mentioned in novels, on television and in films. A fairly clear consensus soon emerged in these media about what games were and how they should be presented: they were esoteric creations, used exclusively by hollow-eyed adolescent males. These males were socially deficient. They probably had few friends, and the ones they did have were as sick as them. Game-playing adolescents were unhealthy, and would remain so until they kicked their electronic habit. Gaming, it seemed, was like an especially pernicious kind of masturbation: something that turned you in on yourself in the worst possible way. The 1993 film Arcade was a typical work along these lines, featuring a sinister video game in an arcade called, suspiciously, Dante’s Inferno , with the ability to capture the souls and take over the minds of the lonely adolescents drawn to it. Hardly a subtle messge, but one that was often repeated.
This popular image was hugely unfair in many ways, but it did have some elements of truth. For their first few decades, games were played largely by adolescent males. They did have a slightly cultish feel to them. And what gamers did, within either the lightless bowels of the video arcade or the closed-curtain fastness of the bedroom, was isolating in a larger social sense. This came about as the result of a combination of historical and technological coincidences. First, early games were primitive. Their manufacture was becoming increasingly less amateur, but they continued to look like what they were: an immature medium, unable to compete with the more fully realised arenas of film, print and music. Games were not fit for the living rooms or the polite conversations of the adult world: they appeared regressive, childish and antithetical to the fully developed social beings that it was dearly hoped each monosyllabic pubescent youth would grow into.
Second, and equally importantly, the development of simple and effective networking technologies lagged decades behind the development of affordable home computers and video games systems. In their early existence, therefore, most games could only have one or, at an occasional best, two players. Setting up and playing across a local area network or even just a serial connection between two computers was a mission certain to defeat all but the most dedicated gamers; and the two-player experiences that were available on consoles and in arcades remained fairly crude, and well within the accepted boundaries of ‘cultish’.
Within the last decade, most of this has changed almost beyond measure, thanks to the combined influences of the internet and the increasing arrival of video gaming as a mainstream – and even a family-friendly – media activity. Yet many of the most fundamental questions about games’ relationships with society and sociability haven’t gone away. Today, books and films can’t get away with crudely caricaturing games as adolescent curiosities; but nor does the emerging social culture of gaming have much in common with many of the older norms of civilised social interactions, or even traditional definitions of what it means to be sociable (which usually involves being in the same physical space as those people you’re interacting with).
In a world where the internet already connects more than 1.5 billion people, and will in 2010 connect double that number, a whole new notion of sociability is being born and tested online. Yet this development has video games very close to its heart. It’s easy to forget that the very idea of social networking, from Facebook to MySpace to Bebo or even Twitter, was pioneered by video games long before there was even such a thing as the internet – in the text-based multiplayer games of the 1970s and 1980s, and then in the online multiplayer games of the late 1990s. No other online social arena is so demanding, engaged, engrossing, immersive or sophisticated as gaming. And no other online activity, including social networking, is more
This popular image was hugely unfair in many ways, but it did have some elements of truth. For their first few decades, games were played largely by adolescent males. They did have a slightly cultish feel to them. And what gamers did, within either the lightless bowels of the video arcade or the closed-curtain fastness of the bedroom, was isolating in a larger social sense. This came about as the result of a combination of historical and technological coincidences. First, early games were primitive. Their manufacture was becoming increasingly less amateur, but they continued to look like what they were: an immature medium, unable to compete with the more fully realised arenas of film, print and music. Games were not fit for the living rooms or the polite conversations of the adult world: they appeared regressive, childish and antithetical to the fully developed social beings that it was dearly hoped each monosyllabic pubescent youth would grow into.
Second, and equally importantly, the development of simple and effective networking technologies lagged decades behind the development of affordable home computers and video games systems. In their early existence, therefore, most games could only have one or, at an occasional best, two players. Setting up and playing across a local area network or even just a serial connection between two computers was a mission certain to defeat all but the most dedicated gamers; and the two-player experiences that were available on consoles and in arcades remained fairly crude, and well within the accepted boundaries of ‘cultish’.
Within the last decade, most of this has changed almost beyond measure, thanks to the combined influences of the internet and the increasing arrival of video gaming as a mainstream – and even a family-friendly – media activity. Yet many of the most fundamental questions about games’ relationships with society and sociability haven’t gone away. Today, books and films can’t get away with crudely caricaturing games as adolescent curiosities; but nor does the emerging social culture of gaming have much in common with many of the older norms of civilised social interactions, or even traditional definitions of what it means to be sociable (which usually involves being in the same physical space as those people you’re interacting with).
In a world where the internet already connects more than 1.5 billion people, and will in 2010 connect double that number, a whole new notion of sociability is being born and tested online. Yet this development has video games very close to its heart. It’s easy to forget that the very idea of social networking, from Facebook to MySpace to Bebo or even Twitter, was pioneered by video games long before there was even such a thing as the internet – in the text-based multiplayer games of the 1970s and 1980s, and then in the online multiplayer games of the late 1990s. No other online social arena is so demanding, engaged, engrossing, immersive or sophisticated as gaming. And no other online activity, including social networking, is more
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