You Are What You Play

I have been a wizard, a warrior, a god. I have built civilizations and seen others toppled at my command. I have colonized planets, built starfleets. I have killed, and I have plundered. I have died and been resurrected. Parades have been thrown in my honor, fireworks set off. I have jumped through every hoop in these algorithmic mazes, satisfied every goal conceived of and coded by pajama’d malcontents, and I have enjoyed every moment of it. But what has it all given me? How have these hours and days of absorption affected the way I experience reality off the screen?

Video games, like all other art, form the lens through which we see the world, the patterns of subconscious thought that stir beneath our eyes and frame what we see and what we do not. What happens when a generation of children is more familiar with video games than any other form of art, including the art of conversation? What happens when children are vastly more comfortable with simulations than with narratives? What happens when a significant portion of a generation’s experiences of pleasure derive from what is essentially the subconscious insinuation of algorithms? What happens when an entire generation becomes used to second-by-second gratification, the rapid thrills of an unfolding simulation that cannot be rivaled by, for instance, reading?

These are serious questions, and they are becoming more serious everyday. On January 20 of this year (the day, incidentally, of President Bush’s second inauguration) Microsoft announced that it had sold a record-breaking 6.4 million copies of its new game Halo 2. The same game pulled in $125 million on its first day of sales, three times the amount made on the most successful opening day in movie history (Spider-Man, $40.4 million). Of course, the movie industry is still much larger than the video game industry, but it may not be so for very much longer. According to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), computer and video game sales topped $7.3 billion in 2004. The point is this: video games are quickly becoming the most important entertainment medium. In 10 years the entertainment market will be completely dominated by them.

While Halo 2 has been rocking the console market, The Sims has become the best-selling computer game of all time, with over 54 million copies of the 7-expansion pack franchise sold in the past five years. The Sims, created by Will Wright and produced by Electronic Arts in 2000, has revolutionized the game industry by significantly penetrating the market’s traditionally weak demographics (women and adults) and successfully transcending borders and language barriers with an unprecedented 17 international editions. The Sims is also conceptually revolutionary: nothing actually happens in the game, which makes its success all the more impressive. Strangely enough,The Sims, which offers players a chance to build and manage households of “people,” is quite similar to the so-called “reality” programs that have over the past decade brought the simulational aesthetic to the television in a big way. Or perhaps this is not so strange: it should come as no surprise that the blockbusters of the existing entertainment industry (action films, reality television) have close analogues in the video game industry (Halo 2, The Sims).

Neither The Sims nor Halo 2 is any sort of flag on the summit; rather, they are merely the gunshots at the start of the race. Until recently, many people were not convinced that video and computer games would do it for most Americans. Some still aren’t. But as the years pass, the population will age, the old will die, the young will grow old, technology will continue to spread in our society and throughout the world, and inevitably (barring a resurgent neo-Luddite movement) within 30 years we will all be playing video games. There is no evidence that this hunger within us will ever die, even as our bodies age. And who would want it to? Nothing beats the rapid-fire thrill of a first person shooter, or the evocations and exhilarations of a sports game, or the alternating states of calm cerebral alertness and frantic applied engagement that characterizes more complicated games like Civilization, Age of Empires, or Starcraft/Warcraft.

For better or worse, video games mold minds. The US Army has recently acknowledged this fact by producing what may be the first-ever piece of interactive propaganda: the game America’s Army, which they use as a recruiting device. But this is not really very surprising at all, and one can hardly blame the Army for the direction that video games have taken. Like the movie industry, what many people seem to prize most in video games is what only large corporate bureaucracies at the cutting edge of graphics and special effects innovation can provide. Unlike the movie industry, however, the video game industry was not the inheritor of any previously existing artistic traditions like acting, directing, stage production, dance, or vaudeville. Video games were entirely new, built up from 1’s and 0’s not by artist-creators but by technologist-creators.

Just 10 years after Doom, the original first-person shooter, was released, there is very little left of its allure. This unmasks the fact that there was very little to its allure in the first place. Today Doom 3 is on the cutting edge of technical achievement, but it too will fade from our memories and leave nothing behind. If the value of video games continues to reside solely in their increasing graphical realism and not in their increasing conceptual sophistication, then we all may be wandering around in binary dungeons for the rest of our lives.

Jorian P. Schutz ’05-’06, is a social studies concentrator in Pforzheimer House.