Do people still know what a good video game is?

 

 

Nowhere, perhaps, do we see this more clearly than in music. Let's take Louis Armstrong for instance. It's a name that many people have heard of, but right now I am going to let you into a secret: Louis Armstrong was a young man once. When he was a young man he played what we call today "trad jazz". And that music was very significant for its time, and more importantly than that, it was liked by young people. Armstrong did something more, however... he lead the way and inspired all kind of important musicians of the 20th century. Big names such as "Thelonius Monk" and "Miles Davis" and "John Coltrane". I have a secret about those people too. They were also young once, and they played their music when they were still young, to young audiences. It was the pop music of the day.

 

Of course, today we can look at what young people listen too. One could be accused of being a deluded snob by suggesting that today's pop music is inferior in some way. Well that's a risk I am willing to take, primarily because it it true. Music does in fact have identifiable levels of sophistication, just like every other creative form. I believe that no one would attempt to argue that fine Italian cuisine can be reasonably compared to the offerings of your average McDonalds, for instance. Palettes can be refined or unsophisticated.

 

What does concern me a great deal, however, is how with so many popular art forms the sophistication of both palette and menu are in decline. The pattern is typical. In the very early days the offerings are crude, but often have a certain life or spirit to them. Then they become more sophisticated and eventually catch the imagination of the market. At this point the art is gradually replaced by a money making machine which becomes so big that it actually has the ability to control the taste of the market. Next arrives a phase in which faith in the very qualities that made the art form special in the first place are weeded out, because such things are fickle and the money making machine desires only to generate money in a reliable way. This pasteurised art form is then practically force fed to the next generation until we have, for example, completed the transition from Louis Armstrong to Lady Gaga. Lady Gaga may be popular, but in my opinion she is to the spirit of humanity what the Japanese whaling fleet is to the Earth's ecology. Harsh? Yes, but let's face it, she deserves it.

 

 

The video game industry is still quite young, however already we see signs of the same thing going on. The other day I tried out a popular MMO game which was lauded for it's exciting space combat. What I found was a confusing unintuitive interface, sluggish controls and pretty dull experience overall. Good space combat? I think of Elite and Star Raders... on platforms with one hundredth of the computing power of today. It's all to do with elegance of design, sophistication of the art of video game development... those early games undeniably have something that the games of today have lost.

 

Are today's young video game designers and developers so influenced by the unending stream of unsophisticated game designs in the market that they can no longer break out of that mold? Have they become so accustomed to low frame rates (even 30 FPS is slow in my book), confusing interfaces, sluggish controls and crude designs that they don't even see the flaws anymore? And, given how popular some of these games are, is this also becoming true of the customers?

 

It's a troubling thought, because if I am right, there is no saving the video game industry from a future in which almost every game which is released is based on the same template, a mirror of the pop music business. It's an invertible consequence of mass marketing and this irrational human obsession with making money instead of making life worth living.

 

 

These days every new pop song seems based on the same three notes, the same three chords, the same rhythm, without any melody or the same melody over and over again, with lyrics that are either about pubescent obsessions of making up and breaking up or riding around in gangs with loaded weapons and shooting each other while swearing profusely. I feel certain that our beloved art form of video games will suffer the same fate, leaving old fogies like me reminiscing on the good old days... when we were young and actually did know better.

 

Well, bring on the rocking chair, the pipe and slippers, the croaky voice and the many sentences starting "When I was young...". I was there as the industry was born, and I watched it grow and reach a glorious peak. My heart is still there, and although many young whippersnappers may have no clue of what I am talking about, I know that one day, probably when I am long dead and buried, I'll have been proven right about video games... and Lady Gaga.