State of the Magazine:
Sometimes, we get letters telling us to lighten up. After all, goes the rationale, these are only games. In addition, some of our readers are absolutely offended at the idea that we take seriously the moral, philosophical underpinnning of computer games and actually believe that these entertainment experiences have applications for community building, cultural understanding and individual edification in addition to being fun.
So, it was with great interest that I read a lengthy book review in the Los Angeles Times which covered a new anthology of the baseball stories of Ring Lardner. The review began by citing a comment by F. Scott Fitzgerald which had virtually accused Lardner of wasting his time and talent by writing about "a boy's game, with no more possibilities in it than a boy could master, ..."
It should be fairly easy to imagine how this disparaging remark from one of my all-time favorite authors would have hit me like a plague in Global Conquest (which knocks every unit in a burb down to one strength point). Fortunately, I did not stop reading the review at that point. After all, I love to read both Fitzgerald and Lardner, often finding myself quoting the title of "You know me, Al!" whenever I mess up (You Know Me Al being a series of letters from a nearly washed-up minor leaguer to an earlier teammate who had already seen the light).
So, it was with great exaltation that I read a quotation from Virginia Woolf stating a position diametrically opposed to Fitzgerald's. The British critic, who cared nothing about the game of baseball itself, stated "It is no coincidence that the best of Mr. Lardner's stories are about games." She went further to state that writing about baseball had allowed Lardner to solve one of the most difficult problems for an American writer, "it has given him a clue, a center, a meeting place for the diverse activities of people whom a vast continent isolates, whom no tradition controls. Games give him what society gives his English brother."
Even though Virginia Woolf never saw a computer game in her life, she has underscored the positive effects of the hobby. If baseball, the national game, was a centering force early in our century, how much more can computer games provide both a focus and a forum for our society on the brink of the information age. Where the national sport has offered meaning and mythos in the past, but has been somewhat devalued by the corporate machinations of modern baseball, computer games have the opportunity and potential to humanize the machines at the center of the technological revolution, as well as to communicate knowledge and transform that knowledge into meaningful myth.
Sure, it's just a game, but games are a laboratory for human interaction and an analog for real-world systems. As a laboratory, we find ourselves able to experiment with new and old approaches to problems, without authentic risk. As an analog, we are able to learn concepts and discover insights that should inspire us to do further research (after all, we probably are not going to play a game on a subject unless we have some interest to begin with).
Sure, it's just a game, but games are one way that human beings communicate in code with each other and the new era of connectivity which seems to be opening up in computer games may be our generation's ritual dance that supplies meaning to the hunt, rat race and struggle to be found in life. Maybe those humiliating defeats and disrupted alliances in wargames and multi-player games will teach us that aggressiveness is not always rewarded. Maybe those significant drops in simulated portfolio value to be experienced in investment games will keep us from making the same mistakes in our real retirement portfolios. Maybe the recruitment of that untrustworthy NPC into our fictional parties will put us on the alert when we have to make real personnel decisions at work. Maybe...
State of the Industry:
Within the industry as a whole, we find ourselves torn between the harbingers of "doom and gloom," who point to the failure of CD-I and CDTV to generate much interest for optical-based, interactive products within the mass market of consumers, and the prophets of affluence, who point to computer game companies as potential take-over targets for the entertainment conglomerates. We find ourselves nodding in a measure of agreement with both sides, but end up having to serve as a voice in the wilderness by reminding everyone that it will be quality software that will eventually intrigue the masses enough to get over their inherent fear of the hardware and, as a result, become involved with entertainment software. The entertainment conglomerates may well move in when the interest is there, but they certainly have no need to "move in" until the public perceives the value of CD-based interactive entertainment as being more than simply "the same games with digitized voice and more pictures." Until those "must play" games are available on CDonly formats, we really have no idea of the potential for CD-based interactive entertainment.
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