Can video game perception evolve from gory to great?

I often think that video gaming doesn't get enough respect. But perhaps that's changing. Today's Wall Street Journal podcast had an excellent 15 minute segment on hot video games for the holidays (link via iTunes). And my avid video gamer son David and I have been watching and enjoying the Discovery Channel's excellent documentary series titled, Rise of the Video Game.

Personally, I'm not a big gamer, although in my youth, I used to stay up all night playing SpaceWar on MIT's PDP-1 (yes, there really was a PDP-1 although you have to go to a computer museum nowadays to see one). Since that time, I've enjoyed a variety of computer-based games ranging from Lara Croft to Neverwinter Nights. Today, I have to admit spending most of my gaming time with specialist products like the excellent X-Plane flight simulator and LittleWing's solid state pinball games [side comment: I highly recommend Littlewing's Golden Logres pinball game, which is a Japanese reinterpretation of the Arthurian legend. It is a great pinball game and also provides a fascinating look into how legends translate in strange and interesting ways between cultures. But that is beside the point.]. But given that annual US video gaming revenues now eclipse the annual US movie box office revenues, I think it is time the business world thought more about video gaming as a growing and important communications medium. With video games now on the verge of making us laugh and cry with their emotional impact, we should expect them to occupy a similarly prominent place in our social fabric.

I think one of the reasons that many people dismiss video games today is that they only really hear about one type of video game: first person shooters like Doom and Unreal Tournament. Imagine where the movie industry be today if the most commercially successful movie ever were slasher-flick Halloween instead of Gone With the Wind. Yet in the video game world, both the press and many adults accept the commercial success of Microsoft's first-person shooters Halo, Halo 2, and Halo 3 as evidence that video games will never amount to anything good. The Halo series are excellent games, but they appeal to a narrow taste -- specifically, those who like shooting.

And that's why it's refreshing to see Nintendo's Wii video game console doing so well in the market. Nintendo's consoles and strict game certification standards emphasize games that cover a wider emotional gamut than "target and kill." And its motion-sensing technology has forced Wii players to develop muscles in more places than their thumbs. The Wii has done so well at expanding the gaming genre and interest, in fact, that it is now in demand at retirement communities as well as in more traditional gaming homes. And it is this broad success of the Wii coupled with Nintendo's DS hand held consoles that have pushed Nintendo to become the second most valuable company in Japan today.

The Rise of the Video Game series asks the question, when will video games make us cry instead of just appealing to our demand for action? That time will soon be here. But the developers who reach this milestone won't likely be those that are working on Doom 9, any more than the producers of Die Hard 5 are likely to break into the top 100 films of all time. They'll be developers in the mold of Shigeru Miyamoto, who spent his entire career studying art and storytelling before he developed the Mario games for Nintendo. And they'll probably be doing it for the Wii.

One final note: for more from an avid vintage gamer's perspective (he owns most consoles prior to the Nintendo Gamecube, including a Sega Dreamcast), check out David's blog at VideoGameNinja.blogspot.com. Feel free to leave him a comment suggesting a topic you'd like to hear from him about; he'd love ideas for future postings.

Technorati Tags: Gaming, Halo, Little Wing, Nintendo, Rise Of The Video Game, Video games, Wall Street Journal, Wii