THE WORLD of Big Entertainment is aflutter. A significant threshold has been crossed. Domestic sales of video games and consoles generated $10 billion in revenue last year, surpassing the $9.4 billion taken in at cinema box offices. No wonder they're making more and more movies based on video games, rather than the other way around.
But people are still inclined to interpret the success of these games simply by contrasting them with older venues. Hence, the conventional wisdom: Video games are "interactive"; players get to "participate," whereas TV and movies cater to mere viewers, the "passive" consumers of a bygone age.
The conventional wisdom is right as far as it goes. But the interactive/passive distinction misses the magic, the dimension of the gaming experience that is truly new -- and perfectly adapted to larger cultural trends. The ultimate allure of the video game resides in its form.
"The medium is the message," the most quoted of Marshall McLuhan's epigrams, justifies the existence of "media theory." It says the way we get information may have more influence on us than the content. It suggests that what a controversial game such as "Grand Theft Auto" has in common with an innocuous one like, say, "Tetris," may be more significant than you would ever guess -- given the hysteria stirred up by graphic game violence.
But to appreciate the importance of what these games have in common, you have to place them in a larger context -- the context I call "virtual revolution." Instead of the dreary old Industrial Age scenario pitting workers against capitalists, we now have a glamorous new post-everything scenario pitting spectators against celebrities.
The rise of reality television is the most obvious manifestation of virtual revolution, but spectators are swarming over the barricades on other fronts as well.
Other reality shows, under other names, are flourishing -- all devoted to one thing: paying attention to people refusing to be spectators. Think of all the mini-celebrities who dominate the chat rooms -- and all the bloggers, and those life journals describing and depicting daily activities and intimate moments, to say nothing of the web-cam sites that broadcast people's lives as they live them.
Consider raves and flash-mobbing, iPods and podcasting, disease-awareness walkathons, karaoke bars, focus groups, talk radio call-ins, e-mails to every news show, cellphone camcorders, homemade porn, sponsored sports teams for tots, and the fact that any high school band can burn a CD and Photoshop ironically zany or darkly brooding cover art and posters of professional quality at next to no expense.
