Gaming, on and off the armchair
Andy Ruddock's article on violent computer games on The Conversation last week mentions Henry Jenkins' opinion that "the trouble with most gaming violence ... was that it was boring" following the Columbine Massacre in the US in 1999.
Having myself tired of yet another first-person shooter around the same time, I'm inclined to agree with Jenkins. To judge by the popularity of games like World of Warcraft and the endless stream of blowing-stuff-up that appears in games reviews in APC Magazine and the conversations of my gaming acquaintances, however, millions of gamers disagree.
Reading through said games reviews, and enduring such conversations, it's easy for scholarly types to dismiss computer games as the most repetitive and unimaginitive form of art ever devised. It being cricket season in Australia, however, reminded me that games like cricket, baseball and various forms of football have been played by more or less the same rules for 150 years or so, and yet people (including me) still find them interesting to both play and watch.
So why shouldn't computer games have the same longevity? If playing a constantly-evolving roster of opponents at cricket and football can keep us entertained for 150 years, why not a constantly-evolving roster of computerised space aliens, fantastical creatures, and terrorists?
Some classic computer games may conceivably have this sort of longevity: I still think fondly of games like Pacman, Tetris and Bubble Bobble long after I lost interest in Doom, Quake and all their clones. Jenkins' and my complaints of repetitive violence might just be symptoms of Theodore Sturgeon's classic observation that "ninety percent of everything is crap" — it's not like every film, book or piece of music released is a masterpiece of inspiration and originality, either.
Game enthusiasts of the 1990s and 2000s often seemed to me to be pre-occupied with the quality of sound and graphics, rather like cricketers being pre-occupied with the construction of bats and balls. A visit to the International Cricket Hall of Fame (formerly the Bradman Museum of Cricket) earlier this week, however, reminded me that the rules and equipment used in cricket developed for a century or more before what we now recognise as the first test match in 1877. In a hundred years' time, will we look back on gamers of the 1990s in the same way we look back on those who experimented with the lengths of pitches, the construction of bats, and styles of bowling in the 1800's?
