Hum186 wk3
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Learning Objectives Video games are accelerating the five trends reshaping mass communication and the mass
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9 Video Games
̖ Destiny made $500 million in its first 24 hours of release, a video-game record. © Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg/Getty Images
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media industries. They are the product of a highly concentrated industry; they are luring people from the more traditional media (audience fragmentation); they are used as and filled with advertising (hypercommercialization); they know no borders (globalization); and they are played on numerous technologies, from game consoles to personal computers to the Internet to smartphones and tablets (convergence). And even though the game industry grosses nearly twice as much as Hollywood does every year, mass communication experts are only now taking this medium seriously. After studying this chapter you should be able to
Outline the history and development of games and the gaming indu stry. Describe how the organizational and economic nature of the conte mporary gaming industry shapes the content of games. Explain the relationship between games and their players. Identify changes in the game industry brought about by new and co nverging technologies. Apply key game-playing media literacy skills.
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“WHY ARE YOU PLAYING VIDEO GAMES? Don’t you have homework or a paper due or something?”
“This is more important. And anyway, what are you, my mother?” “Nope, I just don’t want to have to dig up another roommate, that’s all.” “Glad to know you care. And anyway, it may look like I’m playing video games, but I’m really
doing research for my global politics class. Check it out. This is a game that the U.S. Navy put out, MMOWGLI. It stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet, and the idea is to combat Somali pirates.”
“A game from the government about thwarting Somali pirates?” “That’s this one. There are others, depending on what problem the Office of Naval Research
wants help with. They created a game environment where players like us and experts on all kinds of issues can share new ideas and collaborate with other players. We earn points to win the game.”
“Why does the Navy care what you think?” “It doesn’t, not really. But it cares about what all of us think. It’s Web-based, so MMOWGLI
lets the Navy strategize with way more people than it could ever assemble face-to-face. Navy people know Navy stuff; Africa experts know Africa stuff. Other people like us know other stuff. So we all go online and crowdsource different solutions and unimagined possibilities, you know, let a whole network of people, the crowd, get involved in the process. Wanna play?”
“No thanks. If I’m going to play games, I’d like to kill bad guys with a vast array of magnificent weapons and be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.”
In this chapter we examine games played on a variety of electronic, microprocessor-based platforms. But before we get deeper into our discussion of the sophisticated, entertaining, and sometimes (as you can tell from our opening vignette) not very playful games that abound today, let’s look at their roots in the convergence of pinball machines and military simulators. This is fitting, because as with other media, possibly even more so, converging technologies define video games’ present and future.
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A Short History of Computer and Video Games Carnival man David Gottlieb invented the first mass-produced arcade game, Baffle Ball, in 1931. A small wooden cabinet, it had only one moving part, a plunger. Players would launch a ball into the playing field, a slanted surface with metal “pins” surrounding “scoring holes.” The object was to get the ball into one of the holes. Gottlieb was soon manufacturing 400 cabinets a day. Just as quickly, he had many imitators. One, Harry Williams, invented Contact, the first electric pinball game. Williams was an engineer, and his 1933 gaming innovations were electronic scoring (Baffle Ball players had to keep their scores in their heads) and scoring holes, or pockets, that threw the ball back into the playing field (in Baffle Ball, when a ball dropped into a hole, it dropped into a hole). The popularity of arcade games exploded, and players’ enthusiasm was fueled even more when slot-machine makers entered the field, producing games with cash payouts. With the Depression in full force in the 1930s, however, civic leaders were not much in favor of this development, and several locales, most notably New York City, banned the games. Pinball was considered gambling.
David Gottlieb had the answer. Games of skill were not gambling. And games that paid off in additional games rather than cash were not gambling. In 1947, he introduced Humpty Dumpty, a six-flipper game that rewarded high-scorers with replays. Bans were lifted, pinball returned to the arcades, even more players were attracted to the skills-based electronic games, and the stage was set for what we know today as video and computer games. As Steven Baxter of the CNN Computer Connection wrote, “You can’t say that video games grew out of pinball, but you can assume that video games wouldn’t have happened without it. It’s like bicycles and the automobile. One industry leads to the other and then they exist side-by-side. But you had to
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have bicycles to one day have motor cars.” Games
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writer Steven Kent adds, “New technologies do not simply spring out of thin air. They need to be associated with familiar industries or ideas. People may have jokingly referred to the first automobiles as ‘horseless carriages,’ but the name also helped define them. The name changed them from nebulous, unexplainable machines to an extension of an already accepted mode of transportation” (both quotes from Kent, 2001, pp. 1-2).
Today’s Games Emerge Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, computers were hulking giants, filling entire rooms (see the chapter on the Internet and social media). Most displayed their output on paper in the form of teletype. But the very best, most advanced computers, those designed for military research and analysis, were a bit sleeker and had monitors for output display. Only three universities— MIT, the University of Utah, and Stanford—and a few dedicated research installations had these machines. At MIT, a group of self-described nerds, the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC), began writing programs for fun for a military computer. Club members would leave their work next to the computer so others could build on what had come before. One member, Steve Russell, decided to write the ultimate program, an interactive game. It took him 200
̖ Gottlieb’s Baffle Ball and Humpty Dumpty. (left, right): © Wayne Namerow Collection, photograph Courtesy of Wayne Namerow
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hours over six months to produce the first interactive computer game, Spacewar, completed in 1961. This version featured toggle switches that controlled the speed and direction of two spaceships and the torpedoes they fired at each other. His final version, completed the next year, had an accurate map of the stars in the background and a sun with a mathematically precise gravitational field that influenced play. Russell and his club-mates even built remote control units with switches for every game function, the first game pad. “We thought about trying to make money off it for two or three days but concluded that there wasn’t a way that it could be done,” said Russell (quoted in Kent, 2001, p. 20).
But another college student, Nolan Bushnell, thought differently (DeMaria & Wilson, 2004, p. 16). For two years after the completion of Russell’s game, the TMRC distributed it to other schools for free. Bushnell, who worked in an arcade to pay for his engineering studies at the University of Utah, played Spacewar incessantly. After graduation he dedicated himself to developing a coin-operated version of the game that had consumed so much of his time. He knew that to make money, it would have to attract more than computer enthusiasts, so he designed a futuristic-looking fiberglass cabinet. The result, Computer Space, released in 1971, was a dismal failure. It was far too complicated for casual play, doing good business near college campuses but bombing in bowling alleys and beer halls. Yet Bushnell was undeterred. With two friends and investments of $250 each, he quit his engineering job and incorporated Atari in 1972.
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Long before this, in 1951, Ralph Baer, an engineer for a military contractor charged with developing “the best TV set in the world,” decided a good set should do more than receive a few channels (remember, this was before cable’s rise). He suggested building games into the receivers. His bosses were unimpressed. Fifteen years later Baer was working for another defense contractor when he drafted the complete schematics for a video-game console that would sell for about $20. He patented it in 1968 and licensed his device to Magnavox, which, in 1972, marketed the first home video-game system as Odyssey and sold it for $100.
Odyssey was a simple game offering two square spots to represent two players (or paddles), a ball, and a center line. It had six plug-in cartridges and transparent, colored screen overlays producing 12 games, all very rudimentary. Its high cost and Magnavox’s decision to sell it through its television set dealers—leading to the incorrect perception that it could be played only on Magnavox sets—limited its success. Only 100,000 units were sold. But with Odyssey and Atari,
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̖ Nolan Bushnell and a few of his toys. © Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis
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the stage was set for the introduction of a new art form, and a new industry. The technological foundation was built. The earliest pioneers had seen farther than any others and had made their tentative steps along the path. The world was in flux, as new politics, new music, and new social consciousness began to spread throughout the United States and Europe. The 60s were over. A generation of young people dreamed new dreams and broke down the status quo. It was into that world that first Ralph Baer and then Nolan Bushnell made their humble offerings, and changed the world in ways no one could have foreseen. (DeMaria & Wilson, 2004, p. 17)
The spark that set off the game revolution was Pong, Atari’s arcade ping-pong game, introduced in 1972. Bushnell had seen Odyssey at an electronics show and set his people to creating a coin-operated version (Atari later agreed to pay a licensing fee to Magnavox). The two-player game was an overnight hit, selling 100,000 units in its first year—and twice as many knockoffs (Burnham, 2001, p. 61). Players poured quarters into games looking remarkably like Pong, including Harry Williams’s Paddle-Ball, Rally’s For-Play, and then in an effort to head off what Nolan Bushnell called “the jackals,” Atari’s own Pong Doubles, Super Pong, and Quadrapong (Sellers, 2001).
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̖ Original Pong. © Mike Derer/AP Photo
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Rapid-Fire Developments What followed, partly as a result of the swift advance of the microchip and computer industries (and a healthy dose of technological genius from a thriving game industry in Japan), was a rapid-fire succession of innovation and development. In 1975 Atari, by marketing Home Pong through Sears, made its first steps toward bringing arcade games into the home. Its 1980 release of home Space Invaders cemented the trend. Also in 1975, Midway began importing Gunfight from Japanese manufacturer Taito. Gunfight was significant for two reasons. Although Sega, with Periscope, began importing arcade games into the United States in 1966, Gunfight was the first imported video game. It was also the first game to use a computer microprocessor. In 1976, Fairchild Camera and Instrument introduced Channel F, the first programmable, cartridge-based home game. Mattel Toys brought true electronic games to handheld devices in 1977, with titles like Missile Attack, Auto Race, and Football played on handheld, calculator-sized LED, or light-emitting diode, and LCD, or liquid crystal disp lay, screens. In 1979 Milton Bradley released Microvision, the first programmable handheld game system. Two Japanese arcade imports, Namco’s Pac-Man in 1980 and Nintendo’s Donkey Kong in 1981, become instant classics, all-time best sellers, and with the introduction of Nintendo’s groundbreaking game console NES in 1985, home-version successes. The Japanese company further advanced gaming with its 1986 release of home console game Legend of Zelda, revolutionary because it introduced open structure play— that is, players could go wherever they wanted and there were multiple routes to winning, now standard in modern games.
Arcade games, handheld systems, and home game consoles were joined by personal computer games, beginning with the 1987 release of NEC’s hybrid PC/console in Japan. Now, with games being played on microprocessor-based consoles, producing them for microprocessor-based PCs was a simple matter. By the early 1990s, CD-ROM-based computer games were common and successful. Doom (1993) and Myst (1994) were among the first big personal computer game hits. Doom hinted at a development soon to come in games because it could be played over LANs, or local area computer networks, typically in a single building; that is, it was an interactive game played by several people over a computer network. It was also the first first-person perspective shooting game; gamers “carried” the weapon, and all action in the game was seen through their eyes.
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̖ Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda, introduced in 1986, pioneered open structure play, now standard in modern games. Courtesy of Nintendo
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̖ Namco’s Pac-Man and Nintendo’s Donkey Kong, introduced as arcade games in the early 1980s, became instant home-version classics when Nintendo introduced its NES game console in 1985. (left) Courtesy of Namco; (right) Courtesy of Nintendo
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̖ Two of the first interactive games, iD Software’s Doom (left) and Cyan, Inc.’s Myst (right). introduced gaming to single-shooter play. (left) Courtesy of iD Software; (right) Courtesy of Cyan, Inc.
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Games and Their Players Two-thirds of all Americans over ten years old, 190 million people, play video games (Harwell, 2014). But before we look at these people a bit more closely, we need to define exactly what constitutes a video game.
What Is a Video Game? As technologies converge, the same game can be played on an increasing number of platforms. Myst, for example, was originally a computer game written for Macintosh computers, then IBM PCs, then external CD-ROM drives, then video-game consoles such as PlayStation. Now it can be played online. Versions of Donkey Kong can be played in arcades and on consoles, on the Internet, on Macs and PCs, and on handheld players. Q*bert can be played on arcade machines and on collectable Nelsonic wristwatch game-players. Thousands of games can be played on smartphones and tablets. For our purposes, then, a game is a video game when the action of the game takes place interactively onscreen. By this definition, an online text-based game such as a MUD, or multiuser dimension, which has no moving images (games like 1977’s Zork and 2014’s Hadean Lands), is a video game, but the home version of Trivial Pursuit, employing a DVD to offer video hints to those playing the board game, is not.
That takes care of the technologically based half of the word (video), but what is a game? For our purposes, a video game is a game when a player has direct involvement in the on-screen action to produce some desired outcome. In a MUD, for example, players use text—words—to create personalities, environments, even worlds in which they interact with others toward some
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specific end. That’s a game. But what about Mario Teaches Typing, a cartridge-based learning aid? Even though its goal is teaching, because it has gamelike features (in this case, the famous Super Mario and the manipulation of on-screen action to meet a particular end), it’s a game. The essay titled “Using Games for Good” looks at games that function as more than entertainment.
̖ The skinny, sun-deprived teen boy gamer stereotype may persist, but it doesn’t reflect the reality. GET FUZZY: © Darby Conley/Distributed by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.
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USING MEDIA TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE Using Games for Good
The video-game industry has reached a level of legitimacy and respectability equal to that of other mass media. Now it is being asked the same questions regarding content as they are: What is the impact on kids? What regulations should be imposed? How is the medium used? And just as important, how can we use the medium to make a positive difference?
Game industry professionals, social scientists, educators, and parents regularly examine this last question. Their efforts focus on the use of games for policy change, training, and learning. Their products include initiatives such as Cisco Systems’ Peter Packet Game and Challenge, designed to confront poverty, and the work of nonprofit Global Kids Inc., which has teamed with organizations such as Lego, Microsoft, and PBS in an effort to encourage kids to create their own educational video games. Persuasive Games is yet another example of a provider building electronic games designed for instruction and activism, as is P.O.V. Interactive, which uses interactive games in coordination with PBS documentaries to explore environmental and other issues. The National Academy of Sciences is funding game development by the Federation of American Scientists, designed to build enthusiasm for science as a discipline and a career.
One of the most successful games-for-good efforts is Games for Health, a community of game developers, researchers, and health care and medical professionals who maintain an ongoing “best practices” conversation—online and in annual conferences—to share information about the impact existing and original games can have on health care and policy. Japanese game maker Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution, for example, is an existing exergame that invites people to exercise while they play. Players follow cascading arrows on a video screen, mimicking their movements on a large footpad attached by a cable to a game console. Sony and Nike teamed up to produce another beneficial exergame, EyeToy Kinetic, that encourages users to kickbox, practice yoga, or engage in a number of other physical activities in a variety of simulated environments. Other existing games—just about anything played on a handheld console—are frequently used to reduce children’s anxiety before anesthesia, dialysis, or chemotherapy. Research has shown that time on a portable game relaxes preoperative children even more than their parents do.
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New games, too, are developed specifically to meet people’s health needs. Nintendo developed GlucoBoy, an original game to help children manage their diabetes, and Dr. Mario, to aid patients in managing their own diabetic needs. We saw in the chapter opener that the Navy developed MMOWGLI, but it also created a virtual reality game to help soldiers returning from the Middle East deal with post-traumatic stress disorder. A therapist controls the game to re- create troubling events, helping the player/patient slowly revisit the scene of the trauma. Another games-for-good practitioner, Games for Change, joined forces with the Half the Sky Movement, a global effort to reduce oppression and build opportunity for poor women, to bring Half the Sky Movement: The Game to Facebook. Players take on virtual tasks such as collecting books for young girls in Kenya. Their in-game success leads to real-world payoff; for example, collecting enough books unlocks a donation of actual books to a nonprofit that brings improved literacy and gender equality to developing countries.
These efforts are examples of the gamification of society, using video game skills and conventions to solve real-world problems in medicine, health, policy, personal responsibility, in fact, any issue that humans face. In this sense, gamification is the ultimate use of games for good.
Who Is Playing? What do we know about the 190 million regular American video-game players? For one thing, they are not necessarily the stereotypical teenage boys gaming away in their parents’ basements, as you can see in Figure 1 and from these data (Entertainment Software Association, 2014).
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̖ Figure 1 Game Players’ Demographics, 2014. Source: Harwell, 2014.
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The average game player is 31 years old; 45% of American game players are over 36.
The number of female players 50 and older increased 32% from 2012 to 2013. Fifty-one percent of U.S. households own a dedicated game console, and those that do own an average of two.
Sixty-two percent of gamers play with others, either in-person or online, and a majority play with friends and family (Figure 2). Forty-two percent of parents of gamers play weekly with their children; 75% say games are a good opportunity to socialize with their kids.
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̖ Figure 2 With Whom Do Players Play? Source: Entertainment Software Association of America, 2014.
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Scope and Nature of the Video-Game Industry Players in the United States spend more than $15 billion a year on game content (Graser, 2014a; in 2008 surpassing for the first time the annual amount expended on DVDs), and in 2014, buoyed by the release of new-generation game consoles, more than $5 billion on hardware (Statt, 2015). A championship video-game tournament can easily draw 70,000 live spectators, and more than 70 million people across the globe watch high-level game play on the Internet—as many as 8 million at the same time—an audience sufficiently large to encourage Amazon to buy Twitch, a game streaming site, for just under a billion dollars (Wingfield, 2014b). Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 made $1 billion in 16 days in 2011, besting by one day the movie Avatar’s record of fastest popular culture title to a billion dollars, and Destiny’s 2014 release made $500 million in one day, a record (Lieberman, 2014).
As is the case with every media industry we’ve studied so far, concentration and globalization are the rule in gaming. In 2014 alone, major game-design shops bought $15 billion worth of smaller operations (Pfanner, 2015). As for game console sales, they are the sole province of three companies—the United States’ Microsoft, best known for Xbox and Kinect, and two Japanese companies, Nintendo (Wii) and Sony (PlayStation). Versions of PlayStation and Xbox have long dominated sales and time-of-play. But Wii, introduced in 2006 to appeal specifically to new, nontraditional gamers, has gained significant popularity, primarily because it permits full-body, interactive play using a variety of control wands rather than the typical game’s button-laden controller. In 2010 Microsoft met Wii’s challenge with Kinect, a motion-sensitive game that reads players’ body movements without controllers or wands of any kind. Equipped with facial- and voice-recognition capabilities, Kinect is the fastest-selling consumer electronics
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device in history, selling 8 million units in its first 60 days of availability (besting former champs iPhone and iPad; Kato, 2012).
Nintendo’s cartridge-based Game Boy Advance, multimedia DSi (released in 2009), and glasses-free 3-D, Internet-capable 3DS (2011) dominated handheld devices. Sony countered with PlayStation Portable (2004), offering Internet access for multiplayer gaming, and Wi-Fi- capable PlayStation Vita (2012), boasting the power and graphics of a console and video streaming. But note that all these consoles and handhelds were released in relatively rapid succession. Why? Because hardware makers are struggling to recapture players’ loyalty as gamers increasingly abandon consoles and handhelds for smartphones and tablets. Thus, in addition to the frequent upgrades of their mobile devices, all three manufacturers introduced powerful new consoles in 2013 and 2014. Sony’s PlayStation 4 lets players broadcast their games in real time to the Internet, encouraging friends to join in. Its PlayStation Suite offers an array of games that can be played across consoles, handhelds, tablets, and smartphones. Microsoft’s Xbox One, while maintaining Kinect’s features, is a home entertainment hub, integrating gaming, television, Internet, and movie and music services. When joined with its SmartGlass application, players’ tablets become second game and video screens. Nintendo’s Wii U comes with a gamepad that is, for all intents and purposes, a touchscreen tablet.
Their dominance in hardware provides Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony with more than sales revenue. Third-party publishers, companies that create games for existing systems, naturally want their best games on the most popular systems. And just as naturally, better
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games attract more buyers to the systems that support them. Third-party publishers produce their most popular titles for all systems. For example, Activision’s Call of Duty is available for all consoles and Mac and PC; the hugely popular Madden NFL, which sells more than 5 million copies a year, and the MVP Baseball series come from EA Sports; Metal Gear is from Konami, Tony Hawk from Activision, Elder Scrolls is from Bethesda Softworks, and Batman from Warner Bros. Interactive. Conversely, Codemaster’s MTV Music Generator is available only for PlayStation and Xbox, and several third-party publishers produce Wii-only software—for example, Ubisoft and EA’s Headgate division. Console makers do produce their own titles. Nintendo has the Pokémon, Super Mario, and Pikmin series. Sony publishes the Gran Turismo line, and Microsoft offers titles such as XNS Sports and Halo. Concentration exists in the game software business just as it does on the hardware side. Atari owns several game makers, including Infogrames, and EA controls nearly 50% of all video game sales. In mid-2011 EA further increased its dominance of the content side of the industry with its purchase of casual game developer PopCap, source of some of the most popular free online games such as Bejeweled and Plants vs. Zombies. In an effort to counter this trend, however, a number of websites for independent game designers has sprung up. Most notable is Humble Indie Bundle. Small developers who cannot afford to distribute and market their games on the scale of the big companies upload their games to its website, free of copy- and other theft-protection. Games are designed for all platforms and, once bundled with other games, are for sale at whatever price a player wishes to pay, with a portion of the proceeds going to charity. In its first two years of operation it earned more than $11 million for the site operators, game designers, and charity, and PC Gamer magazine named the Humble Indie Bundle its 2011 community heroes for its support of the indie game development market (Francis, 2011).
A serious problem faced by third-party game creators is that, as in the more traditional media, especially film, production and marketing costs are skyrocketing. Not only has the production technology itself become more sophisticated and therefore expensive, but games, like movie stars, build followings. Given that, the creative forces behind them can demand more recognition and compensation. In 2001, the average game cost $5 million to produce and $2 million to promote. Today, the cost of development alone averages between $15 and $25 million, and a blockbuster like Destiny, with its musical score by Paul McCartney, cost $500 million to produce (but recall, Destiny had that much in sales in its first 24 hours on the market; Graser, 2014b). Again, as with film, industry insiders and fans are expressing concern over the industry’s reliance on sequels of franchises and licensed content, including movie- and television-based games. For example, there are over 100 different Mario games, and money is increasingly diverted to pay for licensed properties like James Bond 007 and Spider-Man.
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And while industry research indicates that a majority of players want game makers to rely less on licensed content and sequels, those wants are in conflict with three important realities of the contemporary game industry—production, promotion, and distribution costs are soaring; 50% of all games introduced to the market fail, and every one of the top 10 best-selling games from 2011 to 2014 was either a sequel to a franchise or a licensed title. Buffeted by difficult economic times like other media, the game industry wants to mitigate its risks, and when franchise titles such as Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto can top half-a- billion dollars in sales in their first few days of availability, insiders see sequels as a reasonable strategy.
̖ A championship game tournament can easily draw 70,000 spectators. © Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images
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̖ Two of video game’s most popular titles, EA Sports’ Madden NFL and Activision’s 360 Call of Duty, are from third- party publishers. (left) Courtesy of EA Sports; (right) Courtesy of Activision
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Trends and Convergence in the Video-Game Industry Like every media industry we’ve studied, the game industry is experiencing significant change, most of it driven by convergence and hypercommercialism.
Convergence Everywhere Cable television giants Comcast and Cox each offer game services for their broadband customers; both DBS providers also offer interactive game services. Most Internet service providers offer some form of online interactive game providers (see the chapter on the Internet and social media). AOL’s iPlay, for example, offers scores of games from designers such as EA Sports, TryMedia, and Funkitron. The service is free for AOL subscribers, and its goal is to keep existing broadband users while attracting new ones. USA Today’s website maintains a gaming platform for desktop and mobile devices that contains 70 games that the paper embeds in related news stories and advertisements. Many game makers, too, offer online interactive gaming. EA’s Pogo.com, a top-10 U.S. website for the last decade in terms of time spent online, offers board, puzzle, word, casino, sports, and card games, some for free and some for a fee.
We’ve already seen that the new generation of handheld game devices is Internet capable. And in an obvious bow to convergence, all new consoles are designed to perform a wide range of game and nongame functions, including playing DVDs, burning music CDs, and providing Internet access with music and video streaming capability, all in widescreen HDTV and digital multichannel sound. For example, Clear Channel’s iHeart Radio brings more than 800 live
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concert broadcast and digital-only radio stations to Xbox users who, if they have Kinect, can control their listening through voice and body movements. Xbox users can also access Slacker’s personal radio service and its tens-of-millions of music tracks, and if they subscribe to Microsoft’s SmartGlass service, they can stream any and all content from their smartphones and tablets to their televisions through their gaming consoles. Manufacturer Samsung sells television sets that connect viewers directly to its cache of games housed on its distant, dedicated servers (see cloud computing in the chapter on film). Cable companies Verizon and Comcast and program providers like HBO, Epix, Netflix, and Hulu stream content via game consoles. In fact, in 2012, for the first time, entertainment usage passed multiplayer game usage on the Xbox, that is, users spent more time with online video and music than playing games (Tsukayama, 2012).You can see how players use their consoles in Figure 3.
Home computer users, able to interact with other gamers for decades via MUDs, have been joined by console players in flocking to massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMO) such as Ultima Online, World of Warcraft, EverQuest, and Second Life. Thirty million people worldwide play more than 80
̖ Figure 3 How Gamers Use Their Consoles When Not Playing Games. Source: Entertainment Software Association of America, 2014.
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virtual worlds games, and one, the hugely popular World of Warcraft, has more than 10 million subscribers.
Technology and players’ comfort with it are two reasons for this wave of convergence— games can be played on cable television; on game consoles; on handheld devices; and online through social networking sites, game developers’ websites, tablets, smartphones, and personal computers.
TECHNOLOGY As smaller, faster, more powerful microprocessors were developed and found their way into game consoles, the distinction between games and personal computers began to disappear. A game console with high-speed microprocessors attached to a television set is, for all intents and purposes, a computer and monitor.
COMFORT WITH TECHNOLOGY As the distinction between the technologies on which games are played has diminished, players’ willingness to play games on different platforms has grown. Demographics help account for this trend. Speaking at the 10th E , the game industry’s annual trade show, Entertainment Software Association president Douglas Lowenstein (2005) explained that by the year 2020, just about everybody under 45 years old “will have grown up with PlayStations, Xboxes, and GameCubes.” What this means for games and gaming, he continued, is that these folks will have “lifetime familiarity with playing interactive games” and be “more sophisticated and discriminating about the games they play” (p. 4).
No better evidence of people’s comfort with playing games across a variety of technologies exists than that which resides in the smartphone you most probably already use.
Smartphones, Tablets, and Social Networking Sites Smartphones and tablets are revolutionizing the video game industry. Fifty percent of console gamers also play on smartphones and tablets, constituting a third of their total game time (Pike, 2014). More than 90% of smartphone and tablet owners use their devices to play games, and in 2015 worldwide revenues from mobile gaming—$30 billion—overtook those from console gaming—$26 billion—for the first time (Gaudiosi, 2015).
Much, if not most, of today’s mobile gaming takes the form of casual games—classic games such as card games (poker, cribbage, solitaire), table games (checkers, pool), matching games, and word and trivia games. Casual matching game Candy Crush Saga has been downloaded more than half a billion times and has nearly 50 million regular monthly users; and the original Flappy Bird, in which players must maneuver a bird between threatening green pipes, was downloaded 50 million times in its first two weeks of availability (Surowiecki, 2014). Games are the single largest category of mobile apps, accounting for 93% of all apps downloaded from the Apple store (Wingfield, 2014a). Casual games can be played in spurts and are easily accommodated by the phone’s small screen. To be sure, however, casual games are a hit among Internet players as well, with more than 100 million online casual game players regularly visiting sites such as gametap.com, realarcade.com, and pogo.com. They are joined by 375 million gamers, primarily female, playing at social networking sites such as Facebook
3
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(Taylor, 2014). Farmville, from game publisher Zynga, has more than 40 million active players who enjoy other Facebook games like Mafia Wars, Cityville, and Draw Something. The world’s largest casual games company is King Digital Entertainment, whose nearly 400 million monthly users play 195 different games, including familiar titles like Candy Crush, Bubble Witch, Farm Heroes, and Pet Rescue (King, 2015).
̖ Social networking games like King’s Candy Crush Saga and Zynga’s Farmville attract tens of millions of daily, primarily female, players. (left) © IanDagnall Computing/Alamy; (right) Courtesy of Zynga
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Hypercommercialism Hypercommercialism has come to all media. Advertisers’ desire to find new outlets for their messages and avoid the advertising clutter in traditional media has combined with gamers’ attractive, segmented demographics to make video games particularly appealing vehicles for many types of commercial and other persuasive campaigns. Advertisers have come to think of games as much like magazines.
Different titles attract different demographics—Mortal Kombat and Grand Theft Auto draw different players than do Spider-Man and Viva Piñata for XBox. Another reason advertisers are attracted to online games is that they are sticky. Players tend to stay (stick) with a game site longer than with other websites. Players don’t just “visit” sites so much as they seek them out to stay and play a while. Sponsors—and the games they advertise on—hope to monetize this attention. Regardless of the platform, industry research indicates the average gamer spends two to four hours playing a single game in a single sitting. Sponsors use games to reach their targets in four ways—product placement, freemium games, advergaming, and advocacy gaming.
PRODUCT PLACEMENT Advertisers like product placement for several reasons. First, a product used in a game is there forever—every time the game is played, the advertiser’s brand not only appears but is used. Second, the placement is not only permanent, it’s DVR-proof; it can’t be skipped. Third, a brand’s association with a game renders it “cool,” but equally important, games’ interactivity creates a stronger emotional connection and therefore a more positive association for players to brands—more so, for example, than simply viewing a TV spot. Fourth, players seem not to mind the ads and even welcome them if it means a game costs less or can be played online for free (Sullivan, 2014). Fifth, they are effective, and that effectiveness can be measured because the response, clicking through to the sponsor, can be precisely measured. And finally, where in-game ads were once static—a billboard atop a building or a logo on the side of a race car—today’s ads are dynamic, that is, a sponsor can alter them remotely and on-the-fly, tailoring them to specific locations and times-of-day.
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̖ Gamers playing Pop It! can win coupons for Target, the game’s creator, and Madden NFL 25 players can win in- game GMC vehicles. (left) Courtesy of Target; (right) General Motors LLC. Used with permission, GM Media Archives
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CULTURAL FORUM Are Games Good or Bad?
“The single biggest misconception about games is that they’re an escapist waste of time. But more than a decade’s worth of scientific research shows that gaming is actually one of the most productive ways we can spend time.” With those words expressing the theme of her 2011 book, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, Jane McGonigal thrust the value of games into the cultural forum. Although a game developer with success in the games-for-good movement, McGonigal was making the argument that games—period—were good for humanity. Yes, kids may play 10,000 hours of video games before they turn 21, but it’s not wasted time. By giving them a sense of accomplishment, meaning, and productivity, game play is producing a new generation of “super-empowered hopeful individuals.” For example, networked games like LittleBigPlanet teach collaboration; games with rewards like Foursquare teach motivation; pro-social games like Super Mario Sunshine teach altruism. She points to the more than 6 million cumulative years people have spent in World of War-craft, just about the same amount of time since humans first walked upright. These gamers, she argues, aren’t just enjoying themselves, they’re literally evolving in real time.
But, counters tech writer Dave Gilson, “Never mind that Americans watch nearly 29 million years of TV every single year, yet no one suggests our living rooms are a modern-day Olduvai Gorge [the Cradle of Mankind]” (2011, p. 56). And social scientists are equally skeptical of games’ purity of purpose. Craig Anderson and his colleagues demonstrated a causal relationship between playing violent games like Grand Theft Auto and both short- and long-term aggression (Anderson et al., 2003). Another group of psychologists found a causal link between more than two hours a day of game playing and attention disorders in kids that persist into early adulthood (Swing et al., 2010). Still another team of researchers discovered that 8.5% of American youth who play video games show multiple signs of behavioral addiction, including “spending increasing amounts of time and money on video games to feel the same level of excitement; irritability or restlessness when play is scaled back; escaping problems through play; skipping chores or homework to spend more time at the controller; lying about the length of playing time; and stealing games or money to play more” (in St. George, 2009).
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But, answers video game industry group Entertainment Software Association (2014), if there is a problem with game playing, it’s up to people, especially parents, to monitor their own play. The ESA notes that 42% of parents play games with their children at least once a week; 68% believe that game play provides mental stimulation or education; 55% say games encourage family time; and 58% think games help their kids connect with friends. Not only do parents seem to agree with Jane McGonigal about the benefits of gaming, but industry sales data suggest that the “bad” games identified by those social scientists are a small minority of all games introduced each year, about 12%. Moreover, like the best of literature and film, games are an important form of creative expression. They are exhibited at some of the world’s great art museums like the Museum of Modern Art in New York and London’s Barbican. Even the Smithsonian in Washington values games as significant cultural products. Its curator of film and video arts, Michael Mansfield, explained upon the acquisition of Flower and Halo 2600 for its permanent collection, “Video games represent a vast, diverse and rapidly evolving new genre that is crucial to our understanding of the American story” (in Weber, 2013).
Enter your voice. Games, good or bad? Of course, you know it’s a much more complicated matter than that. Games do have negative effects on some people, they clearly can be a good in people’s lives, and they obviously have some cultural value. So where do you stand, given the information provided here?
But why, beyond the cash they earn, do game designers want product placements in their creations, a practice begun in the 1980s when Sega put Marlboro banners in its arcade racing games? First, brand names add a bit of realism to the game’s virtual world, presumably enhancing the player’s enjoyment. Second, advertisers and game makers frequently engage in cross-promotion. For example, retail store Target maintains several mobile games on behalf of the brands it sells. Pop It! rewards players for correctly packaging Purina’s dog snack, Beggin Party Poppers, with coupons they can use at the real-world store. GMC vehicles and billboards appear throughout Madden NFL 25. After every real-world weekend of NFL football, GMC selects a Never Say Never Moment of the Week, one play demonstrating
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strong individual player performance. Gamers can then download and reenact those GMC moments in their Madden NFL 25 video games.
So mutually beneficial has game product placement become that placements, which can cost more than $1 million in a popular game, are frequently bartered for free; that is, the game maker and the brand advertiser exchange no money. The brand image is provided to the designer (for realism) and the sponsor gets placement (for exposure). The industry earns well in excess of a billion dollars a year from in-game advertising; Zynga alone made more than $150 million in 2014 from product placements (Jordan, 2015).
FREEMIUM GAMES Even more deeply integrating products into games are freemium ga mes, in which consuming advertising or even spending actual cash allows players to progress in their play. Freemiums happen in a number of ways. In some games, in exchange for watching a commercial, players can obtain virtual goods, like weapons or armor, rather than work to earn the credits necessary to buy them (most players given this option take it). In others, choosing to use a brand-name product imbues players with special in-game attributes unavailable to players content with generic products. There is a third form of freemium games in which players can spend real-world money in order to advance. A game like World of Warriors, for example, has energy meters; when players run out of energy-giving food or elixirs, they must recharge their depleted energy levels to continue their quest to vanquish the Skull Army. There are three primary ways to do this: wait, barter for energy with in-game earned crystals, or buy it with actual cash. Three-quarters of all iPhone app revenue comes from in-app purchases like these (Nash, 2014).
ADVERGAMING Product placement in games has proven so successful that, in many instances, brands have become the games themselves in advergames. Advergaming typically occurs in two ways, brand-specific sites and game sites unaffiliated with a single sponsor but offering brand-based games. Brand-specific game websites are sometimes downloadable and sometimes played online. Either way, their goal is to produce an enjoyable experience for players while introducing them to the product and product information. Chipotle Mexican Grill’s The Scarecrow, a free iPhone game app designed to deliver the message that the chain uses only natural products, was not only recognized as advertising’s “Most Effective Mobile Marketing Campaign,” but its huge popularity produced multiple online parodies and fan sites to teach players in-game cheats (Pierre, 2015). Cable television’s Hallmark Channel goes in even another direction, establishing its own game site, Fun & Games, which offers scores of online and downloadable games, all coincidentally designed to promote its basic cable programming.
Unaffiliated game sites that offer brand-specific games, however, have raised the question of fairness. Critics argue that embedding brand characters and logos in non-brand-specific games masks the true intent of those games. Neopets.com, for example, calls itself “the greatest Virtual Pet Site on the Internet.” It explains to its primarily preteen players
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that their gaming is “completely FREE!” The games, however, include the Lucky Charms Super Search game, the Nestlé Ice Cream Frozen Flights game, the Pepperidge Farms Goldfish Sandwich Snacks game, McDonald’s: Meal Hunt game, and visits to the Disney or General Mills theaters where points are awarded for watching commercials. The company assures parents that all sponsored content is clearly labeled, but critics respond that little kids don’t know the difference between an ad campaign and a game, even if it is so identified.
ADVOCACY GAMING Companies or organizations wanting to get their noncommercial messages out are also turning to advocacy games, primarily on the Web and for mobile devices. Many national political candidates are “supported” by advocacy games. Particularly popular among college-age voters is the still-playable arcade game Obama Race for the White House. Dr. Ian Bogost, who created the genre with his 2004 release of the still-playable Howard Dean for Iowa Game, said, “I didn’t get into games because I wanted to reach a demographic, I did it because I think games can communicate political concepts and processes better than other forums” (quoted in Erard, 2004, p. G1).
Supporters of political advocacy games see three significant strengths. First, the games are relatively inexpensive. A good political game can be created in a few weeks for about $20,000, well under the cost of television time. Second, like other advergames, they are sticky and the
̖ Chipotle’s The Scarecrow advergame. Courtesy of Chipotle
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message is reinforced with each play (broadcast ads are fleeting). Finally, they are interactive, making them a powerful means of communicating with potential voters, especially younger ones. More traditional forms of advocacy messaging, such as radio and television ads and campaign fliers, passively engage voters with their campaign rhetoric. But games encourage potential voters to interact with the message.
Not all advocacy games are about politics, however. There are games advocating the use of energy alternatives to oil (Oiligarchy), religious freedom (Faith Fighter), a more flexible application of copyright (The Free Culture Game), and improving kids’ nutrition (Fatworld).
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DEVELOPING MEDIA LITERACY SKILLS
̖ Fatworld, from ITVS Interactive, is an advocacy game exploring the relationships between obesity, nutrition, and socioeconomics in the United States. TVS Interactive, “Online Video Game, Fatworld,” Public Broadcasting Service-Independent Lens, http://www.fatworl d.org. 2006 Persuasive Games, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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Using the ESRB Ratings The link between games and antisocial behavior has been at issue ever since there have been games, finding particular urgency after dramatic events like those in Jonesboro and at Columbine High. In 1998, 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson and 11-year-old Andrew Golden of Jonesboro, Arkansas, heavy players of the shooting game GoldenEye 007, set off fire alarms at their middle school and shot at students and teachers as they fled the building. In 1999, Doom fans 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and one teacher and wounded 23 at Columbine High School in Colorado. In each instance, the teens’ “addiction” to games was prominently noted. The Columbine shooters had even created a custom Doom to represent the shooting of their classmates.
Congress first investigated the effects of video games in 1993, the same year that Doom was released for home computers. In an effort to head off government restrictions, in 1994 the industry established the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) rating system. It has six ratings (a seventh, RP for Rating Pending, is the equivalent of “this film has not yet been rated”):
EC Early Childhood ages 3 and up
E Everyone ages 6 and up
E10+ ages 10 and up
T Teen ages 13 and up
M Mature ages 17 and up
AO Adults Only ages 18 and up
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Like the movie rating system, the ESRB system requires that games offer content descriptors somewhere on the front or back of the game package explaining why a particular rating was assigned. Although the Federal Trade Commission has lauded the ESRB ratings as the most comprehensive of the three industries’ (games, recordings, movies), media-literate gamers (or friends and parents of gamers) should understand the strengths and weaknesses of this system. Depending on your perspective, this self-regulation is either a good thing because it keeps government’s intrusive hand out of people’s lives and protects game makers’ First Amendment rights, or a bad thing because it is self-serving and rarely enforced. The value of the content descriptors, too, is in dispute. All a game maker is required to list is any one of the descriptors that has led to a given rating—for example, strong lyrics. For some, this is useful information. For others, it masks potential problems. First, according to the ESRB system, if this content is sufficient to give the game an M rating, no other content that might have contributed to that rating, such as mature sexual themes and violence, need be listed. Second, strong lyrics might apply to song lyrics about sex, violence, alcohol, or drug use. Only when the game is played will the player identify the reason for the rating and descriptor.
An additional concern over the rating system is that it is poorly enforced, but this concern may not be well founded. There’s no doubt that some underage buying does occur, but the Federal Trade Commission’s own undercover investigation of the problem revealed that video- game retailers do an effective job of enforcing age-based ratings; only 13% of underage shoppers are usually able to purchase M-rated video games (Lordan, 2013). This is no doubt due in part to the fact that 91% of parents of gamers are present when their kids buy video games (Entertainment Software Association, 2014). You can read the box entitled “Are Games Good or Bad?” to get additional background on why many people think rating video games is a good idea.
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MEDIA LITERACY CHALLENGE Masculinity and Femininity in Game World
Select five games that feature both male and female characters. For each of those characters, list the first three descriptors that come to mind as you look at them. Are there common traits among the men? Among the women? If so, why do you think they exist? How realistic are the portrayals of the men? Of the women? Can you explain your findings and your reactions to those findings in terms of these media literacy skills: Your ability and willingness to pay attention to and understand video game content; your respect for the power of games’ messages; and your ability to distinguish emotional from reasoned reactions when playing video games?
Media-literate game players have an understanding of the ethical and moral obligations of those who design the games they play. Keep this in mind as you read what Entertainment Software Association President Douglas Lowenstein had to say about video game content, “It is one thing to say a product is protected speech. . . But it is quite another thing to say we have no larger responsibility for shaping the quality and values of the culture we live in” (2005). Given what you’ve learned in this exercise about games’ portrayal of men and women, can you address the question of the ethics of gender representation in video games?
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