From the outside looking in -
February 22, 2001 - Chris Jones
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed
within this column are those of the participants and the
moderator, and do not necessarily reflect those of the
GIA. There is coarse language and potentially offensive
material afoot.
Do the Karma Police enforce Instant Karma, or is that what they're trying
to persecute? I was never real clear on that.
Don't say we didn't warn you.
Not a heck of a lot to talk about in the games universe at the moment, I
guess everybody's still waiting for ZOE and the second wave of PS2 games
to hit. Which reminds me, maybe I need to get some preorder money down or
something... nah, there's always a surplus of PS2 software, if not
hardware. And worst case scenario, I can bitch entertainingly about not
having a copy of the game in an intro.
Onward.
| An unrespectable form
of entertainment |
| Chris:
"Perhaps when TV shows show gaming as it really is, that's a sign that
public (the media's) perception is that it's a respectable form of
entertainment."
Gaming as it really is? A respectable form of entertainment? But it isn't.
Not at all. How can it be respectable when we so readily admit that as we
grow older, we must leave it mostly behind? How can it be respectable when
Joe Six-Pack buys his console for GoldenEye, and not for any story, but for
a never-ending cycle of death-matches? How can it be respectable when most
of its best-selling games are nothing but interactive versions of sports we
can't play and the dregs of television? How can it be respectable when the
people's government assumes that it is both childish and dangerous?
Don't get me wrong--some games are more than just DONK-DONK-DONK. Some of
them are a damn site finer, as literature and entertainment, than many of
the books that are and have been printed. But even so, that isn't most
games. Most games are not significantly more entertaining than Pac-Man, and
serve exactly the same purpose: burn a little time, be a little entertained.
Donk Donk Donk.
The really disturbing thing about the use of those sound effects is not how
wrong they are, but how right they might be, as much as we the obsessed are
unwilling to admit it.
--DarkLao
P.S. Damn, man. Did an Objectivist run over your dog? I'm not a fan of it
either, but mercy-killing? Ouch. I think it'd be sort of funny if the movie
tanked, Sakaguchi resigned again, then ended up directing games with the
official title, "Junior Assistant Mailroom Flunky".
|
That's a fairly harsh, but unfortunately, also fairly accurate view of
the situation. For every FF8, there's another Tomb Raider, for every
Vagrant Story, there's another wrestling game. But at the same time, I'd
argue that that's not terribly different from nearly any other medium -
most movies are crap, and yet movies as a whole recognized as art. I'd
also say games as a whole are still way better than TV as a whole. The
point is that you judge a medium by the top of the bell curve, not by the
middle, or even better, by what the medium's capable of, rather than
what it's currently doing.
*Sniff*... and yeah, an Objectivist did run over my dog... poor Fluffy...
| For the 133t only
*Lunar 2 spoilers* |
| Fortunately (I'll get to why later), very, very niche. At least if we're
talking RPG's. Everyone I know who isn't a gamer has absolutely no idea
what games are like these days. It really is still pong or Pac man to them.
It's not just old people, either. Even younger people like my sister will
walk in on me playing Lunar 2, look at the screen, blink a few times, walk
out, and go watch Much Music. There's just no desire to know anything at
all about games.
But then, why should there be? My knowledge of cars is limited to changing
the tires or giving it more go-go juice, I couldn't tell you what the rules
of most sports are, and I can barely name all 10 provinces and, ummm, 3 (I
guess) territories, let alone their capitals. I don't know who the popular
bands are today, and I don't care. My fashion decisions are limited to
which pair of jeans to wear with which white tee shirt.
But I can write C++ and Assembly code in my sleep, haven't played FFIV in
over 5 years but still remember the location of every last treasure chest,
and could tell you right down to the last 1 and 0 how your PC adds two
numbers or counts the length of a string.
But that's because I'm a geek (and I certainly mean that in a positive way).
Other people aren't. Why should they share our interests? What makes video
games in general (and RPG's in particular) so important? It's just another
hobby. Yes I almost cried when Lucia left Hiro to go back to the Blue Star,
but other people cried during that Titanic movie (that I still haven't seen,
and never will), while I probably would have been rolling on the floor
laughing.
But you know what? I like it this way better. Like most elitists, I like
my bands obscure and my anime subtitled. And I certainly don't want
everyone to be playing what I'm playing! Why, then I'd be just like
everyone else! I don't know if my fragile ego could take that kind of a
blow! I need to maintain the fiction that I'm better than the general
public after all, and if role playing games have to stay niche to satisfy
that end, then so be it! </sarcasm>
Cory, who loves himself better than you. |
For sure - it'd be far better for games to remain an under-respected
niche than for them to be completely popularized and watered down. I
don't think most of us play games to be unique (considering the social
stigmata associated with them, you'd have to be crazy to) but being
part of a relatively small fan community isn't a bad thing either.
Games are important, all you have to do is look at the sales
figures to verify that, and maybe if people aren't recognizing them,
it's their loss, not ours.
| It's a labeling issue |
| CJ,
Well, I'd assume the majority of people do not know/do not want to much
about games because of the fact that my own parents STILL insist on calling
every game system I've ever owned a "Nintendo". This is despite the fact
that they've bought me six different consoles over the course of what, ten
years? And it's not just them, it's every adult over the age of 30 that I
have ever met.
Yeah, maybe it's not that big a deal. After all, we gamers are in the vast
minority here. But I don't think that that outdated label helps them view
videogames in a different light than the one they might have held in the
late 80s. I'd like to think this genre of entertainment has matured a bit
sense the Nintendo era. But maybe that's just me.
-Red Raven, who owned a Nintendo for only 2 years |
It's interesting, but "Nintendo" seems to have entered the public
lexicon in the same way that "Xerox" and "Kleenex" did, so that the term's
become so popular that people are only able to think of a whole family of
products by a single brand name. The problem is, I'm not sure you can
uncouple the success of video games from that holdover naming - if
Nintendo had never been popular enough to burn itself into the public memory like it did, games might still be stuck in the limbo they occupied in the early
80's between the 2600 and NES. And with the PS2 (and soon the X-Box)
bending over backwards to get inside every home in America, I don't think
people will be calling all consoles "Nintendos" for much longer.
| Conspiracy Theory |
| "Perhaps when TV shows show gaming as it really is,
that's a sign that public (the media's) perception is that it's a respectable
form of entertainment. Heh, that'll be the day."
Yea.. it will. Think about it. Why in the world would the television industry
want to show games as they are?
More people playing games = less people watching TV. If I were producing a
TV show I certainly wouldn't want to have some beautiful music from an RPG playing
in the background. Next week people might be playing that RPG instead of watching
my show.
Of course its just as likely that the television industry is just ignorant when
it comes to modern games but conspiracies are more fun..
Trent (who recalls hearing music from Punchout on a show years ago.. I think it was Punchout) |
Possible, but kinda unlikely. Still, make your own call on the
issue - maybe CBS, NBC, ABC and FOX really do have some sort of
vendetta against the PSX.
| Lack of focus |
| Yo Chris,
Yes, even with the FFVII and VIII media blitz, the widely publicized
Dreamcast, and the sure attention the FF Movie will bring, we gamers are a
niche group. While some games have surely reached the mainstream, they are
often simpler titles like wrestling or skateboarding.
We're in the same boat as comic books. No one sees it as a viable forum
for conveying serious thought. I admit there're no games that match the
simplicity and tragedy of Death of a Salesman, but they're better than most
of the stuff Dickens wrote. Much as he was paid by the word, our games are
filled with random battles that separate the story from gameplay. Since the
focus is on a mix between story and interaction, RPG's will likely never be
able to hold the same focus on narrative as books can.
Another strange thing to think about is origin. There are famous books
we read from authors of most countries. However, RPG's are almost
exclusively Japanese. Until we can get a real mix of games from more
countries, I don't think that we'll see games (like literature) as varied. I
just hope I'm still around to experience it.
--The Steve |
As Jeremy Parish pointed out a while back, we might be looking at this
the wrong way, assuming that games have to give us stories and ideas on
par with movies or books to be legit. (And I think they are capable of
doing so... eventually.) But maybe the real genius of games is
simply in their gameplay - Tetris is no Hamlet, but why should it be? It's
a brilliant work that's likely to be around just as long as Shakespeare, if
not far longer. Super Metroid is no Alien, but it's just as evocative in
many ways. I'd still like to see games exist as more of a fusion of great
gameplay and story (MGS, anyone?) but one out of two ain't bad.
| Generation gap I |
| Hey Chris.
In my opinion I think games in general have made very little impression on
society. This is in a way odd, since video games now rival Hollywood in
sales, but nevertheless, even among those who play games somewhat
frequently, there are very few who take them seriously. Take a random gamer
who buys a couple of games a year, and tell them that you're going to buy a
video game soundtrack, and you're guaranteed a wierd look. Try postulating
that games are themselves are an art form in their own right, and they'll
probably be rather incredulous. Although you can sometimes get a confession
that they liked playing FFVII, or whatever RPG, because it had a good plot,
try to move from that to suggesting that a game can feasibly have more
intellectual merit than a novel, and you've lost them. At least so far as I
see it, most gamers today see video games as little more than mindless
entertainment; they simply play them despite (or because of) that fact. And
if most gamers are like this, then things can only get worse when you're
talking about people who have never picked up a controller in their life.
Perhaps when our generation has taken over the lead role in society there
will be enough people like us to make gaming enough of a niche to merit some
recognition, and perhaps we'll start reading our game reviews in the Arts
section of our newspaper, but I don't foresee that happening for at least
another twenty years.
-Arpad
|
It's very true that our generation's the first to grow up with games,
and the first to take it as seriously as we do. It's also the case that our
generation's the first to grow up with a wide variety of new media, like
the one you're reading this column on right now: the Internet. So no only is
our obsession with video games new, but the way we express that obsession
is new too. Working at the GIA is a great experience for a huge number of
reasons, one of which is that, at some level, it's like working on William
Randolph Hearst's first newspaper, being at the cutting edge of a
developing medium. Perhaps if the Internet hadn't been around, various GIA
staffers might have gone into more traditional critical outlets, like
newspapers or magazines, and game reviews would have a bigger traditional
public profile... but I can't look at the huge amount of sites dedicated to
games and not think that games are still getting a huge amount of
recognition.
| Generation gap II |
| Lest we forget, Pong and similar early pioneers of the genre were located in
bars, bowling alleys, pool halls and similar locations where you find adults
(and some teenagers), not kids. Nintendo created the image of a videogame
machine as a child's toy that still persists today.
That's why you hear Pac-Man sounds today - because adults recognize it as a
videogame sound more than the Mario theme (or FF or Link, whatever). And
advertising is all about recognition, not accuracy. It's not that people
think that's whata videogame sounds like, but they know that sound is from a
videogame. From their youth (not mine, I'm not that old)
It's odd, because since the PSX, it seems like more people know the
capabilities of videogames than ever before. Hell, I even saw a Conker ad in
a pop-up at ESPN.com. Somebody thinks there's a crossover audience.
RPGs are still a niche though. Always will be. Like modern dance or German
poetry. That's fine. What bothers me is that for some reason, modern dance
is seen as a "acceptable" niche and RPGs are seen as the spawn of Satan
(thanks, TSR).
Orin the lawyer - ignoring comments from the paralegals about "rumble paks"
|
Also a good point - Pac Man was such a touchstone for games that
everyone knows about it, from 10 year olds to 60 year olds. The
Zelda Overworld theme might be just as evocative to some, but not
everybody will get it. And if you're simply trying to indicate that games
are being played without making them into a major plot point, there's
really only one way for you to go.
| Generation gap III |
| Ramza was not a badass. I don't care if you liked him, but he was not a
badass. He was a good character, but he was not a badass. Now Delita,
despite initial whininess, was a badass. And a holy badass to boot.
Videogames in the media? FF8 was shown in Charlie's Angels. The scene where
Drew Barrymore was walking around naked, she goes up to the back door of two
kids playing a part of the game where Squall is fighting a couple of Grats in
the Training Area. All my friends and I were screaming "woo-hoo! FF8!"
Later I found out that Barrymore was naked in the scene. We honestly didn't
notice... It was a crappy movie anyway.
Christoph, who wouldn't want to see Barrymore naked anyway, but Lucy Liu.....
mmmmmmmmmmm..... (gurgling and drooling sounds)
|
I was also able to tear my gaze away from the lovely Ms. Barrymore long
enough to notice that FF8 was being played, and that probably just goes to
prove the point of the letter above - younger audiences (such as the
Charlie's Angels audience) are better able to pick up a wider variety of
game cues, which is why they could show a recent RPG in the film instead
of the original Mario Bros.
And Ramza wasn't nearly as Machiavellian as Delita, but at least he got
to hang out with cooler people - I mean, wouldn't you rather have Agrias
and TG Cid on your team than Ovelia?
| The eight year old in
all of us |
| First off, I do think that hearing Pac Man or Donkey Kong sounds
representing video games in movies is a copyright thing, and also a matter
of convenience. Usually, if you hear those sounds, it's because the video
game is meant as background noise and not actually important to the plot, or
even the scene in question. So the sound guys just head to vault to grab
some generic video game sounds, and that's what they come up with. I think
that the copyright has run out on those sounds (if you can copyright sounds
to begin with), because I've also heard them used as the sound of a computer
analyzing something in the b-movie Shrieker (aka Shriek). Those sounds are
probably in some sort of public domain vault by now, along with stock
footage of A-Bomb testing and that fat guy getting hit with a cannonball in
slow motion.
But on the other hand, another reason to use them is: If you play, say,
Storm Eagle's theme from Megaman X, how many people will recognize it as
from a video game? But if you play the little boops and beeps of an old
Atari game, a lot more people are going to be able to instantly say "That's
a video game."
I think the general public's perception of video games is, unfortunately,
still that of the eight year old sitting 2 inches from the television, eyes
wide open, NES controller clamped in his hands, with his mouth hanging open
(which is why they cause such a ruckus about "mature" games; They imagine
little Johnny with his mouth hanging open, killing scantly clad women in
Night Trap). It's slowly but surely starting to turn around, though. You now
see less images of zombified kids playing video games, and more late
teens/early twenties zombified guys playing video games.
...Hey, I never said it was perfect. :P
And just as computers used to be viewed in the public eye as only being used
by zit-faced geeks with coke bottle glasses, so will video games become more
and more accepted into the mainstream as time progress. Amen.
|
I don't think it's merely a copyright issue - even in the mid-80's,
when Pac Man hadn't been out for that long, sitcoms were still using the
game for sound effects. (And strangely enough, even back then they
couldn't get the controllers right: instead of PSX controllers, people
were usually using Coleco Vision controllers or something.)
And that image of zombie-eyed kids is a stereotype, but there's also a
grain of truth to it. I can't remember how many times I've come out of a 6
or 8 hour playing binge with red, blurry eyes, because I was so into what
was happening on the screen that I forgot to blink.
| Yet another damn
hanger-on |
| Hey Chris
I think that society as a whole still has negative opinions about video
games and serious game players. It makes sense, though. Nintendo came
out when I was 5 or 6, and its predecessors like Atari and Coleco came out
in the late 70s/early 80s respectively, so it's pretty safe to say that
our generation was the first to actually grow up on video games. And
let's face it, there's a lot of middle-aged and older people who still
don't get the whole technology thing yet, and they either cannot or are
not willing to learn. Since these baby boomers make up most of society
today, the general consensus is that video games aren't all they're hyped
up to be. If a gamer's mom or dad didn't tell him/her when he/she was
younger to "turn that damn thing off" on a somewhat regular basis, I'd be
very surprised. Of course there are exceptions, but I'm talking about the
rule here.
On a better note, video games kick ass, especially those written in x86
assembly. These include, but are not limited to, last semester's Tetris
game and this semester's Networked Battle Columns with the Tetris pieces.
For you who don't know what the hell I'm talking about, I'm one of Chris's
fellow teaching assistants who was also busy last night trying not to fail
too many people when we graded exams.
Ryan, who writes kickass x86 video games to torture students with
|
Aside from giving me a chance to give a shout out to Ryan and his mad
programming skills (and while I'm thinking of it, let's have a moment of
silence for the many poor students who got flunked last night) this letter
points out that even if the public's not aware of them, games are still
damn useful things, and are recognized as such by some surprising people.
Video games in a programming class are a great teaching tool, because
they're relatively fun to build and require decent coding to work well.
Beyond that, there's a fair amount of interesting AI work revolving around
games, some of which are classics like chess but some of which are fairly
sophisticated algorithms that could just as easily be applied to Final
Fantasy Tactics or Starcraft. And lastly, there's also the economic angle -
I've seen numbers that suggest that kids trying to get the latest and
greatest FPS experience have been the biggest factor in the PC explosion
over the past few years. So at the very least, games have a solid place in
academia and business.
| Best Se7en joke EVER! |
| If you ask me, videogames aren't considered anything more than a diversion, and
recent ad campaigns seem to be very symptomatic of this. Look at the LoD ads
(back when I was excited about this game, before I found out the hard way that
it sucked.) It showed some great CGI stuff, and the announcer helped build some
suspense, and then it degenerated into slapstick comedy. Does this piss anyone
else off? It would be like advertising the movie "Seven" with the tagline: "It's
hard to get ahead in the world."
I dunno, maybe its just me.
--Aaron.
|
Between the endless Pokemon ads on TV and that stupid Blockbuster "game
trainer", it's probably no wonder games haven't been looked at seriously
by the public. And the solution, as I've been saying for years, is quite
simple: shoot all the marketers.
Closing Comments:
Friday. You send email on whatever, I read all of it, post some of it.
That's all. Later.
-Chris Jones, takes no
pleasure in giving out Fs. Ok, maybe a little.
|
