[ Welcome to The Angry Bear, PC Editor Allen Rausch's biweekly column about whatever intrigued or ticked him off lately. This is the first taste of our new editorial direction that's arrived in the launch of our editor columns. Insightful or funny, controversial or informative, you'll want to check out what we have to say about gaming. Our columns will run every day, Monday through Thursday. ]
If Andy Serkis' ears have been burning for the past few days, let me be the first to apologize. He should have known better than to wade into the crosshairs of gaming when he commented in a recent interview, "Games... there's no heart in them. They're not about anything that is lasting. We put so much into the writing of film scripts and plays, but not into games. And games are where the audience is going to be." The result of that news story and the raft of comments that followed was a fascinating discussion on whether or not games have a heart, or if they can -- and what that even means.
Gamers are defensive about their chosen hobby. And why not? Like jazz aficionados in the '30s or comic book fans in the '50s, they're constantly bombarded with negative messages from mainstream culture that derides what they love as -- at best -- a harmless amusement suitable for small children. At its worst, gaming is the bearded Visigoth hammering at the walls of Western culture, responsible for everything from a falling literacy rate to school shootings to (for all we know) the heartbreak of psoriasis.
Despite this, gaming has flourished. And as the first "Atari-wave" gamers hit their mid-40s and take up semi-responsible positions in society, gaming and gaming culture have at last begun to truly enter the mainstream. Incumbent upon gamers, then, is the need to stop reacting in knee-jerk fashion to all the criticism that gets aimed at our hobby and start parsing what comes through -- to separate the constructive wheat from the reactionary chaff. "In the next generation of kids, you're going to see a lot of storytelling in games," Serkis' continues in the interview. "And I think it's important to invest in that. I absolutely think that gaming is a massive storytelling arena in the making and now the technology has arrived to do that." It seems pretty clear to me that Serkis isn't anti-game, and that perhaps he's actually trying to offer some constructive criticism.
Perhaps we might start taking the time to listen.
At the turn of the 20th Century, the mere novelty of seeing moving pictures was enough to pull in the crowds. As the novelty factor wore off, though, the medium had to grow. It had to develop its own artistic language. At first this meant adding things like narrative, plot and the idea of separate scenes that told a story. It seems impossible to imagine now, but the first "hit" films were of things like trains going into tunnels and filmed horse races. Things that we now consider the basic building blocks of a "movie" had to be invented, experimented with, and eventually perfected to the point where we no longer think of things like a "plot" or a "script" being innovative at all. The 1930s, though, was when "moving pictures" finally became "the movies."
Counting from 1977, the year PONG first hit it big, that's exactly where we are now. Games have 30+ years of history behind them. The "experimental" years where we were inventing the equivalent of the movie plot are behind us. To forestall the inevitable tide of e-mails comparing me to the famous patent guy who said that everything that will be invented has already been invented, I'm not saying that there won't be more evolutionary and revolutionary innovations to come out of gaming. There most certainly will be. What I'm talking about is the end of the Kitty Hawk era of gaming. The Wright Brothers proved that heavier-than-air flight was possible. No one can ever replicate that achievement in the same way that no one will ever again create a videogame with the historical impact of PONG. The question is where we want to go from here.
