Are our games growing up with us? Most people programming the Yaroze are old enough to remember the early days of video games quite well. Unlike the majority of games-players today (who are, as we were once, 12 year old kids), we can spot a zillion influences in most of the games we play; I mean, if you stretch a bit, you can trace the genesis of the first-person shooter back to an adventure game called “Hunt the Wumpus” written in the 1960’s - probably before most of us were born. With all this historical perspective, one thought that keeps creeping through my mind is ‘are video games really changing?’ Do modern developers not just continue to recycle the same ideas, jazzing them up with each new generation of hardware to keep people interested? Alternately, are games maturing, along with the people who play (and perhaps more importantly, write) them? Is it possible that entertainment software is moving from the vague category of ‘hobby’ into the realm of serious entertainment? We could even be witnessing the creation of a new art form - one that will eventually permeate mass culture in the same way cinema has this century. Could the words “When will you grow out of those games?” be consigned to the dustbin of history forever, or are gamers stuck in the public eye as perpetual adolescent males - victims of an unfathomable addiction to technology, spatial logic, violent conflict and forbidden fantasy thrills? More worrying, am I genetically destined to enter my 30’s slightly overweight, with a full, lush beard, a collection of ‘metal’ albums and a slightly embarrassing leather jacket..? Those TV games are all the same... (or “We were happy as Larry with a hoop and a stick when I were a nipper”) Ten years ago, I can remember feeling as if I was going to burst with excitement as I cycled home from the local Woolworth’s; zipped up safely in my jacket was a spanking new copy of ‘Operation Wolf’ for my cherished 48K Spectrum. Many moons worth of saved- up pocket money had just been spent, and if that game failed to live up to the 9-star praise ‘Sinclair User’ and ‘Your Sinclair’ had heaped upon it, well....there was gonna be trouble! Operation Wolf was my favourite arcade machine - rattling machine-guns, superlative ‘twitch’ gameplay, rescue-the-hostage scenarios and amusingly bearded enemies (in those ‘Airwolf’ shades) made for a brilliant and addictive coin-op. The whole experience was just a supremely entertaining and ironic piss-take of CIA activity in Latin America over the 1980’s. Hey - kids are a lot smarter than they get credit for, y’know! Suffice to say, Op Wolf did not disappoint. Even at that tender age, I knew the hardware limitations of the Speccy were going to severely limit the experience - that was fine. What survived (amid the rubble of two-tone graphics, multi-load levels, keyboard controls, and sprites with three frames of animation) was the frenzied atmosphere and the fundamental reason I had enjoyed the arcade original: I was shooting people. Today, I received my copy of House of the Dead for the Sega Saturn through the mail. Mixed reviews in the gaming press (despite near-unanimous praise on the ‘net) failed to dampen my enthusiasm for this home conversion of AM1’s thrilling Model 2 coin-op blaster (my current fave arcade machine). And a good thing, too - despite sops to the hardware limitations of the Saturn (“low-res, glitchy textures and intrusive mid-level loading” according to Sega Saturn Magazine) the fundamental entertainment in HOTD remains, excellently preserved: I can blow the legs, arms, chest, head and toenails off any number of approaching zombies (and Oh-my-God-they-keep-on-coming!!!) For a George A. Romero buff like me, this simple undead-blasting action is pure videogaming heaven. Immersion and Emotion Autoduel was the first proper adventure-y, RPG style game I ever played (unless you count those “Warlock of Firetop Mountain”-type Fighting Fantasy books, which I don’t). I was 11 years old and I was rubbish at it, but a fertile imagination made up for the game’s technical limitations (and the fact I never lasted more than a few hours). I got really into the whole atmosphere of the game - in a way most other gamers I knew seemed to with Origin’s Ultima series (I’m sure I’d have been the same, but my family never had a PC in those days). The rich universe which enveloped the game really gripped me, and I found myself transfixed when I played it, locked in a state of obsession similar to the time I was heavily into Star Wars and, ahem, Transformers. Despite my eventual discovery that it was all a rip of Mad Max, I remember Autoduel fondly. It is also the only Origin RPG which I’ve played all the way through to the end without cheating. Autoduel was one of the few games I reckon I was psychologically ‘addicted’ to - most games I bought as a kid were played to death over a few days, soon losing that exciting, ‘new’ feel. Autoduel remained fresh and exciting for months - until I finally brought down Mr Big and delivered that all-important package to the FBI (apologies for the spoiler, but we’re talking about a 15 year old game here)! Hours of sleep were lost, and I remember daydreaming away during school, figuring out cool new ways to customise my car(s). Looking back, I think I was enveloped by the possibilities the game afforded; I was very much a console kid - “action and shooting games were my bag, baby!” I’d never really thought about playing something like Autoduel, where the goal wasn’t a simple matter of point scoring, enemy-dodging, level clearing and item-collecting. It wasn’t like I’d not heard about RPG’s before, either - in fact, I remember being distinctly bored when my friends would huddle in a corner of the playground obsessing over Ultima. After playing Autoduel, though, I would listen wide-eyed and rapt as they recounted the techniques they had to learn in order to play Ultima IV: obeying the law of the land, dealing with moral dilemmas (to steal or not to steal?), mapping out the landscape of Britannia and equipping their party. Coming back to Autoduel after ten years, it’s still fun but it seems so limited. I was also surprised at how small the game really was (funny how something that I felt gave me so much freedom can now be zipped 10 times on a single floppy disk)! Having picked up Ultima Collection and had a quick shot on the earlier games, I feel the same criticism applies. Still, compared to linear (if entertaining) FMV-fests like Final Fantasy VII or my pet Playstation game, Resident Evil 2, Autoduel is a veritable alternate reality! (continued...) Picture Perfect At some point, games are going to be photo-realistic in quality. Characters in games will become so lifelike as to become indistinguishable from real people. But will programmers be able to keep pace with the graphics? I hope I’m not making grand claims for AI or anything, but I think it’s quite feasible that a number of fairly convincing human constructs could exist in a real-time 3D game world in our lifetime. What does this mean for the future of games? Are we going to be playing Quake XII against a mixture of human and AI opponents, hunting each other down with futuristic weapons in some appropriately apocalyptic setting? Better still - will we be able to play in maps of our own homes, towns, or other real-life locations? Imagine going down to London, getting a creepy sense of deja- vu before turning to your friend and saying “Hey, this is where I fragged you the other night!” when you’ve never been there in real life before. Cool, huh? But will Quake be quite so much fun played ultra-realistically, anyhow? In reality, I’ll bet gunfights aren’t pretty nor are they half as dramatic as a Quake frag-fest. Racing through the streets of Edinburgh might not be up to the fevered imaginary settings created by tomorrows game designers (me! me!). Is there a place for perfectly simulated reality in games? I don’t particularly relish the idea of a fully-immersive ‘Resident Evil VR’, believe it or not! I was scared enough watching the ‘Dead’ movies - would people really want to ‘live’ through them? The possibilities that technological advances afford the sex industry are enormous, too! Don’t laugh that off - the only reason you have a VHS machine in your living room and not a Betamax is because Sony were fussy about who was allowed to produce cassettes for the Beta standard. Like they told you in Boogie Nights, the video porn industry boomed in the mid-80’s (and with it sales of VHS video recorders). True story. The combination of photo-realistic VR and tele-dildonics (don’t even ask) could give a whole new meaning to the term ‘silicon implants’ (hey, I bet that joke’s been cracked before)! Will Nintendo’s 256-bit console fail not because they ban games of a bloody and violent nature, but because they don’t want some smutty porn ‘simulation’ game appearing on the machine? (continued...) Some ideas for further sections... “I find myself getting very narked when I consider that someone who enjoys fishing is probably considered less geeky than someone who plays video games. The same logic applies to golf; why is it more socially acceptable for grown men to obsess over their aptitude when ‘hitting a small ball with a metallic club’? To reduce video games to such bare essentials, you would have to describe playing them as ‘moving pixels around a screen’ - not an untruth in itself, but a description more wanting for detail than Saddam Hussein's directions to the nearest chemical weapons plant.” “Ultimately, games are trivial. They’re a waste of time. They’re pointless. But if you want to apply that logic to video games, you have to apply it to other past times. Football, basketball, card games, board games, games children play in the street - one way or another, the same criticisms that get directed at video games are equally applicable to more traditional pastimes. Yes, playing games all day is not physically healthy. Most would agree that playing games all by yourself in a dark room is quite sad and lonely (especially if you do it all the time). Mindlessly mowing down legions of the undead in some deranged fantasy setting is not going to increase your IQ one iota (although it may do wonders for hand-eye co-ordination). Games are not a substitute for life - they enrich it.”