Proud member of the echo chamber

I may be on to some­thing when it comes to the upcom­ing gam­ing decade.

TNL.net — Novem­ber 21, 2010:

A few years ago, Nin­tendo took a rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent approach to what had been done in the con­sole game world. His­tor­i­cally, the trend had been to games that used more pow­er­ful video proces­sors to increase the level of real­ism in games aimed at the smaller por­tion of the pub­lic called “gamers,” a seg­ment mostly com­prised of men between the age of 15 and 35. With Sony and Microsoft hav­ing taken the high ground in those proces­sor bat­tle, it looked like Nin­tendo was in seri­ous trouble.

But, with the release of the Wii, and its motion-sentitive con­troller, the Wii became a sys­tem that was aimed at a more phys­i­cal expe­ri­ence of gam­ing, engag­ing the whole body. Nin­tendo also opted for a more car­toon­ish treat­ment when it came to char­ac­ters in their games. Between those two deci­sions, Nin­tendo ended up mov­ing games into a mar­ket that hadn’t pre­vi­ously been addressed. All of a sud­den, it became cooler for the whole fam­ily to play together.

The suc­cess of the Wii in expand­ing the over­all gamer audi­ence left its com­peti­tors won­der­ing how they too could enter that mar­ket. Sony recently unveiled the Playsta­tion Move con­troller, which is essen­tially a copy of the approach Nin­tendo has taken with the Wii.

Microsoft, on the other hand, looked at the model and decided to com­pletely do away with the idea of a phys­i­cal con­troller and unveiled Kinect, a sys­tem that com­bines video cam­eras, infrared cam­eras, robot­ics, and infrared sen­sors to let peo­ple use their body as the con­troller. It’s a pretty rad­i­cal move in that any­one can now oper­ate those games, remov­ing one bar­rier to get­ting involved in that space.

The games that have been included as part of the Kinect launch also allow for mul­ti­ple play­ers to get involved at the same time, cre­ate a space that is more social as a result, in a way rem­i­nis­cent of board games in ear­lier times. As a result, videogames will prob­a­bly get more inte­grated to a greater extent in fam­i­lies’ lives.

But social and gam­ing is not purely lim­ited to the liv­ing room. In fact, social games are now one of the biggest trend, with Zynga being the leader in deliv­er­ing offer­ings that com­bine games with a dose of social­iza­tion and a dash of com­pet­i­tive spirit. In only 3 years, the com­pany has estab­lished a num­ber of gam­ing fran­chises that are now being played by over 60 mil­lion peo­ple on a daily basis.

But most inter­est­ing in the social gam­ing phe­nom­e­non is the fact that the major­ity of social gamers do not fill the tra­di­tional pro­file of gamers: a sur­vey ear­lier this year showed that the aver­age social player is a 43-year-old woman.

Between the trends sur­round­ing social gam­ing and the new impact that game con­soles may have, com­bined with the increased num­ber of peo­ple who are play­ing games on mobile phones, it seems we now need to rede­fine the demo­graphic pro­file of gamers.

I would ven­ture, for exam­ple, that the pro­file of gamer is now com­pletely diluted into the pro­file of most peo­ple. The suc­cess of Rock­band has already shown that music and the gam­ing space have now merged suc­cess­fully to cre­ate a new kind of enter­tain­ment that has given new­found life to older musi­cal tal­ent. The launch of the Bea­t­les edi­tion of Rock­band last year was such a cul­tural mile­stone that it even war­ranted its own New York Times Mag­a­zine cover arti­cle.

And the big movie hit of sum­mer 2010 was Incep­tion, a movie that used lingo like lev­els, chal­lenges, and play­ers as part of its nar­ra­tive. In doing so, the movie may have been the first block­buster to fully lever­age game cul­ture with­out being based on a game.

I’d ven­ture that this past sum­mer was actu­ally a turn­ing point in the accep­tance of games as a legit­i­mate form of enter­tain­ment. With it, the whole of our cul­ture is now in the process of shift­ing to sup­port of games as a legit­i­mate enter­tain­ment form, to take their place along­side books, music, and movies.

And 7 days later, I open the Arts and Enter­tain­ment sec­tion of the New York times and find the following.

The New York Times — Novem­ber 28, 2010:

Of the major game con­sole mak­ers, Nin­tendo was the first to start doing away with but­tons. While Microsoft and Sony were busy try­ing to make more real­is­tic high-definition explo­sions, Nin­tendo was real­iz­ing that all those but­tons on game con­trollers were alien­at­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions of poten­tial play­ers around the world. The answer of course was the Wii, with its intu­itive motion-sensitive con­troller that has drawn fam­i­lies and women into gam­ing in a way they never had before.

But the big boys, Microsoft and Sony, have not been too proud to learn from their rival, and this fall they intro­duced sys­tems that go beyond the Wii in bring­ing nat­ural human move­ment into games. The less ambi­tious of the two is Sony’s Move for the PlaySta­tion 3, which is basi­cally a more accu­rate and pre­cise ver­sion of the Wii con­trol wand. Cou­pled with the PS3’s high-definition graph­ics (the Wii is not high-def), the Move repli­cates cer­tain types of phys­i­cal activ­ity, like golf, Fris­bee toss­ing, bowl­ing and sword fight­ing, more accu­rately and enjoy­ably than has ever been pos­si­ble in the liv­ing room.

But Microsoft’s Kinect does away with elec­tronic con­trollers alto­gether. With Kinect you just stand in front of the TV and move your body to make things hap­pen on the screen. You actu­ally dance and throw and kick and punch and run­ning (in place). You are per­form­ing the actual yoga pose or exer­cise. You can even talk to it and it under­stands (though only for basic menu com­mands at the moment).

With prod­ucts like Rock Band 3 and Kinect, the art is becom­ing a real expe­ri­ence. It is a phe­nom­e­non famil­iar to seri­ous play­ers of online role-playing games, where man­ag­ing rela­tion­ships with other peo­ple is at least as impor­tant as the science-fiction or fan­tasy action of the game itself. In Eve Online high-level polit­i­cal lead­ers with names like Sir­Molle (Swedish), Vuk Lau (Ser­bian), UAxDeath (Russ­ian) and the Mit­tani (Amer­i­can) have directly shaped the game play­ing of tens of thou­sands of other play­ers around the world, and yet can be laid low by indi­vid­ual acts of deceit, mis­di­rec­tion and plain old incom­pe­tence, just like politi­cians in real life. In a per­sis­tent online game, with­out other peo­ple to coöper­ate and com­pete with, there is no game at all.

Some may call it pla­gia­rism, I just call it val­i­da­tion. Obvi­ously, I’m not the only one to see the upcom­ing decade as one that will be dom­i­nated by gam­ing but I’m quite sur­prised by how quickly this notion is mak­ing its way into the mainstream.