Last week, all the major video game companies unveiled the future of video games, and it looks a lot like the past of video games: violence, motion control and nostalgic equals. All of this makes Ben wonder if video games are actually becoming a stagnant medium, destined to revel in their own stupidity for eternity. Rich finds it hard to argue with such an impression, but points out some signs of hope behind the curtain.
Ben and Rich also discuss what dangers Christians will have to consider in the relatively near future when it comes to motion control and pushing the envelope.
Every week, Richard Clark and Ben Bartlett acknowledge and respond to the big issues in popular culture. We love feedback! If you’d like to respond you can comment on the website, send an email to christandpopculture@gmail.com, or go to our contact page. We would love to respond to feedback on the show, so do it now! Subscribe to us in iTunes by clicking here. While you’re at it, review us in iTunes! We’ll love you forever!
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Pop Culture is everywhere. We just acknowledge it. Christ and Pop Culture is an attempt to discuss and think rightly about the common knowledge of our age. 
If technology has done one thing, it has helped inch along the question that should have been present from the start: What are game worlds and what are their effects on their tourists?
Videogames are merely an outgrowth of boardgames, and while there was some criticism of boardgames, there has never been any thing near the dedication as in other fields. This is a shame because there is so much to consider and so much to think about, even on an ethical level.
In recent comments, I tried to defend the idea the the Super Mario Bros. gameworld is one built on violence and greed (and to a lesser extent, i think it can be argued, sexual ethics). This is not any kind of new idea. Chess, checkers, and other ancient boardgames are each in their way abstract murder simulators (or at the least, warfare simulators). Some people, if I am recalling my reading correctly, recognized these things and so abhorred boardgames for involving civilians in such violent gameworlds.
So the question of what gameworlds are (and how they relate to we who inhabit the real world but merely stop by for visits) has been around for a while. Unfortunately, most never stop to consider their meaning.
We become inundated by unfounded and unthoughtful opinions such as the two most common: “It’s just a game” (which ignores entirely the question of what a gameworld is) and “It’s murder so it’s wrong” (which shows it has not asked the gameworld question by mistaking the gameworld and its ethics for the real world and its ethics).
I’ll agree with Ben by saying that these are essential questions for anyone who plays or knows people who play to consider and I’ll disagree with Ben by saying that I don’t think the upgrade in technology makes the activity any more dangerous than it ever was. There was always a danger there for those who didn’t understand the gameworld paradigm. The upgrade in technology only pushes that question better into view for those who were never prone to leading self-examined lives.
______________
As far as the big announcements at E3, none of them interest me. The continual push into peripherals and more bodily involvement just means that the thoughtful development of the game itself will be further delayed, being left wholly to those who don’t concern themselves with marketing to new technologies.
I hope that soon, these companies will exhaust themselves on the diminishing returns of peripheral development and begin again focusing on making amazing games. Games that say new things and explore life and thoughtfulness in new directions. I, like Ebert, don’t believe videogames can be great art (as a matter of definition), but I’d sure like to see them become gaming’s equivalent. They definitely aren’t there yet, but they’ve come a long way since 1977.
______________
As for whether games are maturing? I think that may be the wrong question. It’s like asking whether books or film or music is maturing. Like those other cultural artifacts, the landscape of gaming is growing and changing. In good ways sometimes and in bad at others. Gaming, as pointed out, is not some sort of monolithic entity where someone can point at Gaming and then describe the State of the Medium.
Just like with books and music and film, the most interesting stuff and the stuff that’s really exploratory and worthwhile is not going to be the stuff that caters to the masses. The good stuff is not going to be the Lady Gagas and Justin Biebers or the Avatars and Transformerses. It’s going to be the risky stuff that comes out of the corners of the industries. The Wong Kar-Weis, the Gaslamp Killers, the Nami Muns.
I will say that gaming is finally maturing in the sense that its getting older and is finally beginning to reap a crop of critics who even if they aren’t really criticizing works are at least taking baby steps toward a real kind of criticism. The same is recently true of comics and so its going to be an exciting time to watch as someone with chops finally picks up gauntlet and begins developing a GUT of gameworld theory and begins explaining these games not so much from the microcosm within gaming culture but from a perspective of worldwide cultural involvement.
Increasingly, I’m finding that literary critics who are not also critics of film and music and architecture and politics and philosophy are not really all that great at their chosen field. The same goes for film critics, art critics, music critics, political critics, comics critics, and yes: videogame critics. With the rapid shrinking of the world, interdisciplinary criticism will be the only valuable path to go. A gaming critic who only concerns himself with how a game relates to other games will remain wholly ignorant of a good portion of any single game’s moral, spiritual, and ideological heritage.