Coming to a Theater/Televsion Set/Playstation 2 near you
October 28For college students, life before video games wasn't life at all; it was their parents' lives. Not a single one can pretend to remember a world before video games. From arcade machines to the Atari 2600 and Colecovision to the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Genesis to the Xbox and Playstation 2, video games have grown up just as we have. And just like us, they've changed in some unpredictable ways through the years. People seem to have calmed down a bit about violence and disturbing photorealism in video games since the mid-'90s (remember Sega CD and Night Trap, anyone?), due in various proportions to the introduction of video game ratings, the high turnover in consoles and software, and the realization that actual violence is a lot more dangerous than the simulated kind. I contend that our society has grown more restrictive on sex and violence in entertainment in the past 15 years, contrary to the general view that we're getting more liberal all the time. Regardless, video games have gotten a hell of a lot more disturbing. The ESRP rating system may give consumers (and parents of consumers) more accessible information on so-called graphic content, but it may also have given software designers the right to stretch the standards a little bit farther. It seems that when you say on the package that a game contains horrific violence, the violence itself becomes okay. And ironic as that note may be, I think that the violence is okay. Violent content hasn't changed much as game systems have evolved. There are only so many ways you can cut off someone's head and only so many places that blood can splatter. The drastic improvement has been in the immersive quality of these games. Game designers have enhanced the cinematic aspects of their work _ shifting camera angles, stereo and surround sound, finer control precision _ and have made the potential for emotion far greater. They've had to do a lot of work to catch up, but with a century's worth of film footage available, there's a lot of material to study. You probably don't think about it much when you're watching a movie _not if it's well-made _ but things like camera angles and editing and sound give filmmakers more control over how you feel. From swooping cameras to sweeping musical crescendos, there's a lot more to making a film than getting the actors to say and do the right things. As for the games, they're looking and sounding better every year _ better graphics, more storage space for dialogue _ and now they're starting to look more and more like interactive movies...and multiplayer ones, at that. It's not just low camera angles, flickering lighting, and orchestral scores, though. Controls have gotten much better: vibrations controllers really let you know when a zombie's sinking its teeth into your throat, and careful aiming schemes let you put that knife or bullet exactly where you want. So far, the cinematic visions of game designers have been put to use towards increasing tension and fear far more often than making more delicate emotional impacts such as sorrow and affection, but these will come if the market responds well. The already-demonstrated power of video games to create fear and suspense _ I'm thinking of Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, if any of you happen to have GameCubes _ tells me that game makers will start pushing our buttons in other ways, too. Some of the buttons shouldn't get pushed, though. As much as I respect the game industry's ability to imitate the real world in military scenarios like Rainbow 6, I wish the new Conflict: Desert Storm title was a horrible horrible joke. This game puts you in charge of covert military units in the Persian Gulf. The ultimate goal is to assassinate Saddam Hussein. How can Americans wonder why the rest of the world hates us when we make a children's game that promotes assassinating an actual, living world leader? It's beyond disrespect and poor taste; it verges on military propaganda. What about the positive potentials of our ever-more-realistic entertainments? When will we realize them? If you think back a bit, people have touted interactive entertainment as the "wave of the future" for so long that it seems almost safe to assume that it isn't really coming at all. Nevertheless, the potential is there for ever more intense forms of entertainment incorporating the best of many different media. Entertainment is on a convergent evolutionary track. The line between computer games and console games is unimportant today, but that's a minor border to cross with so many more potent and everyday examples around. Example: Television gets more cinematic (The Sopranos) and movies get more like television (commercials in theaters). Music becomes more visual (videos and Enhanced CDs) and films become more sound-intensive (the importance of soundtrack and score to any movie out today). So forgive me for not being surprised that video games are looking more like movies while television is becoming more interactive. I don't pretend that we're going to end up with one ??bermedium like a weekly interactive more/video game that you can only play if you subscribe to HBO (though that'd be an amazing phenomenon if they pulled it off). It's just that we can't pigeonhole entertainment media any more than we can music genres. Just as fusion music brings together aspects of different kinds of music, fusion entertainment will bring together elements of music, cinema, and interactive games in order to express something unique. Fusion hasn't wiped out jazz, though, and I don't expect any new fusion to wipe out television or movies, either. Moreover, game makers are marketing to older audiences all the time. We all once assumed that kids raised on video games would grow out of playing them. We were wrong. A surprising proportion of young adults continue to buy new systems and play new games, and they don't seem too ashamed of it, either. Most music is marketed to the young because young people buy more music; expect the video game industry to take up a similar tact. But gamers will get older, and designers will do well to come up with products that appeal to the less youthful and hyperactive slice of the market. With increasing power, portability, and versatility, video games are eating up more of America's attention every year. Here's to hoping that they start approaching art someday rather than mere entertainment.
