Less than zeroes

THINGS THAT I HAVE LEARNED ABOUT MYSELF, AS TAUGHT TO ME BY THE KINECT

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 17:33:15 -0500

NUMBER ONE: I am grossly unhealthy. I am a hideous, gristly lump of fatty tissue and poor impulse control. If I were to describe myself, I would do it best by pointing at an enormous ham covered in butter, and then bursting into tears.

The Kinect has observed me, and it knows this. “Dance!” it bellows from its seat below my TV. “Dance for me! Bend! Now JUMP! Form the shape of a Y, you pitiable cur!” I flop left. I loll to my right. I strain to follow every order hurled at me. I sweat. I actually, literally sweat. I’m gasping. I think about taking my shirt off.

The Kinect decides that this is the perfect moment to take a photo. “Do you want me to upload this onto the internet?” it asks. “I could do that. This photo that I took of you, at the absolute, shimmering apex of your own burning shame. Is this a thing that you want the world to see? That is an option.”

“No!” I yell at the screen, gesticulating wildly. “That is a thing that nobody should see!”

“Well, okay. I’ll just hold on to it for you. It’ll just be back here.”

I think back to those happy, beautiful, impeccably white families on the adverts. They look like they’re having so much fun! They look like they are in control. I want to be one of those people! “What’s wrong with me?”, I scream at The Kinect. “What’s wrong with you?”, The Kinect screams at me.

NUMBER TWO: I am a failure. The miserablehovel that I risibly call a home is a pathetic container for an epoch-defining piece of technology like The Kinect. It makes demands of me. “Move the sofas back a bit,” it says. “Further. That coffee table’s in the way. Just get this stuff out of my way, dammit. Now, let’s take a look at you.”

I stand near the back wall. “Move back. No, go on. Further.” My heels grind into the skirting board. “Back some more. Come on. Can’t you… Ugh, really? Alright, fine.”

A sign on the screen judges the space I have cleared to be “acceptable”.

“You know, if you could afford a bigger place, maybe we could have some more fun,” it mutters.

“I guess this is fine, though.”

I drop my head and apologise quietly.

NUMBER THREE: I will forever be impressed by shiny toys. The first time I loaded up a game, absent-mindedly scratched my balls, and saw a character appear on-screen and scratch his balls, it was an absolute holy-shit moment. There’s no denying it: the Kinect is a Goddamn marvel of technology. It genuinely feels like it’s from the future. The stuff they’ve managed to pack into that box is incredible.

I’m not sure that it’s the future of gaming. It’s a hell of a lot of fun, but really, its big trick is to detect you moving your body into different poses. For “core” games – your shooters, your thinkers, your drivers, and so on – it’s a lost cause. That’s okay, though – even Microsoft are only putting up a token effort in claiming otherwise. But even for the singing, dancing party games that Microsoft hope will sell bucketloads, it doesn’t really seem at this point that there’s enough variation there to extend the console’s life by another four or five years like they really want. It’s not really clear to me whether that’s a symptom of developers having to learn a completely new grammar to interact with a game, or a shortcoming in the grammar itself.

In a way, though, that’s Microsoft’s problem, not ours. Even if I don’t see it as much of a long-term prospect, for the moment, the early batch of Kinect games are crazy fun. Let them worry about making some money out of it.

I have one complaint about the hardware, though – while I’m playing Dance Central, some weird flaw in its sensors or something makes it think that I’m a terrible dancer. It’s strange. I really can’t explain that one.

ADDICTED TO GAMES? (NO.)

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 17:44:00 -0500

So, there’s this.

It’s a horrible show. It’s called “Addicted to video games?”, but it’s clear that the reporter has answered that question with an emphatic “Yep!” before he’s even started. I can’t speak to the specific instances of gibberish, rampant biases and awful hackery in Panorama’s TV show about games addiction any better than John Walker did on Rock Paper Shotgun – but still, every time Raphael Rowe said something along the lines of “Admittedly, I have absolutely no scientific evidence to back up what I’m saying, right now, to your face. But look at this weird person! Brr, eh?”, my lower intestine took another twist.

I have read and thought a whole lot about video games and addiction. And I have thoughts.

Can people get addicted to video games? Of course they can. Human beings have the impressive capacity to get addicted to pretty much anything. There’s videos out there of a woman who is addicted to compressed air – in other words, concentrated fuck all. And yeah, video games involve revolve responses and rewards that make people want to play more. It’s what makes them fun! So people can get addicted to video games. And unsurprisingly, Twatty McPonytail found some.

Are they addictive, though? Is there a rising problem, a dark cloud waiting to engulf our defenceless society, which can only be ably depicted with moody music and maps of the UK with bad stuff spreading all over it and tense shots of men in dark rooms?

Of course there bloody isn’t.

As Walker pointed out, the people that Rowe found were people with problems. People who were obviously scared, depressed, and couldn’t deal with reality. Games can offer control and power. That’s one of the most appealing things about them. The problems that you face in your average video game are unbelievably simple to solve in comparison to, you know, the real world.

Games can be a sanctuary for people who feel powerless in front of an incomprehensively enormous, uncaring universe. In most games, you are better than a god – the world has been designed around you, to make you feel like a strong, capable person with the power to change and improve your situation. Just look at the games the people in the show were playing. One young man, who was most likely terrified of the future and his place in it, because that’s what young men are like, imposing himself on a virtual world by gunning down its inhabitants. Another, carefully shaping a character from a nobody to a legendary demi-god. And, most telling of all, the awful story of the Korean couple, leaving their baby to starve while they spent twenty hours a day raising a virtual child. Every single one was using a virtual sandbox to play at solving the problems that they had convinced themselves they couldn’t solve in their own lives. I am not in the least bit fucking surprised that the people in the documentary spent way too much time playing games.

Game addiction is a symptom, not a disease. But that’s understandably difficult to accept. I think any parent in the world would prefer that their child was addicted to games than, say, severely depressed. Addiction is a problem with a definite, observable goal: stop the kid playing games, and he’s cured. Depression, on the other hand, is a hugely complicated issue that a person may have to live with for the rest of their lives. Much better to decide that that’s not the problem. I mean, check out the woman who sent her son to a camp to cure his gaming addiction, and found out that one possible solution to his problems was for her to stop hitting him and show him some love every once in a while.

What the people in Panorama were going through was awful. It wasn’t anything approaching healthy behaviour. But to use them to try to show that games are addictive was poor, scaremongering journalism. Worse, it feeds into a phenomenon that, like every other new cultural medium has done in its time, video games are facing: people aren’t asking “Hey! What are these things like?” They’re asking “What are these things doing?” Unlike films or books, which are obviously just things that some people like to do to pass the time, video games must be doing something to affect the people that are playing them, good or bad. Are they improving reactions? Making kids violent? Training strategic thinking? Getting children addicted? It’s the job of the concerned journalist to find out.

It’s almost like it’s not good enough for games just to exist – they have to earn that right. Unlike books, or films, games can’t just be a thing for people to do. If they’re not helping society, they must be tearing it apart. It’s a hell of an expectation.

Like I said, every new cultural medium went through stuff like this. As books became cheaper and more accessible to lower-class kids in Victorian times, the new “penny dreadfuls” were blamed for the problems that society decided children had. Then it was rock and roll. After that, the video nasty. And now, video games. As games become more and more a part of the warp and weft of our culture, all but a minority will see these fears as naïve and unfounded. It’s a shame, though, that for the moment, we’ll have to deal with shit like this.

THE JOURNEY OUT OF THE CRADLE

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 12:59:00 -0400

PART 3: THE HORRIBLE UN-LIFE OF THE UNFORTUNATE GAMER

I recently completed my master’s thesis on the UK broadsheet media’s coverage of video games over the last 20 years. I thought it would be interesting to present some of my thoughts and findings in a series of blog posts. In part 1, I discussed the long and painful route new cultural media take in becoming accepted as artforms by mainstream audiences. In part 2, I tried to figure out what part broadsheet papers have in this. Here’s part 3, in which I talk about the weird status of the word “gamer”, and what it means for you, me, and everybody we know. Kinda.

During the writing of my thesis, I was encouraged by my adviser to concentrate on critical discourse analysis: the study of the relation of language to power as demonstrated in text. Or something. To be honest, I found all the reading I did on the topic to be vague pseudophilisophical hand-waving horseshit (and my undergrad degree was in philosophy, so I like to think that I know a thing or two about vague hand-waving horseshit). It did, however, remind me of the idea that words are pretty powerful things.

We use words to think; you don’t need to go all Sapir-Whorf to accept that the words that we use help to shape the thoughts themselves. For instance: you’ve most likely never heard of critical discourse analysis up until about fifteen seconds ago, but you are probably already treating the work of a cadre of internationally-recognised linguists with a certain amount of suspicion, just because I told you to. Brilliant, eh?

Sulkily making some small use of the huge pile of CDA books I took out of the library, I took a look at the word “gamer”. What the hell does it mean? I mean, really? And if words have power, then what power does this one little word have?

Quite a lot, if you ask me.

COMPUTER: DEFINE ‘LOVE’

If you’re talking about words, it’s useful to start with an agreed definition, so we all know we’re on the same page. My sister, when she was younger, had this word, “apit”, which could mean “apron” or “elephant”, depending on the context. If you’re thinking I’m talking about elephants, when I’m talking about aprons, we’re going to get nowhere fast.

An apron which would BLOW MY SISTER’S FUCKING MIND, if she was still six

Definitions, though – they’re tricksy little fuckers. The word “gamer” is a case in point. I don’t think anyone actually knows what it means. Properly, I mean. The obvious definition is “person who plays games”. Right? A driver is someone who drives, and a dancer is someone who dances, so a game is someone who… Uh, games. It makes sense. Except my mum plays Solitaire when she’s on the phone. I don’t think I’d call her a gamer. Do you have to play games for a certain period of time to be a gamer? Do you have to care about games? What about the woman who let her dogs starve to death because she was obsessed with playing some stupid Facebook game? Was she a gamer? Or is that the wrong kind of game?

This brings me back to a paradox in language that you tend to tussle with a lot in philosophy and linguistics – it’s easy to know what a thing is, but defining it is a helluva lot more tricky. For a lot of terms, any definition you’d care to mention brings up all kinds of fringe cases which force you to either change your definition or bite the bullet and accept them. Sometimes, all you can do is throw your hands up and say, “I know it when I see it”.

In reality, the word “gamer” seems to occupy a similar position to “music lover” for music or “cinephile” or film. In common usage, calling someone a gamer implies that they spend a significant amount of time playing what we think of as “core” games, and that they are interested in and have knowledge of gaming news and culture as a whole. There are other implications involving neckbeards, basements and Yu-Gi-Oh! fuck cushions, but we’ll leave them to one side for the moment.

There’s one subtle but powerful difference, though, betw…

SERIOUSLY, STOP THINKING ABOUT YU-GI-OH FUCK CUSHIONS, THIS BIT’S IMPORTANT

…There’s one subtle but powerful difference, though, between the word “gamer” and the word “cinephile”. They both identify a category of culture consumer, but in doing so they imply the existence of other categories. But a cinephile is a film lover. It’s right there in the name. A gamer, on the other hand, is just a person that plays games. There’s no love there.

The word “cinephile” implicitly splits the strata of film consumers into at least three levels: the cinephiles, the lovers of cinema, who have an appreciation and knowledge of film above the normal level, the normal level itself, where it is assumed that most people reside, and a level for people who have no particular interest in film whatsoever. The word “gamer”, on the other hand, splits the strata in two. You either have an interest in and an appreciation of games, or you don’t. The word implies that there is no middle ground. The assumption is that a person who plays games is either a “gamer”, with all of the socially undesirable things that go along with that, or a “non-gamer”, who couldn’t give two sideways fucks about the stupid things.

(Hey! You! You there, that played through Resident Evil with your boyfriend and that likes to play Peggle when you get bored! You do not exist! Stop doing things!)

NOOOOO YOU DO NOT FIT INTO MY DISCOURSE–FOSTERED WORLDVIEW STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT

This would, of course, not be a problem if the media’s use of the term “gamer” was a reasonable account of the way people play games – if society is made up of a minority of people are, like, super into Halo, and a majority of people who wouldn’t touch the things they came with party bags full of cocaine and Two and a Half Men box sets.

Turns out – and I’m sorry if I’m blowing your mind here – reality isn’t much like this at all.

Go ahead and pick your jaw up out of your crotch.

The Interactive Software Federation of Europe commissioned a study this year called Video Gamers in Europe 2010. They separated their survey subjects into categories, based on how many games they bought and how long they spent playing them.

· “Intermittent” gamers have no regular gameplay time in a normal week, and buy no games, but do occasionally play them.

· ‘Marginal’ gamers play up to half an hour of games a day, and buy 0 or 1 games every three months.

· ‘Dabbling’ gamers play up to an hour of games a day, and buy up to 2 games every three months.

· ‘Magpie’ gamers play up to an hour of games a day, and buy 3 or more games every three months.

· ‘Loyalist’ gamers play an hour or more of games a day, and buy up to 2 games every three months.

· ‘Committed’ gamers play an hour or more of games a day, and buy 3 or more games every three months.

Of these categories, only ‘Loyalist’ and ‘Committed’ gamers – people who play more than an hour of games a day – could really be said to be ‘gamers’, in terms of being deeply devoted to playing games. The ISFE found that 16% of people who play video games can be classified as ‘Loyalist’ and 7% can be classified as ‘Committed’, leaving 77% of people who play video games outside of the media’s idea of the ‘gamer’. I know, I know, down from the mountaintop again with the fucking mind-blowing revelations here and everything, but it turns out that all kinds of people like to play games for all kinds of reasons. The dichotomy suggested by the word “gamer” just doesn’t exist.

YES, THIS ACTUALLY MATTERS

So the media’s definition of the word “gamer” has an enormously shaky relationship with reality. It is also distressingly popular.

Last time, I mentioned the fact that newspapers like to say that video games are “for” someone – that there’s some kind of mysterious cabal of humanity, separate from the mainstream, who for sick reasons of their own play with these weird devices that would appal and repulse any ordinary member of society. Depending on the year, the newspaper, the writer, and the convenience of the lazy assumption, this might be little kids, boys, young men, or whatever. Whoever they are, though, they are not the reader of the newspaper.

The interesting thing is watching what happens when the word “gamer” appears. It’s a surprisingly new word – its first use in the sample of articles that I studied was in 2000 – but after it appears, its use becomes more and more prevalent. Simultaneously, instances of journalists expressing ideas like “games are for children” and “games are for men” plummet. They simply had no chance of competing with the conveniently vague “games are for gamers” framing.

You, apparently

What I concluded from this was that as it became more and more painfully obvious that games weren’t “for kids” or “for guys” (although they tried to hold on to the former for as long as possible, with pretty hilarious results – see part 2), journalists leapt on to the dichotomy-forming “gamer” idea in order to perpetuate their narrative that games were things that weren’t played by their readers. In this narrative, games are for gamers, and the august, moustachioed readers of The Times, the Telegraph and the Guardian most certainly are not gamers, thank you very much.

I’m not trying to imply here that there’s any kind of deliberate conspiracy going on here by the papers – I’m pretty sure the journalists writing these things are as oblivious to the extent that these thought processes affect their writing as everybody else. However, all things being equal, carrying on what you were doing before is far easier than doing something new, and if journalists started talking like a large proportion of their readers had some kind of relationship with video games, they might have to start grappling with them on some kind of meaningful, analytical level, and that sounds… hard.

Like I said at the start, words tell people how to think. To momentarily find some sense in all of that horrible critical discourse analysis guff, Roger Fowler notes in his book Language in the News, “Language provides names for categories, and so helps to set their boundaries and relationships; and discourse allows these names to be spoken and written frequently, so contributing to the apparent reality and currency of the categories”. In other words, the mere fact that newspapers say something again and again makes it that way, in people’s heads.

The evidence of this is everywhere. One person from my course turned to me once and told me how she didn’t like games or gamers – they were stupid nerds who should get a life. She was playing Mafia Wars as she was talking to me. Another example: I carried out a small, unscientific survey as part of my thesis research, and some people who played video games for eight hours a week told me that they didn’t think of themselves as gamers. These people who spend a very sizeable portion of their free time playing video games didn’t think that that was enough to be considered one of those people who really likes playing video games.

I mean, eight hours a week! That’s even more time than I spend masturbating!

“Fucking nerds.”

The danger, of course, in this is that people who were maybe on the edge of caring about video games before – the Resident Evil and Peggle-playing woman before – isn’t going to bother looking any further. I mean, having to know your stuff, and playing for ten hours a week to really appreciate games – that sounds like a lot of hard work! Best leave it to the dorks.

With this kind of attitude, it’s worryingly easy to see games in the future slipping into a similar position as, say comics – after a brief rush of immense popularity, consigned to a small section of society due to assumptions about its niche status. I don’t think games are going in this direction – there’s too much money invested for that to happen – but I don’t think it’s impossible either. And that’s a shame. I think every single smart person in the world should play games, and know them, and understand them, and find out how exciting, and weird, and important, and brilliant they are. Not just for their sake – for me and you, too.

Why do I think this?

Ah, that’s probably for next time.

(It’ll be shorter, I promise!)

THE JOURNEY OUT OF THE CRADLE

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 13:32:00 -0400

PART 2: WHAT THE PAPERS SAY

I recently completed my master’s thesis on the UK broadsheet media’s coverage of video games over the last 20 years. I thought it would be interesting to present some of my thoughts and findings in a series of blog posts. In part 1, I discussed the long and painful route new cultural media take in becoming accepted as artforms by mainstream audiences. Here’s part 2, in which I try to figure out what part broadsheet papers have in this.

Let me tell you something interesting about the academic study of video game journalism: it doesn’t exist.

I’m both surprised and not surprised by this. On the one hand, yeah, it’s video game journalism we’re talking about – generally held in similar regard to waste disposal journalism. On the other hand, this is the first time since the advent of television that a new cultural form is entering our homes. Games are new, weird, and huge. It’s the job of journalism to make sense of things like this: in a sense, to tell people how to think. Some journalists are giving it their best shot. Some journalists are ignoring it and hoping it goes away. And some journalists, well, yeah, some journalists are going batcrap insane and heralding doom from the mountaintops. But they’re journalists. It’s to be expected. There’s also the fact that, like I said last time, art nowadays is as much the thoughts and concepts surrounding an object as the object itself – so people going into in-depth critical analysis and putting games in a wider cultural context isn’t just an indication of a development of the medium – it is a development of the medium itself.

Is it just me, or is all that fucking fascinating?

Video game academia does exist. There’s a terrifying pile of papers written by sociologists salivating over the prospect that these mysterious things that we have let into our homes are turning our children into brutal sociopaths who can no longer take pleasure from anything on this planet apart from pushing ballpoint pens into each other’s eyes, and a small but growing amount of work in video game theory such as appears in journals like Game Studies. But when it comes to academia related to video games journalism, there is a total of one academic paper that I managed to find in my research. That article is Dmitri Williams’ “The Video Game Lightning Rod”, which appeared in Information, Communication and Society in 2003, seven years ago. That article noted the lack of research in the area, and unless I’m wrong, nothing has changed since.

This means that it is no exaggeration to say that my dissertation is the most interesting, exciting, fundamentally game-changing piece of work in the corpus of video game journalism academia in the last seven years.

It also means that video game journalism academic symposia are going to be pretty easy to organise.

Image from the first International Video Game Journalism Academia Conference

So here’s what I did: having collected a sizeable sample of articles at random from the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Independent and The Times in five-year increments, I analysed them for what we in the reading-articles-for-academic-papers business call “framings” – distinct ways that writers portray a subject matter that are recognisable across several different articles. These could be things like “Video games are for men”, “Video games are for women”, “Video games are addictive”, and so on. I put all of these into a spreadsheet, and started to make graphs. Lots of graphs. By using a set of rules to select the articles to analyse, rather than picking out the ones that I found interesting, I hoped to get a reasonably objective, but still qualitative, glimpse at how broadsheet papers think and talk about video games.

There were so many graphs.

So what did I find out?

GAMES ARE ACTUALLY PRETTY OKAY!

Honestly, I was pretty surprised by how positively broadsheet papers talked about video games. 50% of the articles that I read portrayed video games or those playing them in a positive light, while 38% portrayed them in a negative light. (The remaining 12% did not portray them particularly positively or negatively.) This differed from my expectations, coloured as they were by journalism more notable for its inflammatory nature than its accuracy, like the Daily Star claiming that Rockstar Games is planning to make a game based on the actions of murderer Roaul Moat, based seemingly on a bad Photoshop joke, or the constant and unfounded linking of video games and school shootings. While I’d be hard pushed to say that broadsheet papers, even in 2010, could be relied upon to talk authoritatively about video games, they are, at least, far more balanced than their tabloid equivalents.

Silly, hacky attack jobs of the type mentioned above aren’t completely absent. My sample included Anmar Frangoul’s what-in-the-holy-fuck article Logged on and switched off (it’s hidden behind a paywall now, but here’s a sample: “Next time you see your son, daughter or flatmate glued to a video game, take a keener interest. Have they eaten properly, washed themselves, been to the toilet?”; Frangoul neglects to advise on the most delicate method of asking your flatmate if he’s so engrossed in Bejewelled that he has shat his pants) and Baroness Greenfield’s strange column on what she believes to be the dubious merits of video games, which she seems to have written in response to seeing a video game, once, twenty years ago, in the dark. But in broadsheet papers, they are relatively rare: most journalists are prepared to accept the existence of video games, and even admit that some of them are quite good; negative opinions are usually fairly reasonable and balanced with opposing points of view. So there we go! That’s nice.

“Video games!”

Interestingly, and in stark comparison to tabloid papers, more articles in my sample said that games don’t cause children to become numb, mindless killing machines than said that they do. This actually peaked in 2000, shortly after the Columbine massacre, in a frequently admitted and heartening example of papers returning to a story and re-examining it a few months after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.

Surprisingly, a small, but constantly growing, number of journalists were prepared to tentatively venture that in video games, we were bearing witness to the painful birth of a new artform. Significantly, though, no newspaper treated video games as an artform: no article in my sample gave a video game the same in-depth critical treatment that they would give a book or a film.

BUT GAMES ARE FOR KIDS.

This is one of the most striking things I that I found: across all newspapers, across all time periods, games are presented as being toys for kids to play with. You, there, you educated, mature adult with the Playstation controller in your hand? You are a demented freak. You embarrass yourself and your family by doing what you are doing. You might as well be whirling an Action Man around your head while screaming BIRBLEBIRBLEBIRBLE and blowing a big green snot bubble out of one nostril when you’re playing Civilization V. Oh my God will you just look at yourself and what you are doing.

While this perspective shouldn’t be particularly surprising, given that the average person’s idea of the average video game player, it was fascinating to witness writers take wild, Evel Knievel-style leaps of impossible logic in order to hold on to their preconceptions. Presented with patently obvious evidence that video games were being marketed to, and consumed by, educated adults, their reaction was generally to strap themselves to a rocket full o’ crazy, blast over a canyon, and land on the other side in a crumpled pile of pulped brain matter and ridiculous conclusions, one bruised hand weakly forming a thumbs-up poking out of the remains.

…That’s probably enough of that analogy.

Witness the bold and nameless journalist from The Sunday Times, writing in 1990, who wrote: “Nintendo continues to be the No1 seller for computer game-crazy youngsters. The Game Boy unit is even tipped as the basis for future commication systems, as it has a powerful inputoutput port that can exploit digital telephone lines to do home shopping and banking.”

The writer’s unwillingness to accept the fact that hey, maybe Nintendo is trying to expand their market here means that they portray internet banking as the number-one feature that kids have been screaming for. Remember those long hazy afternoons we all spent as kids comparing interest rates on our new savings accounts while we were waiting for the groceries to arrive from Sainsbury’s To You? Aye.

The Guardian provides a beautiful, wonderful example of this – one that made me utter a big, baleful HA! when I read it – in a 2005 article by Cassandra Jardine, who wrote “Rent a game if you aren’t sure whether it is suitable. Children can then say they have played Grand Theft Auto (which includes rape) without having it around all the time.”

Let’s put to one side for a second the little, insignificant, hugely defamatory fact that to the best of my knowledge Cassandra Jardine is lying: no Grand Theft Auto game has ever included a rape scene, portrayed or implied. Jardine’s thought process here seems to run like this: video games are for kids – so Grand Theft Auto must be for kids – ooh, but it’s got lotsa rape in it – okay, better not let them play that for too long then – time for a bagel. Refusing to countenance the idea that this 18-rated series of games was possibly intended for adults to play means that she has to accept the position that it’s okay for your kids to witness rape, if only they don’t do it for too long.

(God, I’d love to be a fly on the wall in the Jardine household. “Okay, Theodore, that’s enough rape for one day! Time to wrap it up now.” “Aww, muuuuuuuuuuum!”)

Theodore settles down with a well-worn copy of Irréversible.

Interestingly, journalists suddenly started to become a lot more receptive to the revolutionary idea that video games are actually played by all kinds of people for all kinds of different reasons in 2000 – seemingly linked to the launch of the Playstation 2. “Last Friday’s launch marks a coming of age. It is the maturation of an industry, the acceptance of an artform and, perhaps, a cultural event on a par with the premiere of the Rites of Spring,” wrote a slightly breathless Ben Hammersley in The Times.

From this point on, adults playing video games were portrayed in a more positive light. Adults playing games was no longer considered somewhat odd and newsworthy, as it was in the past.

ACTUALLY, YOU PROBABLY WOULDN’T LIKE THEM

Go take a look at a games website, and then take a look at a newspaper reporting on video games. Take – just as an example – this review of the PSP from DarkZero and its counterpart from the Telegraph. What’s the difference?

One thing that stands out is that the second article says – over and over again – that the PSP is for kids, or for adults, or for both, or whatever. This is a recurring trait in newspapers – as mentioned above, games are often described as being “for” children, or if they’re not, they’re “for” young men, or men in general, or one-armed centaurs, or whatever. There’s only a weak consensus within broadsheet papers on what particular subset of humanity games are “for” – but there is an unspoken agreement that this group does indeed exist.

Two gamers, arguing about Modern Warfare 2.

What’s more, the reader – the person the journalist imagines when he is writing the article – certainly isn’t within this group. In a newspaper article, the reader is generally afforded a level of familiarity with video games somewhere south of Baroness Greenfield. The most basic concepts – even self-explanatory ones like “touch-sensitive screen” – must be explained. The overall effect is, as Charlie Brooker has said in the past, akin to reading a report on something interesting happening in a foreign country. It’s – well, it’s certainly not inviting to people who don’t play video games.

As I read more and more articles, it became clearer and clearer that almost every broadsheet journalist assumes that his or her readership has little knowledge of video games, and little interest. It’s not a position from which it’s easy to imagine much in-depth critical analysis can arise. It’s also weird, if you think about it: honestly, how high a percentage of the Guardian readership have a great interest in opera, compared to the percentage that have a great interest in video games? What reason is there for this disparity, other than inertia? (Not to throw opera under the bus, there – in-depth critical analysis of relatively obscure issues absolutely has a place in high-quality newspapers, which is kind of my point.) I didn’t see much sign of papers’ engagement with games improving over time, either: if anything, things are getting worse, with framings like “video games are for kids” being replaced with a generic, catch-all framing “video games are for gamers”. (That probably doesn’t make much sense, yet: I’ll be talking about this idea more next time. Lots more.)

VIDEO GAMES, THEN

They’re fun! Except they’re pretty much for kids. And if you don’t play them, you probably wouldn’t like them. They’re a weird kind of thing done by a mysterious cadre of people that are best reported on from a great distance, like bullfighting.

I’d like to qualify all this by saying the above is only a few of the more interesting things I found out in my research – if I covered everything I wrote about, this entry would be eight times as long. But everything I discovered built a pretty solid picture: reading the broadsheet papers talking about video games, there’s this ineffable feeling of trying really hard, and getting really close, but in the end, not quite getting it. They can’t quite make the connections and see – and say – what we all find so brilliant about these things that we spend hours and hours thinking about, and talking about, and playing with. It’s kind of like when an aged relative is asking you what’s happening as you’re playing Gears of War. “Oh, that’s all very impressive. And you’re controlling the big man there? Very good. Ooh, did he just explode? Marvellous”. Yeah, kind of like that – except this aged relative is now explaining to his friend what he saw over a crackly phone line.

Like I said before, the job of a newspaper is to tell people what to think – to take big, scary concepts that their readership is unfamiliar with and make them understandable. I’m sure you have been made aware that for a lot of people, video games are a very big, very scary concept. So, while it’s good to know that for the most part broadsheet papers seem to be on our side, it’d be brilliant to see some interesting, interested game writers talking passionately and at length in our papers. And not just for us – after all, we already know what to think.

(Next time – the imaginary gamer.)

THE JOURNEY OUT OF THE CRADLE

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 12:24:00 -0400

PART 1: THE CITIZEN KANE OF FILM

By Pete Myall

I recently completed my master’s thesis on the mainstream media’s coverage of video games over the last 20 years. I thought it would be interesting to present some of my thoughts and findings in a series of blog posts. Here is Part the First, covering: Are games art? (yes), Why don’t people generally think that games are art? (‘cuz that’s the way it works), and What is the Citizen Kane of games? (you’re not doing it right, dummy!).

It’s a truly astonishing ti…

Actually, tell you what – I’ll ask you a quick question before we begin. What is the difference between this:

And this:

I’ll leave that with you.

Okay, let’s get going. It’s a truly astonishing time to be playing video games right now. We play games on machines tens of thousands times more powerful than those that put men on the Moon. We have the resources to make pretty much any world we want to, and make pretty much anything we would like happen within. The games that we play are starting to have themes, morals, metaphors – they’re starting to be about things. One of the biggest games coming out in the next couple of years promises to be an examination of patriotism and xenophobia set against a backdrop of 1910s American exceptionalism.

I’m going to repeat that, because sometimes you read something so often that you forget how truly staggering it is: One of the biggest games coming out in the next couple of years is going to be an examination of patriotism and xenophobia set against a backdrop of 1910s American exceptionalism.

How fucking cool is that?

A CRUSHING DISAPPOINTMENT LEADING TO A MISGUIDED THOUGHT EXPERIMENT

Games have done the groundwork. We know what works, and what doesn’t. We know what separates what we do from other artforms – choice, agency, immersion. And we can tell that we’ve only just begun. There are so many possibilities within the medium that are only now becoming practicalities – hell, we’re only just beginning to realise that they’re possibilities in the first place. For those in the know, it’s patently obvious that we are witnessing the birth of a new artform.

We realise this, and we get a bit over-excited, and we show our friends what we’ve found. We show them the little opening in the ground on the other side of that hill in Minecraft that led to an unbelievably tense hour spent chipping away at the nothingness, your asshole puckered so tight you could form diamonds, or that lonely evening ride along the Mexican riverbank in Red Dead Redemption – and we know that we’ve got caught in our hands the beginning of something nascent and wonderful, the spark of light at the very start of the nuclear explosion.

In return, we’re met with deep suspicion, if not outright hostility. The President of the United States of America tells kids to get off their Xboxes, because it’s making them fat. Dumb films, light on characterisation and heavy on explosions, are frequently compared to video games. Video games grab kids by the eyeballs, get them addicted, and are as bad as cocaine. Whatever that means. The French novelist Georges Duhamel described the medium as “a pastime of illiterate, wretched creatures who are stupefied by their daily jobs, a machine of mindlessness and dissolution”. You try to explain what’s great about a game to your boy- or girlfriend, and they give you that smile, ‘cos you’re talking about video games.

The fact is, the majority of people just don’t care about this wonderful, brilliant, exciting bundle of possibilties. In fact, most people who play video games – mums playing Farmville on Facebook or insurance claims adjusters playing a couple of games of Fifa after work probably don’t care, either. In the face of incomprehension and crushing indifference, the zealot imagines a game of such compelling vision and unassailable execution that it single-handedly pulls the artform out of the cultural ghetto that it currently occupies and places it firmly in the pantheon of high culture, shaking hands and swapping anecdotes with film, opera and fourteenth-century epic poetry. He asks a question.

If you’ve been within smelling distance of a gaming blog in the past decade, you know what I’m getting at.

It’s…

(oh, God, here we go…)

“Where’s gaming’s Citizen Kane?”

Is it… is it under all of those newspapers?

Where is this game, this wonderful statement of the worth of an entire medium? What’s it going to look like? How will we recognise it when it comes? Has it already happened? Did we miss it? Oh, God, did we miss it?

Despite all of the raucous and self-regarding examination of this question, one facet remains curiously under-examined: is this actually how it works?

WHAT’S A CITIZEN KANE?

In reality, if that’s what Citizen Kane is, then Citizen Kane isn’t film’s Citizen Kane. Well reviewed on its release in 1941, it did reasonably (if not spectacularly) well at the box office and then pretty much disappeared out of sight (partially due to dirty tricks by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, whose life inspired Welles’ portrayal of Kane). It was only a decade later, when French auteur theorists began to hold up the film as a prime example of their belief in a film as the director’s personal artistic vision, that it began to be held in something approaching the regard it enjoys today. In Sight and Sound’s annual poll of the 10 greatest films ever made, it didn’t hit the top spot until 1962 (where it has remained since) – in fact, it didn’t even appear there until 1952.

Reviews from the late 1930s and 1940s demonstrate exactly what critics of the time thought that their movies should be doing. “Unfortunately, Hollywood has now got the idea that ‘social significance’ has something to do with the amusement business”, says Time. “I don’t like movies about people who work, and I don’t like movies about people who have things the matter with them. I work and all my friends work, and we all have things the matter with us. We go to the movies to forget,” says the New Yorker.

“Oh, you know what I mean” – New Yorker critic

To be sure, the idea that film was something more than escapism – that it could aspire to be art – was not unheard of at this point (D.W. Griffiths’ pioneering, and racist, 1915 film Birth of a Nation began with an cue card headed “A PLEA FOR THE ART OF THE MOTION PICTURE”). This opinion, however, was so far away from the orthodoxy that even high-brow publications like the New Yorker laughed at such a suggestion: “…So many excited little articles appear in various select journals spiced richly with terms such as ‘genius’ and ‘artist’ that the reading of them may cast a sad spell over the subject. To be sure such journals have a small circulation as a rule…”

Point is, Citizen Kane wasn’t released to a united chorus of “Oh! Right, films are art now! Gotcha. Sorry ‘bout that.” That’s not what happens – no one piece of work, and no collection of works, can elevate a medium into high culture. It’s just not how it works.

So what does happen?

Shyon Baumann (to whom I am indebted for many of the above quotes) has written an excellent article for the American Sociological Review, Intellectualisation and Art World Development: Film in the United States [PDF], tracking the journey of film from low-culture entertainment, fit only for a couple of hours’ worth of escapism, to the fully-fledged and universally-accepted artform it is today. He notes that it was only in the late 1950s and 1960s that such an opinion started to become the mainstream, and cites various reasons for this:

- The rise in popularity of television, and the corresponding drop in popularity of cinema. This led to an effect whereby cinema started to become the elite option, where people went to feel superior to the kind of proletariat scum that watches TV while breathing through their fucking noses.
- The collapse of the studio system. Until about 1954, the film studios who made films also owned the cinemas where they were shown, meaning they had enormous power over what films were distributed – and, of course, this usually meant that more populist, lowest-common-denominator films had a far greater chance of being shown to a wider audience. (Incidentally – does this talk of the studio system remind you of anything?) Following the downfall of the studio system, film festivals had far greater power in deciding what actually made it off the screen and into people’s eyeballs, and they tended to favour more complex, in-depth, director-led projects.
- A huge boost in the college-educated American population following World War II led to people demanding more sophisticated entertainment in general.
The academic practice of film study led to in-depth theory, and the rise of auteur theory, led to a more coherent, sophisticated philosophy and vocabulary that critics could use in their reviews.
- Yada
- Yada
- Yada.

One really, really important thing to note is that all of the above doesn’t rely on any new films to be made – it’s a change in the audience and the corresponding critical body. It was tremendously popular in the late 1950s and 1960s to reassess previously unrecognised past films as works of art and rediscover “lost classics” (stand up, mister Kane!). The appraisal of film as art is a combination of a coherent critical viewpoint and a sympathetic audience.

Yeah, there was no way that this wasn’t going to come up.

In essence – and if you take something away from all of this nonsense, take away this – film-as-art is not an exercise in film-making: it’s an exercise in film–watching. And the same goes for gaming.

BACK TO THAT BIT WITH THE URINALS

Okay, so hopefully you’ve been thinking about that thing with the urinals. What’s the difference? On one level, very little: you could pick either one up, plug it in and piss all over it if you want to. On the other hand, the second, which I’m sure you recognise as Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, is a hilarious, shocking, smart, stupid piece of work which irreversibly changed the direction of art in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. And the best bit is, those who say “but it’s just a toilet!” have it exactly right. Without the layers of meaning granted to it by an artist calling it art, and people talking about it and thinking about it and arguing the toss about it for 100 years, it’s absolutely no different from urinal #1. It’s the ideas that make art, not the thing in itself. Something is art as soon as it is considered art, and the interesting bit happens after that.

Games, right now, are at a similar point to films in, ooh, let’s say 1945. A large number of good – really, really great – games have been released, and the future couldn’t look brighter. They’re still regarded by the vast majority of people, though, as at best a fun way to while away a couple of hours and at worst a useless waste of time for imbeciles. (Oh, yeah, that quote about the “pastime of illiterate, wretched creatures” and all that, by that smug French novelist? Sorry, that was a trick – he actually said that 80 years ago, and he was talking about films.) Some people believe that video games have great artistic potential, and write passionately on the subject, but they’re very often not taken seriously by people even within the medium.

It’s a pattern which you can see emerging whenever a cultural medium based on new technology emerges. If you look at television, film, and radio (and I have), then you’ll see exactly the same thing. Every one of those is now, to a greater or lesser extent, considered by most to be capable of artistic expression. So, for the bad news – there’s going to be no Citizen Kane of games. That’s not really how it works. Still, though, bear in mind that the kids who played Pac-Man as 5-year-olds are 35 years old today. Games aren’t a new invention for them; they’re as much a part of their everyday lives as television was for the generation before. They are – you are – sophisticated people, people with degrees; doctors, lawyers, academics and journalists. They don’t think there’s anything strange about going to the theatre, heading home, and turning on the Xbox. The circumstances are in place for a games-as-art ideology to be disseminated to a sympathetic audience. It’s going to happen soonish. And that’s when the fun begins.

In part two: okay, so what did I actually find out?