Video Games: Not Mainstream Yet

 

“Hi!” I said, approaching the customer service desk at Circuit City.

“Hello, can I help you?” she returned with a smile.

 ”Yes, I’m looking for the Orange Box for PC–it’s a piece of software.  I’m wondering if you have it in?”

Her smile faltered.

“I’m sorry, Orange…what?”

I produced the weekend advertisement I had snagged on my way in for just such an occurrence, opening it to the video games page, in which the Orange Box was prominently displayed.  I laid it on the counter facing towards her and pointed at it. 

“This…” I said.  “The Orange Box.  It says here it was supposed to come in yesterday, and that the Xbox version is guaranteed by 2 p.m. today.  I called earlier for the PC version, but they said it wasn’t here.”

“Oh.”  was her only response.  She stepped back slowly and looked around.  I wasn’t sure if she was hoping someone else would come along to help me, or if she was just looking to see where these fabled “games” were held. I could see a stack of new media just opened on the back counter, and she half heartedly shuffled through them before returning.

“Um…I’m not…hmm…well, let me go check…let’s see if…huh–have you…have you checked the games rack over there?”  she said finally, perhaps hoping that I might leave her be.  When I replied that I had already looked there, she was deflated and unsure of what else to do.  She looked relieved when another employee happened to walk by. 

“HEY!” she said, grabbing him by the arm as he scooted past her, “do we have ‘the Orange Box?’ “  She made a scrunched-up face whenever she was forced to say these words, as if there was suddenly a pungent odor in the room.

“Yeah,” the male employee returned casually.  He almost seemed bothered to be asked.  “It’s right back here.” He pointed to the stack she had just rummaged through.  They went back together and I heard an exclamation of recognition followed by them both returning to the counter, as proud as can be.

“Here you go!” she said.  I stared at the counter, where an Orange Box for the 360 now sat.  I sighed, smiled as politely as I could, and said, “Sorry, this is for the 360.  I said I’m looking for the PC version.”

They both looked at me as if I had asked them I wanted to buy a dishwasher that could play HD-DVD’s in 1080p.  I think they half wanted to check again to make sure that this wasn’t the right product, but then the guy said, “Um…ok, I’ll look in the back.” 

He departed, leaving me alone with the sheepish female employee.  We smiled awkwardly at each other, not knowing what to do and then finally deciding to busy ourselves with made up tasks–she shuffled papers and went to stack and restack various DVDs in the back room while I pretended I was extremely interested in Entertainment Weekly’s latest publication. 

After a few minutes, the male employee came back with the PC version of the Orange Box.  “Here you go,” he said, before dumping it on the counter and hurrying off to his other tasks.  I promptly paid for my item and left, laughing at the whole incident from the door to my car.

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Video game aren’t as mainstream as we think we are.  This year’s casual games boom has certainly increased the amount of people who are playing video games, and most people know what a “Wii” is, but we have a long way to go. 

As I look over various gaming site forums, people talk as if a few stories in the national news media and the popularity of the Wii means that gaming has become accepted, that we no longer have to be careful about who we relate our passion to, that most people get it.  There are constant stories in the media about the growth of gaming into a mainstream industry–I’ve even covered some of the statistics myself.  But you’ll never find me making the assumption that video games aren’t still viewed as foreign and childish by a majority of people–let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

I’ve been doing some thinking lately about where gaming is as an entertainment medium, and it’s clear that we’re still only in the adolescence phase–games are growing up, but there’s still that social awkwardness between those who play games and those who don’t. 

I recently had a friend of mine remark about a shirt I was wearing that has an Xbox controller on it and says “Body by” followed by the graphic of the controller.  This friend is your strong, athletic, man’s man–a hunter, an athlete, the kind of guy who likes going out in the woods and letting out his Tarzan yell.  He taught physical education at a local school, and when he saw the shirt, he gave it a dismissive look and said, “yeah, looks like you’re going to keep me in business.”

I wrote a while back about Andrew Bub’s heart attack, and asked that you give him some financial support if you could spare it.  The day after I posted, another friend of mine confessed to me that he “couldn’t help laughing at the irony of a guy who advocates video games for parents and children getting a heart attack.”  Andrew wrote about this very kind of attitude in his first days back from the hospital.

I’m lucky. My heart is rebuilt, and they say it’s in better condition than before. I shouldn’t have another heart attack again. In fact, I don’t even need to make a lot of changes to my lifestyle.

Why? Well, my heart was damaged years before. Late teen fast food and partying, my twenties spent smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey. Loads of Bratwurst, cheesecake, fast food all while sitting on my ass doing nothing had turned my heart into small French village from the game “Call of Duty” – a battle-worn moonscape. It pumped along without complaint, hiding the damage from doctors.

On GamePolitics.comsomeone probably posing as the infamous anti-video game attorney Jack Thompson made this remark: “A lifetime of sitting on your ass playing video games will do this to you.” Like gamers deserve heart attacks or something. In reality, about 3 years ago I worked on a big article for a big magazine about excer-gaming and I’d used Dance, Dance, Revolution to lose 25 pounds. I still do that, and play Wii, to keep it off. But the GamerDad message has always been moderate. I garden, I eat right, I exercise. Those are the things the doctors want me to do now. Those are the things that didn’t save me from my heart attack (the damage was already too severe) but they did help me survive it. And they will protect me from the next one.

It’s amazing the stigmas that still exist and the derision that gamers still sometimes endure.  Gaming isn’t a solitary, isolating activity–it’s a social past time, and it increases your social awareness and communication skills.  Gaming helps an individual to problem solve and react with precision that requires intense thought.  Gaming for few hours a week doesn’t cause heart attacks–it saves people from them.  And yet we’re still seen as strange, “unhealthy” people to many. 

This isn’t helped by network television’s reinforcement of the gamer stereotype.  Despite the many positive signs of recent note, gaming is still seen as the butt of a joke.  A punchline of the uncool.  Especially the hardcore minority of gamers.  And that isn’t going to change overnight (or even in one Wii-filled year). 

The point I’m trying to make is that we’ve got a ways to go before we see fruit from the seeds that have been planted in the last few years.  Women gamers are on the rise, but they still need more representation in the industry, and more games that cater to their tastes.  The ratings system has to change and grow to become more on par with television and film ratings in terms of credibility as well as content definitions.  We need to stop arguing about games as art–people who are silly enough to deny the medium with clutching-at-straws arguments like “games can’t be art until they make people depressed” aren’t worth trying to convince.  Keep making the games that evoke pathos from us all, and eventually it will become an unnecessary question to talk about. 

Finally, above all, the belief that games cause violent behavior needs to be put to bed, both in the political arena and in our social circles.  This is happening quietly, as gamers are growing up into parents and are responsibly introducing their children to their favorite past time, but it still can’t come soon enough.  Educating and informing parents about the real benefits of gaming, and how to responsibly moderate their child’s gaming is one of the chief tasks of the next decade, as video games move from being something that only “the kids” play into a social activity for everyone.

With time, the inevitable maturing of video games into an accepted mainstream activity will become a reality.  In fact, I’m convinced that gaming will eventually be the dominant form of entertainment.  After all, what’s better than interacting directly with the story?  Add to that the high probability that we’ll eventually see a technological convergence between television and video games, where our entertainment becomes interactive, and where it’s expected that the user will interact with the story, and it’s easy to get excited about the future.  Maybe then I can go into a Circuit City without getting looked at sideways.  On second thought, we’ll all probably be downloading our games digitally by then.

–WG