As a hobby and as an industry, gaming is going through some wicked growing pains. Games are truly the rock & roll of this generation; non-gamers decry it as childish escapism at best, a ticking time-bomb of societal menace at worst, while we in the fold can rarely muster up anything more effective as a counterpoint than “you’ll see if you just give ‘em a try!” While that parry could stand a chance to some change-averse politico with an album they can simply passively listen to, it suffers in this medium of interactive entertainment. Realistically, who is going to take time away from railing against games as harbingers of the apocalypse long enough to sit down with a controller and struggle through the thousand “how do I make my guy do this?” situations gamers adapted to long ago?
We could certainly help our own struggle for acceptance, though, if we’d stop wanting it both ways.
The average gamer is 32 years old. It’s a statistic that shocks many when they first hear it, but it makes sense; the generation that made Nintendo billionaires in the eighties has grown up and, by and large, kept playing around jobs and raising families. And we are many, enough to skew the average up from the gamers targeted by annual Hannah Montana and That’s So Raven games.
What hasn’t shifted with this median age, though, is the public perception of games as being just for kids. Whenever violent or sexual content in gaming is brought up in the media, it is universally accompanied by some blowhard espousing the haggard old platitude, “Won’t someone think of the children?” as if it’s still relevant or fresh. Gamers profess frustration at outsiders’ ignorance of our hobby, but there’s something to be said for stepping out of your experience and viewing an issue through your opponent’s eyes.
It lets you see message boards filled with gamers’ ire that they have to “settle” for just the hint of horrific, unsparing depictions of evisceration in games like Manhunt 2, instead of the full unblinking torture-porn glory of it all, once the censors got done with it. It lets you see whole sectors of gamers thrown into an outrage when a highly-anticipated title only gets an 8.8 out of 10 from a professional reviewer upon release.
It lets you see the gaming industry crying from the rafters that it wants to be respected as a reputable art form for people of varying ages, just as film or literature are, and yet being complacent in selling favorable reviews to advertisers. Or only using the 7-10 range on a 10 point review scale to avoid angering passion-blinded fanboys. Or printing gushing previews of upcoming titles in which some hot new game is lauded for being “just like a blockbuster movie” in its presentation, as if the lowest common denominator just isn’t low enough.
From an outsider’s eye, the industry is run by children, for children, and begs to be marginalized. Roger Ebert’s infamous and oft-repeated belief that games can never be considered art is understandable, when our greatest knock-kneed aspiration is to create an experience emulating a Michael Bay film, which itself could never be confused for art.
This isn’t simple curmudgeon’s semantics; aspiring to emulate film is not the problem. The problem, for gamers professing this hobby as an adult’s enterprise, is the dearth of intelligent, thought-provoking, truly adult games at retail, and the palsied acceptance by consumers of the few which exist. The Okamis and Icos and Beyond Good & Evils of the world languish at the feet of Generic Space Marine Shooter #3476 and Amnesiac With Ridiculous Hair Fights Evil With A Sword The Size of a Pontiac, Volume MCXXXVIII, while gamers pretend they have no voice in forcing gaming’s maturation. The encouraging success of titles like Bioshock and Mass Effect underscores this voice; the developers are listening, and will only churn out what we want. And what we want, evidently, are at least seven World War II-themed first-person shooters every year.
Escapist fare is fine. The film industry floats on it every summer. But they also have a balance, with artistic expressions that stand to broaden our perspective of our world and our place in it. Games, more often than not, settle for the prettiest explosions they can generate, or the skimpiest outfits, or the most caringly-depicted disembowelings.
Perhaps the worst part of all of this is that the outsider looks at something like Manhunt 2 and assumes it’s what we mean when we describe ‘mature’ gaming. Show me the first person ready to rally around Manhunt 2 as a bellwether for adult gaming and I’ll show you a misguided and probably teenaged debater who has yet to truly examine what adults truly want from their games, as it would take precious time away from blanketing gaming website message boards with posts decrying the juvenilia of the industry.
Especially when it could all be made okay, and the outsiders would all see, if they’d just give ‘em a try.