computer Space, built by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Danby, was the first true video game.  It looked like fish had designed its dark blue curvaceous plastic body.  There were no blazing decals splayed across the side, just a panel of six randomly flashing buttons that subtly called out like the sirens.  The graphics were horrible.  The sound was dismal.  Yet, it was played feverishly, with the fate of a pixelated galaxy at stake.  The object was to pilot your blot like space ship around an equally blot like galaxy and destroy enemy blot like invading ships.  Its inventors graduated from MIT with honours in computer science; so it comes as a slight surprise that the programming geniuses decided to invest their brains in creating something so ‘mindless’.  Little did Danby and Bushnell know, however, that this simple game would be the beginning of a 48 billion dollar global industry, and the end of infinite lives.

 

One year later, Danby and Busnell created the game “Pong”, and with it, an entertainment juggernaut.  After trying to sell the simple video table tennis port to major software developers, the pair opted instead to create their own company: Atari.  It was the first company of its kind, one solely devoted to the commoditisation of video games.  Coin operated gaming machines landed with the subtly of a meteorite upon America.  Video arcades – supplied by several developers including Atari – sprung up in malls, restaurants, and again on carnivals’ midways and boardwalks.  Because these games needed to generate money, game-play had to be based on something finite.  The preferred solution was to center the story and game-play on a scenario that gave players a determined number of ‘lives’ in which to get through a linear based adventure.  It was a question of how to make games simultaneously interesting and economically viable.  How could a game get youth to keep feeding their quarters into a seemingly insatiable machine?  The answer, initially, was violence.  Given America’s history, it doesn’t seem bizarre to solve an economic problem with violence, just interesting.  The midway games of the 1920s and all the following pinball machines never used violence to accrue coins.  It was not until the video arcades of the 1970s that violence became inextricably linked to games.  So, what really came first, society’s glorification of violence, or violent video games?  Ironically video arcades gained reputations as seedy spaces that bred violence and apathy.  Players plunked in countless coins to indentify as violent heroes, only to become social villains.

 

Arcades, though labelled as antisocial cesspits, maintained popularity and prosperity for nearly two decades, but like an ELE (extinction level event) hitting earth, they were about to go the way of the dinosaurs.  Developed by Danby and Busnells’ Atari gaming company in the early 1980s, the Atari 1600 Home Entertainment System once again shifted the gaming paradigm.  With the home system, gamers no longer had to stock their jeans with roles of quarters.  They just hit the “ON” in order to detach from reality.  The only problem was the epic atrocity of the games.  Graphics, sound, game-play, it was all too frustrating instead of fun.  In fact, the system was so awful, Atari nearly destroyed the market it initially created.  The reason is that, unlike today, anything technologically advanced took up a lot of room.  “Pack Man” is heralded as one of the greatest games of all time; but the Atari version, which came out five years after the initial arcade release, is heralded as one of the worst games of all time.  The home version simply didn’t have the computing power to generate anything better than “Pong”, but it was not cost effective or economical enough for the company to produce and sell something as large as a fridge.  The negative arcade social climate, coupled with the nightmare that was the Atari 1600 nearly caused the collapse of the fledgling industry. 

 

America had taken video games to their technological and enjoyable limit; like a celebrated sumo making his way into a match, Japan stepped into the video game arena with gravity.  Two grand champions squared off for control of the home entertainment market: Sega vs. Nintendo.  Each console/software developer had their own technology, vision, designer camps, and style.  Over the next two decades, these companies took what Atari had started and buoyed the industry to better shores.  This golden age of gaming witnessed the colossi clash, resulting in some of the best games and systems ever created.  Characters like Sonic the Hedgehog, Mario and Luigi, Solid Snake, Kid Icarus, Samus, and Wonder Boy instantaneously created entertainment property legend.  With every generation of new gaming system, these characters would be featured in dozens of titles.  Some even spawned television shows, action figures, and major motion pictures.  These characters represented global companies; fans adored and idolatrised them.  Think of any international corporation today, then try and name their lovable mascot.  It is impossible because international corporations do not use mascots.  Sega and Nintendo, by contrast, were built by them. 

 

These software behemoths ushered video games into the modern era and opened the doors for other corporations like Sony and Microsoft to push the industry beyond impossibility.  The gaming industry today is an entertainment monolith.  By best estimates, it generates over one hundred billion dollars annually, and that number is ascending (IGN, 2008).  Last year, one single game sold 170 million dollars in the first 24 hours.  This toppled the previous record set two years earlier by the same game’s prequel.  This feat, however, is dwarfed by the highest grossing entertainment property of all time which generates exponential amounts of capital daily by charging players for monthly online subscriptions.  It is nearly incalculable how much money the ten million subscribers generate for the developer.  The game is known as an MMO or massive multi-player online.  In other words, there is a 10 million strong online community that devotes countless hours to maintaining and expanding the game’s universe and capital. To put it into perspective, the game’s developer spends 2.5 million dollars annually just to maintain the online servers, of which are located in over 20 countries.  Today’s industry pushes the sense experience to fantastical proportions.  The levels of immersion far exceed any other medium because developers strive for excellence in all the mediums that coagulate to form tremendous sensual experience. 

 

It is this meticulous attention to quality ingredients that has led to the gluttony of players, and the negative attention from media and social analysts.  The aforementioned MMO requires an average of 20.3 days to reach level 60; it is estimated that 15% of the players are about at this level which equates to a combined total of 83,430 years of playing time.  Evolutionists theorize that speech was developed 80,000 years ago.  To look at it another way, each one of those people have lost a total of 16 work days.  Even at an 8 dollar per-hour wage, that is still 1,536,000,000 dollars.  It is important to keep in mind that the figures are only based on 15% of the people playing one single game.  In fact, as I write this very sentence, here in knowledge common, the guy beside me is checking his MMO account whilst 8 people are lined up for computer time.  Unquantifiable hours have been spent by people playing video games, and that is only since the turn of the century.  These figures parallel world-wide drug use. 

 

 Limitless hours of violent immersion have profound psychological effects, or so the media says.  The Columbine shootings were, in every way, tragic.  Interestingly though, the discourses that emerged had little to do with American led wars, fascist literature, parental supervision, or even gun control; instead violent video games emmerged as the leading cause for the shootings.  As I said earlier, video games utilize violence.  Psychologist Patricia Arraiga also notes that “most of the research done so far has shown that violence is video games’ main ingredient” (523).  She goes on to note the effects of violence in video games are similar to that of movies and television, yet is more potent due to games’ immersive qualities (524).  Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (the two responsible for Columbine) were known to play a vastly popular game called “Doom”.  The game created one of the most popular genres called FPS or first person shooter.  It takes the ‘first person view’ of a one man army, battling his way through swaths of enemies.  The current entertainment sales record is held by a game of this genre.  Eric and Dylan wrote fan mail to the “Doom” developers, id Software.  As a result, the victims’ parents filed multiple law suites against the developer, sighting them as the cause for the loss of their loved ones.  Moreover, the media induced video game maelstrom spawned countless ‘Columbine’ video games, downloadable over the internet.  It has become obvious that video games have a deep – and dark – social potential.  The important question, are games blurring the lines of virtual and reality, and what are the subjective and social effects of the distortion?