Now, in what’s considered its seventh generation, the video game industry is going through an amazing, yet tumultuous boom.
Triple-A series, such as Call of Duty, Gears of War and Uncharted, cause millions to flock to their Xboxes or PlayStations on a nightly basis. Meanwhile, Nintendo, with the Wii, has gotten people gaming who, only a few years ago, couldn’t conceive of any game console other than the Atari.
PC-gaming is still going strong as well. Games like Team Fortress 2, World of Warcraft and League of Legends have become so interwoven with Internet culture that a new generation of PC gamers is arising within an already well-established PC-gaming community.
But as the industry expands at an almost alarming rate, there have been a number of glaring issues. Similar to the movie industry, an increasing number of games are nothing more than remakes of old ones, or unnecessary sequels to already over-milked franchises.
An all-too-apparent need for game developers to copy the current “flavor of the month” has caused an awful stagnation in creativity which, along with overpriced downloadable content and a new focus on gimmicky motion-sensitive controls, has disgruntled a number of gamers.
Obviously, this is only a small look into the current ups and downs of gaming, but this relatively young industry still has a lot of settling to do after its recent growth spurt. As it continues to grow, there are a number of paths down which the captains of the gaming industry can steer the market, and the main problem lies not with the present, but what it can become in the future.
Although on the surface Ray Bradbury’s classic, “Fahrenheit 451,” portrays the horrors of a world where the censorship and destruction of books is the norm, there is an often-overlooked theme throughout the novel.
While Guy Montag spent his days as a “firefighter,” riding the fire department’s Salamander truck, spewing book-destroying napalm rather than life-saving water, his wife spent her days at home in front of an interactive TV screen.
A sort of interactive soap opera, including a varied virtual family, kept Mildred Montag blissfully confined to her television room, distracted from the hardships of intellectualism and the discomfort of real life.
As the video game industry rakes in the money from its recent success, the major video game consoles seem to slowly be drifting away from their original purpose and are becoming “Home Entertainment Systems.”
This year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) made it clear that video games are now on the back burner as Microsoft continued to push the Kinect, Sony announced their 3D aspirations and Nintendo unveiled the Wii-U, the spiritual successor to the Wii, which brought tons of new “gamers” into the scene.
Products such as Microsoft’s Kinect and Sony’s Move encourage the creation of virtual reality games which are undemanding and an eerie harbinger of the future which Bradbury predicted. The conglomeration of video games, TV shows, movies, sports and all other sorts of hedonistic technological outlets allow people to become inactive consumers confined to their couches.
The advent of social networks and their integration into every technological device available is also apparent in the rise of what would be more aptly called the Home Entertainment Industry. Long gone are the days of meaningful conversation and insightful letters. The entirety of a person’s social interactions are made up of fleeting statuses and ambiguous “likes,” readily available on all new gaming systems.
In the end, whether the video game industry will keep its name or slowly mutate into a Bradburyian nightmare is up to the consumer. We can either choose to buy into these changes as though nothing’s wrong or we can choose to ignore the siren call of the TV and its allies in hopes that the industry turns toward the right direction.