Fun Inc. (10 page)

Perhaps above all, amid much of the media’s insistent focus on certain negatives and dangers, it’s important to maintain a sense of proportion – and of the ways in which gaming use so often defies every stereotype of both subject and attitude. Take my own entirely ordinary exploits within one of the most controversial games of all time,
Grand Theft Auto IV
, my pre-ordered copy of which joined the 608,999 other units sold in Britain on 29 April 2008. The game is full of pastiche violence, of slyly explicit dialogue and ceaseless minor homages to cinema, television and music. It has an 18 certificate, and I won’t be inviting any nine-year-olds to join me in investigating its world. But the play experience is an open-ended delight of exploration around ‘Liberty City’, a lovingly detailed parallel New York, within which you can pass hours driving around in various vehicles, watching the sun rise and set, trying to attract the attention of cops and then shake them off, and – in one especially memorable moment – driving a stolen ambulance off a roadbridge on to a raised section of trainline, then manoeuvring it underground and through the ‘Manhattan’ railway network. All this is best done in company, and most of the pleasure I’ve taken from the game has involved sitting on a sofa with friends, dissecting the city and deriding each other’s driving skills with gleeful abandon. It’s quite a thing, too, to be moved by the beams of an unreal sun setting behind a not-quite-Manhattan skyline.

If you think this kind of reaction puts me on the outer fringe of unusual, think again. Most of the game’s content and in-built achievements are geared around various kinds of exploration and driving tricks; the series’ huge following is largely due not to its slick presentation or gangsta styling, but to the quality of the ‘sandbox’ it offers – that is, the non-linear, living and breathing tiny world it allows you to race anarchically around. This is where the root of its appeal lies: in something designed not simply to breed compulsion, but as an experiment with what it is that we find delightful, exciting, arresting and even beautiful. The common denominator here is far from what is widely assumed to be ‘lowest’ in human nature. Sex and violence, for instance, aren’t nearly as high up the list of what most people demand from games as most critics assume. Of the twenty bestselling console games of all time, only one (a
Grand Theft Auto
game, naturally enough) involves any real-world violence at all: the top slot is occupied by
Wii Play
, a family-friendly compendium of retro-pursuits like virtual fishing, laser hockey and billiards; No. 2,
Nintendogs
, is a ‘pet’ game that involves looking after and dressing up a cute pet dog; No. 3 is from the
Pokémon
series of cute role-playing games; and most of the others are driving or role-playing or platform games, all of which involve escape and vicarious thrills, but not violence in any pornographic sense. Similarly, the bestselling game series of all time is
The Sims
, a ‘virtual life’ simulation.

It’s interesting to compare games, in this respect, to that other exponentially expanding technological phenomenon, the internet itself. During the first few years of the internet’s existence, many serious commentators argued that it would inexorably become mired in pornography to the point where it could barely be used for anything else. Yet today, although pornography can indeed be accessed online in sufficient quantities to keep anyone who wants it supplied for the rest of their life, only a couple of the world’s 100 most visited websites relate to pornography, and 99 per cent of web traffic is non-pornographic. Instead, people spend most of their time online on such activities as social networks, searching for news and other information, sharing (non-pornographic) images and videos, buying and selling goods and media – and, of course, in playing games, which is now the world’s third largest internet-based activity after search and socialising.

All of which is to say that painting human nature as too violent and venal is itself a dangerous distortion in the struggle to understand our relationship with new media. It’s a point that’s made explicitly by one of the most significant documents yet to appear on society’s relationship with the dangers and pleasures of this technology: Dr Tanya Byron’s March 2008 review
Safer Children in a Digital World
, prepared at the request of the British government in an attempt to map out its digital strategy for Britain over the next decade. Commissioned in a climate of concerned headlines and parental unease, Byron’s conclusions poured cold water on what could have been a conflagration of media hysteria. ‘Having considered the evidence,’ she wrote, ‘I believe we need to move from a discussion about the media “causing” harm to one which focuses on children and young people, what they bring to technology and how we can use our understanding of how they develop to empower them to manage risks and make the digital world safer,’ It may sound banal, but Byron’s 226-page report is enormously valuable for the clarity of its assertion that the media debate must move on towards the adult business of education, contextualisation, responsible classification and regulation; and the early identification of those who may need support in their use of media, and indeed in their lives as a whole.

Finally, if there is one danger that is both real and often overlooked, it’s the error of assuming that any medium can or should stand alone. It may be the apex of the uncontroversial to say that all human pursuits are diminished by excess – but the much-feared prospect that playing video games will automatically breed illiteracy, sloth and ignorance is not something that games themselves have any power to bring about. Balancing the multiplying demands of pleasure, leisure and work may be harder than ever in the twenty-first century, with more and more competing options for an often shrinking amount of free time. Understandably, there will always be those who wish to return to the alleged simplicities of an older world. But the present is in no way helped by the crude caricaturing of this youngest and most dynamic of our media; and the case cannot be made for the virtues of reading, conversation or even television-watching simply by pouring scorn on something else.

C
HAPTER
6

The Warcraft effect

From the 1970s onwards, video games were increasingly being mentioned in novels, on television and in films. A fairly clear consensus soon emerged in these media about what games were and how they should be presented: they were esoteric creations, used exclusively by hollow-eyed adolescent males. These males were socially deficient. They probably had few friends, and the ones they did have were as sick as them. Game-playing adolescents were unhealthy, and would remain so until they kicked their electronic habit. Gaming, it seemed, was like an especially pernicious kind of masturbation: something that turned you in on yourself in the worst possible way. The 1993 film
Arcade
was a typical work along these lines, featuring a sinister video game in an arcade called, suspiciously,
Dante’s Inferno
, with the ability to capture the souls and take over the minds of the lonely adolescents drawn to it. Hardly a subtle messge, but one that was often repeated.

This popular image was hugely unfair in many ways, but it did have some elements of truth. For their first few decades, games were played largely by adolescent males. They did have a slightly cultish feel to them. And what gamers did, within either the lightless bowels of the video arcade or the closed-curtain fastness of the bedroom, was isolating in a larger social sense. This came about as the result of a combination of historical and technological coincidences. First, early games were primitive. Their manufacture was becoming increasingly less amateur, but they continued to look like what they were: an immature medium, unable to compete with the more fully realised arenas of film, print and music. Games were not fit for the living rooms or the polite conversations of the adult world: they appeared regressive, childish and antithetical to the fully developed social beings that it was dearly hoped each monosyllabic pubescent youth would grow into.

Second, and equally importantly, the development of simple and effective networking technologies lagged decades behind the development of affordable home computers and video games systems. In their early existence, therefore, most games could only have one or, at an occasional best, two players. Setting up and playing across a local area network or even just a serial connection between two computers was a mission certain to defeat all but the most dedicated gamers; and the two-player experiences that were available on consoles and in arcades remained fairly crude, and well within the accepted boundaries of ‘cultish’.

Within the last decade, most of this has changed almost beyond measure, thanks to the combined influences of the internet and the increasing arrival of video gaming as a mainstream – and even a family-friendly – media activity. Yet many of the most fundamental questions about games’ relationships with society and sociability haven’t gone away. Today, books and films can’t get away with crudely caricaturing games as adolescent curiosities; but nor does the emerging social culture of gaming have much in common with many of the older norms of civilised social interactions, or even traditional definitions of what it means to be sociable (which usually involves being in the same physical space as those people you’re interacting with).

In a world where the internet already connects more than 1.5 billion people, and will in 2010 connect double that number, a whole new notion of sociability is being born and tested online. Yet this development has video games very close to its heart. It’s easy to forget that the very idea of social networking, from Facebook to MySpace to Bebo or even Twitter, was pioneered by video games long before there was even such a thing as the internet – in the text-based multiplayer games of the 1970s and 1980s, and then in the online multiplayer games of the late 1990s. No other online social arena is so demanding, engaged, engrossing, immersive or sophisticated as gaming. And no other online activity, including social networking, is more popular between friends than the playing of video games.

Perhaps the most fundamental question of all here is how someone can be said to have ‘met’, let alone got to know or formed a friendship with, someone else when their relationship is entirely mediated through a screen. It’s a question that mystifies and concerns many people of the non-gaming generation, and that even among gamers largely lacks any fixed points of reference or means of critical evaluation. But it’s also an increasingly common, albeit implicit, assumption that the various virtual interactions in someone’s life – their emails, their electronic chats and texts, their phone calls, their blog posts and shared photographs, their Amazon wish list and
Second Life
avatar – are collectively at least as revealing of who they are as the conversations they have with colleagues across a desk or with friends across a restaurant table. The very notion of what social interaction means is shifting fundamentally.

According to one influential and wide-ranging study, the 2008 Pew Internet/MacArthur Report on Teens, Video Games and Civics in the US, the great majority of game-playing today is a shared experience of some kind. Surveying over 1,000 teenagers, the group of players whose behaviour is probably the best indicator of larger trends to come, the Pew Internet/MacArthur report said that 94 per cent of American teenage girls played video games, as did 99 per cent of teenage boys; and that, across both sexes, 76 per cent reported that they played with friends, either in person or online. These numbers have steadily increased over the last decade – similar surveys in 2001 and 2003 put the figure at just over 60 per cent – and, given that all the most rapidly growing sectors of the industry today are linked in some way to social gaming, are certain to keep growing.

The trend is predictable enough in that, like sports, the pleasures of most games are best sampled in company. Each game is a live, unfolding performance to which every player brings something slightly different – and during which the pleasures of discovery, skill and achievement are invariably enhanced by the presence of a sympathetic audience. This is especially true of the genre of games designed to be played by friends or family members gathered in a living room: various party games on the Nintendo Wii, or performance games like
Guitar Hero
and
Rock Band
where much of the joy is – as with board games or watching live sports – in the atmosphere of the room itself, rather than anything in particular that’s happening on the screen.

Still, perhaps the weightiest criticism of the impact of modern games derives from one fundamental point: that, in the majority of cases, the primary interaction is between a player and an unreal, onscreen realm. In contrast to unmediated face-to-face relations, the theory runs, these game-based interactions are inevitably diminished, and in turn diminish the things that flow from them, such as friendship, trust, commitment and affection. It’s an argument that has been put eloquently by, among others, the philosopher Roger Scruton, whose position, as articulated in a 2008 article for
The Times
, is as follows:

In real life, friendship involves risk. The reward is great: help in times of need, joy in times of celebration. But the cost is also great: self-sacrifice, accountability, the risk of embarrassment and anger, and the effort of winning another’s trust. Hence I can become friends with you only by seeking your company. I must attend to your words, gestures and body language, and win the trust of the person revealed in them, and this is risky business. I can avoid the risk and still obtain pleasure; but I will never obtain friendship or love.

When I relate to you through the screen there is a marked shift in emphasis. Now I have my finger on the button. At any moment I can turn you off … Of course I may stay glued to the screen. Nevertheless, it is a screen that I am glued to, not the person behind it.