Last week, as if you didn’t notice, the new Microsoft X-Box 360 went on sale, and serious gamers waited up until midnight for the chance to buy it. Of course, for the serious teenaged gamer who rolls out of bed at about lunchtime, midnight is the equivalent of high noon. I was not among them.
I haven’t played video games for a few years, but I’m aware of the fact that the video game industry recently surpassed the movie industry in size and revenue. The comparison is interesting. A typical video game today is a massive production, from the actual coding to the marketing and packaging. It’s a lot like an interactive movie where you get to play a part in the plot. And with today’s networked gaming consoles, you might be one of dozens of players in the same game competing over the internet.
About five years ago, I played a handful of video games as part of a reporting assignment. It didn’t seem right to write about a game like Tomb Raider or Abe’s Exodus without finishing the game, just like you’d never write a book review or a movie review without getting to the last sentence. The thing about a video game, though, is that in order to finish, you pretty much have to become an expert. Deadlines loomed, I cheated as much as I could–but still, I was weeks away from reaching the end of these special role-playing games with multiple levels.
And that’s when I realized precisely what a time-sink a video game can become. That’s not necessarily bad. There are lots of things I do for recreation that take up ten or twelve hours a week–fishing, sailing, cycling, and cross-country skiing all come to mind. But the other thing I try to do with my leisure time is read–novels, non-fiction, poetry, newspapers, magazines, whatever. And the time commitment to finishing a video game felt to me about the same as finishing a long novel, or maybe a good trilogy by Robertson Davies or Cormac McCarthy. I’m not sure how long it would take me to finish re-reading Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, but I’m sure a video game verison would take about as long–whereas the movie, even though it was a mind-numbing three hours long, only took most of a Friday night.
If you get to the end of a modern multi-level video game, you’ll frequently be treated to a credit reel–just like the end of a movie. And like most movies, a modern video game has dozens, sometimes hundreds of crew members. I certainly respect what they do, and I can see why a new game costs around thirty dollars–the cost of a hardcover book.
Last year, the cultural critic Steven Johnson wrote a book called “Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.” He argued that things like video games and modern television shows teach children important associative skills, hand-eye coordination, that kind of thing. I can understand his argument, and I sympathize with his urge to fight back against the sort of people who reflexively whine about the bad influence of modern media. The only thing worse than whining children is whining, moralizing adults.
I don’t expect to run out to buy an Xbox 360, or a new Sony Playstation, or whatever Nintendo is now making. And the PC on which I used to play NHL Hockey and FSIA soccer gave up the ghost earlier this year. There are only eighteen hours in the day (I’ve started subtracting shut-eye, as it’s become non-fungible.) I know there are probably some amazing games available now, but I’m getting nervous–nervous that I’ll never get around to reading the novels of John Dos Passos, or Theodore Dreisser, or Sherwood Anderson, or dozens of others I may never get to. Somehow, I suspect all those great novelists of the 20th century will have a longer shelf-life than “Resident Evil,” or “Mortal Combat” or even the highly tempting “Need For Speed”–and that’s reason enough not to spend $400 on the new XBox.
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