With so much venture funding going into Web-based, ad-driven casual games (both the companies that create them and those that monetize them), you’d think the gaming industry as a whole was moving in that direction. I certainly did, at least until today.
Mogwai is cutting down the time he spends playing World of Warcraft. Twenty hours a week or less now, compared to a peak of over 70. It’s not that he has lost interest–just that he’s no longer working his way up the greasy pole. He’s got to the top.
While Marvel’s lawyers have been doing plenty of work on their own to hurt interest in the new movie “Iron Man,” some are suggesting an even more interesting scenario: that the release this week of the videogame Grand Theft Auto IV (to excellent reviews) will have an impact on how many people are willing to buy tickets to “Iron Man”’s opening weekend.
I hate video games, on or offline. I hate the way they suck real people into fake worlds and hold on to them for decades at a time. I hate being made to feel hateful for saying so, and I hate being told to immerse myself in them before passing judgment, because it feels like being told to immerse myself in smack and teenage pregnancy before passing judgment on them. This is not because of anything wrong or bad about video games or heroin or teenage parents. … It’s because, compared with everything else on offer in a kid’s life, video games and heroin and teenage pregnancy are a colossal waste of time.
In real life, people rarely want to get into a firefight. But in many video games, particularly military-themed first-person shooters (FPS) like the just-released Rainbow Six Vegas 2, you can’t wait to step into the line of fire. After all, you’re an elite commando, and there’s no way not to fight–no button to press to call your nervous wreck of a wife or go hang out with the kids. It doesn’t matter how many bullets you take while gunning down whole platoons of terrorists and mercenaries, because this is red-blooded escapism at its geekiest. So shut up and start shooting, guys.
But unlike sci-fi FPS games such as Halo or Doom, military shooters have a tradition of so-called realism. Most of the in-game weapons are available now–or at least loosely based on designs that could eventually reach the likes of Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, as optimistic as game developers might be about a high-tech replacement for the M-16 assault rifle, there are no plasma rifles or rail guns in your arsenal. … So as this successful genre continues to deliver best-selling titles, will increasingly powerful PCs and game consoles allow military shooters to become more realistic than ever?
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