With Nothing to Talk About But Movies and the Weather
Warren Spector is not a man to be trifled with. Anyone who is perfectly willing to put Mark Hammil as an ace space-fighter pilot but not as Luke Skywalker in their videogame has testicles the size of Kilamanjaro. Also, anyone who makes Deus Ex is awesome.
These days, Warren's been a very outspoken critic of his industry. The press and industry leaders themselves have spent the past three years focusing on gaming's transition into the mainstream and technological growth. Certain developers and Nintendo itself as a corporate entity have during that time period been insisting on a push towards greater innovation in design and play in order to nurture an ever growing gamer populace while others like Sony and Microsoft see the future as a natural evolution of gaming's past; better graphics, more powerful hardware, and games as one branch of a grand entertainment web of different media from music to movies centralized in a technological hub in the home. At the International Game Summit in Montreal this past November, Spector gave an impassioned talk on this topic and his vision of videogames' future as a medium isn't all peaches and cream and profit. He acknowledges that while that pleasant mixture is one possible outcome, an industry wide crash akin to what happened in the early 1980s is just as possible. He is currently elaborating on this through a series of articles being published by The Escapist magazine entitled Gaming at The Margins and while nearly all of his criticisms and praises ring true, his specific evidence that gaming could fall based on the precedent of past forms of entertainment is not only false but downright silly in light of such an intelligent argument as the one he's making.
Spector points out five separate media as examples of how quickly the public's interest can be lost in the blink of an eye: radio drama, vaudeville, arcades, the Broadway musical, and comic books. He sites them all as entertainment that were at one time at the height of consumer desirability but what he fails to point out, ironically enough, is that at least three of these were outmoded not because of just waning public interest but because they were technologically rendered moot. Radio drama and vaudeville were quite literally replaced by television. Television provided the exact same entertainment offered by vaudevillian stage acts and radio drama through variety programming and televised dramas, often times by the exact same entertainers who provided them through the outmoded media. Broadway, and the musical itself, despite a renaissance in the latter 20th century, has never come close to achieving the popularity it had in pre- and post-war America on a global scale and has remained a historically small market when compared to television and, yes, even videogames (have musicals ever earned in the billions of dollars per year, even on a relative scale?) Even theater broadly is a poor example as it too was antiquated, perhaps not artistically but popularly, by the advent of television and film. Arcades too lost popularity not because arcade games were no longer interesting to consumers but because game technology grew to offer not only a comparable experience but a more valuable and ultimately affordable one.
And comic books, geez, comic books have never, ever, since 1937 when that first issue of Action Comics hit stands and created the superhero, been a truly mainstream form of entertainment. At least videogaming has started being seen as a respectable pastime for all ages early on in its life. Comics spent the better part of sixty years relegated to the cultural ghetto of being "just for kids."
So, Warren, what is it that will offer consumers the same experience as videogames? What new technology will come and tear the controller away from millions of players across the globe and offer them something new? Virtual reality? Holodecks? Psilocybin mushrooms? A newly discovered continent in the middle of the Atlantic ocean named Hyrule?
I agree with you. I do. Things need to change for videogames to truly blossom into the artistic expression they can, should, and will be. Development costs must go down. We must think of new ways to play. People must stop buying WWE games.
But if you think for one second that Grand Theft Auto is going to go the way of weekly episodes of The Shadow, you are dead wrong.
These days, Warren's been a very outspoken critic of his industry. The press and industry leaders themselves have spent the past three years focusing on gaming's transition into the mainstream and technological growth. Certain developers and Nintendo itself as a corporate entity have during that time period been insisting on a push towards greater innovation in design and play in order to nurture an ever growing gamer populace while others like Sony and Microsoft see the future as a natural evolution of gaming's past; better graphics, more powerful hardware, and games as one branch of a grand entertainment web of different media from music to movies centralized in a technological hub in the home. At the International Game Summit in Montreal this past November, Spector gave an impassioned talk on this topic and his vision of videogames' future as a medium isn't all peaches and cream and profit. He acknowledges that while that pleasant mixture is one possible outcome, an industry wide crash akin to what happened in the early 1980s is just as possible. He is currently elaborating on this through a series of articles being published by The Escapist magazine entitled Gaming at The Margins and while nearly all of his criticisms and praises ring true, his specific evidence that gaming could fall based on the precedent of past forms of entertainment is not only false but downright silly in light of such an intelligent argument as the one he's making.
Spector points out five separate media as examples of how quickly the public's interest can be lost in the blink of an eye: radio drama, vaudeville, arcades, the Broadway musical, and comic books. He sites them all as entertainment that were at one time at the height of consumer desirability but what he fails to point out, ironically enough, is that at least three of these were outmoded not because of just waning public interest but because they were technologically rendered moot. Radio drama and vaudeville were quite literally replaced by television. Television provided the exact same entertainment offered by vaudevillian stage acts and radio drama through variety programming and televised dramas, often times by the exact same entertainers who provided them through the outmoded media. Broadway, and the musical itself, despite a renaissance in the latter 20th century, has never come close to achieving the popularity it had in pre- and post-war America on a global scale and has remained a historically small market when compared to television and, yes, even videogames (have musicals ever earned in the billions of dollars per year, even on a relative scale?) Even theater broadly is a poor example as it too was antiquated, perhaps not artistically but popularly, by the advent of television and film. Arcades too lost popularity not because arcade games were no longer interesting to consumers but because game technology grew to offer not only a comparable experience but a more valuable and ultimately affordable one.
And comic books, geez, comic books have never, ever, since 1937 when that first issue of Action Comics hit stands and created the superhero, been a truly mainstream form of entertainment. At least videogaming has started being seen as a respectable pastime for all ages early on in its life. Comics spent the better part of sixty years relegated to the cultural ghetto of being "just for kids."
So, Warren, what is it that will offer consumers the same experience as videogames? What new technology will come and tear the controller away from millions of players across the globe and offer them something new? Virtual reality? Holodecks? Psilocybin mushrooms? A newly discovered continent in the middle of the Atlantic ocean named Hyrule?
I agree with you. I do. Things need to change for videogames to truly blossom into the artistic expression they can, should, and will be. Development costs must go down. We must think of new ways to play. People must stop buying WWE games.
But if you think for one second that Grand Theft Auto is going to go the way of weekly episodes of The Shadow, you are dead wrong.
posted by seaandthebells at 10:16 AM
1 Comments:
I think there are also social issues behind the death of arcades in America. Apparently, at some point in the 80's, parents decided that they didn't want their kids to go to arcades, as they had a reputation for being dens of iniquity. Likewise, no store, in a mall or otherwise, wanted to be next door to an arcade. Those brave enough to do so would find a rise in shoplifting, vandalism, and disrespectful kids using slang that they didn't understand.
For further proof of this, see Japan, where arcades are still popular despite being the world's capital for videogame development.
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