Today is the day I call out the PC Game industry. If you missed my tale about the woe of the industry last week, read it or not here. Quick recap, things ain’t great, pirates are rampant, piracy isn’t the real problem. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, lets talk turkey (my jive is aces, I know).
If you’re a PC Gamer, you most likely know your platform is dying or at the very least transforming into something else. The question isn’t is it happening, the question is why is PC Gaming as we, the players of RTS, RPG and FPS games, know it declining? And to lesser extent, can it be saved or even, should we bother to try to save it?
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.
If you believe anything the Washington Post or our government tells you, this should make you very afraid:
Intelligence officials who have examined these systems [MMOs] say they’re convinced that the qualities that many computer users find so attractive about virtual worlds — including anonymity, global access and the expanded ability to make financial transfers outside normal channels — have turned them into seedbeds for transnational threats.
Yep, MMOs are the next frontier for terrorist and crazies looking to take over the world (Dear terrorists and crazies, Pinky and The Brain called and they want their shtick back). Except not. If you read the entire article, you’ll find what bothers the government really is that they can’t see exactly what everyone is doing at all times. So yeah, said bad people could be plotting bad things…but really, the big problem is that that big brother can’t see everything. One Jack Dempsey from a nonpartisan group that monitors privacy issues puts it nicely:
“They want to control this technology and make it even easier to tap than it already is,” Dempsey said. “When the government is finished, every new technology becomes a more powerful surveillance tool than the technology before it.”
This is the real fear they are actually expressing:
Intelligence officials said, however, that the spread of virtual worlds has created additional challenges because commercial services do not keep records of communication among avatars. Because of the nature of the systems, the companies also have almost no way of monitoring the creation and use of virtual buildings and training centers, some of them protected by nearly unbreakable passwords.
Now people are creating virtual training centers with “nearly unbreakable passwords”. God, that’s scary shit! What shall we do? Shut all the MMOs down? Make virtual worlds illegal? Make every single line of text uttered in them required by law to be easily monitored by big brother? Hmmm…well, what’s happened so far, to get our the government so worried?
One intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he had no evidence of activity by terrorist cells or widespread organized crime in virtual worlds. There have been numerous instances of fraud, harassment and other virtual crimes. Some computer users have used their avatars to destroy virtual buildings.
Wait a second… We have zero evidence of any terrorist cells, crazies or anyone else doing anything beyond fraud and harassment? Oh wait, virtual buildings were destroyed! Everyone flee!
You know what this is? Fear mongering. This is government officials seeing boogie men in the dark, because they can’t see in. This is bullshit passed off as real worries. And it’s not even a real worry since everything an MMO does can be tracked by specifically tracking what specific people do (at the ISP level, etc) instead of wanting the entire MMO industry to have government hooks so they can monitor everything happening in them. They shouldn’t have those rights on our phones, why should they have it on MMOs?
This is government trying to get people worried so they can get access to yet one more thing they don’t really need to have access to. It’s sad, pathetic and funny all at the same. You know, funny if laws don’t happen to give big brother access. Then it’s just sad.
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What Would Matt Do: Maybe do as Lum suggests, not take Snow Crash quite so seriously.
Wow… Back when I first covered 4.0, I asked that Hasbro/Wizards not screw it up. I realize that was asking for a lot. After playing Star Wars Saga (Talent trees stolen from WoW, no more rolling for saves, dumbed down lots of things) and seeing what they are saying about 4.0, I haven’t been that enthused…
Then a buddy tells me you can find out exactly what they are doing with 4.0, before it’s even released. I thought that was pretty sweet…then he tells me they are selling two separate books each at $20 a bucks a pop. Not with actual rules or anything. Nothing you’ll be able to use in the game when it finally releases in June. Just preview information. That’s it.
Just so we’re clear here, Hasbro is selling previews of their next system. SELLING IT. WTF?!?! I knew, I fucking knew it. I knew Hasbro was going to screw it up. I knew they were going to nickel and dime us. I knew they were going to milk every penny out of this shit. And even I didn’t foresee them selling got damn preview books. I can’t wait to see what else they charge us for. Maybe they’ll release new rules that requires everyone that wants to play owns all three of the core books, or that to run a game, you have to pay them a fee (like another company tried to do) or maybe sign away your first born. Or maybe even worse, they’ll want you to sign up to a monthly fee to access errata (i.e. - bug fixes), new adventures, character sheets, etc.
Thanks for ruining D&D Hasbro, thanks a fucking lot.
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What Would Matt Do: I guess I’m going to have to stick with 3.5 and White Wolf for now. Oh, and give a hearty fuck you to Wizards of Draining their Customer Base of Every Last Nickel and Dime, er, of the Coast. Sometimes I really hate being right.