Middle aged gamers, do they change the game?
source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/24/arts/television/24vide.html?ref=arts
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- St_Alia_10191
- added this
Seth Schiesel writes, "The first generation to actually grow up playing video games is turning 40. As a group, they aren’t in the basement and they’re not maladjusted. They are responsible middle-aged parents, and many are coming into the full flower of their professional lives. People who play video games (most of whom probably do not consider themselves “gamers”) are moving into positions of power all over our society, even in the White House.
When Bill Burton, a deputy White House press secretary, tried to explain this week just how antiquated Obama staffers found the Bush computer systems, he used an analogy that should have made immediate sense to anyone under the age of, oh, 40. “It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari,” he told The Washington Post.
As recently as five years ago, video games were in danger of disappearing into the same cultural netherworld that comic books fell into many decades ago. In the United States (unlike, say, in Japan), it remains an act of fairly extreme cultural deviance to tell your friends that you are going to stay home on a Friday night reading comic books.
The great lurch toward grudging respectability that began a few years ago will almost certainly continue in 2009, if only because of the continuing popularity of mass fare like Wii bowling, Guitar Hero and Rock Band, not to mention Madden. And so video games are becoming acceptable in the manner that watching reality shows or sports on TV all night is acceptable. Bravo. But that can’t be all games are capable of. The real test of 2009 is whether games with a bit more intellectual and artistic ambition can continue to flourish."
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- groups:
- Entertainment, Tech, Gamers
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- tags:
- Entertainment, Tech, Video Games, Gamers
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MizPiz
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Hopefully with more people playing and refrencing them, video games would finally recognize as an art form.
- 3 years ago
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MizPiz
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cerealforeal
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Realism ftw.
- 3 years ago
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cerealforeal
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SW2
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Games are a terrific educational tool in the correct setting.
How will they change? Audiences have less time to devote to narrative based gaming and this is showing through already. Titles such as Call of Duty are front loading their releases so that the levels are fairly short and the focus for achievements is online.
Social games such as LittleBigPlanet, Singstar, GuitarHero and RockBand allow people to actually play together which makes it far more mainstream.
- 3 years ago
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SW2
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pjacobs51
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My son is getting his Masters in game programming at Digipen, up in Seattle. Their website has bunches of free test games you can try out. Just look up "Digipen games"
- 3 years ago
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pjacobs51
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hersheleh
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Speaking of games becoming more high art. This is a tough juggling act that has to be played between apeasing market profits and expanding peoples minds. The difficulty is in the cost. Making games these days can be just as, if not more, expensive than making feature films. That is if you want all the fancy graphics. If not there are plenty text based adventures out there to stimulate your mind for years to come.
- 3 years ago
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hersheleh
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St_Alia_10191
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hersheleh:
True true. A friend of mine works for Volition, they test video games and created Saints Row 2 (which Yahtzee recently crowned his Game of the Year '08). A good game like that takes thousands of man-hours to produce.
- 3 years ago
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St_Alia_10191
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numinant
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hersheleh:
game companies focus far too much on trying to push the technology, rather than embracing simpler methods that work. i look forward to the expansion of an 'indie' game movement.
- 3 years ago
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numinant
