April 12, 2011

Video game culture during wilder vs. safer times

For me video games have never been a central part of what was going on culturally, but since they've grown so much in popularity that they've eclipsed music as the main thing that young people are fascinated by, I guess it's worth a quick look at how different the world of video games was in rising-crime times, using four of the recurring themes I've noted before as a guide.

First, games were a lot harder, and it had nothing to do with technical limitations. Rather, it reflected a demand-side desire for being put to a challenge and honing skills instead of waltzing through a game and not needing skills at all. You died easily and often in games up through the early '90s. Even by the mid-'90s, games like Super Metroid had all kinds of health refills that enemies dropped, plus rooms that totally refilled your health. Not to mention the direction that Castlevania games took with Symphony of the Night, where a save room is never more than a few screens away, and which totally refills your health. By now, these so-called realistic first-person shooter games allow you to recover your health automatically as long as you hide in a corner like a little girl and don't get shot any further.

How do I know this change is due to the wussification of audience demand, and not some technological improvement on the supply side? Because it doesn't take much to implement the "automatically heal shortly after being hurt" feature -- more than one health state (i.e., not just dead or alive, but degrees of alive), a means of hurting you (like enemy contact), a means of increasing health (like power-ups, as they used to be called), and an in-game timer (not necessarily shown on the screen).

Super Mario Bros., the first game that anyone played for the Nintendo way back in 1986, had all of these things. When you're big Mario or fire Mario, a hit from an enemy shrinks you back to little Mario, and there's a timer that could count 5 or 10 seconds after you got hit, and then the game could restore your status to big or fire Mario. Why didn't they? Because that wouldn't be a game anymore -- no more than if, five minutes after being scored on in football, the refs automatically took back those 6 or 7 points and "healed" the scored-on team to healthy status. This point generalizes to all older games with the necessary features (Legend of Zelda, Ninja Gaiden, Castlevania, etc. etc.), so clearly it was something that customers just did not want. They wanted a challenge.

When the world is getting more violent, you feel more of an impulse to better yourself, whereas during safer times you don't feel like the wimpier enemies out there are worth training so hard for. (See also the change in movies about dorks or outcasts -- before they struggled to improve themselves, like in Weird Science or The Karate Kid, whereas now they are content to stay dorks, like in American Pie and Harold and Kumar.)

Second, playing games was much more social -- well, it was social at all, as opposed to not at all. Again this is not due to technical differences, like the availability of games that you can play with someone else online. The key here is the mid and late '90s, after the culture became much safer and everyone secluded, but before online video games were at all common. Those were the dark ages for playing games with another person: arcades were just about dead by then, and you rarely went over to a friend's house just to play video games, at least compared to the early '90s and earlier. Since there was virtually no online game-playing at the time, it could not have caused a die-off in social interaction among game players. Rather, this was just one piece of the larger trend toward everyone locking themselves inside and hardly traveling to less familiar spaces, especially public ones like an arcade.

Third, playing games was a lot more cooperative, not merely social. A social interaction could be competitive, after all. Although there were a handful of player-vs.-player games during the Atari and Nintendo days, these were mostly sports rip-offs (Tecmo Bowl, Bases Loaded, Blades of Steel, etc.) that did not occupy a very large share of our hours playing games. And no games in the arcade were like that, aside from the despised Karate Champ. Instead, games where two or more people could play were cooperative -- all of you would team up in order to take on a common enemy, usually some criminal organization or race of aliens who threatened to take over your city or the world.

These are by far the ones that got the most attention, generated the most enthusiasm, and are most fondly remembered today -- Contra, Double Dragon (and its sequel), Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, X-Men, Simpsons, T2, and on and on. Granted, the feeling of togetherness lasted only as long as your common enemy did, so after the game was done, you went your separate ways and didn't care what happened to them. But that's still far more than can be said for today's social interactions among game players -- basically a bunch of 13 year-olds cursing each other out over the internet.

Things started going downhill in '91-'92 when Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat became smash hits and nearly single-handedly destroyed the cooperative mode of game-playing. These games pit one player against the other in a fighting match, a genre that was to become dominant during the rest of the '90s. By 1997, GoldenEye turned the first-person shooter genre into one primarily based on player-vs.-player gameplay, rather than teaming up to fight a common enemy, as it could have easily gone if these games had been introduced in the 1980s. (I'm sure a video game version of Red Dawn would've been better than the movie.) I know that these games do allow for teaming up of players, but overwhelmingly they are played in me-against-you form.

Tellingly, there's an arcade game that looks superficially like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat, but that came out in 1990 before the violence level hit its peak -- Pit-Fighter. It digitized live actors for its visuals, just like Mortal Kombat, and it involves nothing more complicated than beating the shit out of others, while a crowd cheers you on. However, unlike the direction that developed during the '90s, here if there are two or more people playing, it's them vs. a set of common enemies. (And since 1990 was still part of the '80s, there are no butt-kicking babes as there would be in later fighting games, just a couple of psycho metal chicks.)

Rising-crime times cause people to band together to take on the common threat that looks more and more like it won't go away on its own, and that is too strong for an individual to scare away. So there's a stronger feeling of community. Falling-crime times cause people to loosen those ties, since there's no longer a need for them. So there's a stronger culture of one-upsmanship, like Stuff White People Like.

Fourth, and related to the previous two, video game players were more altruistic toward each other, especially strangers. When violence is soaring, you not only have to band together to take it on, but be prepared to give things up in order to better your team-mates, not as though you were just a bunch of mercenaries. The real test of altruism is giving up something to benefit strangers, and of course that mostly took place in arcades, which died off when people stopped trusting strangers. I'm not an online game player, but from what I've observed of my brother, online game players aren't sending each other money through PayPal or something so that all involved can keep playing together. I know that YouTube celebrities get sent random gifts from their fans, but that's not what I mean -- first, because hardly anyone is that famous, and second because that's a hierarchical form of the groupies giving to the stars, not equals on a team giving up something to benefit the others.

During those cooperative games, sometimes you would have brought more quarters with you than your partner. So, even if they were as good or better than you skill-wise, they still might be kept from playing further just because of lower wealth at the outset. Well, that's not right, you thought, so you gave them a quarter and maybe another and maybe another still, just to keep them in the game with you. Sure, you got some small benefit to yourself from that -- namely, someone to help you get through the rest of the game -- but it was a net cost to you and net benefit to them.

In fact, I remember at least two times in elementary school when I purposefully brought five dollars or more in quarters to an arcade so that I could recruit someone to help me finally beat a game that I (or anyone else) could never beat alone. "Hey man, I got ten bucks in quarters -- five for me, five for you -- you wanna try to beat Final Fight?" That was a total stranger, a boy about my age. Another time I recruited some friends and acquaintances during recess to go beat Ninja Turtles at the bowling alley after school got out, and that would've been impossible if you tried by yourself. That time it was more like $20 split four ways, since that game allowed four people to play simultaneously.

It was very costly for a kid to do, and I didn't get a huge benefit from doing it, which is why I only did this twice (that I remember). But in those days you were more willing to take a hit so that others could join in and have fun, especially if you wound up kicking ass on some game that had forever thwarted your isolated attempts to beat it. I didn't make a big show about it or lord it over them, played down their thanks, and never expected anything in return, let alone ask for it. It was one of those rank-leveling things you have to do if you want a small team to help you out like that; it has to be egalitarian.

Most histories of video games are narrowly focused either on the technological changes or the rise and fall of various businesses. I haven't seen many social histories -- or even one, that I can think of anyway. Probably because the typical video game addict is the doesn't-relate-to-people systematizer, making the technology and market share data more appealing to them. Still, anyone born between about 1975 and 1984 lived through most of these major changes in the social aspects of video games, and could likely write a good history just off the top of their head. Something more extensive and in-depth than what I've done here, where I've only stuck to the aspects that relate to my larger interest in how social life and culture changes when the violence level is rising or falling.

17 comments:

  1. One potential confounding factor is that most early video games were coin-operated. These had to involve frequent player deaths, because the owners needed players to keep dropping in quarters.

    Many of the early home console games either were direct ports of arcade games or were strongly influenced by them in terms of design principles.

    Video games have only been around during one rising-crime/falling-crime cycle, so it's hard to disentangle the cyclical effects of cultural zeitgeist with the effects of the maturation of the medium.

    By the way, a counterexample to this trend is the popularity of MMORPGs, which allow or require cooperative gameplay, often on a much larger scale than the 2- and 4-player games of the '80s, and can be quite challenging. It's not uncommon for a group to spend ten or more hours cumulatively over a period of several days or weeks learning to beat one boss.

    Also, many '80s arcade games were not really all that challenging. They often featured unlimited continues from the exact point of death, so that you were guaranteed to win as long as you dumped enough quarters in. There was challenge in winning cheaply, but none in simply winning.

    The problem with the challenge in a lot of home console games was the opposite: After failing a certain number of times you had to start over from the very beginning. Often this involved a lengthy and tedious repetition of content you had already mastered, and you'd end up spending only a small fraction of your gameplay time on content that was actually challenging to you.

    The newer video games--those that actually have any challenge to speak of--tend to do a much better job with this. Because you can save your game frequently, you don't have to deal with the tedious repetition of trivial content, and instead can spend most of your time attempting challenging content.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Born 1975. I could definitely draw up a history, but for now I'll say that current trends are swinging the pendulum back.

    In some part, this is due to consoles finally taking preeminence over PC games, with the latest generation of consoles. Something I think your analysis of video games overlooks is the relevance of rise and fall of PC gaming. Many of the early gamers moved over to PC’s and kept up the rich tradition there and expanded upon those values you were looking for in console games. With the consoles finally having the horsepower and interfaces needed, the PC crowd has slowly migrated back, bringing with them the craft and appetite.

    Regardless of the underlying causes, “old school” gamers are exerting a much stronger influence in today’s games and it’s bleeding over to the next generation. Key developments in the industry:
    - Deep and creative stories or lack thereof, make or break games now. Technical execution used to be enough – who had the best frame rate, raster shading, and polygons per second – but now beautiful games flop without developed characters and decent story. Game critics almost sound like movie critics. Mass Effect, Bioshock, newer Metal Gear Solid, newer GTA, Silent Hill, newer Call of Duty, Halo, Fable, Portal, Assassins Creed, Gears of War, Fallout, Red Dead…just a few off the top of my head.
    - Co-op is back. I don’t know which game gets to claim the crown as first, but all of a sudden every game has to have legitimate co-op modes. And they’re getting even more robust. At first it was just a generic 2-player mode, but with the latest installments of all of the big shooter titles, you now have tons of options: wave, zombie, 4+ co-op gameplay, objective, etc. They wouldn’t be there, and getting so much attention, if people weren’t playing them and asking for more.
    - Difficulty settings. This is another area I think you overlook. Even during the “lean” years, most games had multiple difficulty settings, one of which was some ridiculously hard one. So, what you’re lamenting as a decline in difficulty is simply an industry paradigm change from the default difficulty to a range of choices to make games more accessible. Newer games are going a step farther and giving players “hard core” modes where health regen, save points, and other perks are limited or eliminated.
    - A resurgence of classic arcade games and new versions of them have brought back some of that platformer magic. I’ve recently played through new installments of Mega Man (9 & 10) and they are just as evilly difficult as the originals. I read some interviews of the developers and they absolutely wanted the games to play just like the old ones. Mega Man is only one example of old games come around again.
    - Live Arcade and the other console development areas are giving Indy studios, and large studios with experimental divisions, the market area to try new things…some of which are old things. I’ve seen more and more games adding levels of difficulty that haven’t been seen before. In this sandbox, they’re finding out that even the younger players might just be interested in a challenge.
    I’m not addressing how the average kid acts and plays today, as that’s not my area of expertise, but I can say industry trends are moving in a better direction.

    ReplyDelete
  3. A lot of games came from Japan. What was happening with crime over there, and do you know if it affected Japanese consumption?

    The cooperative beatemup arcade game I liked to play was X-Men. There was an imitation of that based on the Simpsons, but that wasn't as good.

    Street Fighter Alpha 3 (for Dreamcast, I don't know about arcade) had a cooperative survival mode where two players could join up against an enemy. Being a 2D fighting game, it wasn't well designed for that kind of setup, but it allowed me and my little brother to get on opposite sides of the opponent and cheap them to death. I believe Perfect Dark also had a cooperative mode.

    ReplyDelete
  4. On old videogame difficultly: part of this was a legacy of the arcade. Arcade machines were incentivized to kill you frequently so you'd have to put in more quarters.

    Some of ways this was translated into videogames wasn't very pleasant, particularly when you'd be sent back to the beginning and have to waste time replaying levels you'd already mastered, whereas the arcade would let you keep going forward as long as you had money.

    Part of the change is kids had a lot of free time to put up with that replaying the early parts shit, but the video game playing demographic has gotten older and has less free time, so when we fail we quickly lose pateince if we can't get right back to the challenging new part that needs to be overcome.

    ReplyDelete
  5. "One potential confounding factor is that most early video games were coin-operated. These had to involve frequent player deaths, because the owners needed players to keep dropping in quarters."

    But arcade owners didn't hold a gun to customers' heads, and there was no monopoly in making arcade games. So, if players really did not want that experience, it would have been weeded out through market competition.

    E.g., Capcom or whoever makes a fun game whose main selling point is that you don't constantly die. Holding the amount of time played constant, it's true that this makes less money than the one where you die frequently.

    However, if there really had been a high demand for such games, then the always-dying games would not have been played at all -- "nuts to this frustrating crap" -- while the ones with less frequent deaths would have replaced them.

    ReplyDelete
  6. "After failing a certain number of times you had to start over from the very beginning. Often this involved a lengthy and tedious repetition of content you had already mastered, and you'd end up spending only a small fraction of your gameplay time on content that was actually challenging to you."

    Yeah but that's real life. Every time you go through a play in football, there's all that tedious stuff you've done a million times before, and only some of the current play is truly new and challenging. Same with talking to girls, making a sales pitch, hunting animals, raising crops, pasturing your flock, etc.

    Sometimes they did go too far, but overall it was better when you were sent back to repeat stuff. Compare that to playing the same game on a ROM and using save states every 5 seconds -- borrrinnggg.

    ReplyDelete
  7. "A lot of games came from Japan. What was happening with crime over there, and do you know if it affected Japanese consumption?"

    I think they've seen a steady drop since the 1950s, although I'm not sure if there were counter-trends (I think the first half of the '80s saw rising crime, but then it fell back during the later '80s).

    ReplyDelete
  8. "Regardless of the underlying causes, “old school” gamers are exerting a much stronger influence in today’s games and it’s bleeding over to the next generation."

    Right, the average age of video game players keeps rising by about a year every year, so video games each year tend to cater more to people born in that '75-'84 birth cohort.

    They at least have some memory of, and by now a desire for a return to, those harder games. If it were always a youth-oriented industry, then everything would be Pokemon by now.

    At the same time, that older demographic may like harder games, but they're also the ones leading the trend toward video games as a narrative device instead of being games, i.e. fun activities with zero narrative pretension.

    And video games just don't work as narrative devices like movies or TV or literature. They require too much conscious action and decision-making, rather than just sitting there and absorbing the experience.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Don't underestimate the power of arcade owners in the 80's. Old school Arcade owners demanded difficult games because they didn't want experienced players to monopolize a given game.

    Anybody remember the 'invincible' pterodactyle in Joust? Arcade owners wanted that in order to boot skilled players off the machine.

    But the programmers broke the promise by allowing the player to kill the pterodactyle if you're lance was the exact height of the head. It was hard enough to pull off that most players were still killed by the monster.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Oops, just read wikipedia on joust. Turns out there was a bug that made it easy to beat the pterodacyl with a different trick. But the arcade owners still were pissed.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Sounds more like a demand-side thing -- the mass of customers didn't want some whiz kid hogging a good game forever, if only one person could play at a time.

    ReplyDelete
  12. "But arcade owners didn't hold a gun to customers' heads, and there was no monopoly in making arcade games. So, if players really did not want that experience, it would have been weeded out through market competition."
    Given a choice between spending a bunch of quarters, and not having to spend any, every player is going to want the latter. But that doesn't work for the arcade owner. The challenge is to design a game that sucks as many quarters as possible out of players, without driving them away in the process. A videogame economy not based on quarters-per-play (I believe MMOs charge monthly) is going to work differently.

    "E.g., Capcom or whoever makes a fun game whose main selling point is that you don't constantly die. Holding the amount of time played constant, it's true that this makes less money than the one where you die frequently."
    And as home ownership of gaming devices (whether PCs or consoles) increased, there was indeed such a transition.

    ReplyDelete
  13. "The challenge is to design a game that sucks as many quarters as possible out of players, without driving them away in the process. "

    You're not disagreeing with anything here. The point is that this threshold has moved over time -- people were fine dumping lots of quarters in before, because they liked a challenge, whereas wimpy players today don't want to ever die.

    "And as home ownership of gaming devices (whether PCs or consoles) increased, there was indeed such a transition."

    Home ownership relative to all video game players was huge in the early 1980s, right before the crash if 1983, yet there was no transition to rarely-die games after that.

    Then when Nintendo hit big starting in 1986, ownership of home consoles skyrocketed (even more with Genesis and Super Nintendo). Yet, again, arcade games stayed pretty hard through the early '90s.

    ReplyDelete
  14. “At the same time, that older demographic may like harder games, but they're also the ones leading the trend toward video games as a narrative device instead of being games, i.e. fun activities with zero narrative pretension.

    And video games just don't work as narrative devices like movies or TV or literature. They require too much conscious action and decision-making, rather than just sitting there and absorbing the experience.”

    To the first point, the console video game space has grown significantly with the latest consoles and their online content. There are games that fit your negative mold, but there are also many, many more that don’t. By your writing, I think you’re observing a small set of gamers (nephews?), and the games they play the majority of time, and are not exploring content yourself, observing a large and diverse sample of gamers, and not observing your own samples’ lower % games played, i.e. what other games they dabble in for kicks or when they’re bored with the blockbusters.

    To your second point, au contraire, I provided a short list of games that counter your point and they’re only getting better. You’re interjecting personal opinion and prejudice against games as a narrative device. Have you played through any of the recent blockbuster titles? Studios are spending millions for development, voice actors, sound tracks, etc. and the budgets are only growing as they settle in and get comfortable with the thought of producing these behemoths. It takes a lot to shift the development paradigm from a handful of code-monkeys in a cubicles to an entire development team that includes titles usually only found in movie credits. And people are buying these new moviesque titles and asking for more, bigger, better.

    A point I missed adding before is the industry focus on online game-play over single-player content, so if you’re judging based on single-player play only, then you’re missing the point of a lot of the games in the first place (and I’ve already mentioned more difficult game modes). This is actually a big gripe within critical circles and developers are slowly swinging back around to fix this shortcoming. Point being that the “difficulty” you’re seeking is actually found in competing with other humans. Developers have poured their energies into map design, game mechanics, balancing, online fluidity, etc. and left the single player experience as an afterthought. The list I provided gives games that have rectified this problem (at least in recent titles of long-running series) or don’t even have multiplayer options. With the explosion of the narrative titles, gamers are finally getting their cake and eating it too. It’s no longer sufficient to provide either a good single-player or multi-player game.

    ReplyDelete
  15. The impression I got from my cousins in their 30s was that when they were kids they played video almost exclusively at 7-11. Nowadays you have annoying little dickhead kids talking shit on xbox live from the safety of their homes and PC magazines warning their young readers if they have rickets due to lack of sunlight from staying inside all day. Ugh. Nevermind the Game Developer's Conference where you see a bunch of grown up professional dorks and aspiring professional dorks. Going to school to make video games? Please.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Dang guys, can we all agree that this is an industry in its, at best, teens? I say teens, because it's definitely not matured and it's not in its infancy. But, seriously, you're trying to wax nostalgic on something that has existed a mere 30 years. For any new medium there is a birth, rapid development and change, and maturity process, for both the medium itself and the people involved, both producers and consumers. Radio, television, movies...I'm sure we can go back and find a lot of the same hand-wringing as they matured. It seems silly to me to make straight-line comparisons between todays games and gaming habits and those of 15+ years ago.

    ReplyDelete
  17. As Camel Feet mentioned, you don't mention the PC much. FPS games had PvP and co-op since the original Doom. Even back then, there were plenty of difficulty levels to choose from, with the most difficult levels only accessible once the game was beaten. This mechanic still exists today. It was, for me at least, a very social game because of the availability of LAN computers at school.

    The same is true for the original Warcraft and C&C. These were very social games because the best way to play them was over a LAN. 2v2 matches that involved both cooperation and competition were common.

    Also, your opinion of the social nature of today's games is overly colored by your brother's online experience. I still find fighting games and even FPS games to be very social. I spent countless hours in the past two years playing against friends in the latest Street Fighter game at my place. These games are not easy. There is a high degree of technical ability needed to correctly execute damaging combos and a high degree of strategy needed to successfully win against poor matchups. The last several FPS games I've played on the console have only been played in a social setting at someone's place, either co-op or PvP.

    The only games that have become less physically social to me are computer games. The friends I play with online are people I know and hang out with in real life, but we don't usually bring our laptops over to one person's place to play.

    There is still altruism online. You might not see real world currency exchange hands, but the real world value of certain items in MMOs is significant. I've seen a lot of these items given away for free to friends and strangers, even when the amount of time needed to acquire these items was weeks of realtime playing.

    ReplyDelete

You MUST enter a nickname with the "Name/URL" option if you're not signed in. We can't follow who is saying what if everyone is "Anonymous."