[This is the piece that was rejected from a gaming website because it needed "tidying up." You can see the full story here.]
Like most of Geekdom, I’m still playing Skyrim. Can’t help it. The game is so ludicrously vast that it’s possible I’ll never stop.
My girlfriend made a worried comment the other day that with games this vast and immersive, it’s no wonder that childhood obesity is an issue.
She has a point. I can remember playing Sonic the Hedghog for hours when I was a child, and Sonic just ran around and jumped. At no point did he ever run into an Orcish dungeon and summon a demon to hurl flames into the faces of zombies. (Alright, one time he did, but it was years later and I’d just taken, like, ALL the drugs.) What are children doing these days, with games so complex they can eat entire days of an adult’s life?
It’s interesting to note that the media, as an entity, hasn’t really jumped on this particular scare yet. The once perpetual tabloid hysteria about video games being bad for everyone seems to have died down in recent years.
There are a number of possible reasons for this. Perhaps the people who are writing the papers are now a new generation who have played games themselves and know that nothing bad happens to your psyche.
Maybe the cultural watchdogs noticed that, twenty years after “Doom”, the younger generations had not, in fact, dismembered each other in an orgy of violent bloodletting and power ups, and perhaps games weren’t going to lead to the middle classes being chainsawed to death by angry space marines after all.
Or maybe – and this is my pet theory – games just got a little too sophisticated for the people who didn’t play them.
Hear me out: Here’s a screenshot from 1997’s “Carmageddon.”
For those of you raised on high-res graphics and 3D immersion, that’s a car running some dude over.
I don’t think it’s unfair to say that, if you didn’t know anything about games, seeing images like that would probably set off the “Games Are Bad” alarm in your mind.
If you happened to stroll past your offspring and saw that crudely rendered image of vehicular carnage entertaining him or her, you’d probably worry about what sort of hideous effect the games industry was having on the sanity of the nation’s youth.
By contrast, here’s a still from last year’s “Bulletstorm.”
That’s a much less obviously gory shot, largely because there’s a lot more going on onscreen. Whereas the limited technology of the day made the two chief graphical priorities of Carmageddon into “Car” and “Splattered Organs”, modern games like Bulletstorm have graphical considerations like shading, the time of day in-game, movement of foliage, realistic collision physics, impact trauma from bullets, and so on and so on.
If you wandered past your child playing Bulletstorm, as a non-gamer you’d probably have no idea what was going on. In much the same way that older generations initially dismissed rap music as “just a bunch of noise”, you won’t understand gaming unless you’re part of the culture. It’s just a bunch of confusing images.
From a passing glance, it might actually look like games have gotten less violent. In actual fact, for those who don’t know, Bulletstorm rewards you for killing enemies in the most sadistic ways you can think of. Given the choice between the 1997 death (run over at speed) and the 2011 alternative (knee-capped with a pistol and then kicked penis-first into a giant cactus) I think I know which I’d prefer.
So this, I believe, is why tabloid hysteria has died down. People who have never played games just don’t have a clue what’s going on anymore, let alone what they should be offended by.
Where does that leave the fat kids I mentioned at the start?
In pretty good shape, I’d say.
For many of the same reasons that non-gamers have come to ignore the industry, I’m really not sure young gamers are in any danger from the hyper-immersive likes of Skyrim.
There’s a reason I played Sonic the Hedgehog and Streets of Rage for hours when I was eight years old; they’re simple and fun.
I can honestly say that the reason I can now play Skyrim for hours is that I feel a sense of duty to complete the ridiculously convoluted quests I’m handed. Last night I saw a woman stabbed to death in a marketplace by a stranger, and now I’m on a thousand mile trek to find out why, because dammit, that woman-shaped clump of pixels on screen didn’t deserve to die like that, and I want to make whoever is responsible pay!
Similarly, one of the finest games of all time, 2010’s Uncharted 2, is a delight for older players because of the intelligent dialogue between characters, from the subtle intrigue of the double-agent characters to the sexual tension between the hero and a journalist who is searching for a Russian war criminal.
Heavy Rain, meanwhile, was scarily close to being a real-life simulator, with your character required to brush their teeth and cook dinner, but also deal with feelings of inadequacy as a parent and the threat of a serial killer who slowly drowned his victims.
All of which is a little heavy for your average pre-teen.
Kids, much like girls, just want to have fun. They aren’t looking for a digital recreation of War and Peace, they just want some mindless entertainment, same as I did. And take it from me: After three hours of bouncing a blue hedgehog around, it gets a bit samey. I can’t imagine it’ll be any different for modern children. They’ll get bored, and probably want to go and play football.
Kids aren’t the ones who’ll get fat because of immersive, plot-heavy videogames. It’s the rest of us who should be worried about that.
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