Fun Inc. (25 page)

It’s a notion that is remarkably close to becoming a reality. At the 2009 Game Developers Conference, for instance, a service called OnLive was announced, complete with a new kind of domestic gaming box that its makers dubbed the MicroConsole. Essentially a decoder of highly compressed signals sent via a broadband connection, the MicroConsole connects directly to a television and allows users to play any game they like by running it on a distant central data centre. The service will operate, initially, from five locations in America, but could theoretically be expanded much like any internet service company.

A fair amount of cynicism has surrounded the OnLive announcement, largely relating to the fact that efforts at ‘centralised computing’ have historically tended to end up either costing too much or suffering from too many reliability problems to be viable. But it’s certain that sooner or later either OnLive itself or a service very like it will enter the marketplace and begin to compete. With regard to netbooks – relatively inexpensive and low-specification laptop computers designed mainly for online use – the fastest growing area of the modern computer market, the notion of delivering all kinds of remote gaming services to consumers is unlikely to go away.

At this point, it’s worth sounding several notes of caution. New technology is marvellous to wonder at, and in the realm of gaming it can often border on the miraculous – this kind of delight being one of gaming’s defining attributes. At the same time, however, change is never driven only by what is theoretically possible, or even by what is most exciting or transforming; there is also the weight of the past and of the fault lines, controversies and conflicts within any industry or medium.

Although the games industry is now starting to become a truly global phenomenon, it has traditionally been divided along a number of rigid and surprisingly impermeable regional lines. Throughout its history, gaming has been divided between, broadly, West and East, with America and Europe following a very different model to Asia – and Japan and Korea following their own idiosyncratic, and extremely influential, patterns within this.

The reasons for such extremes of regional variation relate to wealth, technological infrastructure, tradition and politics. China and Korea have traditionally enjoyed cheap, plentiful internet access, but have had low personal ownership rates of computers and little individual purchasing power, making online games the great money-spinners (Korea also had for many years a number of incredibly punitive taxes on all Japanese imports). Japan, the birthplace of the console, has always been intensely patriotic in its gaming – and curiously obsessed with internet applications for mobile phones for which the internal market is huge, but for which there is almost no international demand. America and Europe, meanwhile, have emphasised domestic play on both computers and consoles, with high purchase rates of expensive blockbusting games and a reputation for innovation and craftsmanship matched only by the elite Japanese firms.

This compartmentalisation is finally starting to break down. Hardware has, since the early triumph of Japanese consoles, always spanned international boundaries; but now software hits are also drawing large numbers of players from across both the Western and Eastern markets. Moreover, gamers are finding themselves less limited by local technology, and by personal income, as the battle shifts from technical innovation to accessories, downloads and the construction of social forms of gaming and brands that can be carried across multiple formats.

This is not to say that worldwide gaming will entirely converge any time soon: in emerging markets, such as China, most people still don’t own their own computers. But it is increasingly likely that global competition will bring into play an almost Darwinian principle, with local companies likely to fall under the weight of increased foreign competition. This may prove the case, for instance, in the Korean online gaming market, which has traditionally evolved in isolation from both the West and Japan and placed a strong emphasis on the ‘grind’ of levelling up with friends rather than more sophisticated tactical considerations. As markets merge online, the South-East Asian sector is likely to consolidate, with Korea losing out to China’s rapidly growing player community and its entrepreneurial levels of innovation. Similarly, Europe at the moment lacks any truly dominant regional online games specialist.

Like so much of digital culture, these transitions are bound up with a number of urgent and specific questions that governments and regulators need to address. In an age where virtual worlds span nations and even continents, and players collectively earn and exchange billions of dollars through them, what is the status of virtual property and money? What is the status of goods and services that individuals have bought, or created themselves, within this environment? And how can any of this be enforced, or a method of taxing income relating to virtual items be introduced?

Couple this to continuing concerns over violence, sexual content, censorship and addiction, and you have one melancholy certainty for the future of gaming: future controversies and scandals are likely to emerge on a scale beyond anything we’ve seen so far. Video games have been blamed before for teen violence, for falling educational standards and for disengaging players from the societies they live in – and with games growing ever more powerful and ubiquitous, there’s every chance that this youngest of modern media will become the scapegoat for the most headline-grabbing of future controversies.

Such objections are not entirely irrational. Change is always traumatic, and games are a profound engine of change, both generationally and across society as a whole. Games are exceptionally powerful, and this power will be abused and exploited, not least by manufacturers seeking easy publicity by plumbing the depths of an ever-broadening audience’s tastes. Some games have already been banned for, among other things, simulating the stalking and rape of women, for excessive violence and for scenes of distressing cruelty – none of which are peculiar to video games, or common in games, but which take on an understandable extra dimension of distaste because a player is actually ‘doing’ rather than merely watching. Censorship debates and panics will continue, as will the still more intractable debate over addiction – for which the only real solutions are vigilance, education and the identification of other underlying issues.

By their very nature, video games represent a profound challenge to many existing social assumptions and structures, not least of which is the very notion of society as something defined by proximity and geography rather than the transnational web of affiliations of many in-game communities. Along with the increasing ubiquity of the internet, some people will undoubtedly become conflicted between the demands of their virtual and their real lives – and one of the major challenges of the present century will be working out how to deal with this migration of attention, interest, effort and expenditure away from the actual and local towards the incorporeal and the diffuse. It’s a challenge that games, if correctly understood, can help with rather than hinder, for it’s within games that many of the most striking innovations in online community management are occurring: developments geared to making virtual relationships fairer, more transparent and more rewarding. Actuality will have to work hard to keep up with virtuality, but this may well be no bad thing.

One striking point, here, is that every major game world in existence is currently operated by a private corporation, which, given the sheer number of people playing some games and the value they attach to their virtual existence, puts a great deal of power into the hands of organisations whose primary motivation is simply profit. Such profits are of course bound up with keeping players happy, a powerful reason for maintaining a high quality and integrity of service. But keeping people happy does not represent anything like the full potential of virtual worlds, and if we are to understand and exploit their potential fully, there is great scope for research organisations, universities and even governments to step into this arena and begin large-scale gaming ventures. Games have already proved they can offer by far the most effective and appealing techniques for organising meaningful virtual communities, and if the notion that they somehow cannot be serious can be got out of the way, the potential of not-for-profit gaming is immense.

A virtual voting system could, for instance, be hugely effective at increasing voter participation and awareness, as could information projects connected to everything from energy visualisation to community collaboration and consultation on laws and local spending. Already, individual avatars can number among the most valuable – and certainly the most intimate and valued – of some people’s possessions; and we are not too far away from a time when people may see their unique online embodiment as a literal extension of their self, complete with possessions, attributes and a legally protected right to exist and undertake economic activity. In this context, the question of who controls and regulates such a realm – a government, a private company, or even a distinct international authority – is a question with powerful consequences for an age thick with virtual work as well as play.

The economist Edward Castronova is one vocal advocate of government and university investment in virtual game worlds, in part because of his own Catholic faith and his belief that a ‘good life’ – either virtual or real – must be larger and distinct from a merely enjoyable, comfortable one. Virtual worlds can be hugely seductive, and there is a fine line between having life-enhancing experiences within them and seeking out virtual experiences in order to escape the challenges of living a real life. With the possibilities for distraction and escape more potent than they have ever been, it has correspondingly never been more important to educate people about balancing their lives between all the opportunities for distraction and participation on offer – and ensuring that the vulnerable are protected, and the pathological identified and helped.

What, finally, of other media in a digital age? In mid-2009, I was part of a panel of five interviewers who spent two hours discussing with Mark Thompson, Director-General of the BBC, his perspective on the future evolution of the media as a whole. Did he worry about younger people tuning in and dropping out of the established media world, and losing out in consequence? ‘If one looks at media throughout the ages,’ he replied, ‘people always fear total substitution: the horse buggy to automobile. Actually, that doesn’t seem to be the way things play out. Books, it turns out, have a wonderful future in the digital age. People thought television would kill off radio. Why on earth would you want a radio when television can give you everything a radio gives you plus pictures, they asked – quite wrongly as it turned out. Then television was going to kill cinema. But what we’ve actually seen is their co-existence, and the reorganising of interrelationships between media as you go. I believe that physical newspapers are likely to be with us twenty to thirty years from now – although the economics of newspapers will probably change beyond recognition, and there will almost certainly be fewer. Similarly, the passive experience of television is getting better and better.’

Thompson’s answer echoes a theory first stated by the German thinker Wolfgang Riepl in 1913. Riepl, a newspaper editor, observed that when it came to media, technological advances never entailed the wholesale replacement of an existing form with an entirely new one, as it had done, for instance, in fields such as transport (where the horse was entirely replaced by the railway and, later, the automobile) or warfare (where gunpowder rendered bows and arrows redundant). Instead, what he called convergence occurred, with each medium impacting upon but not replacing the other, and a new system of usage involving both media gradually emerging. Today, those who fear that the ascendancy of video games – or any other medium – will impoverish the world by driving out older forms of expression should take comfort from Riepl’s so-called ‘law’, which has proved remarkably prescient over the course of almost a hundred years.

Like society itself, media are better understood as a constantly evolving and interlocking system than as a discrete series of trends and ventures. There is competition within such a system, of course, sometimes of a brutally Darwinian nature. But there are also synergies and shared fundamentals, the most significant of which is the users themselves, whose natures have not shifted perceptibly over the millennia between the invention of writing and the present day, let alone between the creation of cinema and the birth of the games console. Older media must continue to adapt, and governments, societies and families must continue to support and value them. But the apparent war between different media is emphatically not a struggle for the human soul between debasing and ennobling tendencies. There is bad and good in each medium, as well as great power, and the recipe for progress remains much the same as it has always been: investigation, rigour, understanding, specificity, context, education and, perhaps above all, the refusal to succumb to glib hysteria.

Just as the printed word, recorded music and moving images have already done, the interactive art that is video gaming will continue to develop alongside its audience, serving both the best and the worst of them. It is rapidly becoming one of the central ways in which we seek to understand (and distract, and delight) ourselves in the twenty-first century, and one of the most important resources we have for understanding and creating the kinds of business and communications strategies that are likely to dominate the next few decades. Above all, for the coming generations – for whom the world before video games will seem as remote a past as one without cinema does to us – the best gift we can bequeath is a muscular and discerning critical engagement.

Epilogue

In June 1938, the world was less than eighteen months away from what would prove to be the bloodiest conflict in human history, the Second World War. In Europe, Hitler’s Germany had recently annexed Austria and was poised to add Czechoslovakia to its swelling empire, while dictators held sway over Spain and Italy. In the east, Japan was perpetrating a brutal war of invasion against mainland China, while Stalin’s Soviet Union had since 1937 shot or transported more than a million people in the Great Purge. Meanwhile, in the city of Leyden in the southern Netherlands, a historian was completing his work on a book that contained these words: