Extra Lives by Tom Bissell

provided an elderly lead character, with the exception of those games that allowed variable age as part of in-game character customization, which in any event accounted for 12 percent of researched games. Short went on to explain the meaning of all this, but his point was made: (a) People like playing as people, and (b) They like playing as people that almost precisely resemble themselves. I was reminded of Anthony Burgess’s joke about his ideal reader as “a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, color-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.” Burgess was kidding. Mr. Short was not, and his presentation left something ozonically scorched in the air. I thought of all the games I had played in which I had run some twenty-something masculine nonentity through his paces. Apparently I had even more such experiences to look forward to, all thanks to EEDAR’s findings. Never in my life had I felt more depressed about the democracy of garbage that games were at their worst.
    The panel moderator, Chris Kohler, from
Wired
magazine, introduced himself next. His goal was to walk the audience through the evolution of the video-game character, from the australopithecineattempts
(Pong
’s roving rectangle,
Tank
’s tank) to the always-interesting Pac-Man, who, in Kohler’s words, was “an abstraction between a human and symbol.” Pac-Man, Kohler explained, “had a life. He had a wife. He had children.” Pac-Man’s titular Namco game also boasted some of the medium’s first cut scenes, which by the time of the game’s sequel,
Ms. Pac-Man
, had become more elaborate by inches, showing, among other things, how Mr. and Ms. Pac-Man met. “It was not a narrative,” Kohler pointed out, “but it was giving life to these characters.” Then came Nintendo’s
Donkey Kong
. While there was no character development to speak of in
Donkey Kong
(“It’s not Mario’s journey of personal discovery”), it became a prototype of the modern video-game narrative. In short, someone wanted something, he would go through a lot to get it, and his attempts would take place within chapters or levels. By taking that conceit and bottlenecking it with the complications of “story,” the modern video-game narrative was born.
    How exactly this happened, in Kohler’s admitted simplification, concerns the split between Japanese and American gaming in the 1980s. American gaming went to the personal computer, while Japanese gaming retreated largely to the console. Suddenly there were all sorts of games: platformers, flight simulators, text-based adventures, role-playing games. The last two were supreme early examples of games that, as Kohler put it, have “human drama in which a character goes through experiences and comes out different in the end.” The Japanese made story a focus in their growingly elaborate RPGs by expanding the length and moment of the in-game cut scene. American games used story more literarily, particularly in what became known as “point-and-click” games, such as Sierra Entertainment’s
King’s Quest
and
Leisure Suit Larry
, which are “played” by moving the cursor to various points around thescreen and clicking to the result of story-furthering text. These were separate attempts to provide games with a narrative foundation, and because narratives do not work without characters, a hitherto incidental focus of the video game gradually became a primary focus. With Square’s RPG–
cum–
soap opera
Final Fantasy VII
in 1997, the American and Japanese styles began to converge. A smash in both countries,
Final Fantasy VII
awoke American gaming to the possibilities of narrative dynamism and the importance of relatively developed characters—no small inspiration to take from a series whose beautifully androgynous male characters often appear to be some kind of heterosexual stress test.
    With that, Kohler introduced the panel’s “creative visionaries”: Henry LaBounta, the