Television vs. Video Games. Fight!

<BELL RINGS>

“In the red corner weighting in at 110lbs is the TV, undisputed champion of the sitting room since 1954, the darling of countless billions who have succumbed to its simple soporific charms. In the blue corner, the nimble upstart, the Video Game console, weighing in at 8lbs, rocking thumbs since the late 70s, but claiming their first world crown in 1985. The object of parental dismay ever since, and a font of moral panics. TV has been repeatedly bested by the youngster over the years but now is the time for TV to fight back! …”

This fight is far from over and the title bout takes place each year in January in Las Vegas at CES. Las Vegas is more than gin soaked gamblers, lamenting their losses in gaudy palaces of deceit. It’s the battle arena for global consumer electronics giants to fire salvos at each other. Each device is slimmer, faster and more innovative than the next. Want a 4mm thin TV? You got it. A fridge that can chill a can of coke in five minutes flat? Waterproof Smartphone. No problem.

CES is significant as its there that SMART TV is publicly racing ahead. Adoption is yet to reach a tipping point, but the migration is clearly apparent and for the console manufacturers, SMART TV is a spectre that cannot be ignored. App Stores on the device allied with intuitive inputs, motion control, gesture control and voice recognition are all present in the latest TVs. The ‘Killer App’ of Kinect just got pulled into the host, Kinect and the 360 now look like a counterintuitive double act. They’re starting to resemble clutter in the early stages of obsolescence.

It used to be the case that a games console provided entertainment that the TV could not, this hegemony went unchecked for decades as screen manufacturers stood idly by watching Nintendo, SEGA and Sony make a killing, delivering visceral content through adopted hosts. By the time the Xbox came along the stranglehold was vice like and the need for a console to deliver games was unassailable. They were untouchable.

The Wii arrived. Dragging with it new input methods and consumers, who were the exact intersect of the TV/Gaming audience. The lines became blurred primarily as the consumers (primarily) didn’t care which device was delivering the experience. The Wii UI aped TV channels, and recalled an aged CRT screen. The shark had been jumped. The console was invisible. Then the single most seismic event ever to hit gaming came along. The equivalent of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. The App Store.

In hindsight the Wii’s achievements will be all but forgotten, seen as an anomaly, an old model based on hackneyed technology allied with unique ideas.  The App Store opened the wallets of the non gaming ABC1 audience. The iPhone was a trojan horse, silver bullet and a vial of poison all wrapped into one. The games industry is still reeling from its impact. Its clear many will never get up from the suckerpunch.

The App Store explosion legitimized short form content delivery to the mainstream, and awakened every device manufacturer, to the fact they would to become a digital storefront. Many wastefully spent billions in an effort to mimic Apple, few succeeded. In 2012, It’s all about the audience. Samsung and LG command huge global audiences, engaging with them daily. They provide the warm blanket, the reassuring voice and the window on the world. TV is second only to the mobile phone as the ultimate ‘personal’ device. People love TV. Watch as they place them on walls, pushing family portraits to one side. Placed on an altar for the worship of false prophets.

TV as a concept crushes the Video Game a billion times. Video Games are niche. TV is Simon Cowell. TV is a huge metal fist in a velvet glove, the host will defeat the parasite, and the content will migrate into the TV. The consumer has ceased to care. Fanboys are a niche that are no longer the target of the console manufacturers attention.  The irony is that the console manufacturers are driving convergence, with motion control and the drive to turn Xbox LIVE into a ‘entertainment destination’, thereby quickening the infection. The 360 has mutated from a core gaming platform to a set-top box in an aim to capture the lapsed Wii audience. The problem? This audience has already made the jump to mobile and tablet, and they’re not coming back.

To the console manufacturers who think this won’t happen, I have one word. Kodak.

Video Games consoles are laid on the canvas bleary eyed, as the referee stands over them counting …

< … 7, 8, 9 … Its time to throw in the towel … >

Mario: Help Me Love You

How GameLine foreshadowed Xbox LIVE [by Twenty Years]

Meet the GameLine

In 1983, the prospect of downloads to consoles was unthinkable to many.

Bjorn  Borg had just retired from Tennis, the last episode of M*A*S*H had just aired and most importantly the NES launched. In hindsight it feels like the dark ages.  In 1983 GameLine appeared. GameLine looked like an oversized Atari 2600 cartridge, and was a dial-up modem that could download games to your console. In 1983 the Atari 2600 was six years old, only a  year earlier the ‘Darth Vader‘ iteration had come to market. For the record, this was a nickname.

"Xbox LIVE, I am your father!"

The prospect of downloading games at that point was effectively ‘science fiction’. The English nation was still wrestling with loading games onto the ZX Spectrum from cassette, downloading may as well have been alien technology, and effectively was. Alien tech it appeared was everywhere, as in 1979, Kane Kramer invented the first digital music player, in 1981 he filed his UK patent application. The early 80s was clearly tin foil hats and Mel Gibson all the way. However it wasn’t until 1996 that Audio Highway made the first commercially available MP3 player in 1996. Apple wouldn’t crash the party until 2001. Xbox LIVE wouldn’t be launched until 2002.

So why did it take so long from inception to marketplace success? In simplest terms the infrastructure simply wasn’t there, from a technological and cultural perspective. Dial up connections in 1983 were the preserve of scientists, nerds and maths teachers. The rudimentary wonders of the 2600 were enough visual shock and awe  for a generation. The high street was still king and the internet was ‘never going to take off’. GameLine typifies an inherently disruptive technology that would pave the way for those following it. The challenges GameLine faced are still evident for services like Onlive today, publishers were inherently suspicious of GameLine meaning that many top-tier game never appeared on the service, none of the key third parties at the time supported the service (such as Atari, Activision, Coleco, Mattel, and Parker Brothers).

GameLine went bust in 1983, but key members of the team became integral to the success of AOL. Whilst it didn’t have the connected gameplay features of LIVE, that honour would fall to the Dreamcast in 2001, it did introduce online leaderboards. Almost two decades later Xbox LIVE supported by a global corporation finally nailed the proposition and infrastructure. Relatively speaking, the global Xbox LIVE remains small (35 Million current members), but indicates that the experiments made thirty years ago were entirely on target. R.I.P GameLine.

 

 

PSN, Where Are You?

We are now 17 days into the PSN outage of 2011. Five years ago this would have been inconsequential, in 2011 its damaging Sony’s reputation, annoying consumers and stonewalling revenue to developers and publishers. Sony have their back to the wall.

Litigation and allegation point in one direction then bait and switch in another. The progenitor of this failure is fundamentally irrelevant, the fact that it’s been seen as unthinkable by many, and covered in the mainstream press is another.

Consoles must be connected, when they aren’t they cease to breathe.

Sony immediately were under siege. organisational inertia struck to the core and they froze. Consumers asked ‘what was going on?’ but Sony fell silent. They immediately faced heavy criticism, and the inertia stilted the corporations reaction time. There are two main reasons that consumers felt aggrieved.  They felt Sony had failed to deliver a service that they had learnt to become dependent upon, that underpinned their social graph. Consumers were also stunned that a trusted brand had left themselves open to the industrial scale theft of personal data. Whilst the ingenuity and complexity of the attack on Sony was still not entirely understood, consumers were afraid.

The fact is clear that Sony should have fessed up to consumers as soon as the shockwave hit. Allegations stand that Sony had known for six days before alerting consumers. This is unthinkable, and underscoring the billion dollar sucker punch about to hit Sony as part of a package of free content, upgraded systems and insurance policies. To date Howard Stringer has offered to insure US-based PSN users for a million dollars each. The perks of litigious culture writ large. X360 owns North America, Sony should look EMEA-wards to get their house in order.

The establishment of a platform is a multi billion dollar endeavour, that has crippled many, and blindsided a few. Nintendo established a huge platform but dropped the ball on the online provision of service. Microsoft nailed the Xbox LIVE service (ten years old in 2012) with occasional hiccups such as the service falling over during Christmas 2008, this was not an entire system failure however, just intermittent outages across parts of the service. To placate animosity Undertow (800MSP)  was given away to everyone on the service . This is a world away from the hemorrhaging of content that will leech value from PSN in the month of May 2011.

The eyes of the gaming nation are on Sony. They have been very publicly bested, and lay on the canvas bloodied and bruised. Will PSN ever recover from the fear of attack again. Platitudes and assurances of online security will take time to win people over. Microsoft made a public misstep due to RROD, which was down to a design flaw, and it still haunts the platform to this day.

The billion dollar war chests needed to pull PSN from the brink and rescue the 360 from hardware failures show the brutality of platform holding. Will the future in the cloud placate these worries? will connected consoles forever be compromised? Only time will tell.

Your move Sony, make the right one.

Can the 3DS save the QR code?

Time was when it was all about hipster geeks at SXSW on iPhones. Not the 3GS, not iPhone 4. The original ‘great leap forward’. In June 2007 this was a second coming of the mobile device. A collective technological rapture created exaltation, until the iterative Apple machine started to grind like a Ford production line in the early 1900’s. The 3GS quickly took away the lustre from the handheld gaming market as iOS started to gnaw into unfamiliar territory for Apple. The DS had made the touchscreen commonplace in 2004 but lacked the widespread reach of a telecommunications device and didn’t manage to squirm into the mainstream in the same way. It sat, ghettoized as a games device, a child’s plaything.  Despite a three-year head start the iOS handhelds (iPhone and iPod Touch) and DS iterations have about the same installed base. Around 150 million worldwide.

Ten years earlier (in 1994) Denso-Wave had created the QR code. A visual hyperlink that fitted perfectly as a call to action in a duncical mobile landscape.Adoption was rapid and wide-reaching in Japan and South Korea. The West was ambivalent. The barriers to widespread QR adoption in the West are:

• Lack of installation of QR readers in mobile devices. Many OEM refuse to hard bake QR readers into handsets, indeed many are shipped ‘vanilla’ to retailers (stripped of additions).
• Consumers are dispassionate and mobile web adoption whilst increasing with smart phone installation has been steady but unexplosive.
• Brands have been reticent to adopt due to a thudding understanding of the transformative power of the mobile web.
• Finally they look awful and ruin creative. In a society where they are commonplace they fit into the visual nomenclature in a landscape devoid of QR codes they pique interest, which gives way to apathy and lack of effectiveness.

As a direct response tool they work, but brand managers don’t always understand that.

But, all of a sudden the hipster are trading QR codes online. A flurry of Pokemania has made QR codes hip. The scanning mechanic is being widely praised and a tech almost twenty years old is suddenly fresh and new for an audience who generally had let QR codes pass them by. Nintendo‘s adoption of QR codes is commonsense and logical in the 3DS, for them it feels like a late adoption of such a familiar mechanic. Suddenly the Mii feels relevant again, collectible, engaging and fun.

Now , see how long the hipster geeks keep this going.

Concept: Why the Video Games Industry needs Ubiquity

In the 25 years between 1983 and 2008 the CD player became ubiquitous.

In 1985 the CD player was  “ … transforming the way people listen to music. With their sweet sound, easy operation and virtually indestructible disks, they represent a technological leap beyond records and tapes.” Time magazine described it as the “ … fastest selling machine in home-electronics history”.The reason for the CDs success was simple, the sound quality was an improvement on both vinyl and tape and they were robust. CD players were the must have item of the 1980’s. CD sales increased in the mid to late 80s and sold well in the early 90’s. The first portable CD player, the Discman, appeared in 1983. The first CD player, manufactured by Pioneer, for the use in the car appeared in 1984. The CD was first used as a CD-Rom in 1985.

Whilst the CD had a great strength in its ubiquity, it also caused problems. CDs were not region specific, even with copy protection encryption they were able to be copied, and the commonness of the product meant they started to be perceived as a commodity instead of a vessel for art.

Every CD player in the world could play a properly authored CD (whilst burnt CDs can cause problems), and this meant that not only was the price of the format forced down, but the cost of the technology continued to fall. In 2011, an entry level CD player is £20 or less. This meant that the format was completely interchangeable between multiple devices and there were no problems playing a CD on players from different manufacturers.

In the video games industry the situation is quite different. There have always been competing manufacturers; in 2011 there are 3 main manufacturers of Home Consoles: Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, but there have never been an opportunity to play Nintendo games on a Sony or Microsoft device and vice versa. Whilst games may appear on different systems, they are not portable across manufacturers, these releases are multi-platform.

The platform with the most commonly shared architecture is the Personal Computer (PC). Most PCs share the same operating system (most commonly Windows), and the main differences come from the internal components. In most cases a game is limited in its reach by the system requirements, namely a new game may require elements that older PCS do not have to run. PC development has been incremental, but rapid, since their introduction in 1981 by IBM and less specifically bound by the Generations cycle that exists in console gaming.

But what if ubiquity was the goal? As Chaplin and Ruby (2005) comment:

“Ubiquity is what the [games] industry has been after for years, and ubiquity seems to be what it is finally getting. One study, from investment analysts at Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown, has just concluded that the potential market for video games had grown from 20 million people in 1980 to 96 million in 2001 and is now growing exponentially—106 million people in 2005 and onward, as every baby born takes to the videogame habit.”

This was suggested by J Allard in 2003:

What I’d like to see us do as an industry is create more standardisation… Before television was standardised, there was no television. Before video was standardised, there was only Beta. Beta only had limited success, but it was technically superior and was a profitable business – but it didn’t have ubiquitous content, and you didn’t have it in every consumer’s hands, and it was price prohibitive. Today gaming has a lot in common with what BETA had yesterday. DVD, CD, television and radio are all ubiquitous – how do we make gaming ubiquitous too? I think it’s through standardisation

Quote: Ronald Reagan on Young People

I recently learned something quite interesting about video games. Many young people have developed incredible hand, eye, and brain coordination in playing these games. The air force believes these kids will be our outstanding pilots should they fly our jets.

The Billion Dollar Roll: How Tenpin changed the direction of video gaming forever

The rapid advancement of technology is often characterized by a simple theme. The desire to  communicate gave birth to the fax, mobile phones and the Internet. Video gaming has also had a common theme that has unified families, driven innovation in the arcades and ushered in the greatest step change of the current console generation: The widespread adoption of motion control. The unlikely lightning rod for this continual and unabated drive towards innovation has been the desire to replicate (as closely as possible) Ten Pin Bowling.

Video Game bowling is one of the most played video games genres in the history of the industry. This fact alone is astonishing. And also raises the question why? How is this even possible?

Bowling is cited as having its roots in Germany in 300 AD, with the first formalised rules coming into place in New York in 1895. Bowling for the Atari 2600 was released in 1978. A year later Midway released 4 Player Bowling Alley into the Arcades with a table-top cabinet that had two trackballs that looked and felt like bowling balls, the cabinet evoked the feel of the bowling halls with its wood effect veneers. In the years that followed there was a constant stream of Arcade and Home console iterations of the sport.

Ten Pin Deluxe (Bally Midway) hit the arcades in 1984 and was a shuffleboard bowling game integrating a puck and a monitor. It was also one of the greatest cabinets ever conceived with a faux wood lane and again attempted to replicate the motion of bowling in the best way possible at the time. These crude iterations were paving the way for intuitive motion based controls driven by the fact that bowling was hugely popular as a mainstream leisure activity that has an intuitive and familiar mechanic and a robust and enduring appeal. The formula was attempted over and over. The continued migration away from gimmick to video game simulation culminated in Alley Master (Cinematronics) which hit the arcades in 1986, complete with improved graphics but an ill-considered choice of stick input.

A decade later the next major innovation happened in the handheld space when Virtual Bowling made it on to the ill-fated Virtual Boy in 1995. Nester’s Funky Bowling followed it up in 1996. Through the 1990s iterations hit the PC, Playstation, Gameboy, Nintendo 64, SNES and Xbox in the 2000’s Bowling came onto mobile and iOS in the form of Midnight Bowling and PC browser-based oddities like Polar Bowling and Elf Bowling bemused rather than amused. Konami brought Simpsons bowling into the arcades in 2000, and rather than make a bold attempt to deliver the depth of lane found on the Virtual Boy Konami made the interaction more visceral by utilising a trackball.  Michael Jackson was such a fan he owned cabinet number 42145. Silver Strike Bowling revolutionised out of home trackball ten pin in 2004 and 2010 changed the game with a connected LIVE experience throughout the United States. Trackball Ten Pin had reached a high watermark that it looked impossible to surpass.

The definitive moment in the evolution of video game bowling came in 2006, 28 years after the release of bowling on the Atari 2600. Wii Bowling shipped with every Wii outside Japan. Globally the mainstream fell back in love with Video Game bowling. Wii Sports is the best-selling video game of all time which (at time of writing) had shipped around 76 million copies. 85-year-old John Bates is currently the Worlds Greatest Wii Bowling Player having bowled in excess of 2,850 perfect games. He pwns on Wii Bowling.

Kinect perfected the formula further, to a point where the experience delivered by Kinect Sports is rewarding, intuitive and great fun. The Nintendo Touch Generations dream had finally become a reality, sadly not on a Nintendo platform. Pwned. Finally it seems as if the abolition of the prop has defined the genre. This memo was clearly not received by CTA digital who smelt gold in them thar video gaming bowling hills and created peripherals across all three current gen machines.

Microsoft went all in with a marketing budget for Kinect of half a billion dollars. I can’t help but think this is because they knew they had the video game bowling crown in the bag.

Let’s hammer the pocket.

News Just In!

Cory Archangel has an installation called Beat The Champ running at the Barbican, London until 22nd May 2011. I can’t wait to see it. It’s an installation based on the sounds of Video Game Bowling

Related Articles

• This 85-year-old will thrash you at Wii bowling (inquisitr.com)

The Beatles Killed The Dreamcast

The 9^th of September 2009 marked the 10^th anniversary of the North American launch of the Dreamcast. A decade later it was the release date for The Beatles: Rock Band. These two events are both symbolic as they bookmark what has been one of the most turbulent periods in the history of entertainment media. Time feels like its accelerating with an exponential nature, the speed of progress. 1999 was a world away from today, the key evolutions in the online space were yet to come. Napster was launched in 1999 and closed down in 2001. Google came into being in 1996 and grew to its pre-eminent position throughout this period. Facebook wasn’t launched until 2004, with Twitter bringing up the rear in 2006. Throughout this period the music industry faced its biggest struggle as it wrestled with the colossus of peer to peer, and the digital tsunami it faced. The music industry emerged bloodied and bruised, and has never fully recovered. This context is relevant as in 1999 the Beatles back catalogue was considered to be so valuable that its inclusion in a video game, ‘a child’s toy’, would have been unthinkable. Therefore, something must have changed. Did video-games grow up or did the music industry wake up to its potential? Or was it somewhere in the middle?

The launch of the Dreamcast, represents a high water mark. The Dreamcast was a seminal moment in the history of both Sega and Video Game consoles themselves. So much was right with the Dreamcast, the device itself has an understated elegance, its dimensions were balanced, and it is arguably the best looking console in history. It had the might of Sega behind it, who had an unprecedented history of innovation and success. The previous generations of consoles had divided the video game nation and created a loyal and unflinching following. Whilst the winds of change were evident, namely the spectre of the Playstation, each and every Dreamcast owner was proud and excited about the potential of the system and the future for Sega. As history has proven this was to unravel over the next two years. The potential reasons for the Dreamcast’s demise have been eloquently and exhaustively discussed. At this point I can only contribute my own perspective. The Playstation represented the start of the erosion of the pursuit of video games as an innovative artform. The wildy inventive Chu Chu Rocket! came out soon after launch and Rez came out in 2001 on both Dreamcast and Playstation 2, although it’s natural home was the Dreamcast. Sega had a vision and  purity derived from the gameplay lessons learnt through the evolution from arcade to home console.

The Dreamcast redefined what a console meant by a single inclusion of the 33.6  kbps modem (in Europe), and the accompanying Dreamarena online service. Dreamarena was a dial up service created through a partnership between ICL, BT and various ISPs. Dreamarena closed in March 2003. Dreamarena was free and provided the blueprint for services like Xbox LIVE and PSN. The lessons learnt provided an insight to Microsoft and Sony at the expense of Sega. The online capabilities of the Dreamcast were at odds with the times where online PC gaming was nascent and seemed unthinkable on a console. Sega were aware of the risk and the inclusion of the modem in each Dreamcast cost them dearly:

“I forced [Sega] to put in modem functions. At that time, I had a lot of opposition that said it was ridiculous to stick in a modem that cost several thousand yen. But, I managed to get it my way” Isao Okawa, President of Sega

After Sega bowed out of the console arms race, it was left to Sony and Nintendo to slug it out, until the arrival of the Xbox in 2001. Sega had occupied a unique market space, as it had attributes of Nintendo and Sony, a unique combination of genre defining IP (Sonic) and hardcore gaming appeal. The video game industry owes a huge debt to Sega. As Sega moved across to become a developer/publisher the devotees rubbed their eyes in disbelief …“How could this have happened?”

In the years that followed the Games Industry grew, and fractured into a myriad of subdivisions, built around genre and target audience. In 2005 Red Octane released Guitar Hero. In 2007 EA/Harmonix/MTV Games released Rock Band. The material differences between the two, in 2009, are essentially irrelevant.  To date Rock Band has sold 13 million copies with a billion $ in total sales and in excess of 50 million track downloads. From the outside looking in, it appeared there had been a perfect synergy of games and music. This was far from the case.

The games and music industry were bumping heads as the music industry was still trying to attach the material values of a physical world to a digital landscape. Well documented digital hold outs began to emerge, AC/DC, Metallica and most famously the Beatles. The exact reasons for this are varied, be it a consideration that digital was devaluing music, a natural suspicion or blind fear and panic. In the realm of music games the music of the Beatles represented the ultimate goal. The digital hold outs began to fall … lured by a new audience and inevitable revenues as they were coaxed onto the gaming platforms. As the games hit the mainstream the pressure from band managers, record labels and publishers became so ferocious that no-one could resist. The Beatles were literally for sale.

For the games industry a band like the Beatles represents a gift. A huge and dedicated  fan-base with a history of repeatedly buying the countless re-issues that have been force-fed to the audience over the years. Stereo? Mono? Limited edition Miniature album packaging? Box sets?. The fan-base devoured them like a gluttonous beast, seemingly insatiable and ever thankful. George Lucas faces criticism for endlessly profiting from his audience, whereas the Beatles strangely have avoided this fate.

The Beatles also represent a route to the non-traditional gamer, or indeed for that matter the non-traditional music purchaser. Whether Beatles Rock Band is a good game or not is wholly irrelevant. It will sell, this is a given as the stars are aligned in such a way that the plaudits and sales figures are inevitable. Who is going to kill the goose that lays the golden egg? Not the games press, and certainly not the worldwide media who enjoy huge sales spikes everytime they put the Beatles on the cover.

You may think this churlish, of me as a killjoy who is standing in the way of the enjoyment of others. For me these events, separate by a turbulent decade illustrate the limitless potential of video games as a medium, ranged against the calculated creation of a product that is intended to break new markets, recycle IP, and perhaps even make enough money to soften the blow once the Beatles music falls out of copyright. Everything about Beatles Rock Band is recycled, The concept for the game, the music therein and perhaps even the plastic in the instruments. The Dreamcast represented a visionary company making and brave, ambitious and ultimately disastrous strategic move. However, without the Dreamcast the ecosystem that has allowed Rock Band to sell 50 million downloads would not exist.

If we try and re-engineer history to infer an aetiology in reverse, it could be argued that the drive towards commercialisation, sequelism and fundamentally mainstreamism were the seeds that were apparent at the very point of the Dreamcast’s collapse. Therefore it would seem that the very thing that has advanced the video games industry  as a whole was the exact thing that helped to eliminate the Dreamcast. The Dreamcast is a cautionary tale to the games industry, but in hindsight created the industry we have today.

The Dreamcast is dead. Long Live the Dreamcast.

Playing Dead: Community And Video Games

Community is a word that is used continually when referring to the Internet. Almost as though it had not existed prior to 2000. Social Networks have proliferated and with it have dragged the reluctant and the misanthropic into a mire of engagement that leads to high expectations and failed attempts to connect. Community therefore has become a ‘grey area’, that is as fluid as those who make up each node jarring against the next. Personal cliques give way to a myriad of on-line niches, groups, forums and fan-sites.

Wikipedia identifies a clique as being ” …an exclusive group of people who share interests, views, purposes, patterns of behavior, or ethnicity” whilst a community (in biological terms at least) is described as “…a group of interacting organisms sharing an environment”. This therefore leads to the question: Does a community of gamers exist? Or is it simply a clutch of cliques?

Being a gamer in 2009 is a highly complex, expensive and involved endeavour.

Let me caveat that comment. Being a dedicated gamer involves a lot of time and effort. Therefore it could be surmised that gamers, united through adversity would be unified in the enjoyment of a common goal. As Seth Godin might say a ‘tribe’. A community perhaps? Nothing could be further from the truth, gamers as an audience are highly stratified, competitive and parochial. Even the act of purchasing a video game is fraught with tension and, in some cases derision.

In the UK (bricks and mortar) game retail is split into a number of different experiences. Non Specialist high street retail is an odd and soulless experience, where games are towards the back of the store, whilst the front line releases shout at you from the front of store racking.  As music continues to wane in importance for retailers and consumers alike, DVDs provide the cash cow, and set the tone for the rest of the store. Staff are often apathetic, uninformed and dispassionate. Rare enthusiasts are to be cherished.

Specialist retailers are split into a couple of subdivisions: the larger chains and the indies.  By far the most engaging and interesting experiences are to be found in stores like CEX on Rathbone Place, London. CEX has 86 stores in the UK, but has still, in the ones I visit at least still managed to distill the essence of what makes an interesting and alarming retail experience.

Upon entering the store there are a number of things you notice, firstly the corrugated Mad Max/generic Sci-Fi spacecraft style flooring reminiscent of an 80s nightclub that had been done out purely inspired by ‘Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome“. The walls are lined with an adhoc collection of games, all second hand, all of which are jumbled, erroneous and slightly tatty looking. Once this has assailed your visual senses, and you struggle to determine which part of the Thunderdome houses the staff, you are assaulted by one of two things: Dated sounding drum and bass circa ‘Super Sharp Shooter’ Era or ‘Extreme Metal’. These two are often placed together in an unwieldy (yet compelling) mixtape combination. The music is always too loud and is only broken by the theatrical stage laughter of the staff (who appear to be having the time of their lives). Their attitude towards you exemplifies the best tradition of ‘record shop culture’. The basic tenents of which are ‘always presume you know more than the customer’, ‘always try to be cleverer or cooler than your customers’ and ‘wherever possible look like you’d rather be somewhere else’. CEX, Rathbone Place has this down to a fine art and for that it should be applauded. Buying a game there is an odd, frustrating and exciting process. That said it is the perfect antidote to the anodyne experience of other retailers.

These experiences illustrate a key fact. Gamers are entirely lacking in empathy for others who share their passion. Instead of providing a fetile breeding ground for the gaming community, they simply serve to amplify the differences. The culture of video games seems to be created upon competition between platforms, franchises, genres and even regions. Fanboys proliferate flame wars at will, the net provides a breeding ground of sneering and name calling and print magazines appeal to niches separated by platform. Connected game-play environments such as Xbox LIVE provide a crucible for animosity to fester and be made flesh.

Xbox LIVE is not community, despite the fact that each of it’s users shares a common interest. For that matter neither is Myspace or Faceboook as they are all simply collections of individuals connected by technology.   The interactions that take place do not signify that it is a community, but a network. At worst Xbox LIVE is a place filled with venomous young men desperate to instill their values and vent their frustration in a digital form. At best it can provide an architecture that can house a persistent world like Paradise City. Xbox LIVE provides a connected game-play environment and a retail experience. Neither of these are indicators of a community. Xbox LIVE is a platform for an audience.

The continued differences between casual and hardcore gamers, the elevation and continuation of the console wars and the race towards new input methods will all contribute to the stratifcation and alienation of the different segments of the collective gaming audience.

As games strive towards mass media acceptance with increasing marketing budgets and development cycles, it seems like the audience is splintering into a universe of mass non-conformity lacking an overarching objective that can drive and unify the audience into a community. Is there any coincidence that there has not yet been a successful social network built upon a shared passion for games?

Gaming Community? The words themselves feel like an oxymoron.