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 YOU
PROBABLY KNOW somebody like him. No matter what he does, he can't seem to
shake the game. He goes to family gatherings and can't stop talking about
it. He goes to bed with his girlfriend, promising that he'll leave it alone,
but he wakes up an hour later and heads to the machine. One night, his girlfriend
is fed up. She walks into his study where he's playing and confronts him:
"This is too much, I'm leaving." His hands stop. He looks up from the cool,
gothic glow of Ultima Online and says to her, "You don't understand. I'm
getting stronger."
He may be right. After flourishing for decades in kids markets, videogames have discovered their greatest new audience -- adults. And adults are discovering them back. Twentysomething "Tomb Raider" fanatics now crash Toy Fairs trying snatch a glimpse of Lara Croft's real world polygons. Stanford MBAs wage corporate warfare against Harvard grads in Stardock's "Entrepreneur." Last Friday, author/filmmaker/TV producer Michael Crichton announced that he is forming a game company called Timeline Studios to provide Tom Clancy's "Red Storm Entertainment" with some clear and present competition. Hollywood itself even went so far as to nominate the opening video sequence of "Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus" for an Oscar. ("Wing Commander," alas, didn't make the cut.) By any measure, the revolution in gaming is already afoot. With that in mind, FEED brings you a two-part theme issue on the industry, the aesthetics, and the future of videogames. In the first part, we feature three essays: Celebrated girl-game CD-Rom auteur Theresa Duncan (Smarty, Chop Suey, and 00) plays the most violent games on the market -- Carmaggedon, Postal, and Grand Theft Auto -- and reports back in "Trigger Finger;" Neil West, game columnist for the British magazine Arcade, writes about the rapid and often wrong-headed progress that gaming has made in past 20 years in his essay "The Virtual History Lesson;" William O'Shea talks to Robyn Miller, co-creator Myst and Riven, about his new film projects in "Lands of Promise." We've also brought together the designers responsible for the industry's most ambitious games -- Marc Laidlaw (Half-Life), Matt Householder (Diablo), Will Wright (SimCity), and Josh Randall (Thief) -- for a FEED Dialog "Next Level: The Frontiers of Game Design," moderated by New York Times game columnist JC Herz. For those looking to fire off salvos of their own, we've created a single Loop discussion about this game issue -- look for the "Loop" link on every article to join the conversation. --Austin Bunn
We've created a single Loop discussion about this game issue -- click here to join the conversation. Available in multiplayer only.
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Of
course, the courtship between adults and videogames has been happening
for years, but it's poised to become a flown-blown marriage. In the next
12 months, the multi-billion dollar games industry is set to become the
next electronics industry, period. The watershed may be Sony and Toshiba's
two billion dollar bet on the home-entertainment console PlayStation II.
In addition to playing games, the PlayStation II (due out next year) will
play CDs, DVDs, and fire up a Net connection. But if the booming market
for PC, Playstation, and Nintendo games has been built on technologic
innovation -- well, that and shotguns -- the broad popularization will
be staked on feeling. In a sly bit of public relations, Sony calls the
heart of the new PlayStation the "Emotion Engine" -- a rendering chip
that will have three times the processing speed of Intel's newest release
Pentium III and over twice the sheer power of a Silicon Graphics workstation.
The definition might be high-tech, but the result should be high-art:
extraordinary detail, graceful camera movement, and characters with arresting,
almost human expressions. But is more pixels coming at us faster
really progress? Where are the evolutions in game design happening and
where will they come from?
In
the second part, Village Voice film critic Gary Dauphin's piece "Camera
Ready" explores just how much videogame engineers owe to movie-making;
FEED editor-in-chief Steven Johnson talks to renowned urban planners William
Burch (Yale's School for Forestry and Environmental Studies), Mitchell
Moss (NYU Taub Urban Research Center), and William Mitchell (dean of the
MIT School of Architecture) about the politics of SimCity 3000 in "The
Uses of Sidewalks." And in a special version of BottomFEEDers titled "Chain
of Command," we profile the team of folks -- an illustrator, a programmer,
a marketer and a tester -- behind Requiem, the highly anticipated game
from 3DO. We've also provided a pair of pages for an industry overview:
"High Scores" gives the leadings statistics on the bestselling games,
formats, and market penetration, and "Replay" offers links to some of
the best journalism about games available on the Net.