Fetching princesses threw fake cash in the air and Gothic Avengers waved plastic swords at miniskirted "booth babes" with purple hair. This neon-lighted boombox was Las Vegas with video games instead of slots, pulsating with sound and light.
The enormously noisy, glitzy display of Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), held last week at the L.A. Convention Center, was designed to overload the senses of both chain-store buyers and gamers looking for a new, totally immersive world to play in. And there were plenty of worlds at this installment of the annual high-stakes showcase for sellers, publishers and developers of video games: hobbit houses next to castles bordering graffiti-scrawled alleys that led to futuristic laser-lighted rocket ships.
With global consumers spending a billion dollars more on video games (the PlayStation/XBOX/GameCube versions--"console games"--as well as those played on PCs) than on movies, the $9.4-billion industry this year declared itself "A World of Its Own." That was the conference theme, as well as an accurate description of the mental space of the hard-core gamer at play. The question is: Just what kind of world is it? John Kreng, a stunt coordinator and former video-game producer, along with a handful of game developers, offered a glimpse into its changing dimensions, a world where the key battle seems to be between impulse and imagination.
Kreng, in his 30s, has been playing video games since the industry was in its early stages--that's more than 20 years in front of the box. He looked around, hoping to be impressed. "Nothing's really grabbed me," Kreng said. "I mean, none of this stuff makes you gasp or think or teaches you anything. A few years ago, the emphasis was on role-playing games and clever puzzles you had to solve. And those games are still around, but the tide's going against them. Now, it's all fast twitch. I mean, console games have always been like that, but now it's true for most PC games too."
Kreng quickly tapped his thumbs against his forefingers as an example of fast twitch. "That's the way it's been going these last few years--from storytelling to twitch games."
Classic "simulation games" like Sim City or Civilization--in which players build communities or countries--and "adventure games" that involve role-playing and puzzle-solving, like Myst, have strong narrative elements and little or no competitive game-play.
But, said Kreng, role-playing games and "God games [in which the player builds a virtual environment] take time, and most people don't have time anymore. It's a microwave mentality. Most people don't want to know the story. They get home from work or school, they're tired, they just want to kill enemies. Blam, blam, blam."
That's the opposite of what's happening in other media. Sports coverage, for example, depends on narrative. During the Olympics, we get touching film clips about what hardships an athlete has had to overcome on the way to the medal stand. And take a look at professional wrestling. You'll see story lines drawn straight out of soap operas: jealousy, rage, betrayal, envy. This looks like a carefully orchestrated attempt to bring in a female audience, and it seems to be working. But in the video-game industry, though there is a female audience for the products--perhaps 15% of the E3 crowd consisted of young women--the target market is young males, who apparently prefer twitch games with pure adrenaline-churning game-play and minimal story.
The writing on the wall was clear to DreamCatcher, a medium-sized company (with 75 employees) based in Toronto. In 1996, it started publishing visually evocative, narrative-rich adventure games in which the player could solve intricate puzzles and explore fantasy worlds full of everything from Arthurian knights to futuristic space travel.
"What's interesting about the customers that play our adventure games is that the age range really covers the entire spectrum," said Richard Wah Kan, the company's president and chief executive. "There are middle-aged and elderly; there are people in their 20s and 30s; there are males and females, about a 50-50 split." But the core gamers--the ones with the time and money to fuel the industry--are male, and young, from 12 to 25. They're the fast-twitch crowd. So at E3, DreamCatcher rolled out what its press kit called a "new look." It relegated its adventure games to a newly formed division called, appropriately, the Adventure Company; and the DreamCatcher label now publishes games--including console games--aimed at the core gamers.
Judging from the crowds, DreamCatcher's most popular new game at E3 was Gore. (No, it's not about the 2000 election, though the body count rivals that of the Florida ballot wars.) Gore is a multi-player shooter game set in a gritty futuristic urban landscape. Each player sees what's in front of him, from his own perspective, while trying to gun down the others. As the title promises, there's a lot of blood.
