Fun Inc.
Authors: Tom Chatfield
Why Gaming Will
Dominate the
Twenty-First-Century
TOM CHATFIELD
PEGASUS BOOKS
NEW YORK
For Mum, Dad and my wife, Cat
Contents
Preface
Epilogue
Bibliography and ludography
Acknowledgements
Index
Preface to the American Edition
In April 2008, my friend Jon flew from North Carolina to visit me in England. Jon manages a store in a small town in Gaston County, just outside Charlotte, and this was the first time he’d travelled outside America; he’d had to get his first ever passport for the trip. It was also the first time we’d met face to face, although we’d known each other for almost two years.
Jon and I met in World of Warcraft, a game that my wife, Cat, and I have played ever since it launched in 2004. The three of us started out helping each other with in-game tasks. Then, as we got to know each other better, we moved on to talking through microphones and headsets while playing. We swapped emails, linked up on Facebook, discussed books and films, and pieced together the details of our very different lives. Jon was smart, in his early twenties and had dropped out of college due to funding difficulties; Cat and I were working long hours in medicine and publishing, and World of Warcraft offered us a sociable, absorbing evening “out,” away from the pressures of daily life.
We often think of video games—and of digital culture in general—as a substitute for worldly encounters, and a troubling one at that. Yet our appetite for the digital has grown hand in hand with an increasing recognition of the value of the live and the interpersonal; and, above all, of the importance of the social aspects of technology. More than anything else, it is these sociable, interpersonal forces that are driving forward the next stages of the digital revolution. Jon was the first gaming friend of mine to visit us in London, but not the last: since his stay, several others have made the journey across the Atlantic, while my wife and I have travelled up and down America’s east coast visiting and staying with people we first got to know through video games.
What this means is that the blank spaces on our map of America have been filling up, gradually, with individual human voices and faces. And while video games are far from the only reason we know people outside our own country, they have meant that we know people far off the tourist trail: people managing stores in small towns, living in military bases, serving their country abroad, raising families at home.
Video games have been a central part of this process not because they’re uniquely powerful—although the shared experience of play is, at its best, one of the most universal of all human undertakings—but because they’re an increasingly central part of both American culture and of an emerging global culture. I believe that this culture has the power to re-mould the 21st century at least as radically as cinema and television did the 20th.
This is a shamelessly partisan book about video games, and I make no apologies for that. Over the last decade, alongside my work writing a doctorate and teaching literature, working as an arts and books editor in London, and speaking and writing on technology and the arts, my experience of games has been a hugely enriching part of my life. This is something I hope to share and explore.
This isn’t, however, a book about why games are “good” any more than it can be a repudiation of why they are not “bad.” These kind of statements are as meaningless as it would be to reduce every book ever written or every film ever shot into a single opinion. It’s precisely because I love games that I’m anxious to point out that 90 percent of the titles out there are not good enough. In everything from their artistic merit to their playability, design and quality assurance, they could be better. Sometimes they are awful, objectionable, banal, or simply not enjoyable. This is to be expected. Contrary to the popular myth of electronic entertainments as implacable engines of manipulation, it is very difficult indeed to make a decent video game, let alone an excellent one. Creating great games is both an art and a science—indeed, it’s one of the most demanding digital activities it’s possible to undertake.
America is the world’s greatest video-gaming nation, and it should be proud of this status. It dominates globally in terms of the value of its market, but also in the sophistication of its audience and the quality of its industry. It’s thanks to games, in large part, that I have got to know America as I do. Or, to be more precise, it’s thanks to games that I have got to know certain Americans. I am far from alone in this. The greatest value and interest of any medium is always the human experiences it enables, not the machinery in which it encodes them. And, at their best, electronic games can show us at our best: creatively, socially, politically and intellectually.
Wanting video games to be better is a central part of loving them. But the anatomy and criticism of games is a task for a different book to this one. Indeed, it’s a task already being undertaken with considerable sophistication and relish by the gaming community both online and in print. What I hope to achieve is something at once simpler and more fundamental: to explore why video games are worth taking seriously in the first place; to suggest the nature and range of the discussions it is worth having around them; and to show how these discussions may help us to understand our culture’s increasing augmentation and amplification by technology.
If there is a fundamental message here, it is of continuity, not transformation. To face the future hopefully, together with all the possibilities of its technology, we must remember that we humans are the same as we ever were. It is only our possibilities of being and action that have changed: we are more stimulated, more distracted, more interconnected, more challenged, more able to learn, more able to lose ourselves than ever before.
This book was largely written in 2009, which means that, in a field defined by constant innovation, its contents are already some distance from the cutting edge. I’m not too worried about this. I hope that what comes through is my belief that by far the most interesting things about both video games and people are those aspects of them that will not transform in the space of twelve months, twelve years, or even half a century. The reasons that games exert so deep and broad an appeal are very ancient, and if we’re to have any hope of understanding the future more than a year at a time, we must take the long perspective.
Finally, as I write these words in mid-2010, one word in particular looks in urgent need of retirement: “gamers,” that segment of the population who know and play video games. For there is fast becoming no “us” or “them” when it comes to games. In 2009, the National Gamers Survey reported that 83% of the U.S. population played video games, including 72% of men and women over 50. Whatever your opinion on video games, they will soon be universal. Within another generation they have their place in every home and pocket, as inevitable as a computer or mobile phone. This is neither a dreadful nor a marvelous fact: it is an aspect of the world we must learn to live with and understand as best we can.
We need to take this word “gamers” and throw it away, together with all those other generalizations that open up no debate and that mask the future under vague hopes and wild fears. We need to talk seriously, now, about how to get the best out of games, where the worst really lies, and what the games we play can tell us about ourselves and our future. The news may not all be good. But we cannot afford to ignore it.
C
HAPTER
1
The fun instinct
Video games are both a medium and an industry; an emerging and increasingly powerful form of entertainment, expression and communication. Yet they are also just one subset of the grand category of games: structured activities carried out for pleasure, according to certain written or unwritten rules. Games are as old as civilisation itself and are found in all cultures. Evidence survives of competitive game-playing from as early as 2600
BC
, while archaeologists have found game ‘boards’ that were apparently scratched onto the backs of statues by bored Assyrian guards in the eighth century BC. Humans have been playing games for at least as long as we have been reading, writing and perhaps even speaking – and this latest great resurgence of game-playing at the heart of modern culture has deep roots in both our cultural and our biological history.
The urge to play is universal, not just in human cultures but among higher animals. From ants to birds to monkeys, playful rituals such as mock-fighting allow animals to test, improve and even (something that may sound rather fanciful in the case of ants) celebrate their being in the world. It is only humans, however, that play games in the strict sense. A play-fight between primates may obey the most elaborate kind of unwritten rules, but only humans are able to codify their games independently of themselves. We are rule-making (and rule-seeking) creatures, and our love of order extends to play.
The modern world’s attitude towards games is itself an odd mixture of the dismissive and the deeply committed. In the case of sports, at no point in history has any activity commanded as much attention as sporting endeavour. The 2006 football World Cup was, thanks to the reach of modern media, watched at some point by over three billion people. At the time of writing, this was the single greatest collective experience in human history, although the 2010 World Cup will surely overtake it. Nothing, including religion, is so thoroughly international, or so blind to the divisions of race, nationality or creed. For all its compromises, the modern Olympics is rightly celebrated as the greatest human festival of internationalism in history.