For Video Games, Mainstream Success Comes With a Price

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By SETH SCHIESEL

So there I was Friday morning, listening to the customary locker-room banter on WFAN, the sports-talk pioneer, as conversation turned to the betting odds on the best picture Oscar. As a few of the numbers were listed, Craig Carton, the bawdy provocateur who is one of the morning show’s hosts, dismissively cut off the segment and started talking about how he had an appointment that evening to play NBA 2K9 online against a friend in upstate New York.

In a fascinating generational twist, Boomer Esiason, the 47-year-old former N.F.L. quarterback who plays the straight man on the program, made a halfhearted attempt to mock Mr. Carton for his Friday night plans. Mr. Carton, a married father of three who turns 40 next week, shut him up with a line very much like: “What am I supposed to do? Dance the night away?”

It was a pitch-perfect moment that summed up why in 2009 video games are poised to become an even more established and central component of mainstream culture. Like Mr. Carton, the first generation to actually grow up playing video games is turning 40. As a group, they aren’t in the basement and they’re not maladjusted. They are responsible middle-aged parents, and many are coming into the full flower of their professional lives. People who play video games (most of whom probably do not consider themselves “gamers”) are moving into positions of power all over our society, even in the White House.

When Bill Burton, a deputy White House press secretary, tried to explain this week just how antiquated Obama staffers found the Bush computer systems, he used an analogy that should have made immediate sense to anyone under the age of, oh, 40. “It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari,” he told The Washington Post.

As recently as five years ago, video games were in danger of disappearing into the same cultural netherworld that comic books fell into many decades ago. In the United States (unlike, say, in Japan), it remains an act of fairly extreme cultural deviance to tell your friends that you are going to stay home on a Friday night reading comic books.

The great lurch toward grudging respectability that began a few years ago will almost certainly continue in 2009, if only because of the continuing popularity of mass fare like Wii bowling, Guitar Hero and Rock Band, not to mention Madden. And so video games are becoming acceptable in the manner that watching reality shows or sports on TV all night is acceptable. Bravo. But that can’t be all games are capable of. The real test of 2009 is whether games with a bit more intellectual and artistic ambition can continue to flourish.

I have to admit that by Christmas I was a little burned out on video games. Playing games for hundreds of hours a month can do that to you.

So I got away, in the hope that taking a refresher course in other media would help me understand games more thoroughly. I read Hermann Hesse. I saw Alan Gilbert conduct a program of Schubert, Brahms and Schumann at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. I watched Clint Eastwood’s first major film, “A Fistful of Dollars,” back to back with his latest, “Gran Torino.”

It worked, because at times in all the reading and watching and listening — in all the merely consuming — I chafed at how little control I had, at my inability to affect the narrative, at being taken on a joy ride by someone else. At those moments I longed to be able to make a decision, to solve the problem myself, to take responsibility for what would happen next — all the elements that make a game.

But more important, it also worked because all of that reading and watching and listening proved to me just how far most games have to go before they rival traditional media in two important areas: emotional depth and eliciting an intellectual engagement with one’s own place in the world.

From a narrative perspective, there have certainly been a few games that provided those qualities; historically, Planescape: Torment and BioShock come to mind. More recently, so have games like Fable II, Fallout 3 and Grand Theft Auto IV. And setting aside narrative, I find many of those qualities in the unscripted vastness of Eve Online.

But the artistically deflating, if commercially inspiring, truth is that with the exception of a few mega-franchises, the biggest bucks in the game business now come from providing casual party and family games that are little more than interactive cartoons.

The four top-selling games of last year all fall into that category, more or less. Yes, Wii Fit is helping people in a real-world way, and of course almost every Nintendo game is a jewel of polish and design. But Nintendo games aren’t generally trying to elucidate anything meaningful about the human condition. And neither are lucrative popcorn shooters like Gears of War and Call of Duty.

It is hardly a bad thing that it seems to be working. Even as the economy faltered and traditional entertainment segments from Broadway to the music business continued to reel, the overall game industry grew by 19 percent last year in the United States, to $21.3 billion, including $11 billion in software sales. Nintendo claimed responsibility for 99 percent of that growth, mainly because of Wii and the portable DS unit. So the morning-radio shock jocks are playing football and basketball games, and most everyone else is playing Wii bowling. There are a fair number of people getting shot with virtual machine guns. Here and there something approaching art is happening and actually making money.

Let’s focus on that last category in 2009, whether they arrive as new games in established franchises like Resident Evil, Mass Effect, God of War, BioShock or StarCraft, or as new properties revealing new worlds.

More Articles in Arts » A version of this article appeared in print on January 24, 2009, on page C1 of the New York edition.