Future video game developer here.
When you talk about video games, you can't ignore the industry's roots. Go back to the basics: Space Invaders, Pong, Centipede, Galaga, Pac-Man. Before there were home consoles, there were these things called arcade machines, at which people would stand for hours, mashing buttons and feeding in streams of quarters in vain attempts to stay alive. Some people thought that these games were corrupting the youth, sucking them dry of their aspirations and their change. Some also believed that the games were sending all sorts of terrible subconscious messages to the young minds addicted to them (what did those dots stand for in Pac-Man, anyway?)
Mythros hit the point on the head here. These games were classics, ARE classics, because of their simplicity and clarity of goals and gameplay. Pac-Man: eat dots. Galaga: shoot the aliens. Centipede: kill the centipede down to the very last of its bizarrely independent segments.
Here is where you get the stereotype of games creating short attention spans. Frankly, an arcade game isn't meant to be played for more than a couple of hours at a time. Plus, consider the amount of money being spent; you're not going to offer up "Final Fantasy" for potentially 75 cents (if the person playing is any good).
But then home consoles entered the market. Suddenly, without the pressure of having to finish up quickly so that the next kid in line could play, gamers were free to spend as long as they wanted on a particular game. The ability to save progress was monumental. The most frustrating aspect of the original Super Mario Bros. is that when you want to see the ending, you have to play through the entire thing in one sitting. With save files, you can get (Viridis, appreciate this) long-running role-playing games. Imagine trying to get through Dragon Quest in one shot. Heck no.
With the introduction of save capability, games could now be used to tell long, epic stories. Now the focus was going to go to how graphics, sound, technology, etc. could be improved to better tell those stories. And, as technology improved, we somehow decided that what we wanted in our video games was increased realism. Ocarina of Time was amazing for the fact that Link looked around his environment.
Also, the increased realism means an increase in realistically depicted violence. Here you get a lot of people complaining. Did you know Mortal Kombat was pretty much the reason for the ESRB? As far as violence goes, there's always been violence, in books, in movies, in classical plays (spoiler alert: basically everybody dies in Hamlet). Video games are an easy scapegoat because they're a fairly recent development and, frankly, are far more immersive than any other form of entertainment to be developed thus far. Dungeons and Dragons used to be scapegoated for a lot of stuff. Correlation doesn't equal causation, though, I'll warn.
I'm not going to talk a lot about video games of recent times, since I assume you all are pretty well-versed on that.
But what I notice, as somebody who intends to go into the industry, is that there's been an interesting trend toward nostalgia. People are getting tired of horrendously complex games built on graphics. The rise of WiiWare and Internet-based games has led me to believe that simpler games, with well-balanced gameplay and easy access, have greater staying power than a lot of what's being released nowadays. Don't get me wrong, I love Square Enix's products to death, but there's something about Tetris and the original Sonic the Hedgehog that nothing's going to replace (speaking of Sonic, anybody hear about "Project Needlemouse"? I don't have much faith in Sega at this point but one can always hope).
What's also an interesting trend is the ever expanding video game market. "Hard-core" gamers whine and complain that video games are increasingly being marketed to kiddies and old people, but hey, look at it this way: the kids will grow up and old people have money. I think it's pretty amazing that grandparents and grandchildren can get together and play Wii Sports like they used to play board games. Nintendo's playing it smart, if you ask me.
I also think that video games are going to forever move toward our dream of virtual reality—that is, a totally immersive experience where reality and fantasy blend together so that you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. I think that's bad for people who are already delusional, but for people who have healthy minds and are capable of understanding what's fact and what's fiction, I can't imagine anything more exciting.
People play video games because they're an escape. You can do things in video games you couldn't do in the real world. Games provide a world where you are in control, where you are important, where the things that you do actually matter.
Video games reach a lot of people that you might not reach through fine arts museums. As an artist, I'm excited about that. I want to bring art to people through video games.
I've pretty much lost my train of thought. Sorry for writing so much, hope you were able to trudge through it.
The Gaming Industry
