The video-game revolution seems to have been delayed.
The transformative power of game machines – for entertainment, lifestyles, technology and artistic expression – was supposed to be incontestable. By now, a typical family “game night” was expected to be a PlayStation night.
Instead, many Americans remain completely untouched or unchanged by electronic games, even though the medium’s impact appears to be nearly everywhere. Rock and hip-hop acts want to be on game soundtracks; cell phones are being developed with more game functions; and online games are goosing broadband Internet use.
Non-gamers only shrug. And that disconnect has persisted in spite of crucial generational shifts (like the many Nintendo fan boys who should now be game-playing fathers) and behemoth marketing campaigns (which include six years of Xbox evangelism from Microsoft).
Indeed, there are all manner of signs that the next big stretch of progress for the video-game industry will be straight uphill.
One possible red flag: a statistic from a recent Kaiser Family Foundation study that showed television dwarfed video games in the amount of educational respect it received from young children’s mothers. Television! That’s the brain-eating goblin that decades of research has indicted for turning children into brats and sluggards. It won’t be easy to jump-start the next generation of gamers if moms are among the conscientious objectors.
Yes, computer and video games have their own baggage, which includes a numbing repetitiveness in the service of violence and vulgarity. But interactive games were supposed to have the whip hand, if only because they have the imprimatur of the digital age. Complex games would teach us all to multi-task and solve problems in ways that would help us in school and on the job. Graduate students would turn from film to games, directing interactive dramas with alternative endings that depended on the choices and skills of the players.
Games were going to alter the way we think, tell stories, make decisions, teach, learn, work, draw, communicate and dream. Right?
For many Americans, they already have. But many isn’t the same as most.
Although widely accepted statistics are hard to come by, it’s clear that video games have a long way to go before they seep thoroughly into the collective consciousness.
Market researcher David Cole, who runs the firm DFC Intelligence, says his best estimate is that 40 percent of U.S. households own a working video-game console. Michael Pachter, an analyst for Wedbush Morgan Securities, estimates that 52 percent of households own consoles. Neither Cole nor Pachter is counting handheld devices, such as Nintendo’s Game Boy or Sony’s PlayStation Portable.
Game consoles are critical to the industry’s most ambitious plans. They’re the machines with the potential to be the hub of family entertainment centers, as well as another conduit for getting people online. Computer games also can be influential, but home PCs have far less chance of dominating living rooms and recreation rooms and the group activities that go on there.
Cole and Pachter’s console percentages aren’t much different from the “guesstimates” that were common three years ago, when the PlayStation 2, Xbox and Nintendo GameCube were in the middle of their life cycles. Those machines and their games, which featured slicker graphics and edgier content, were heavily promoted as lures for new gamers.
But the expansion of the gaming base doesn’t seem to have materialized.
Game publishers have talked for a long time about broadening the appeal of their games – fewer shoot-`em-ups, perhaps? – and some have done so. But in the end, the industry still caters overwhelmingly to the hard-core, blood-and-guts, pedal-to-the-metal young male audience that provides the most dependable buyers.
Are there innovations with character development, story angles or game styles that could make non-gaming households – non-gaming moms and wives, in particular _ feel as if they’re missing something important?
At LucasArts, the video-game realm in George Lucas’ entertainment empire, the aspirations are increasingly in that direction.
“Is there an opportunity to create content that crosses a larger `psychographic’ and demographic segment? No doubt about it,” says Jim Ward, LucasArts’ president.
But for the moment, the industry is still playing catch-up to far more entrenched forms of entertainment. Consider this: More than 80 percent of U.S. homes have two or more TV sets and 66 percent have cable.
The knee-jerk response from many in the video-game world is that they own the future. And maybe they do. A 2003 study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project reported that 70 percent of college students said they played console, computer or online games at least once in a while, and almost as many _ 65 percent _ described themselves as regular or occasional players. The study also found about the same number of college men and women saying they used video-game machines.
Some industry research contends that games already are attracting the older folks who can extend the game world’s base. But those numbers tend to be misleading. They say, for instance, that the average game player is over 30 years old. But that includes people who play free card and puzzle games online. Those aren’t the types of games that are going to drive technology innovations or upend the way we communicate. You don’t need broadband to play computer solitaire, and it’s a whole other type of gamer who’s yelling instructions into headsets to far-flung squad-mates during war games on Xbox Live.
Still, Cole and other analysts see the number of adolescent and college players as evidence that video games will eventually become a multi-generational tidal wave. Despite career and other time pressures, hard-core gaming passions would persist throughout adulthood and be omnipresent in the lives of those families’ children.
Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has long talked about that evolution, characterizing kids’ use of games as a Head Start program for the digital age. But he thinks another big catalyst will be the advertisers who are increasingly dropping product-placement ads into game scenery.
At this point, Jenkins said in an e-mail, “gamers are still a niche which is highly attractive to advertisers _ 18- to 27-year-old males . . . but once the advertisers get a toehold in this medium, and once the game industry gets used to their dollars, there is going to be a stronger incentive to broaden the games market to include other groups which are heavily targeted by advertisers.”
Broadening the game audience might have another clear benefit: It could relieve some of the pressure generated by politicians and activists who fear the possible effects of violent games. Last year, New York senator and likely presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton joined the crowd of politicians advocating legislation to restrict the sale of “Mature”-rated games, such as the “Grand Theft Auto” series, to children. So far, all such efforts have failed in the courts, which have given games ample First Amendment protection. But how many of those nervous moms from the Kaiser survey are reacting to the ways games have been stigmatized?
At least one gaming company isn’t waiting for the industry’s problems to be solved by time. Before the end of the year, Nintendo will release its new concept in game machines, the Wii (pronounced “we”). The Wii’s distinguishing feature will be a motion-sensitive, one-hand controller, more like a TV remote than the button-crammed two-hand game controllers that are traditional.
No kid would be intimidated by the standard controllers, but Nintendo is betting others have been. With the Wii, Nintendo is targeting the classically elusive non-gamer and thinks it also can re-energize regular gamers, whose other choices are the new Xbox360 and the upcoming PlayStation 3.
Previews suggest the Wii games are a hit with established gamers who are excited by the unique playing concepts that come along with the new controller. But the ultimate significance is Nintendo’s willingness to risk its video-game identity on an unproven design, largely in hopes of attracting new customers and then holding them.
In promotional videos, Nintendo (www.nintendo.com) shows people of all ages manipulating the controller for “fresh experiences.” You think “mom” when a woman smoothly moves the controller the way she would a golf putter. And a man waving the controller like a conductor’s baton for a music game could be anyone’s grandfather.
There will be plenty of hard-core games as well. But by making itself technologically friendly, Nintendo also has unveiled a vision with a benign and universal sense of fun.
Nintendo’s estimates of where the business stands are among the most conservative: It figures only a little more than 30 percent of U.S. homes have a current-generation video-game console. That presents a huge opportunity for expansion, but little is guaranteed.
Pachter, the Wedbush Morgan researcher, is projecting revenue increases just because games will be more expensive, but he foresees only a tiny increase in the total number of console games sold by 2008. Unless something big happens.
“Big” means more households, more women and a wider age range for fans. If it happens, it will translate into more than just an economic explosion for the video-game industry. The time to play video games will be taken from other activities, and people will begin to cultivate new attitudes about what constitutes good entertainment, who they want to play with and what they think about government having a say in it.
That’s when the revolution will have a real start button.
