My name is Sergio Ortiz and I play video games.
Last week I took some time to examine the origins of video games and more importantly the origins of their relationship with society at large. Now while games have advanced leaps and bounds since the early arcade and home console era of the 1980s, much of society's view towards them have not. Here in the modern era of gaming, beginning in the 1990s and continuing through to the present, understanding the continued relationship between gaming culture, video games themselves, and the public at large will require a more in depth examination of the modern era as a whole.
Last week I took some time to examine the origins of video games and more importantly the origins of their relationship with society at large. Now while games have advanced leaps and bounds since the early arcade and home console era of the 1980s, much of society's view towards them have not. Here in the modern era of gaming, beginning in the 1990s and continuing through to the present, understanding the continued relationship between gaming culture, video games themselves, and the public at large will require a more in depth examination of the modern era as a whole.
Part II:
The Modern Era
1990s to Today
By the beginning of the 1990s, the video game industry had rebounded from the great video game crash of the early 1980s, the age of the arcade had died, and technology had marched forward at a staggering pace. Computers and the internet were beginning to creep into the everyday lives of the average household and society keenly felt the uncertain winds of change begin to blow as the Cold War concluded and the information age dawned.
While computers and the internet grew in visibility, so too did the video game. Super selling consoles like the SNES and Sega Genesis had found their places in some 33% of American households[1] by 1995. Alongside them, the personal computer did not hesitate to find its audience either with such mega hits as Doom redefining the state of play in the 3D world. This period of wholly unprecedented growth in both mainstream penetration as well as technological developments only rose as the years wore on.
The 8-bit era of the 1980s had given way to the 16-bit and then 32-bit generations, ultimately resulting in the 3D revolution of the mid 1990s with the release of the Nintendo 64, Sony Playstation, Sega Saturn, and dedicated video hardware in the PC space. Games were, for the first time, beginning to shed the boundaries and limitations of the technology upon which they were built. And just as each new game pushed the limit of the tech behind them, so too did they push the against the limits of their artistic potential.
Beginning in the late 1980s, video games had begun to integrate professionally composed scores, pushing up against the limited audio technology available. With the rise of efficient audio streaming solutions for games in the 1990s, composers were no longer constrained by the limiting chiptune sequencing of previous generations, and for once given the ability to score high quality soundtracks with a wide range of vocal and instrumental pieces.
Beginning in the late 1980s, video games had begun to integrate professionally composed scores, pushing up against the limited audio technology available. With the rise of efficient audio streaming solutions for games in the 1990s, composers were no longer constrained by the limiting chiptune sequencing of previous generations, and for once given the ability to score high quality soundtracks with a wide range of vocal and instrumental pieces.
Likewise, as their graphical and auditory fidelity expanded so too did their narrative prowess. With the vast expansion of their potential audience, video games saw a rapid growth in the quality and complexity of video game narratives. Starting in the 1980s and continuing further in the 1990s, video games began to provide more and more context for the gameplay they contained, featuring fully fleshed out characters and intricate plots, all designed to fully immerse the player in the world created for them. Perhaps the most explicit example of this is the rise of the adventure game genre and its so-called “golden age” beginning in the late 1980s and following through to the mid 1990s, featuring such titles as Monkey Island, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango.
For society at large however, the 1990s represented a new chance for growth and prosperity, a golden age where information and promised peace prevailed. For those alive at the time, it turned out to be anything but. The world watched as the horrors of the Bosnian Civil War were broadcast into every household, as American troops blitzed through Iraq in Desert Storm, as a president was humiliated by his own lies, and as the Somalian nation fell in tatters. For society at the time, disillusionment reigned supreme.
Yet still the public turned towards the computer and internet for hope. Many rushed eagerly into its welcoming arms, building the rich speculative dot com bubble of the mid-late 1990s. Meanwhile the youths of the era, ominously dubbed Generation X, were defined by a culture increasingly reliant on technology and continually disillusioned by the world around them.
Tragedies such as the infamous Columbine School Shooting and the egregious links ill-informed news outlets made with video games along with a lingering sense of failed youth did much to cement societal views, leaving many warily eyeing games as dangerous flights of fancy. All the while children would increasingly flock to the home of whosoever happened to have the latest console or hottest new release. As such, many of those on the other side of the generational divide became more entrenched in their previously set views toward games, seeing them now not only as frivolous toys of errant youth but as symbols of a continually disjointed society, where interconnectivity and transparency reign.
By the turn of the century computers and internet access had skyrocketed, reaching nearly 50% of American households[2]. Those who had rushed head first into the waiting arms of the new information age had found themselves crushed by its harsh realities, leaving those errant youths of the 1990s to rebuild the virtual domains emptied by the dot com crash. It was then that the new generation, born and raised in the information age, began to sprout.
The lost generation of the 1990s took the helm from their 1980s counterparts, as interconnectivity and transparency became the defining words of the new millennium. Social networking grew from an obscure tool of college students to a booming industry capturing the fancy of societies worldwide. The internet itself matured from its wild early years into a necessary utility for individuals and businesses alike. Computers, once the tools of those on the cutting edge, were in schools around the country and reaching into households. Not only had they become ubiquitous in society, but their computational power had proven true Moore’s Law far beyond anyone’s expectations. In telecommunications, the hardline telephone gave way to networked over-the-air cellular services, a reality that seemed only a pipe-dream just a decade ago. The youths of this age were part of a society so immersed in technology that they could not recall a time when there was none.
The gaming world found itself abuzz as the sixth generation of home consoles came hot on the heels of the golden year of gaming of 1998, which had seen the release of such revolutionary titles as Half-Life which managed to change the way developers and gamers alike looked at immersion in first person games, Starcraft which refined the traditional RTS genre down to a point, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six which brought pseudo realism in games to the masses, and Baldur’s Gate which revived and expanded the CRPG genre, among countless others.
The sixth generation would not only meet but exceed the expectations of gamers worldwide, building upon the games and hardware revolutions of the 1990s. Here we would see the once great Sega open the new generation and close their console doors with the overshadowed Sega Dreamcast. Sony would capture the wonders of gamers with their technological powerhouse that was the Playstation 2. Nintendo would wait quietly with the release of the Gamecube. And the industry would be shocked by the entry of computing giant Microsoft into the home console space with the Xbox.
On the personal computer front, the age of Mac gaming would go silent as Windows became the defacto OS of choice. Microsoft hailed the new decade with the release of Windows XP, as the dedicated video card industry fell into full swing, anticipating and promising an age of even more astounding graphical fidelity and gameplay for PC enthusiasts.
Beyond mere technological advances, the modern era has seen the re-emergence of social gaming through the earliest LAN and internet enabled games of the 1990s, to the fully fleshed out social networks of PC MMOs and competitive shooters of today. Gaming has long since ceased to be a solitary venture. Even those who had once (or still do) scorned gamers as lonesome outcasts will readily admit to having fancied a game of Rock Band or Halo in their time.
Continuing further, the so-called “casual” game market has enticed and gathered an even larger market, capturing the hearts and minds of even those on the other side of the great generational divide of the late twentieth century. With family oriented home consoles like the Nintendo Wii having reached a near complete market saturation and the booming popularity of the now requisite puzzler games built into every phone and social networking application, one would be hard-pressed to find an individual who is not a gamer in some form.
And yet decade old fears and distrust of games and the technologies that power them continue. The fact that games have become such a forceful part of society today is undeniable. What those who look down their nose at games and gamers deny are their place as experiences as worthwhile as say film or music. This denial seems to stem from the inexplicable link the public at large has managed to form between games and youth cultures of the 1980s and 1990s. In the minds of many, games represent less an artistic expression of experience and more the apparently growing sense of disjointedness between society and the individuals that make it up.
While computers and the rise of the internet have allowed far more connections between people around the world, the ultimate result was a sense of losing oneself. Between the faceless words and images of internet message boards and the constant forgoing of one’s physical realities in favor of updating one’s virtual statuses, it is not difficult to see where this disjointedness arises.
It is the unfortunate luck of video games, as the medium that defined the age of information, that they would be linked in the minds of the masses with this loss of self. Those who do not understand the state of games will readily dismiss gamers as individuals who have lost their own sense of self when in reality they are anything but. Games, from their earliest incarnations, were meant to engage players in roles and experiences that, if anything, more readily aid players in the defining of themselves than any other medium.
From the designers and developers to the end-users, games represent the cutting edge of artistic expression. Just as those in the golden age of film could hardly have imagined what lay beyond their chosen medium, we now can hardly see beyond the continually evolving world of games. I do not doubt that sometime in the future games will be usurped by a medium even more expressive and accessible, but until that time I will content myself with the examination and study of the state of games.
The question still remains though, with games seemingly stuck now in their current state of society’s views, what will their future hold, and perhaps more pertinently, how will they finally be proven to a seemingly unwilling public? I shall examine and seek to answer these questions next week in the final installment of State of Games. So tune in next Sunday for my final musings and thoughts on the constantly shifting State of Games.
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