PRESENT TENSE:I FOUND myself prevaricating over a copy of Call of Duty: Black Ops during the week. The television ads had worn me down.
When I say “worn me down” I mean “sold it to me after 2.6 seconds”.
The ad for the computer game features explosions, guns, glory and a soldier jumping from a cliff en route to explosive, gun-filled glory. It looks remarkably real for something that was created in a few slim pieces of technology in some offices somewhere. And it induced in me that simple age-old yearning to lock myself in a room for a week, survive on caffeinated drinks with names like Mind Bomb and then emerge bearded, repulsive and with pupils the size of an underfed atom.
Many people want similar thrills. This Call of Duty title has broken the sales records set by the previous title. The game’s first-day sales alone topped €265 million: about 5.6 million copies. It’s not comparing like with like, but it’s still worth noting that Avatar took about €175 million on its opening weekend. This allows us to drag out the old top-line stats about gaming being bigger than the film industry. But just as interesting is how this has happened while, in terms of cultural analysis, much of the media has been stuck on the first level.
In cultural terms the games industry is like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: everyone knows it’s big, and millions contribute to it, but nobody really knows what to do with it.
You won’t have seen Call of Duty’s stars on the cover of magazines, or lengthy critical appraisals of the game’s place in modern culture. There were celebrities at its launch, but they were so far down the ladder of celebrity that they really just hold it against the wall for all the real stars.
Music and movie coverage is spread across the media, too, but readers know its true home is in the culture pages or the glossy magazines. But games? Coverage is thin compared to its worth, and the stories seem not to belong anywhere. They’re news stories, sometimes business ones, but the consoles are the household names, so the games themselves tend to be treated only to reviews and to occasional short pieces.
And they lack identifiable personalities. They have few stars. Lara Croft: 1990s icon. Donkey Kong: 1980s icon. Mario has been famous for three decades, but there are no Vanity Fair interviews in which he reveals the real man behind the moustache.
There’s not much clamour to interview senior physics programmers, nor much clamour to read about them. (Although they have an interesting job. The physics of Call of Duty’s guns made for a good Guardian piece this week. It’s a delicate balance of speed and skull-splattering finesse, apparently.) There is no great writing about games. There are lauded film, book, art and music critics. You’ll find their collected works on the bookshelves. You will not, though, be able to pick up a book and relish a classic review of Final Fantasy V.
Into that vacuum comes predictable mainstream coverage. The previous Call of Duty was the one that spawned outrage about a sequence in which the player could shoot an airportful of hostages. The ethics of that aside, the superficiality of games coverage allows the stereotype to be shallow, the focus to be distorted.
Ultimately, there’s the ongoing question of whether it’s art at all, whether it deserves to sit on culture pages. There are beautiful, thoughtful, experimental games, but many remain linear at heart. Find something, kill something, advance. There is an art involved, but as it blisters the thumb does it touch the soul?
The veteran movie critic Roger Ebert asked recently: “Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009. Why aren’t gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves?”
Yet the film-maker Guillermo del Toro, whose Pan’s Labyrinth and other creations are imaginative wonders, is developing a game of his own. He declared last month: “Video games are the comic books of our time.” (Actually, comic books are the comic books of this time, but let’s not be picky.) He went on: “It’s a medium that gains no respect among the intelligentsia . . . You will see that they are an art form, and anyone saying differently is a little out of touch.”
The Irish Times’s Ticket supplement expanded its games coverage this year, as a way not just of reflecting their popularity but also of getting at some of those questions. Our Life Culture pages on Monday will carry a piece on the visuals of Assassin’s Creed. Some will see that as a sign of cultural rot, others as overdue recognition of the subtleties behind encouraging millions to bash away at a controller.
In the meantime I’ve bought Call of Duty: Black Ops. I’ll see you in a week. If not, please send help. And snacks.
