It's always good to see mainstream media sources attempting to crack the wizened nut that is videogame culture. This week, two newspapers have waded into different but equally ancient gaming debates: 'why don't more girls play games?' and 'are games art?'. If you've allowed yourself to fall out of date with current thinking in these areas you'll be relieved to discover that nothing much seems to have changed in the last few years...
First up, the New York Times declares that 'The Game Is on to Woo the Elusive Female Player'. This starts out as just another fawning piece about UbiSoft's Frag Dolls - the girl gaming clan that has now been franchised across the globe (there are groups in France, UK and the States). Then, a shock revelation:
"...things are starting to change in the gaming industry, where developers and engineers are typically guys with a penchant for creating action heroes and buxom female sidekicks. Today's producers are starting to lay down their weapons and talk about the importance of video play infused with depth and emotion."
The piece then ticks off all the required 'girl gaming' topics - E3's threatened fines for semi-clad booth babes, The Sims, the 'fact' that women like stories and characters and aren't so keen on shooting stuff (a point only slightly undermined by the looming presence of those Frag Dolls - who, quite noticeably, aren't called the Story Girls or the Emotion Ladies). The piece also runs the mandatory quote from a girl gamer claiming that what women want is more realistic physical role models in games - you mean just like the realistic physical role models that inhabit womens magazines?
The article ends with a brief paragraph on Alive Ubisoft's forthcoming disaster game set after an earthquake, in which characters, 'rely on their instincts and each other' to survive. But is this new form of touchy-feely-'em-up an example of trying to reach out to the female audience or just a natural evolution of the action game as we move into the next generation?
Videogames as art - part 3692 At last, the Sydney Morning Herald has entered the videogame art debate, with it's provocative header, "Good game but is it art?". Again, all the familiar examples crop up, including Roger Ebert's rash declaration that videogames cannot be art because they're interactive and therefore completely lack authorial control (he's obviously never played a Medal of Honor game - they're almost Kubrick-esque in their didactic linearity). And of course, the Kandinsky-inspired Rez crops up - seemingly the only videogame ever to have had one eye on traditional art. Erm, Okami anyone?
We also hear about how videogames borrow certain technical traditions from films, and that this is a young industry comparable to the early days of cinema. Ho hum.
I always read these articles expecting to find some nugget of perceptive brilliance - a piece of wonderful thinking that could only come from a writer operating outside the videogame fraternity and its conventions of thought and language. I'm always disappointed. Cultural critics are merely treading water, unwilling and unable to keep up to date with an alien industry inhabited by, 'scruffy koalas intent on their work,' as the writer of this piece puts it.
Look, the industry isn't young anymore and comparisons with the likes of D. W. Griffith and the Lumiere brothers are redundant. Games are the product of an accelerated digital culture - they have caught up with mainstream film-making in most quantifiable areas. There is a debate to be had here, but it is light years beyond the idle summing up of old arguments and isolated arty games.
