I had a chance while out shopping yesterday to evangelise the power of games to my five month's pregnant wife. She is not a gamer. I am not absolutely sure how she views my interest in them. She's married to a man in his early thirties who spends double-figures hours per week immersed in imaginary worlds. I frequently talk to her about the pro's and con's of alternate specs or how difficult pvp in battlegrounds can be. But, as I have pointed out to her in the past, I don't drink, do drugs or porn, or beat her. I keep the house clean and tidy, do all the cooking and shopping, and run a small business. And she did get a trip to France last month because of my 'hobby', so she can't complain that much.
But she's not a gamer. The only game she applied as a child was Pac-man and the only games she really enjoyed playing since we met were multiplayer Halo and Star Wars Battlefront 2 - essentially because they were uncomplicated shooters.
Yesterday I was deciding whether or not to buy Guitar Hero 3, or whether in fact Rock Band would be a better investment. My wife gamely (no pun intended) followed me around all the High St. shops that sell games while compared prices. She asked me whether there were any good games for children. 'Not really', was my answer. I then had to explain that the majority of games designed for children are pretty poor quality, particularly movie tie-ins. This, I explained, is probably because the developers have short development cycles and are largely bound by the constraints of the originating film. So Superman Returns has to feature a man flying around beating people up, Kung Fu panda has to be about a Panda that runs around beating people up (with a few platforms to spice things up), The Golden Compass has to be a load of crap, etc., etc. Its not like an entirely original game which usually starts with a cool idea being expanded upon. Plus theres the fact that the ideal target market for games companies is a male in his twenties or thirties with large amounts of disposable income.
As I mentioned before, my wife is quite pregnant. We should have our baby at the beginning of November. 'So,' my wife asked, 'what games will our child play when he's five?'. A good question, and one that games companies today are probably trying to answer as I write.
My personal view is that the games of five, ten, or twenty years to come will be quite unrecognisable from what you and I play today and not just because of advance in technology. I think games for the next generation will occupy a completely different cultural space.
Consider if you will movies. Today they can be about pretty much anything, written, shot, and edited in a variety of styles. There are comedies, dramas, horror, romance, and documentary films. Films have political significance, can be morally strengthening or repugnant, influence the course we take in life and how we treat those around us, or just make us laugh, cry, or be silent. Movies would be said to be the cultural lynchpin of the majority of Westerners in the last 10 to 20 years. But it wasn't always like this.
If you go back far enough, to the advent of the moving picture, movies and talkies were initally regarded as nothing more than cheap entertainment for the masses. The first stars were slapstick comedians, then pretty boys and girls. While there is indeed a lot of dross being churned out of films studios today, by and large films are a world away from their simple beginnings.
The same thing happened to pop music - initially regarded with suspicion and derision by the establishment, then becoming widely accepted and dominant in mainstream culture - as well as radio itself, and I would venture to suggest the printed word, at least so far as novels are concerned.
The printed word, radio, pop music, and the moving picture then all had inauspicious origins but came to be accepted and eventually culturlally dominant as the youth that grew up enjoying them assumed the positions of power in society. It seems likley then that the same thing will happen with games.
Where film really took off as a serious medium in the 70's and eighties with the emergence of talents like Spielberg, Lucas, Scorcese, De Palma, Pacino, De Niro, Redford, Streep, Fonda, Nicholson, and so on, I imagine we will see a similar reinvention of gaming in the next decade or so.
Right now, there is probably a teenager or group of friends at a college of polytechnic somewhere in the world with a radical idea for a game or style of play. It won't be an iteration on a current game or style. It probably won't be as simple an evolution as motion-controllers or peripheral lighting. But they will create a new game with a story or hero or style that takes everything that has been great about the games they loved as kids and presents it in a way that makes the whole world say 'Yes! I want some of that!'. Spielberg invented the Blockbuster with Jaws - what will the first real blockbuster game, the one that 'non-gamers' want to go out and buy, be?
Who will be the Raging Bulls of the games world?
MMORPG.com writes:
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