Someone linked me to this piece by Steve Gaynor. It’s an interesting article about how he views gaming as getting the same level of respect as comic books, how gaming will not be able to bridge the gap he sees that books and movies have. He states it as a wager:
I’ll bet you that video games will never become a significant form of cultural discourse the way that novels and film have. I’ll bet you that fifty years from now they’ll be just as mature and well-respected as comic books are today.
He goes on to give many reasons why gaming will be nothing more than a poorly thought of hobby for the next half century. I’ll give him that he put a lot of work into his argument. But I’ll also give N’Gai Croal some love for destroying the basis for most of his arguments in a two part answer:
- Less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from 20 years earlier. Among 17-year-olds, the percentage of non-readers doubled over a 20-year period, from nine percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004.
- On average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading.
That pretty much erases his books are better theory…no one is reading them. And controllers being the other big issue reason doesn’t really hold well on further examination either:
Another point worth making to debunk the idea that videogames are somehow unreasonably inaccessible is to compare them other types of games, like chess, basketball, or Dungeons & Dragons. Each of these games has rules, and therefore a learning curve. Each requires a commitment in order to develop from being terrible to mediocre to respectable to good to great. These real-world games have the advantage of leveraging more deliberately taught interfaces–motor control and literacy–than their electronic counterparts. But we’d be willing to wager that other than the not-so-insignificant problem that many have with navigating three-dimensional environments on two-dimensional screens, it would probably take less time to teach someone to become comparably skilled at Halo 3 than it would at the position of quarterback–even when you factor in the complexity of the controls.
Yeah, that pretty much says thanks but no thanks.
After reading both parts of Croal’s rebuttal, I was upset. He took my argument right out from under me and stated it a lot better than I could have. But thinking about it further, I don’t think he took it far enough.
It works like this…according to NPD, 63% of the US plays video games and 30% played more this year than last year (as of December 2007). Comic book numbers are no where near that and probably never have been. Games can do things comic books can’t. They can provide an experience, a visceral feel that only comes with “being there”. And they aren’t passive. That isn’t really my point though.
The point is this. Gaming is already a part of society. It’s as big of a business as movies are right now and it’s growing larger every year (where as movies are struggling). Gaming won’t become a part of society like movies or books (poor, poor books), it’ll be bigger and at some point, it’ll become even more a part of society than either ever was. Because gaming has the huge advantage of bringing the experience to the gamer in a way that neither of the others can do. You can be a space captain trying to save known space or a force user (may it not suck) or whatever else you can think of, someone is or has already made a game about it. Games allow you escape reality in a way that no other medium does and more and more people are catching onto this. They allow you to take a break, to solve puzzles, to destroy worlds, to change the lives of virtual beings with the hand of god.
So it all boils down to this. Gaming is already a part of the culture world wide. Korea has made super stars of their Starcraft players, Japan has fully embraced everything gaming, and the release of Halo 3 was on every news channel around the world. As games get easier to get into and more able to simulate reality, things will only get crazier. Just wait until you can jack into virtual worlds Lawn Mower Man style (without the dopey getups). We’ll have people literally starving to death because they couldn’t bring themselves to leave their virtual world.
So while N’Gai (he’s so dreamy) really took the air out of my argument, I don’t think he took it far enough. Gaming isn’t becoming a part of our culture. It already is and will only get more so as time goes on. People from all walks of life plays games now and I predict in ten years or so (not fifty) we’ll see gaming over take most other forms of entertainment. To use an oft used phrase, the future of gaming is now. Not fifty years from now, not even ten really. There are already more people playing games than not in this country alone. Let the industry grow up a bit, learn how to really use the medium, and it’ll be even more dominant than it is now.
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What Would Matt Do: I’m going to live it up personally. As I’ve said in the past, we’re living in the golden age of gaming with each year getting better than the past. It’s an awesome time to be a gamer and more and more people are seeing that.