Are Video Games Still Fun Any More?

Picture the scene.

In front of a fish cannery on a crowded dock, a billboard declares the merits of "Tuna Helper." A glamorous housewife, resplendent in June Cleaver-esque evening dress and six-inch heels, bends over to examine the contents of her behemoth stove. Like, apparently, all 1950's housewives, she gets enormous pleasure from this task, so much so, she does it in full make-up.Over the other side of the dock, a somewhat incompetent and utterly klutzy roller-blading kid has somehow found himself grinding the safety rail of a rusted whaling vessel. Before long, he's up on the mast, and is compelled to jump on the harpoon. The harpoon fires across the dock, slicing a crane cable suspending what looks suspiciously like an Easter Island head. It falls, smashing through the bottom of a ship, which begins to sink. Smokestacks tumble and inexplicably land to form ideal quarter-pipes. The desolation is immense, but the harpoon continues to fly.

Right into our housewife's rear end.

This has become a classic piece of video game humor for me. It's got everything - please, someone find a screenshot of this! The game in question is Aggressive Inline, without a doubt the console equivalent of a 'B' movie - it's buggy, sloppily executed, and probably available in your local GameStop's bargain bucket for about $3. Depending on your sense of humor, it's also either riotously funny, or something you won't be able to avert your gaze from, like a bad interstate accident.

I consider myself lucky - 'the right age' - when it comes to gaming. I saw it begin as a kid; as a teen, I'd be pumping all my pocket change into Moon Cresta at the chip shop. Like the generation after me, I have the hand-eye coordination of a fighter pilot. (But, like the generation before, I can still catch a ball. Yes, a ball. You remember those things. When people used to play outside). My first after-school job was testing video games; after graduating, I was a games developer. Another hiatus followed, having kids and stuff - and now I'm the one they call for when they can't finish those pesky bosses. I've seen a lot of changes, of course; from the purely abstract and geometric to near movie-quality realism; games that required intense amounts of imagination to even perceive, to those where you may as well sit back, couch potato, and watch the cutscenes play. And yes, I often wonder, technology aside, whether we've seen the best, or if the best is yet to come.

The problem is one of redefinition. Periodically, over the past thirty-odd years, media technology has improved, leaps and bounds. Software lags behind hardware. Developers are keen to exploit the latest new shiny thing, but it takes a while for the new shiny thing to reach maturity. The same holds true for any medium - bleeding-edge movie special effects even as recently as a decade ago look almost laughable now (there are some movies I sincerely regret ever having glimpsed on Blu-Ray), CD's with "unlockable online content" and DVD's "packed with special features" became the norm, but just because a technology means you can do something, it doesn't mean you should. There are, of course, some remarkable standouts. The light-cycle sequence in Disney's Tron for instance is still astonishing, but that's not so much because of it's technological achievement - it's more art. Toy Story showed that feature-length computer animation was possible, and indeed all the Pixar releases since have been technically astounding, but that's not what's made them successful. Storytelling, engagement, and humor trumps technology, every time.

I'll take a guess it was something like fifteen years ago when I first saw video games reach that level of maturity. No longer were games simply a question of something that side-scrolls, seemingly for ever, then inexplicably a gorilla appears and starts throwing barrels at you. Suddenly, games had stories; the ability to get emotionally involved, to be entertaining, to be humorous, and to be memorable. (There were some absolute stinkers around, of course. Nostalgia doesn't necessarily mean everything back then was great). I must admit, being a games programmer at the time was an exciting proposition. I thought nothing about the long hours - sometimes even continuous weekends fueled only by stimulants - involved in getting products out the door. This was indeed art, this was creativity, this was something good, and just being a tiny part of it made it all worthwhile. A golden time, certainly; then technology did what it always does. It had the nerve to change on us. The senior developers (in other words, those of us over 25) were tasked with making the most of these new technology challenges, because, quite simply, it was adapt or die. If we didn't release for Windows 95, or Playstation, or 3DO, or Jaguar, or Saturn, or Nintendo 64, the company would be dead within a year.

We went away and coded our experiments as quickly as we could - no mean feat indeed, as not all of us were up to the mental gymnastics required to throw around three-dimensional rotation matrices like they were going out of style, and artists used to painting everything flat in a handful of colors now had to model things with triangles. We were ready to make our presentations to The Boss, and had little idea what the reaction would be. One of our demos was for a potential driving game, unlike those we'd done before. This was simulation work - the motion and responses of the vehicle determined by some pretty hairy differential equations. This wasn't just another driving game. This drove exactly like a real car, we enthused to The Boss, and hung ourselves on those very words. "But where's the fun in that? If I want to drive a real car, I'll drive one. And kids don't want to drive a real car - that;s just not exciting, is it?" The room went silent. Next demo please. Mine. I was proud of it, indeed, and I'd got a crackerjack artist to make the best impression. The image on the screen was as close to a photograph of a real room as possible. Expectantly, everyone waited for something to happen. From the side of the screen, an animated figure walked into the scene - admittedly, he had a bit of a limp, and his head was a bit square, but he was walking. Into the scene. We took great pains to point out how he interacted with his environment, how he'd actually go behind the table, get smaller as he walked away, how when he got to the door, the screen would change, how when we took him outside he'd follow the terrain, as if he was really there, and yes, that really could be a photograph he'd be walking in. The Boss appeared unmoved, so it was time for a sympathy vote; how every single pixel on that screen had been individually calculated, and practically chiseled out with brute-force calculation. We'd slaved on this. Finally, he drew a deep breath, and responded. "Where's the game in it? Where's the fun? I don't get it."

Fortunately, we weren't the only ones who didn't have a clue. That initial burst of releases on these exciting new platforms was, as a rule, pretty desperate - it took something like a couple of years before everyone had gone through the retooling and the reinvention, before the maturity came, the quality, and the ability for the games to be entertaining again. The companies that "got it" are still around. The rest of us, long gone. And, with only occasional flux and evolution over the next few years, things got better and better. The stories got better and better, technology yielded to better art, better writing. Eventually we managed to grab the tiger by the tail. And the humor of a harpoon shooting into a housewife's rear end on a billboard wasn't just fun. It was expected. This is as entertainment industry, after all.

But the last few years haven't impressed me at all. The innovation in technology has continued; accelerated, even. Furthermore, the marketing machine has gone into overdrive. The original gamers like me are middle-aged now; the 'hardcore' gamers are our kids; and a new class of 'casual' gamers has emerged - like my parents. Grandmothers pack a Nintendo DS in their purse between their pepper spray and grocery coupons, then go home, stand on a board, and pretend to hula-hoop or throw themselves off a ski jump. I'm all for that. This is entertainment for everyone, However the technology and marketing hasn't let up long enough for the games to reach maturity. The storytelling and the humor just seem to have gone, replaced instead with a production churn of what is quite simply 'shovelware'. Casual gamers get duped with some terrible movie and TV show licenses; products which require little thought or inventiveness to deliver. The hardcore titles are a mix of vandalism, anarchy, punk culture, first-person kill-everything-that-moves, and generic Guitar Hero releases and respins. My apologies, but I aspire to be neither a punk nor a one-man killing machine. Don't even get me started on Grand Theft Auto. (Put it this way. Cop-killing and interstate pile-ups are not funny. The Blues Brothers is. Don't games makers understand the difference?)

I don't believe it's lack of talent - there are some incredibly inventive people out there, and, yes, every once in a while, an absolute gem shines out from all the others, but they're few and far between. I think it's simply a rush, the mad panic of time to market, the fact that nobody has given the technology or the marketing time to settle, there's no window of opportunity to give the developers time to grapple with each innovation and make the most of it. There are some indie houses out there, outside the system, that will do what they want, produce something off the mainstream such as Braid, Darwinia, or World Of Goo, and once in a while remind us, hey, this is what video games ought to be about. They can be funny, engaging, and tell a story.

Just give them time.

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