By Keith Stuart: Charlie Brooker dominated Channel 4′s Saturday night schedule with his wry look at 25 of the most influential video games ever made. Did it get its message across?
Video games remain in a weird liminal zone between fan culture and mainstream understanding – I think Charlie Brooker’s programme, How Video Games Changed The World, which aired on Channel 4 on Saturday night, caught something of that. The spread of the medium, from Pong in 1972 to Twitter (yes Twitter) today, has been one of quiet contagion. Once in a while an icon bubbles into mass acceptance, so that you get Pac-Man cartoons, and Lara Croft on the cover of Face Magazine and World of Warcraft parodied on South Park, but much of the magic remains arcane. If video games have changed the world, what Brooker showed was that they have done so without anyone’s permission.
And sure, the format of the show – a list punctuated by talking heads and library footage – has been overworked to the point of exhaustion, but it provided a strong framework in this instance. From seeing Jeff Minter describe the appeal of Space Invaders as essentially “tidying up”, to Ron Gilbert admitting how the Secret of Monkey Island was heavily influenced by the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, there was interesting insight here, from people who have shaped the medium and know it inside out.
The choice of games was provocative too. We were always going to see Street Fighter II, GTA III and The Sims. But it was good to see both bad and good outliers – like Night Trap and Pa Rappa the Rapper – earning mentions due to their considerable contemporary impact, rather than any lasting global impression. If we’re talking about how video games changed the world then Night Trap make sense: it married the cinematic and interactive, it tested the censors and it suggested a future in which game narratives could be troubling, even perverse. But yes, it was also shit.
Lara and horror
Some sections nicely revisited old arguments from the past. There was the debate around Lara Croft and whether she represented a feminist presence or an objectified plaything. I loved what Aoife Wilson of Official Xbox Magazine said about it – the fact that her 10-year-old self didn’t care about any of the controversy, she was just thrilled to see a womanon screen who she could control. Rab Florence was brilliant on Doom, comparing the idea of being scared by that game to early cinema goers frightened by footage of a train coming toward them. Later, the concept of arms manufacturers licensing their weapons to the makers of titles like Call of Duty to boost the profile of their deadly products sent a true chill through the programme.
Sure, there were major omissions – there were always going to be. Getting upset and angry over that seems weird to me. Brooker and his writers Matt Lees, Cara Ellison and Jon Blyth had a clear throughline they wanted to project, and they did it with clarity and humour. Ending on Twitter – chronologically, rather than in terms of merit – was clever, I thought. Because the one obvious way games have changed the world is by infecting every other user interface on the planet. From Sky Sports stats to social network “likes”, the media landscape is now awash with the semiotics and reward systems invented by video games. Those who shouted “Twitter isn’t a game, I hate Twitter!” missed the point. Twitter, like it or not, has changed the world, and within its complex machinery are the mechanics and compulsion loops of games.
What I also liked about the show was that it illustrated how dated many preconceptions about gaming are. That it’s just for teenage boys, that it can’t explore real-world issues, that it is exclusively heterosexual. Much mainstream understanding of games comes from the blockbusters that can afford to advertise on TV or fill the shelves at Tesco. But that’s like imagining that all cinema is Michael Bay and Disney animations and super heroes. Matt Lees’ analysis of Papers, Please as a game that introduces the concept of guilt as a mechanic, and that shows how evil is insidious and gradual, was excellent and important. I think it’s games like Papers, Please and Gone Home that truly point toward where this industry will go next.
Mining for meaning
I was on it too, of course. I mispronounced the Japanese term “kawaii” to the chagrin of many colleagues, and one internet viewer dismissed my contributions as “excruciating”. I’ve had some nice comments as well, thankfully, many referring to the section in which I credit Minecraft with changing my autistic son’s life. So far, no one seems to have questioned that statement – no one seems to have spluttered indignantly about how games are invariably a negative or marginal influence, and that he should be reading books. He does read books. He reads, he plays Lego, he takes all of his action figures into the bath and imagines long, detailed naval battles for them. He goes to the park, he has friends around. He does all that.
Oh, but he also has a gigantic virtual playground in which he now designs and builds vast surreal citadels, filled with traps and ocelots. Here, he is the king, the master, and he takes great pleasure in explaining it all to others – because God knows enough of his time is spent having others explaining things to him. My wife, who knows or cares nothing about games, watched the programme and said it was nice to understand why I cared so much about them, to have that illustrated in such a digestible way. My mum rang me up and said she’d enjoyed it – even though I said fuck on national television. She said my dad would have been fascinated by the programme and she’s right.
Obviously, I’m not a disinterested observer. I took a part in the show, and enjoyed it too. I would do it again. And while no attempt to explore the appeal or the influence of games will ever be perfect, it was a very decent stab at it, with many memorable moments. The sad thing is, we many have to wait many months for another broadcast treatment of the medium. While Radio 4′s Front Row promised to make games part of its regular remit, it hasn’t; the Culture Show, too, only seems interested when a new Grand Theft Auto comes out. With so much going on in games, these radio and television commissioners are missing out entirely – they are almost unconsciously ceding responsibility to YouTubers and specialist online documentary makers. In doing so, they are failing their audiences. Because games mean something, they are fascinating, and increasingly, whether we realise it or not, they are changing us.
http://www.theguardian.com/us