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Game On: The History and Culture of Videogames
Examines the world of videogames from a global perspective. Highly illustrated throughout, the book is structured around ten essays focusing on key themes, from characters in games to future technical developments. Writers include J C Herz, Steven Poole and Henry Jenkins. Short essays by players also appear.
144 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2002
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June 5, 2013
This book was produced to accompany what may have been the first major exhibition of video gaming in an art gallery (in both Edinburgh and London) in 2002.
The exhibition was excellent and no doubt helped one member of my family to feel even better about (eventually) choosing video gaming as the subject of his university course.
But, in retrospect, I regret that there seemed not to be a traditional catalogue available (or else I was misled into thinking that this book was such an artefact for the future).
Instead, what we have here is a series of essays, of varying quality, one or two of which are arch and truly awful, with some added eco-cant at the beginning.
It all looks very dated about one of the fastest moving industries in history. A catalogue of the exhibits would have been far more useful, giving us a base-line history of the genre in the last century.
Having said that, the better essays give us a decent picture of what people thought was important in 2002 and we can use the book to compare and contrast what was expected and what actually happened.
For example, there is no reference to the massively fast growth in social media gaming and mobile platforms and tablets simply because, well, they weren't available then.
Other things are talked up that have not had much impact - notably machanima which became crass to an extreme and virtual worlds which rather stagnated despite the massive rise of the MMORPG.
What has changed are the graphics. The graphics of 2002 look clunky in the extreme and would be wholly unacceptable today in a world where games can show us a remarkable hyper reality.
Video gaming has been immensely influential - Hollywood adventure movies routinely use the 'level' meme to structure their narratives - and is more sophisticated but the book has one insight to hold on to.
This is that video games are, well, games. That is, they are not to be confused with the narrative forms of other arts like film or the novel.
The gamer is not simply watching or passively allowing words to create mental images away from reality. The gamer is actively engaged in manipulating formal rules for particular outcomes, usually competitive.
This may explain one of the great frustrations for many outside observers - the inability of the gaming industry to do more than add beautifully designed bells and whistles to a very few narrative forms.
Gaming is immersion in a restricted set of possibilities that are usually linked to a very few and simplified primary drives - hunting, being hunted, winning, acquiring, raising status, being 'more than'.
It is skill-honing and wish-fulfilment but it is not often subtlety though this is not how it needs to be in the hands of some coming genius of the genre.
Someone is going to enter into this field, on the back of increased computing power and the availability of artificial intelligence, and introduce subtlety much as the Renaissance introduced perspective.
What this needs, of course, is a market (which is probably sufficiently there) but also the ability to understand a very advanced technology alongside a creative and artistic mentality.
This mentality, though, will be very different from the expected one of the individual genius. It is more likely to be the Disney type leader who can collaborate equally with workshop and purchasers.
We are on the edge of this change. Some masterpieces - Myst, The Sims, Final Fantasy perhaps - have drawn us closer to a point where, eventually, we will see interaction guided into self-discovery.
Instead of the mere expression of desires and clan-based competition, the game may mature not into the 'vision of the artist' but of a 'guided shared vision' that has a process-based and not a fixed 'form'.
In a 'guided shared vision', the prime creators and the game players would be co-creators of an inward reality that is personally transformative. At that point, we will have a high art on our hands.
The exhibition was excellent and no doubt helped one member of my family to feel even better about (eventually) choosing video gaming as the subject of his university course.
But, in retrospect, I regret that there seemed not to be a traditional catalogue available (or else I was misled into thinking that this book was such an artefact for the future).
Instead, what we have here is a series of essays, of varying quality, one or two of which are arch and truly awful, with some added eco-cant at the beginning.
It all looks very dated about one of the fastest moving industries in history. A catalogue of the exhibits would have been far more useful, giving us a base-line history of the genre in the last century.
Having said that, the better essays give us a decent picture of what people thought was important in 2002 and we can use the book to compare and contrast what was expected and what actually happened.
For example, there is no reference to the massively fast growth in social media gaming and mobile platforms and tablets simply because, well, they weren't available then.
Other things are talked up that have not had much impact - notably machanima which became crass to an extreme and virtual worlds which rather stagnated despite the massive rise of the MMORPG.
What has changed are the graphics. The graphics of 2002 look clunky in the extreme and would be wholly unacceptable today in a world where games can show us a remarkable hyper reality.
Video gaming has been immensely influential - Hollywood adventure movies routinely use the 'level' meme to structure their narratives - and is more sophisticated but the book has one insight to hold on to.
This is that video games are, well, games. That is, they are not to be confused with the narrative forms of other arts like film or the novel.
The gamer is not simply watching or passively allowing words to create mental images away from reality. The gamer is actively engaged in manipulating formal rules for particular outcomes, usually competitive.
This may explain one of the great frustrations for many outside observers - the inability of the gaming industry to do more than add beautifully designed bells and whistles to a very few narrative forms.
Gaming is immersion in a restricted set of possibilities that are usually linked to a very few and simplified primary drives - hunting, being hunted, winning, acquiring, raising status, being 'more than'.
It is skill-honing and wish-fulfilment but it is not often subtlety though this is not how it needs to be in the hands of some coming genius of the genre.
Someone is going to enter into this field, on the back of increased computing power and the availability of artificial intelligence, and introduce subtlety much as the Renaissance introduced perspective.
What this needs, of course, is a market (which is probably sufficiently there) but also the ability to understand a very advanced technology alongside a creative and artistic mentality.
This mentality, though, will be very different from the expected one of the individual genius. It is more likely to be the Disney type leader who can collaborate equally with workshop and purchasers.
We are on the edge of this change. Some masterpieces - Myst, The Sims, Final Fantasy perhaps - have drawn us closer to a point where, eventually, we will see interaction guided into self-discovery.
Instead of the mere expression of desires and clan-based competition, the game may mature not into the 'vision of the artist' but of a 'guided shared vision' that has a process-based and not a fixed 'form'.
In a 'guided shared vision', the prime creators and the game players would be co-creators of an inward reality that is personally transformative. At that point, we will have a high art on our hands.
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