Shadows on the Screen: The Cost of Mainstreaming

Just in time for E3, the Entertainment Software Association announced that sixty-eight percent of US households play computer or video games. What does that mean to you and me? And how do Cylons, Asher Roth, and stickball figure in?

To answer the first question, those numbers suggest that one way or the other gaming is entering the main stream. People, not “gamers“, play video games. How couldn’t they? The PS2 is nearing year 10 and is a staple of entertainment centers everywhere. People on mass transit strike up conversations about “their kid’s Nintendo” and how shocked they are that its fun. Do you have any interests? Well there’s likely a game for fulfilling that fantasy.

What does this mainstream acceptance add up to. Well, when you take a look at the gaming media, writers from all sorts of publications (this one included) have been angling for legitimacy for the medium for over two decades. There are certain benefits gained by going legit.

One of those benefits is widening the focus of the art. Sci-Fi isn’t a new genre, but the steady growth of its inclusion in pop culture has allowed well financed production of quality material in broader fields. Love them or hate them, shows like Lost, Heroes, Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Battlestar Galactica exist only because other “genre” programs (Star Trek, Buffy) have helped to ease more and more of the population into it. To be clear: Those old shows make it possible to sell those new ones, not to make them. I’m sure Abrams had that damned show bouncing around in his head long before he was confident enough to pitch it.

But when it comes to gaming, where will that broadened focus leave us? Modern Battlestar‘s Cylon menace builds on a robot-people foundation established by previous sci-fi standards like Blade Runner and Alien (which of course built off of even lesser known greats like Metropolis.) Will future mainstream games build on titles we like? Why will mainstream titles in the future build off of Ico when EA’s Carnival Games sold so much better? If the benefit of being legitimate in the eyes of the masses is improving the form, then is the best we can do more (better) minigame compilations?

Maybe the issue is with our use of the words “legitimacy” and “mainstream.” They’re different words for a reason, right? A work, medium, or genre being acceptable in the mainstream says nothing about the quality of a product (so long as we’re agreed that quality is a separate thing from popularity.) Being accepted into mainstream culture only demands one sort of legitimacy, and maybe that’s not the kind that game journos and developers have been clammoring for. Legitimacy comes in many forms. Economic legitimacy, artistic legitimacy, that sort of legitimacy where you can tell your Aunt that what you do is make/play/review games without being embarassed even a little. If we want that, then is gaining popularity best for us. Maybe not the oldest problem in the book, but a damned common one: is mass market acceptance worth the price of admission.

Let’s give it ten years and ask Asher Roth. Asher, up and coming rapper from the suburbs of Pennsylvania, spent the last year building underground hype and gaining the support of hip hop critics and bloggers, shrugging off accusations of snagging Eminem’s style and dealing primarily in middle-class metaphors instead of inner-city similes. His mix tape, The Greenhouse Effect, was well receieved and acted as an outline to what Roth was capable of. He could do ringtone rap, he could even spit bars targetting Jay-Z’s hip hop empresario status. And then his album came out. And it was frat rap.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a handful of great tracks, but the record is a blueprint (and not the kind that launches a new sound in the genre.) Asher is all queued up to produce songs about beer pong and pizza for the next fifteen years. Which is a shame, because the kid has potential to be something new and different. And I fear that in fifteen years he’ll look back, release a collaborative track with a fan favorite MC and hope that he can regain the hype of his youth.

If you want, I can copy and paste those last two paragraphs and change those words from “Asher Roth” and “collaborative track” to “Nintendo Wii” and “Metroid: Other M” but I prefer this condescending way of making my ponts much more. I’m not saying that Nintendo has sold its soul for success. I’m not so naieve as to believe that anything but the bottom line is what drives a company to begin with. Besides, even if their goal is to create a platform hosting games that people like, well, it seems that people don’t like the same sort of games that we do.

If this isn’t the first time you’ve read one of my editorials, you’ll know that I can’t stay away from comparing gaming to other arts & entertainment media. But maybe there’s a closer line to draw that will better reflect our situation. Before videogames are media, they’re, well, games. So this time I’m aiming my analogical anecdotes elsewhere: sports.

Baseball is hardly my favorite sport. Ever since the Philly’s blew the series in 1993 my love for the sport has faded. And as my interest has waned so has the country’s (and steroid scandals haven’t helped.) The game has changed since it was popularized, just as it changed from previous ball-and-bat games. The business of having fun – and all of the corruption of pure ideals that goes with it – has existed since before video games and it won’t stop here.

But some people, not everyone, not the mainstream still adore baseball.  Some people even love a version of the sport less mass market and more connected to its playful origins. On my way out of the subway the other day I caught a poster for the NYC Street Games ’09 festival.  There it was. It wasn’t baseball, it was stickball. I don’t know if they’d be playing fast pitch, slow pitch, or fungo, but somewhere out there in the shadow of a national sport was a legitimate sub-sport. Little league drama, farm team complications, major league gambling scandals don’t change the fact that people just love to hit a ball with a bat, and in some ways the venality of the sport has done more to make stickball a legit event, with the added support of nostalgia and a desire to return to our roots.

I often feel like when I reach this point in my columns, I’ve said a lot of nothing. That’s true here too. I’ve said “Hey, I wish they made games I liked, but maybe things will be ok in the long run anyway.” But even if I change nothing, it has to be said. Other M exists because we voiced that Nintendo was doing us a disservice. One way that the critic provides a service is in his ability to help legitimize things. So, even if I’m repreating myself here (and I am) let me be clear in my goal to mainstream the following: “Everyone chill, everything will be okay even if it isn’t exactly as I’d like it to be.”