CVG as DVD

The Legendary Ron Gilbert is hosting a discussion on whether games make as much money as films over on his Grumpy Gamer. The general concensus is: Hell no! and Why are we even asking this?

Ron -- I hope I can call him Ron, he's left a comment on my site once so I feel we're more than acquaintances -- says he's hoping for the computer game equivalent of 70s movies to happen. Great. I'm looking forward to EA's Harold and Maude and seeing what America's newly envalued society does with it. Actually, though, I think computer games probably have to get through the thirties and forties first.

You can, I feel, think of everything up to the 90's in computer games as silent films and one-reelers from when the film industry was starting up and learning the grammar of film. Up until then one person could make a pretty complete game in their bedroom and then sell it to a publisher. A nascent studio system was already beginning, though, Sierra, EA, etc. This would probably make Monkey Island (Ron's legendary game) the equivalent of a Laurel & Hardy film -- Way Out West, say -- it's an amusing piece and there's a lot of effection for it from those who saw it when it was released or caught it in a revival, or on TV, at an impressionable age, but you can't help but feel it's from another era when things were done different.

Of course now there is a studio system and that system seems to be content to put out western after western or film noir or adventure story. Whatever the current fad. Ron seems to want the emergence of men of art to rescue games from the money men (before, to extend the metaphor, messing things up and putting money men in a much stronger position), but first, I think, it would be good to see Casablanca or Treasure of the Sierra Madre or, well, Bringing Up Baby. We need a Ford or a Hawks, perhaps just a Huston would do, to show what the medium is capable of while slyly playing with it's conventions.

And those conventions are hardening: FPS, RTS, Sports, Racing. That's about all you get. The last good Beat 'Em Up, for example, was probably Soul Calibur, and that was for the Dreamcast (SC II is really just a remix of that and can't count). Text adventures -- interactive fiction, if you must -- are an obscure branch of gaming that's kept remarkably heathly, but non-commercial, by a group of dedicated enthusiasts. Text input is difficult with a joypad, besides even the best of that old genre had its "hunt for the right phrase" problems. Puzzle games are only done in flash (check out jay.is for the best of last year) or for handhelds recently, it seems.

Of course, the occassional oddity appears now and then. This years ball of oddness is Katamari Damacy which has been getting great reviews. As far as I understand it the point of the game is to roll around and allow things to stick to you (which you can probably do in my apartment, but that's not really fun). That it's Japanese is probably a given, that the Japanese are so comfortable with wierder gaming ideas something that needs closer inspection. Carrying on the movie analogy, I'd guess this is Rashomon, rather than, say, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

What I'm saying is that, for all its sophistication, the games industry is still in its infancy. I don't think that it has explored what it is capable of and what people want (rather than what they will accept) with an any great detail, falling back on the same old tropes time and again, eventually rejecting those that the public get bored with, without having anything like the courage, or saftey, to challenge them with different genres or even, you know, the gaming equivalent of a musical.