A cover of the acclaimed comic book "Planetary." Written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by John Cassaday
The babe in his cradle is closing his eyes
The blossom embraces the bee
But soon says a whisper, arise, arise
Tomorrow belongs to me
--"Tomorrow Belongs to Me" from the musical "Cabaret," music and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb
A bet is a type of game, one with which we here at Level
Up have become intimately familiar. So when we got wind of a brand new
wager of sorts, between bloggers Borut Pfeifer (at The Plush Apocalypse) and Steve Gaynor (over at Fullbright),
our antennae perked up immediately. And what was it that prompted this
bout of gambling? It was level designer Gaynor's admittedly pessimistic
assertion that "...I'll bet you that video games will never become a
significant form of cultural discourse the way that novels and film
have. I'll bet you that fifty years from now they'll be just as mature
and well-respected as comic books are today." To which the more
optimistic Pfeifer, who's working on one of Electronic Arts' Steven
Spielberg games, replied, "I’ve certainly had days where I’d agree with
most everything he says. I get where it’s coming from. Whether it was a
frustrating day at work, or sometimes just going to a particularly
rough GDC, I am not immune to that brand of despair. But, overall, I
gotta say, games still have much more to achieve as a medium--if I
didn’t think so, I wouldn’t be working on them."
One sees the
glass as half-empty, the other sees the glass as half-full. But both
are largely proceeding from the same set of assumptions when they
subject videogames to a close examination--in terms of their
accessibility; required level of engagement; maturity of subject
matter; visual realism--and find them wanting. Take the issue of accessibility, of which Gaynor says:
Video games are hard for people to get into. The barrier for entry is higher than perhaps any other popular entertainment medium. To read a book, all you need to do is go to a library, pick one up, and start reading (which isn't usually an obstacle considering the high literacy rate in the modern world.) At the advent of popular film, you only needed to walk to a movie theatre and pay your nickel (or nowadays, ten bucks) to see the latest release. Processing the experience isn't an issue: sit, watch, and you've received an experience equal to anyone else in the audience....
Over time, the technical and systemic complexity of video games have increased, while the barriers to entry have largely remained undamaged. Taking inflation into account, the cost of a home console unit has stayed largely constant since the mid-80's (and the price of a competent gaming PC has similarly kept pace;) controllers have sprouted more buttons, gyroscopes, and analogue sticks than ever; and it's still extremely common for games of high quality to be too difficult for a non-gamer to play effectively.
This is certainly a legitimate comparison, but it neglects the amount of time, money and effort that it takes to teach a child to read. Ditto for the number of hours we all spent in our youth consuming a variety of moving images, which enabled us to develop the visual literacy required to understand a modern movie or TV show. If children spent the same amount of time playing videogames as they did learning to read or learning to watch, the maligned-by-comparison-to-the-Wii-Remote Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 controllers would be second nature to most people. Note, we're not saying that that's a good thing, but there are already signs that the decline of a literary culture and a the rise of "an era of 'secondary orality'," as writer Caleb Crain puts it in his fascinating and troubling December 24th, 2007 New Yorker article titled "Twilight of the Books," to which we hope to return in a future post. Crain cites a recent National Endowment for the Arts report named "To Read or Not to Read," which offers up, among others, the following depressing statistics:
- Less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from 20 years earlier. Among 17-year-olds, the percentage of non-readers doubled over a 20-year period, from nine percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004.
- On average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading.
- Reading scores for 12th-grade readers fell significantly from 1992 to 2005, with the sharpest declines among lower-level readers.
2005 reading scores for male 12th-graders are 13 points lower than for female 12th-graders, and that gender gap has widened since 1992. - Literary readers are more likely than non-readers to engage in positive civic and individual activities – such as volunteering, attending sports or cultural events, and exercising.
The point here isn't to wag a finger at videogames, but merely to observe that the segment of youth leisure time that had previously been devoted to reading is obviously being reapportioned. And while the report's summary does not specifically cite videogames, it's likely that interactive entertainment has picked up some significant, um, market share among young people. Based on this trend alone, even if there were no changes in interface or accessibility, it stands to reason that videogames would become more pervasive simply because videogame "literacy" is becoming more widespread. So to cite the relative impenetrability of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3's controllers as a permanent barrier to future audience goes flies in the face of all available evidence--and that's before we even get to the gestural control capabilities of the Wii Remote and the Sixaxis; the touchscreen and microphone inputs in the Nintendo DS; alternative controllers like those in Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Hero and Rock Band; and forthcoming interfaces like 3DV Systems' depth-perception cameras and Emotiv's neural processing headsets; to say nothing of the long-predicted future advancements that will truly enable game developers to break on through. So from the perspective of human-computer interfaces, tomorrow belongs to games.
Another point worth making to debunk the idea that videogames are somehow unreasonably inaccessible is to compare them other types of games, like chess, basketball, or Dungeons & Dragons. Each of these games has rules, and therefore a learning curve. Each requires a commitment in order to develop from being terrible to mediocre to respectable to good to great. These real-world games have the advantage of leveraging more deliberately taught interfaces--motor control and literacy--than their electronic counterparts. But we'd be willing to wager that other than the not-so-insignificant problem that many have with navigating three-dimensional environments on two-dimensional screens, it would probably take less time to teach someone to become comparably skilled at Halo 3 than it would at the position of quarterback--even when you factor in the complexity of the controls.
Next: For Part II, in which we discuss how to "smuggle" more artistic ambition into videogames, click here.
