Video Games are seeping into nearly every part of our lives, and game designers are trying to seize the opportunity to imbue these games with newfound meaning and purpose. Brooke talks to game designers and futurists about where games are going and how they are shaping the future of collaboration.

Despite the comparisons, video games are a wholly new medium, allowing an interactivity, agency and complexity most other media just can't provide. Brooke talks to Kill Screen Magazine editor Jamin Brophy-Warren, novelist Nicholson Baker, and journalist Tom Bissell about the power and potential of video games and video ...

The original Nintendo console, the NES, turned 25 this year. OTM producer PJ Vogt reports the cautionary tale of Nintendo’s rise and (relative) fall, and why both were good for video games.

According to the market research firm The NPD Group, 27 percent of America's entertainment dollar is spent on video games. According to New York Times Magazine author and game aficionado Clive Thompson, whether you play them or not, video games have changed the way way you interact with technology.

Tom Bissell is one of our favorite writers on videogames.  His book last year Extra Lives, was a study in how videogames work (or don’t), why they’re a singular medium and why Bissell finds them so terribly addictive.  Last summer, when we talked to him about the book, he told us that his call for better writing in videogames had been answered – he’d been approached about developing a game.  He hoped to bring the skills of a novelist to bear on character development, plot and dialogue in a big, ambitious, shoot-em-up blockbuster.  Well … it seems things didn’t entirely work out.   In a recent piece on Grantland Bissell lamented:

Last year I published a book about video games called Extra Lives. A couple of developers read it and came calling. This excited me, given that one concern of my book is how poorly video games have told stories. Video-game storytelling is a more challenging conceptual problem than it may seem, and the manner in which this problem might best be addressed is in no way apparent. I was eager, all the same, to storm the castle. But of the various projects to which I found myself attached or within an eyelash of being attached, one imploded, one was canceled, one I removed my name from, and one entered stasis. But the whole reason I was playing so many games I neither liked nor loved was to see how they had stormed that same castle. At least, this was what I was telling myself while playing, say, Crysis 2 at four o'clock in the morning. So a month ago I decided to quit playing video games.

Luckily for us Bissell didn’t exactly quit playing videogames.  In fact the rest of the lengthy piece is a review of the latest offering from Rockstar/Team Bondi, a Los Angeles based noir entitled, unfortunately, LA Noire. Bissell certainly played the game.  And he proceeds to do the other thing he advocated heavily for when we talked to him last – offer a thoughtful critique.  Bissell thinks that videogames will only be taken seriously when they get the sophisticated criticism that every other art form receives.  So he’s a man with a mission.  And part of that mission is unique to the medium …

Video games can do a lot of things other storytelling mediums cannot. Their penance, however, is to have to deal with things foreign to other storytelling mediums, one of which is a uniquely damaging form of audience disruption. Just about every storytelling game employs various masking systems that attempt to anticipate internally disruptive player behavior. Say you have an in-game friend — what happens if you try to shoot him or her? Does the bullet fire and blood fly and nothing happens? Or does the bullet fire and blood fly and does the friend say, in so many words, "Hey, what gives?" Or does the friend actually die and cause a restart? Or does the gun maybe lower when you pull the trigger? As everyone who plays video games knows, masking systems can be greatly amusing to test and prod, and the first thing I did in L.A. Noire was drive my car directly into some pedestrians and plow through a few streetlights, after which I insisted on driving my partner and me to our first crime scene in a dump truck. Once we got to the crime scene, I stranded my partner there and took off, still in my dump truck, spreading more mayhem. Had this been GTA or Red Dead Redemption, the law would have come calling, but the most incisive criticism I got from my partner during all of this was: "What are you doing?" Isn't it obvious, partner? I'm playing.

 

As it turns out, L.A. Noire's masking systems are not so great.

But part of that mission is a kind of textual analysis. What’s the author’s intention?  And it’s only when Bissell has gotten frustrated with the limitations of the videogame-ness of L.A. Noire, the clumsiness of its gameplay that he starts to understand what it does best.  Good, old-fashioned character development – the kind you’d find in a more traditional narrative.   

This weekend we’re rerunning our special hour-long look at videogames.  I hope you’ll listen to Bissell’s contribution and check out his full review of L.A. Noire.  And I hope Bissell will break his resolution and start obsessively playing videogames again and give them the tough love they deserve.

This week, we're rebroadcasting our special hour on video games. In celebration of the occasion, the Supreme Court (huge OTM fans), struck down a California law that would have levied a $1,000 fine to against retailers who sold violent games to minors on Monday.

"video games qualify for First Amendment protection.  Like protected books, plays, and movies, they communicate ideas through familiar literary devices and features distinctive to the medium," wrote Justice Antonin Scalia in the court's opinion in Brown v. The Entertainment Merchants Association. "The basic principles of freedom of speech . . . do not vary' with a new and different communication medium.

"California’s argument would fare better if there were a longstanding tradition in this country of specially restricting children’s access to depictions of violence," Justice Scalia wrote, "but there is none. Certainly the books we give children to read—or read to them when they are younger—contain no shortage of gore. Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed."

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito wrote a concurring opinion that stated the existing California statute was simply too broad as currently written, skirting the First Amendment argument altogether. Dissenting Justices Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer both wrote their own dissenting opinions. Stephen Totilo of the video game blog Kotaku has posted a concise summary of the key points of each of the opinions.

Bo Anderson, CEO of the Entertainment Merchants Association, said in a press release on their website "We are gratified that our position that the law violates the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of expression has been vindicated and there now can be no argument whether video games are entitled to the same protection as books, movies, music, and other expressive entertainment." Other video game trade associations have made similar statements in support of the ruling.

Leland Yee, the California state Senator that authored the law, also posted a response to the ruling on his website, saying "As a result of [the Supreme Court's] decision, Wal-Mart and the video game industry will continue to make billions of dollars at the expense of our kids’ mental health and the safety of our community. It is simply wrong that the video game industry can be allowed to put their profit margins over the rights of parents and the well-being of children."