Video games are this decade's cutting edge art form - Financial Times

Many bemoan the end of mass TV viewing, but this is the era of mass playing, says Helen Lewis ©Getty Changing times: a gamer tries out the Wii U What do the books of Terry Pratchett, the film Iron Man 3 and the video game Grand Theft Auto V have in common? The answer is that they are all regarded as "geek" pursuits, and therefore not part of the cultural mainstream. That is bizarre: Mr Pratchett has sold more than 70m copies of his Discworld series of novels. Iron Man 3 , based on a character from Marvel Comics, has the best box-office receipts of any movie this year. And Grand Theft Auto V, released yesterday by Rockstar of Edinburgh, is expected to take more than $1bn in sales. The game is part of an industry expected to generate worldwide revenues of $66bn this year – releasing titles across consoles, PCs, Macs, tablets and smartphones. It employs thousands in highly skilled jobs: its writers create multilayered stories told over dozens of hours. Its designers conjure up lush landscapes and futuristic cities while economists study their virtual markets for clues to help solve real-world problems. Yet whenever I am invited to talk about video games, three things tend to happen. First, I am described as some variation of "political journalist by day, gamer by night" – as if playing video games were an exquisitely unusual hobby such as bog-snorkelling. Second, I will be asked whether violent games contribute to real-life violence, despite a yawning absence of evidence to demonstrate any causal link between the two. Third, I will be asked to defend the fact that I play games at all – as if there were only one type of game. Imagine if you told someone you were enjoying the latest Harry Potter novel, and in response they gasped: "Hang on, you read books?" Video games are treated differently from other cultural mediums: they are derided, misunderstood or, worse, simply ignored. The US television series Mad Men has generated endless column inches, won 15 Emmys and four Golden Globes, but it has never had truly mainstream appeal. The average weekly audience for the show in the US is below 3m. Meanwhile, the Grand Theft Auto series has been around since 1997 and has shifted 135m copies. Many people bemoan the end of mass viewing – the days when a water-cooler TV series could win an audience of tens of millions – but they overlook the fact that this is the era of mass playing instead. Show someone in their 30s an image of a plump Italian plumber with a moustache and overalls, and they will confidently identify him as Mario, the protagonist in decades of Nintendo games. Having lived without mainstream approval for so long, the games industry has bypassed it, appealing directly to enthused audiences. The advance reviews of Grand Theft Auto V were largely published on specialist games sites rather than in the mainstream media, next to the books and arts coverage where they belong. But this reflects the widespread treatment of video game releases as technology stories rather than cultural ones. Game reviews often talk about realistic graphics and intuitive control schemes as much as they do about stories and character development. The comedy website Something Awful once tried to imagine what would happen if films were treated the same way. "The music plays at the right time. When a scene gets sad, the music becomes sad. When there is a battle, the music becomes exciting," read their parody. Why does this matter? Because video games are likely to be the dominant cultural medium of the next decade: the average age of a gamer is now 30, and the gender split is close to even. In the past five years alone, I have been chased by a giant baby while completing fiendishly difficult puzzles, saved the world (a lot) and fought a quattrocento Pope who was armed with an alien weapon. I have also played games made on a shoestring by people who love the medium and want to use it to convey something heartfelt about themselves or the world around them. There is so much to say about video games. When will we be ready to listen? The writer is deputy editor of the New Statesman Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web. via Technology - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNH0YDYMru4GFBF7XZ9IcuP9g6CNUg&url=http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/64a8cce4-1f88-11e3-aa36-00144feab7de.html

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