The video game industry is doing well. Since 2002, annual product line receipts for the entertainment software publishing industry have increased more than 130 percent, from about $4 to $9 billion in the last eight years. At real annual growth rates of around 17 percent from 2005 to 2008, the industry is showing a consistent pattern of ever-increasing growth unseen in a majority of industries.
It's worth remembering that "Modern Warfare 2," a large third-quarter release last year, made more money on its first day, $310 million, than any entertainment release (that's books, music, movies, theater, everything) in human history; "MW2" went on to make around as much money as "Avatar," which is the fifth movie to gross more than $1 billion. Video games even have a noticeable presence in the U.S. GDP, contributing about $5 billion.
Yet the term "video game" itself has a strong stigma about it left over from the earliest years — a stigma that, compared to the movie industry, simply hasn't significantly changed since Atari. The sheer newness and novelty of this medium has shaped the public's perception of what a video game can be: a frivolous, shallow pastime.
And what can a video game be? The video game is a blank digital slate whose raw potential has never been popularly, and hardly, if at all, academically, analyzed.
If only because of the recent threats of financial usurpation, let's compare video games to movies and remind ourselves what movie and film, which continue to be the most accessible and versatile form of popular entertainment, have the potential to be by existing precedent. Film can be social commentary, can be a catalyst for social change by exploring social norms in new ways, can express and blend emotions in an infinite variety of ways; it can visually communicate perhaps what comes closest to an artistic expression of universally experienced truths about the human condition, can be propaganda or educational, and so much more, all of which are strengthened, not weakened, by the entertainment power of the medium.
Art that is entertaining is art that is relevant, that speaks to an audience and doesn't separate the intellectual from the emotional. The intriguing thing about video games, especially the most popular releases of today, is that they don't even allow themselves to enter that artistic realm that film is so comfortable in. Most of the 100-man teams that spend years developing the "StarCraft"s, "Halo"s and "Call of Duty"s don't have so much as an English major on them.
The credits for these games claim to have writers on the staff, but all of the factors that go into a game seem to roundly alienate any narrative, intellectual or emotional, from shining through whatsoever. The rudimentary steps of a narrative are usually taken, character development, etc., but these developers attach stories to their games like Ayn Rand tagged on half-assed epistemology to Objectivism, in essence stating that epistemology is a useless pursuit.
There's some irony there. The interactivity of video games gives them a level of persuasiveness and emotional investment that is potentially unmatched by any medium, including the passivity of movies. The Master Chief, the decade-old "Halo" series' iconic protagonist, says incredibly few lines and is very direct when he does, but for some reason he's become one of the most charismatic figures in the industry. His character, with no discernible effort or priority put on the part of the developers, created an emotional investment in the plot for so many players merely because he was a fleshed-out and likable enough character that his actions had meaning, yet everyman enough to instantly sympathize with.
"Halo: Reach," for some reason, has dropped this dynamic, and as such, the single-player campaign in that game has the emotional involvement of a trip to the DMV.
Developers, for whatever reason, have either not wanted or not been able to address the challenge of balancing the interactivity of this medium with narrative. Perhaps it's the infatuation with how rapidly the technology is growing. Or maybe it's the sudden success of an industry that has found a medium so inherently entertaining and an audience that will uncritically purchase its products, that the business models discourage investing extra resources in something as unnecessary as an emotional reason for playing. Tragically, these myopic fools, blessed with wealth and infrastructure, haven't unlocked a fraction of this medium's expressive power — and IGN.com keeps dishing out the nine-out-of-ten scores as if the industry wasn't so obviously in its infancy.
—Wiley Robinson is an undecided sophomore. He can be reached at rrobin23@utk.edu.