I work for Sony vetting pitches and providing design support for third-party titles. Developers come to us looking for money to make games. My producer and I do a due-diligence on them and make a recommendation to senior management about the viability of the project. Then we ride herd on the team during the development process, making sure that they’re hitting their milestones and providing creative support as needed.
It’s interesting to read this thread because I spent most of yesterday putting together a four-page memo arguing that we should fund an “adult” game that was pitched to us recently. Not “adult” in the sense of “Look, boobies!”, but adult in the sense of a game about a serious topic treated in a non-exploitative way.(Sorry to be so vague, but I’m under NDA and I can’t reveal any specifics of the actual pitch.) It’s exciting because I think we actually stand a pretty good chance of getting management to approve this title.
If videogames want to be taken seriously as an adult medium, we have to earn that respect. And by “we” I mean both the developers and the audience. If all that came out of Hollywood was Steven Segall flicks and slasher porn they wouldn’t get any respect either. They earn their respectability with movies like “Letters from Iwo Jima” or “Good Night & Good Luck” – adult dramas with mature themes and subject matter.
I’m not really sure where I’m going with this. I guess I just want to say that some of in the industry ARE pushing to expand what constitutes a videogame.
I suppose they did, but as young kids or teens when Atari came out, we didn’t know too many adults who were playing video games in bars. From our perspective, there was us, the kids, who played them, and our parents & teachers, who didn’t. Truthfully, I’m a little older than the typical curve…my younger brother & sister were into Atari, but I was in HS at the time we got ours, and I didn’t find it that compelling, so to me it really was a kid thing.
That’s my point. IME, among my peers there is a nearly 1:2 correlation between spending most of their time playing videogames, and also taking serious steps to make a career out of videogames. 50% is gigantic compared to the number of people who spend most of their time watching TV and seriously endeavor to make a career out of it. That tells me that the people who spend their time playing videogames while others are watching TV are more likely to view a videogame as an intellectual exercise, and be occupied by a fascination with how they work and how they’re made, not to mention a burning desire to do it themselves. Whether that’s caused by the nature of the activity itself or the people who are generally drawn to it, I can’t say. I suspect that time will tell. As videogames become more mainstream (witness how the Wii has found relative success marketing to both serious gamers and people who don’t think of themselves as gamers), we may indeed find that they become the late 21st century’s answer to television: just another way to zone out.
For now, I can’t say I see a parallel. To me, watching TV is passive and incredibly boring, while playing videogames (mostly this, which is about a year younger than I am) is an exercise in cunning and specific, learned skills. And my experience is that, the more I play video games, the more the creative center in my brain yearns for an outlet. Looking back, I’ve found that the periods of my life where I played games the most were also the periods where I did the most writing and art of various kinds, some of it game-related (like the book I’m in the process of writing, which I won’t go into here).
fetus, I’m afraid I am not convinced that your experience represents the majority of video-game players. It certainly doesn’t describe the people I know who play them. The guys (and it’s mostly younger guys, in their 20s or early 30s) I know who do so generally say that it’s a relaxation thing.
Although certainly, anyone who is interested in them to the extent you say is not just “zoning out.”
It’s a good thing I just bought Halo 3 otherwise I’d be sorely tempted to go kill a little girl and steal her Adam even though I’m supposed to be playing a good guy now that I have a little girl of my own. Remember as Dr. Suchong says, it’s not immoral to kill the Little Sisters, it’s simply putting them out of their misery.
Well how about a “thanks” from this gamer? I don’t play like I did as a kid, but I appreciate games that don’t treat me like one either. First you have to make your video game equal to plain old good cinema, and the next thing you know, you get to make the equal to Boogie Nights.
I’m not old enough to know for sure - I’m 25 and I think I had this idea about five years ago - but my general idea is that as the Baby Boom generation aged, they noticed what Mosier said: kids have more fun. So the idea of a buttoned-up parent who put away childish things went out the window.
Miller… you’re probably right. And I would guess that stores like Wal-Mart said they won’t carry AO games before the manufacturers said they won’t make them.
That might be true. But lately, people are paying more attention to the post-college years - just this morning, the New York Times wrote about the “odyssey years” of 20-30 (although I don’t agree with everything David Brooks wrote), and a few years ago, who’d ever heard of the term “quarter-life crisis?” On the one hand, it all sounds new, but on the other it reminds me of the wanderings of the post-WWI Lost Generation.
I’ve thought that for a long time now, but had wondered if I was just seeing something that wasn’t there. Nice to see someone else had the same thought.
I’ve definitely seen it in my group of closest friends from college. It’s for very different reasons than Hemingway’s group, of course, but I think this group is asking some of the same questions about life, or wondering about some of the same issues.
“Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” - C. S. Lewis
You get a big thank-you from me too, even if I own a DS instead of a PSP . I’ve enjoyed videogames for years and I do hope that this trend towards catering to adults continues. I find Nintendo’s been doing an excellent job at pitching to adults, what with Brain Training and the upcoming Wii Fit. I just wish that the trend were pushed further, as it has in Japan. For example, if my Japanese were better, I could buy myself DS “games” that would teach me to mix drinks, choose wine, or balance my home budget. (Hmm, maybe I’d better do that last one first…) Adults buy and use game consoles, so why shouldn’t there be products that suit their interests?
But this EXACT scene was included in Mortal Kombat: Deception and Mortal Kombat: Armageddon as one of the “stage fatalities.” Game ratings are equal to movie ratings, looking at games like Mortal Kombat and God of War, it’s almost useless to argue this point.
And I have to say, I don’t see this worry that games are “just for kids” anymore. I grew up playing games and I never stopped. Video games may not yet be for the adults over 35 who didn’t “grow up” with games (as WhyNot said, they gave up their games when they went to college), but for every adult between the ages of 18 and 30, video games are our thing.
It won’t happen in five years or 50. It already happened and I would say it happened in November 2005 when the Xbox 360 generated a ton of press, not as a kid’s toy, but as a gadget for all.
None the less, we were explicitly told by the ESRB that including that scene in our game would give us an AO rating. Feeding a guy into a meat grinder is not going to earn a movie an NC-17. It might change a movie from PG-13 to R, at best. The fact that a similar scene made it into some other games (ones that were higher profile or from larger publishers than the one I worked at) doesn’t prove that the rating systems are equal, it just shows that the ESRB doesn’t consistently apply their own standards. But then, neither does the MPAA, so they do have that much in common, at least.
Miller, did you see the movie This Film Not Yet Rated? It’s an exposé of the MPAA in general and the ratings system in particular, which all turns out to be rather KGB-like. You might find it interesting.
I think it’s ridiculous that video games are censored so much as well. Where are these kids’ parents? (Plus, what’s the fun of playing a forbidden video game if all the nudity is censored?)
Additionally, I find it almost as disturbing that kids are playing video games so much in the first place. And I was astounded when I learned that they create developmental computer games (“lapware”) for infants as young as six months old. It has no proven benefit and, IMHO, kids should be moving around, exploring things with their hands and mouths and interacting more instead of sitting and watching something on a screen.
Also, I don’t see computer games as childish - in my opinion, they’re designed for an age group older than junior high. But I think that’s just my upbringing speaking - my mom used to chase us out of the house when I was a kid, telling us, “If you need something to do, I’d be more than happy to give you something to do. The floor needs scrubbing, laundry needs washed, carpets need vacuumed,…” Hell, I already have my 17-month-old helping out cleaning up his toys and pulling weeds with me. (Okay, so he sits in the bed while I pull the weeds and whaps the remainder of the weeds with a stick - but the company is nice.)
I agree with the rest of your post. I’m not even fond of those “books” with the little pictures on the side you can press for sound bites. IME, it makes little kids totally uninterested in the book part, and fascinated with the pushing buttons part. And they, quite literally, give me a headache.
My son got his first game system, a Gameboy Advance(d?), at 11, while recovering from major back surgery. I think it was the perfect time for him. He has a good underpinning of practical knowledge gleaned from Lego and K’nex and taking things apart and putting them back together again. He knows how to do chores and how to amuse himself in the woods with some sticks and a stream and no batteries. As a tween and teen, though, I think there is social value to video games - he and his friends talk about video games and play video games and swap video games. It would be a great social handicap to not be a part of that.
Sarahfeena, I used to look askance at video games as well, and elevate reading. Then I realized that video games today are not the simply eye-hand coordination mindless entertainers that you and I grew up with. Today they’re much more like interactive movies. I overhear conversations the 14 year olds are having about the plots, the art, even the themes of their favorite games. Once I thought about it, I remembered how much I loved those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books as a kid. Today’s video games are like Choose Your Own Adventure but in an audio-visual format. At least, that’s how I justify their continued existence and growing influence in his life!
And, ironically, his love for video games has increased his reading skill and frequency, as well. Video games => manga => graphic novels => regular novels => speculative nonfiction => nonfiction.
. I’ve enjoyed videogames for years and I do hope that this trend towards catering to adults continues. I find Nintendo’s been doing an excellent job at pitching to adults, what with Brain Training and the upcoming Wii Fit. I just wish that the trend were pushed further, as it has in Japan. For example, if my Japanese were better, I could buy myself DS “games” that would teach me to mix drinks, choose wine, or balance my home budget. (Hmm, maybe I’d better do that last one first…) Adults buy and use game consoles, so why shouldn’t there be products that suit their interests?