Reformat The Planet

8-Bit Art, ConvenienceStoreGourmet, 2010

I remember some of the first games I played when I got my first computer (an IBM PS/1) sixteen years ago. Thanks to shareware, and also rampant piracy in the local IBM factory, I had The Duel: Test Drive II, Crystal Caves, Keen Dreams, and Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis (all seven floppies of it). Of course, looking back the graphics were pretty awful, Test Drive's level scenery was highly repetitive, Keen Dreams' audio wouldn't work for some reason, and the dialogue in FoA lacked voice acting. I also had Wolfenstein 3D  and Prince of Persia, but they don't count because the former would never load and the latter was lacking the manual, so I had no idea how to draw the sword and therefore get past the first level. Yet somehow I managed to get a number of years enjoyment out of those few games. I've grown up in the medium as I never say 'video games'

Despite my self-description, I own comparatively very few games - there's about 40 games on the shelf, mostly PS1 and PS2. Though I still put on San Andreas and use it as a graphically updated and sandboxed Test Drive, the story of that game is hardly groundbreaking and equal parts homage and parody. The games that do stay with me, and prompt a play through perhaps every year or two, are those with strong narratives. On the strength of narrative, one of the few series I've followed is Metal Gear Solid (except for MGS4 because of Sony's pricing con with the PS3); being plot-driven, philosophically engaging, and highly cinematic - that is, in visual composition. Visuals dominate the gaming medium, but historically in terms of the texturisation and rendering the machine was capable of. This trend is why current generation consoles output high-definition near-realistic graphics. It's also why investment and production costs on high-end titles have skyrocketed this decade.

In response to the substantial investment required to produce a first class title, the games market has shifted to casual gaming. Though casual gaming brings to mind the success of Nintendo's Wii console, the largest games platform is currently mobile devices of which the iPhone dominates. Flash games used to be the preserve of web arcades, but time-killing mini-games are where the money is now. For the gaming medium, this spells qualitative decline and narrative death. A proliferation of low-end titles harks a return to the early 80s when the industry crashed after a run of poor-quality ports and licensed games. Notoriously, ET on the Atari was symbolic of everything wrong. The defining image of the North American crash is of ET cartridges in a landfill, particularly suiting for a mass produced soulless product of licensing agreements. Still, "video games" are depicted in the mainstream-media as being no more advanced than those of 1983. The character Mario recently celebrated 25 years since the (Japanese) release of Super Mario Bros. . Media outlets cued up VTs of 8-bit gameplay from 1985. The middle aged types who probably bought their kids a NES back in the day still understand gaming as a bleep soundtracked distraction with the narrative depth of a flipbook. But gaming can tell stories equivalent to those on film, not just framing devices for eating pellets.

Flooding the medium with cheap sub-Tetris clones and the like not only risk the acceptance of gaming as a valid medium, but also the value of games. Cinema, lacking only interactivity, is the closest medium and a warning. While art films are still made, in the popular mind cinema equals Hollywood and the sequels and remakes and reboots that Hollywood produces with great frequency. Whilst movie piracy is the product of changing mores about ownership, for many it's the result of the devaluation of film. What is so redeeming about a particular film that you would be compelled to see it in cinema let alone buy a copy? Formulaic, unoriginal and unengaging output can be easily and correctly thought of as nothing more than bits on your harddrive.

Hollywood is arguably in the midst of a crash in the guise of the war on piracy. Gaming is nearing a Second Video Games Crash. The current consoles are all planned with decade or more lifespans. Improvements in graphics have driven generational hardware; and having reached the technical and budgetary limits, the big three manufacturers are pushing new interfaces and trying to capture the casual gamer demographic. Firstly, motion control is the domain of casual gaming. You'd be better exercised playing the actual sport than dancing about your living room to Wii Sports (and why not, since you're already up and moving). Secondly, Nintendo's reliance on selling the Wii to casual gamers is not going to endure into another hardware generation. Those casuals who already paid for a console and peripherals to play Wii Fit in the evening are unlikely to empty their wallets again for a faster or more powerful Wii 2. They've succeeded in revolutionising the wheel, so to speak, but can they really do it again?

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