A Long Tail of Hand-Wringing

Yesterday I heard a pair of stories related to gaming air back-to-back on NPR. I’m an avid NPR listener, and in general I give it a lot of credit for very fair reporting on tech culture in general and games in particular. It’s probably the only MSM source where I can hear a gaming story and think that the reporter is anywhere close to “getting it.”

So it was today with a piece looking at two graduates of USC’s interactive media program and co-founders of thatgamecompany, Kellee Santiago and Jenova Chen. The pair helmed the latest darling of the art game crowd, Flower. The story was less about Flower and more about how universities are now turning out a generation of game designers. A taste:

Those games studies classes were also where [Santiago] met Chen, who had come to the U.S. from Shanghai with the intention of studying computer science. He’d made games as a hobby when he was a teenager, but by the time he got to USC, he was disenchanted with them.

“Even though we grew up with games, at the same time, the gamers are actually outgrowing the games,” he says. “Very few games have actually achieved those qualities that would be interesting to an adult.”

Right after that, NPR finished out the hour with a spoken essay by Peter Sagal, host of the network’s cool news quiz show “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.” Sagal reminisces about growing up reading sci-fi novels and getting lost in virtual worlds. Aaaand then – you guessed it – he rips on the idea of virtual words that exist as code rather than written words. Here’s how it ends:

Today, you turn up your PC, put on your headphones, sign up for Lord of the Rings Online, and just, you know, go there. You can spend your whole life talking and playing with and beating up imaginary people, and from all accounts, many do.

Let me say, from the experience of years, that I’m not sure this is good for us. Real people — maybe you’ve heard this — are slightly more difficult to handle than imaginary people. Even more than Balrogs; and Balrogs, as everybody knows, are a pain. I’m raising children now — a challenge, by the way, on which J.R.R. Tolkien sheds no light at all — and I see them drawn to the flickering, dimly lit holes leading from our house to the other worlds — the TVs and movies and computer games — and I can understand the almost overwhelming urge to crawl through. But I also wonder if, like me, when they grow up and have to say farewell to childish things, they’ll have nothing real to let go of.

Let me say that I understand the concern, in general, with kids and too much screen time. I think any rational person who plays games can see that viewpoint, especially those who do have kids (though I don’t). But for Sagal to wax poetic about his beloved imaginary world while dissing another form of the same thing just because he doesn’t have the same attachment to it seems … a little weird. To be clear: he’s not lamenting that people today aren’t reading, or that science fiction isn’t what it used to be, or that a game doesn’t have the same narrative power as a novel. All Sagal’s doing, if I’m reading it right, is getting nostalgic and launching into the old “kids today …” speil.

What’s the point? Did he have some deadline to meet with this story? Maybe NPR’s editors had this thing in their back pocket and were just waiting for a chance to use it as a counterbalance to a gaming/tech story at some point?

I’m not writing to ding Sagal as much I thought his piece brings up a broader point. It’s so funny to me that attitudes like this still seemingly carry so much weight. We live in a computerized age. There’s no turning back; and while it’s only natural for us to wonder about consequences this strikes me as a classic example of wringing hands just for the sake of it.

Despite the needle moving in a pretty positive direction overall the last couple of years, games in particular still seem to stick in the craw for some reason. There’s a long tail of hand-wringing here that other pieces of the digital age don’t seem to experience. Take a look at the backlash a few years ago against MySpace and Facebook. I’ll bet you know a half dozen people who told you two years ago that Facebook was a waste of time, and yet now they have a profile with nearly 100 friends and take one of those dumb “Which 80s Band Are You?” quizzes every other day. Right now the target of choice is Twitter. Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist Leonard Pitts and the (supposedly) progressive Web site Alternet both had Twitter in their crosshairs in the last few weeks. The verdict in both cases: Twitter’s a banal waste of time that no one with a life should be messing with. …Sound familiar?

Yet I’ll be willing to bet that in two years we won’t see that kind of attitude about Twitter. But for games, the stigma persists, some 30 years on. This is why I don’t believe in the “give it time” argument from the people who say games today are what rock music was in the ’50s or what movies were in the early 1900s. Those mediums didn’t take this long to reach a point of wider acceptance, and they came of age in a time when the culture moved at a much slower pace. It’s on us, the community, to evangelize or die on the digital vine.

And honestly, it’s not about acceptance or validation. Really. Validation is for the insecure. Acceptance is for 12-steppers. So those probably aren’t the right words. It’s just about getting to a point where the culture is off our back about this shit. I don’t know what the word for that is. I just know we aren’t there yet.