Just written a short-ish column for the Guardian comment pages about the forthcoming PS3 game console - an example of the hyper-real cul-de-sac that computer games are heading into, where verisimilitude becomes as important as the gameplay itself. They've edited it a little too neatly for their slot, so I'm putting the original copy in extended post below, along with a whole load of hyperlinks to references that aren't in the Guardian original.
UPDATE: Conducted a very nice interview with an alternative radio station in Australia, Radio Adelaide, about this column. You can download the clip from here, for the next month or two.
PLAYSTATION 3
Guardian Comment, 9 November, 2006
Pre-edited version
Pat Kane
As the tidal wave of the new eco-Puritanism begins to swell darkly on the horizon, it may not be the best of times to be launching your latest non-recyclable chunk of plastic and silicon. And even as these kind of chunks go, Sony’s new computer game console, PlayStation3 – launched in Japan and the US at the end of this week, and in the UK in the Spring – hardly covers itself in glory.
If the purpose of this machine, in the words of Neil Postman, was “to amuse ourselves to death”, it could hardly be better fashioned. As well as supplanting your DVD player using Blu-Ray technology (which sounds like a particularly cheesy superhero), the PS3 will bring “the power of a supercomputer to your living room”, creating the “next generation of computer games”.
Yet this awesome number-crunching power is harnessed to the most mediocre and bathetic of ends – the hyperrealism of its images. Trillions of calculations will be devoted to getting the ripple of a muscle, or the fold of a cloth, absolutely right.
The opening list of titles for the PS3 reminds us of how strangely we comport ourselves before our computer games. While WWII squadrons dive-bomb, Tiger Woods thwacks it into the rough, and Genji swishes his blade liberally and lethally, we players sit tautly on our couches, holding our controls like a votive offering, twitching our thumbs.
We call computer games “interactive” media, but we should more accurately call them interpassive. Self-confined to our homes and hearths, we surrender our personal adventurousness to these virtual proxies on screen. They conquer and excel and defend themselves on our behalf, in scenarios of clichéd battle and ersatz struggle.
The dominance of military values in computer games – an industry now bigger than Hollywood - seems just too appropriate to an age of pre-emptive warfare. These war games are almost like an “opium of the people”, in that old-fashioned sense: for players, they provide an intoxicating experience of power and mastery, in which the societal legitimacy of war itself never gets questioned.
If its dazzling capacity for verisimilitude gets properly exploited – and the US Army has already heavily invested in the games industry - the PS3 could easily be the ultimate weapon of mass distraction. In its black casing with silver trimming, the console even looks a shaving from the side of a stealth bomber.
Yet there are rumblings in the industry that the PS3 might not be the automatic success that Sony expects. And that’s partly because other games-makers have decided that there might be a demand for a bit more, well, playfulness in these play machines, beyond the sturm-und-drang.
Nintendo’s direct competitor to PS3, the Wii (say it out loud, and yes, you may snigger) encourages happy, goofy families to wave the controller about at a screen, pretending to do table tennis or stroke virtual pets. Their handheld games like Brain Age are now being used by senior citizens to maintain their mental sharpness. Sony has a few family-friendly applications – notably Singstar, a karaoke-style game – but in general, as a wander round the racks of any games-store easily reveals, it’s only warriors and athletes that get to perform at the Playstation.
What’s also disappointing is that Sony seems to have ignored the huge debate around “serious” games – the pressure from those in government, activism, education and the arts to open up the undoubted power of these platforms to different, less market-driven narratives.
At last week’s Serious Games Summit in Washington, games like the UN’s Food Force (where you compete to provide the best aid strategy) or Re-Mission (a morale-booster for young cancer patients) show the possibilities. But none of these organisations could afford the huge development costs involved in producing games for Playstation or Microsoft’s X-Box. And as for educational uses? Let’s just note that one of the most recent Playstation offerings is Bully, which pits its two-fisted protagonist against a vicious boarding school environment.
With such an image problem, the games industry should be thinking of ways to support initiatives that show gaming as the coming literacy, rather than a pervasive pathology. Indeed, where is the computer game that does for environmental consciousness what Will Wright’s SimCity did for a generation of aspirant young architects and urban planners?
Even so, you might not choose to play such an eco-game on the PS3. Reports are that its demands on electrical power are more than twice that of its immediate rivals, and eight times that of its predecessor. That seems like a fitting technical fact for an industry and art-form which seriously needs to address its corpulence, perhaps even decadence.
Pat Kane is the author of The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living, http://theplayethic.typepad.com
Recent Comments