the Byron review favoured BBFC instead. Yet the F in BBFC stands for Film, just as the F in BAFTA stands for Film. And games are nothing like film. Film is an old medium in decline. We are the best medium with the technical advantages of interactivity, connectivity and non linearity. We are the future and they are the past. We really don’t need their institutions on our back and we have the power to create and use our own.
I would imagine that if you trawled the archives from around 100 years ago, you could find newspaper articles proclaiming that books would be made redundant by film. Plus ça change..
The problem here is taking a personal experience and extrapolating it (with the aid of natural sales trends) into a vision of the future. Bruce finds games more involving than films and has a stack of features such as non linearity to justify his personal preference. However, the very features he holds high are far from a replacement for the experience provided by the old medium. Non linearity makes telling a compelling story very, very much more difficult; connectivity reduces a finely tuned experience to a clamour of 'me too' mediocrity and so on.
That's not to say that games aren't deeply involving, or that the possibilities offered by technology aren't exciting. It is certain though that they're not the stake in the heart of film either.
Should games have their own institutions? Possibly, but they should not loose sight of the fact that the old media remain far more sophisticated and evolved than games have yet become. We're still seeing baby steps in connectivity and interactivity which may be technically very impressive, but are still remarkably shallow experiences. If you doubt that, take a look at games little more than a year old and witness how outdated they can feel.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment