By Henry Jenkins
The real problem with video games
The changing face of child's play
Students dreaming of game design
The industry's top creative minds
This web page was designed
and created by Anne Kapler.
Last year, Americans bought over 215 million computer and video games. That’s more than two games per household. The video game industry made almost as much money from gross domestic income as Hollywood.
So
are video games a massive drain on our income, time and energy? A new
form of “cultural
pollution,” as one U.S. senator described them? The “nightmare
before Christmas,” in the words of another? Are games teaching our
children to kill, as countless op-ed pieces have warned?
No. Computer games are art—a popular art, an emerging art, a largely unrecognized art, but art nevertheless.
Over the past 25 years, games have progressed from the primitive two-paddles-and-a-ball Pong to the sophistication of Final Fantasy, a participatory story with cinema-quality graphics that unfolds over nearly 100 hours of play. The computer game has been a killer app for the home PC, increasing consumer demand for vivid graphics, rapid processing, greater memory and better sound. The release this fall of the Sony Playstation 2, coupled with the announcement of next-generation consoles by Nintendo and Microsoft, signals a dramatic increase in the resources available to game designers.
Games increasingly influence contemporary cinema, helping to define the frenetic pace and model the multi-directional plotting of Run Lola Run, providing the role-playing metaphor for Being John Malkovich and encouraging a fascination with the slippery line between reality and digital illusion in The Matrix. At high schools and colleges across the country, students discuss games with the same passions with which earlier generations debated the merits of the New American Cinema. Media studies programs report a growing number of their students want to be game designers rather than filmmakers. Find video game chats.
The time has come to take games seriously as an important new popular
art shaping the aesthetic sensibility of the 21st century.
I will admit that discussing the art of video games conjures up comic
images: tuxedo-clad and jewel-bedecked patrons admiring the latest Streetfighter,
middle-aged academics pontificating on the impact of Cubism on Tetris,
bleeps and zaps disrupting our silent contemplation at the Guggenheim.
Such images tell us more about our contemporary notion of art—as
arid and stuffy, as the property of an educated and economic elite, as
cut off from everyday experience—than they tell us about games.
