For most of my life and long before it began, video games struggled to break into the mainstream and gain status as a respectable art. And with good reason: rose-tinted glasses or not, even the gaming pioneers of the Ford-Carter years would surely admit that their little hobby was just that, a curious plaything more remarkable for simply working than for touching the heart or soul. The Atari and Intellivision era brought higher fidelity to the medium as it stonewalled its way into the American consciousness with heavy marketing campaigns. Development fervor exploded before anyone knew it, and quality control was a distant afterthought. Games were everywhere, and so were their dedicated, magazine-reading fans. But to the uninformed masses picking up a sleek-looking cartridge off the shelf, the chances of going home with something fun — or even non-embarrassing — were about the same as finding gold doubloons in a barrel of dead fish. Games were broken and shallow, and it wasn’t long before the novelty wore off for most Americans. The affair was over. That’s probably why there are still 20 truckloads of unsold “E.T. the Extra Terrestrial” cartridges for the Atari 2600 buried in Alamogordo, N.M.
R.I.P. Video Games, 1947-1983.
In the oft-retold miracle of the industry, of course, the arc of history has kindly turned most of the medium’s main obstacles into laughably false clichés. Games today are no more inherently shallow, vulgar or childish than any other brand of storytelling. But that very framework — seeing games as storytelling devices — is a vestigial descendant of that same misunderstanding that, back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, relegated games to the artistically impotent sideline of comics and anime in the first place. Despite expectations to the contrary, games aren’t inherently about stories, per se. They’re interactive experiences from which stories can sometimes emerge, whether they’re totally scripted or unique to every player.
When Nintendo reinvigorated American gamers in 1985, it made a smart decision. It put stories aside and made them entirely subservient to gameplay (it kills me to say it, but I suppose there’s a potential comparison to adult films there: focus on the good stuff). As it turned out, making games with gameplay in mind was a winning formula, and the most successful titles of the time basically didn’t have stories at all — Mario, Final Fantasy, Zelda and so on. They didn’t need to. By having only the most basic of premises, they also blazed the trail for one of the signatures of the medium — letting players tell their own story, in their mind, based on simple actions. That could’ve been the redemptive trait that games “needed,” at least for the mainstream consumer who would never have known it anyway. But much of the time, games stepped into what many people considered the sacred, story-driven province of books, film and theatre. That, of course, typically resulted in them being lambasted or ignored.
Today, the script has been reversed. Like one might’ve expected in 1985, people can sit down and watch their son or daughter play a game like Uncharted or Call of Duty (notice that I said watch) and have nearly the same experience as the person holding the controller. For better or worse, mainstream games today tend to mimic Hollywood more than ever. It might be inevitable, really. That’s mostly because developers can finally take that approach without falling embarrassingly short of the mark, at least in terms of visuals — if it looks good at a glance and has a story pitch that can dance with commercials for ABC’s fall lineup, then armchair quarterbacks and soccer moms across the country will have a much better chance of picking it up.
It’s not a tragedy by any stretch, and I’ll always accept the way the market rolls the dice. But even so, we find ourselves in an era when the common perception of what a video game is, exactly, is once again radically divided between the people who play them and those who don’t. Being who I am, though, I feel increasingly removed from the days of my youth, in the quiet years between the crash of ‘83 and the dawn of movie-quality rendering on home consoles. Back then, games that reigned supreme had stark but inspiring presentation and engaged my imagination like a masterful novel.
Even if they’re not on top anymore, those games are still out there. So let me close this tale with a shout-out to the little guys — the indie developers, the college guys making iOS games, the publishers still willing to bring this stuff to Steam and XBLA and even the folks making motion control into something meaningful. Keep your heads high and do your thing. People still notice, even if the sales charts don’t always show it.