Games As A Part of Mainstream Culture - What Are We To Do?

Ever since I graduated high school, the mainstream acceptance of video gaming has given rise to a ubiquitous culture that revolves around games and gaming in general. Initially fueled by a handful of websites such as GameFAQs, IGN, 1Up, and Penny-Arcade and magazines like PC Gamer and Nintendo Power, the gaming revolution has exploded in the last year, producing pieces of shrapnel like gamer chairs, Gamer Grub, G4 TV and a gamer line of razors.

As games become a integral part of our culture and artistic expression, many people liken them to other cultural products like TV shows, novels, popular music CDs, and movies. But is this correct? Have games really achieved that level of status and cultural recognition? Is buying the new Madden game every September just as important as seeing a major summer blockbuster? Is Grand Theft Auto as popular as Britney?

Good games certainly have a pedigree, and throughout the short history of games there are ones that are looked on as iconic genre definers. Half-Life, Tomb Raider, Super Mario World, Pac-Man, GoldenEye, Mario Kart, Zelda : Ocarina of Time, Quake, Doom. All of these are classics of the video game culture; the Rockys, Star Wars, Gone With The Winds, and King Kongs of their genre. Regardless of production values, special effects, or story lines, gamers look to them as the hallmarks of good gaming.

And, just like movies, books, and music, games keep being made, released, and enjoyed by people all over the world. But isn’t their something different about games? On one hand they look like a movie, but they play through like a book. And there is always music on the background. A game encompasses a lot of other media forms, and delivers its content in a nice, programmed package. This should be good for us - after all, we now have film, story, and music on one package. But do we take games as seriously as all that? The trend in culture sure indicates that we do.

But where is the social aspect of gaming? Where are the gaming clubs, the dollar game nights, and the Nintendo discos? Why aren’t retro games as celebrated as classic movies or 1920’s jazz music? Why has it taken games longer to reach the majority of the population? I think there are several reasons.

The primary reason is that games run on specific hardware. Unlike movies that would all play in a VCR or DVD player, games were locked to the consoles that they were made for. The recent increase in popularity has a lot to do with more games going cross-platform. The same game is now available on more than one machine, and therefore is more accessible to a larger audience. Hardware tethering, incidentally, has a lot to do with retro games falling out of the public eye. As more and more retro consoles bite the dust, games that are still very playable have nothing to be played on, and thus sit around and collect dust. Retro game emulation and archiving has helped a lot in this area, and needs to continue if we want to save games as part of our cultural history.

Another reason is that games are interactive. They require time to learn and developers usually vary the control scheme from game to game, thus not guaranteeing that being good at one game means being good at another game like it. This can get frustrating. Being interactive also means that games take much longer to complete than a movie takes to watch or a CD does to listen to. Twenty to thirty hours is not uncommon, with some role playing games requiring upwards of seventy hours. This is a lot of commitment, and means that you cannot go through 10 games as quickly as you can watch ten movies.

Being interactive has an impact on the third reason, which is that gamers don’t necessarily like to cross genres. While some casual gamers play sports, racing, and action games, others may play only first-person shooter or real-time strategy games. Music lovers have CDs spanning many different genres, just like movie buffs have films spanning such classifications as action, romance, comedy, horror, or drama.

We are at a crossroads. On one hand, games are certainly a part of our lives, part of out culture, and part of our media. On the other hand, we’re not about to start dedicating spaces in public libraries to house game collections. We still see games as largely a juvenile, time-wasting, low-class art form. Some of you even shuddered when I called it an art form.

So what do we do when our companies are pouring millions of dollars into an industry that we don’t want to recognize as a legitimate repository of cultural value? If games are here to stay, why we don’t feel like preserving them and in doing so creating a visible historical timeline of where we have come from as a gamer culture? Will computer games just turn out to be a fad that eventually dies out? I don’t think so. We as a society have to find ways of making games that aren’t locked to hardware platforms, that are enjoyable for people of all ages, and, most importantly, are worth preserving.





_DZ