The terrain isn’t promising. Everywhere fussy, grubby graphics are seething on Xbox consoles, machine guns are gack-ack-acking and cars are skidding into patchily shaded walls. Tabloid wisdom pegs the game biz as a bunch of geeks and nerds feeding fantasies to agoraphobes, sociopaths and illiterates. While I meet plenty of friendly, delightful people, there’s enough cruel truth in the stereotype to keep it slouching into my mind. Beauty, meaning and pleasure don’t appear to be this crowd’s ambrosia.
But it’s also clear that the game-industry beast is preparing to morph. Digital games “will be to the 21st century what cinema was to the 20th,” conference organizers promise me, quoting I forget whom. The market-research firm NPD reports that sales of videogames and related hardware reached $9.4 billion last year in the United States alone, outgrossing the movie business for the first time ever.
The troops are psyched. Reedy guys with stuffed animals on their backpacks go around repeating, “In Korea, you know, game designers are like rock stars!” (See you in Korea, honey.) But the point is, I am clearly not alone in hoping that the industry bringing us Wrestlemania X8 will deepen culturally as it expands. Workshops about dealmaking and audience manipulation are now supplemented with lectures on “Creating Characters With Dimension and Depth.” Ongoing debates rage among attendees about whether an injection of “dramatic narrative” or a game’s inherent “rule set” best generate “deeper meaning.”
Fellow questers swarm the halls and bars. I run into pilgrims like Suzanne Seggerman from WebLab.org, who hopes to bring “social awareness into game design.” Academic heavies like “Hamlet on the Holodeck” author Janet Murray are in the house, tracking the industry’s progress toward something that might pass for passion. Game artist Eric Zimmerman, CEO of gmlb.com, and a crew of experiment-prone designers who instigated the first “Annual Indie Game Jam” this year in Oakland are playing games with games people play. I get to see some of their cross-referential, self-aware wares–not-for-profit, off-the-cuff gamelets fraught with wry existential hilarity. In one effort, God v. God, the deity who gets the most “souls” into his heaven wins, so the optimal strategy is “convert, then kill.”
A number of women comment on how the industry’s esthetic defies market logic. By loosening the definition of game to embrace creative play as well as competition, Electronic Arts’ series The Sims has established a lasting relationship with paying customers of each gender. Nevertheless, the rest of the industry remains stubbornly committed to its market niche of fickle, win-lose game purists. It might pay handsomely to risk a step outside the box, but the cautious warriors of the game biz tend to stop at nudging the envelope.
What’s odd is that instead of getting discouraged by the constraints that game designers choose for themselves, I start to see some charm in them. Newly armed with handy descriptive phrases like “first person shooter” (FPS), “real time strategy” (RTS) and “Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game” (MMORPG), I learn to break the blur of noisy boy-games into subsets and metaphors. I come to sort of appreciate how the sci-fi shooter Half-Life is exploring the use of “story,” and how cool it is that the underworld shooter Thief can be won by stealth alone, without ever firing one of the game’s plentiful weapons. These games don’t jump their ship, but they do redesign the lifeboats.
So when the notoriously violent Grand Theft Auto 3, by Rockstar Games, wins this year’s top prize to become Game Developer’s Choice of 2002, I don’t even groan. I get that it’s the game-biz analog to “The Sopranos,” the TV show about the mafia, full of canny detail, interesting moves and satirical edges. Back home at Ground Zero, New York, I even sit down to play it. I wander the mean streets of Liberty City, picking up virtual hookers, repainting stolen cars and beating up concerned people like myself. Meanwhile, in real life, Israel and the Palestinians are blowing each other to bloody bits. Beyond its clever, nasty fun, GTA3 feels fitting for the times, a game in which all victories are both compulsive and degrading. It’s hardly the bright grail I went chasing, but there’s beauty and cultural significance in its vertiginous, visceral badness. As for profitability, the thing is hell on wheels.
