Due to the wonders of modern technology I was able to watch Charlie Brooker’s How Videogames changed the world last night. Well using TV On Demand Catch Up anyway, nothing dodgy. The show charted the rise of video games and in particular 25 titles that were considered hugely influential in the direction the gaming world took.
The show featured contributions from people inside and outside the game industry, the contributors included Peter Molyneux, Jeff Minter, Will Wright, Tim Schaefer, Neil Druckman, Ron Gilbert, John Romero, Nolan Bushnell and Rhianna Pratchett. Quite an impressive line up.
Now obviously being a list show people will disagree with the list, but here it is:
- Pong
- Space Invaders
- Pac-Man
- Manic Miner
- Elite
- Super Mario Bros
- Tetris
- The Secret Of Monkey Island
- Street Fighter II
- Doom
- Night Trap
- Tomb Raider
- Parappa The Rapper
- Starcraft
- The Sims
- Grand Theft Auto III
- Shadow Of The Colossus
- World Of Warcraft
- Wii Sports
- Call Of Duty 4 – Modern Warfare
- Braid
- Angry Birds
- Minecraft
- The Last Of Us
Hold that thought. The show didn’t really touch upon virtual worlds such as Second Life, but it clearly showed how the foundations were laid to create the virtual world experience.
The show covered themes such as sexism, demonstrated by Lara Croft’s shrinking bosom over the years. Violence was covered, which created ratings for games. Sandboxes, non linear gameplay, MMO’s, shared experiences, gamification, all of these paths lead to the virtual world experience.
The gamification angle is laid on a bit too thick in my view by the inclusion of Twitter. Twitter is not really a game is it, but you can argue that some people play a game in terms of the number of followers they can attract and the number of retweets they can get. The same concepts can be applied to the likes of Second Life. How much traffic can you get? How many friends on your list? How large is your inventory? How many people can you attract to an event? However like Twitter, Second Life isn’t really a game but I’ll discuss that more in another post.
The path to virtual worlds and user generated content comes more from non linear paths and the way that it became acceptable, although still frowned upon, to see adult themes in video games. This is why there’s adult content in Second Life, others had already laid that path. Although I doubt very much that Linden Research thought adult content would take off in quite the way it did, the fact that it was already around in other video game mediums made it a less controversial hurdle than it otherwise would have been.
Another area of interest to virtual worlds is the way indie gaming has come full circle. In the early days people could make games from their home and thanks to indie gaming, they can do so again. That’s why the likes of Braid are in the list. This indie angle is also why virtual worlds can prosper today, you don’t need huge production teams to create content. Obviously a huge production team helps but you don’t need one and that’s empowering.
I found the documentary interesting, humourous and at times exciting. However it is a shame that virtual worlds were pretty much skipped over. There is a very strong argument for Second Life to be in that list. Second Life was a ground breaking development in terms of user generated content and later for allowing people to change their own world by making bank from selling that user generated content. Second Life really is an important player.
However as I said earlier, list shows always create debate about the list itself. The fact that there are titles on the list you don’t agree with shouldn’t take away from the importance of how video games have changed the world and will continue to do so.
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