I went to PAX East this weekend, and it was thoroughly enjoyable and inspiring if not wholly successful. (But then again, maybe it was. More on that later.) Turns out it was a much larger thing than I realized.
Somehow I managed not to play a single game while I was there. Not even a few rolls of Zombie Dice. It’s a celebration of games and I was apparently more interested in (unsuccessful) networking and attending the industry-insider panels. Look, I still enjoy games quite a bit, but I’ve gotten a lot more selective as I’ve aged and my interest in games is much more complex than when I was growing up. There were a few games here that were interesting to me, mostly indie or XBLA titles (or both). The big name stuff for the most part I’m unlikely to play. Most of it just doesn’t do much for me anymore.
Let me put this plainly: as a gamer I am for the most part embarrassed by what we have done with video games. The Escapist (a great publication with an unfortunate title – see below) had a nice rundown of one of the worst offenders in the industry, but there are others. Games can do so much more than provide escapism for people – they can make our lives better. All the evidence in my life shows me that it’s true. Watch Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk called “Gaming Can Make a Better World” – it’s a short video and you’ll be convinced by the end. She gave the keynote at PAX; naturally I managed to both get my book signed and come off like a complete tool at the post-speech meet & greet.
In any case, I don’t see Jane’s vision being taken up by the industry (again, for the most part). I see developers making money by using complex metrics to squeeze every micro-payment out of you while enticing you to ensnare your friends in a complex web of time-wasting nonsense. But that’s just me. (I should point out that Zynga does support some good causes with their sad, sad piles of money.)
In mainstream commercial games, I see bullshit titles getting sequel after sequel while brilliant, innovative games fall into the dustbin of obscurity often due to promotional issues with publishers. To be fair, a lot of amazing games are sequels (and some great games are getting sequels), but that’s besides the point. My worry is that almost no progress is being made in the area of using games for things other than amusement or escapism. At the very least, maybe we could get a moderate dose of social utility with our alien frag grenades and BFGs. I heard a story this weekend at the Gamers Doing Good panel about doctors’ creative ways of prescribing video games as treatments, which they know from experience can be effective but have zero legitimacy as a treatment within the medical community. I find that to be unconscionable.
If there was one take-away from the conference, it was that the guys answering fans questions about games aren’t the guys to network with (if you’re from a DC nonprofit), and that if you have a vision for a game, you’re basically going to have to make it yourself with your own company.
An interesting thought. I want to create a complex adaptive system with social, economic and political characteristics and study the interactions from and between the resulting emergent phenomena. In other words, a game. A fairly complex game, and probably one that would have some interesting stories, based solely on the nature of the system. There is research out there that supports the notion that studying complex games could tell us useful things about our own economic and political systems. If that’s true, and we crafted the game in the right way, I think we might learn some very interesting things indeed.
Stay tuned.