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Can games ever reach a cultural impact on par with other media like books or film? Steve Gaynor believes they won’t. On his blog he wagers that games will never become a significant form of cultural discourse and, like comic books, will forever “stay marginalized and juvenile”.

I think I’ll take that bet. I believe gaming will break out of its niche and into mainstream cultural consciousness.

Although Steve’s view is pretty bleak and pessimistic, I do see where he is coming from. I can strongly relate to his sentiments about the overwhelming majority of “adolescent male fantasy or cheap cash-ins” in gaming. I just don’t think those kinds of games are likely to stay dominant forever. Let me give some arguments in support of a more positive outlook. (Now is probably a good idea to read Steve’s post, if you haven’t already.)

To paraphrase, Steve argues that games require specialized equipment such as PCs or consoles, which often have complex controls, and this creates a high barrier to entry that ultimately limits mainstream adoption.

The words “specialized equipment” are a bit of a red herring though, because that’s exactly what a medium is: a specific piece of technology that grants us a certain means of communication. TV sets are specialized equipment and so are books. We just don’t think of them that way anymore because they’ve become standardized and nearly everyone is trained to use them.

A medium becomes more accessible as adoption increases, so what may be a high barrier to entry today may be less so in the future. You can see this happening in gaming right now. People can play games on their phone, housewives play Bejeweled on their PC and grannies have DSes on their nightstand. The specialized equipment is spreading and, as time passes, more people are exposed to gaming.

As for the obstacle of complex controls, I believe this is a general design problem that isn’t specific to games. For all the talk of complex game controls, people seem to be forgetting the complexity of today’s TV remotes, which usually have between 30 and 40 different buttons. I have often seen my mother struggle just to switch channels. She even has to switch the TV on and off when she accidentally enters teletext mode, because she doesn’t know how to go back. Still, she’s watching TV.

In all fairness, early TVs had no remote and maybe around a dozen buttons, which surely helped their adoption rate. I’m not saying games shouldn’t have more streamlined and simplified controls – they definitely should. Some games have horrible controls that discourage people from playing and designers should always address that. I just don’t see control complexity as some kind of deal breaker for achieving cultural significance.

As the populace gradually becomes more gaming literate, complexity will also be less of an issue. As long as there remains entry-level games (and there will be, unless the casual market suddenly disappears in a poof), gaming literacy will continue to gradually go up. In the meantime, not every game has to be as simple as Pong. Saying a game is too difficult for non-gamers to enjoy is a little bit like saying a book is too difficult for illiterates to enjoy.

The next point in Steve’s post is that games require active participation and often considerable effort, but most people actually prefer passive media. This is where I disagree the most.

If interactivity and effort are truly obstacles to cultural significance, then I guess nobody would care about real-life sports. Nobody would bother to play an instrument. Nobody would dance. Nobody would have any hobbies. The reality is that people already do all sorts of things that require dedication and effort, and they do it for fun. The active nature of gaming is its core strength, not its Achilles heel. It will propel gaming to greater cultural significance in the decades to come.

Maybe mass media tricked us into believing that people want to be lazy. While I would agree that people in general like passive media such as TV and film, do they really prefer it above all else? I highly doubt that. Both passive and active media clearly have a place, though given the dominance of passive media in past decades, active media have a lot of people’s time to reclaim. And that’s exactly what’s happening. People are getting increasingly comfortable with a different mode of media consumption: they spend more time on the web, playing games or listening to just the music they want on their mp3 players instead of tuning in to the radio.

You could dismiss the internet as being fundamentally old media (it’s used it to gain access to text, images or video) but I think this is a complete mischaracterization. Using the internet is very active even at its base level of interactivity. You have to click things in order for anything to happen. Even if you use the internet just to get access to movies or TV shows that you can passively watch, you still have to actively get those downloads from somewhere.

The main appeal of gaming and other interactive and participatory media is, I think, the feeling of empowerment that they provide. Games often have a possibility of failure, but even moreso they reward success and give players a feeling of accomplishment (or even just a feeling of ‘having caused things to happen’). That’s a really nice feeling. And it’s hard to get that from passive media. Gaming actually makes that feeling of empowerment more accessible to people. For instance, playing Guitar Hero is a lot more accessible and instantly rewarding than learning to play a real guitar (though it seems Guitar Hero has led some people to take a stab at real guitar playing). That aspect of gaming fits perfectly in the currently emerging media culture.

Again, I don’t see how the interactivity in gaming could do anything but encourage broader cultural impact.

Steve draws many parallels between gaming and comics, which I’m not sure I have a good response to, simply because I don’t know enough about comics. I have no idea why comics never broke out of their niche. Though it should be said that over in Japan, it did break out of its niche, where it’s as thematically broad as any other medium and enjoyed by people from pretty much any demographic. I don’t know what caused comic books to be held back so much in the West. But whatever it was, I don’t think the same is happening to games. In fact, I’d say games have already advanced beyond the comic book phase in terms of cultural significance.

To be clear, as a longtime gamer I do understand what Steve is referring to. I’m personally sick of the sci-fi, fantasy and horror clichés. I don’t like the narrow thematic and gameplay range of interactive entertainment. As a longtime and possibly jaded gamer, I survive on an unsteady diet of games like ICO, Rez, Shadow of the Colossus, Katamari Damacy, Beyond Good & Evil, Portal, and so on. I have to play these games in or order to tolerate more Gears of War and more Call of Duty – the kind of games that seem to dominate the gaming landscape.

Gaming should indeed become more diverse and more broadly appealing, but I believe that is already happening. It’s just that we’re not seeing it through our hardcore gamer eyes. Gaming is diversifying and reaching more people than ever, but to see this you have to look a bit beyond the narrative-heavy AAA titles.

Let me point to exhibit A: the explosion of casual gaming over the past few years. There’s games about cooking. Games about caring for animals. Games that help people stay mentally fit. Games that help people stay physically fit. Music games. Detective games. Safari trips. Medical simulators. None of that strikes me as particularly comic book-like. No men in tights, elves or starships there.

Just this morning I watched some footage from Endless Ocean, a nonviolent Wii game about deep sea exploration. It’s like creating your own Jacques Cousteau documentary in which you are doing the diving. I think it’s impressive for a medium to have a thematic range that goes from “steal a car and shoot the driver in the face” all the way to “hitch a ride on a blue whale in a beautiful ocean environment together with a friend”. I don’t think comics had that kind of scope at their relative point in development to where gaming is now.

Let’s also not forget serious gaming, educational games and virtual worlds, each broadening the scope of gaming in their own ways and, in some cases, using more easily relateable themes and connecting more closely to the human condition.

Progress may be slow, particularly in the main hardcore entertainment segment that people like us are most exposed to (and even more so within the ’story games’), but it’s definitely there.

Finally, I’d like to address the point of games emulating movies, which according to Steve hurts their potential cultural significance. As much as I hate games trying to be movies, I’m expecting this to be just a temporary phase. It’s actually happened before, time and again. Early movies remediated stage plays. Early TV remediated radio. Games are remediating cinema, but as both consumers and game makers develop a better understanding of the medium, I believe that will come to pass, at least for the most part.

To summarize, I find it hard to understand how anyone could be so down on gaming’s potential as a broadly relevant medium considering not only what’s happened in the past, but also what is happening now. Gaming is already growing up.

How much can I wager?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 4:36 pm and is filed under Game Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.