Convergence culture: Gaming, which already dominates TV, is about to get more interactive, writes Haydn Shaughnessy.
I've never had an appetite for computer games, or any kind of games, but suddenly gaming and competitions are everywhere. On television ( Pop Idols, Celebrity Come Dancing, celebrities ice skating, the giveaway at the end of the TonightShow, on every radio programme I listen to, including Carl Corcoran on Lyric Breakfast, the Sudoku in newspapers and poker on the sports channel).
It seemed to me that games were for nerds who lock themselves away in the back bedroom with a joystick. What's going on? The fact is gaming, which I regard as a minority pursuit, is already mainstream and perhaps the most influential cultural pursuit in the media universe.
Games have so successfully challenged the formerly diverse schedules of the television industry in this respect that our television sets during early peak hours are now dominated by game shows.
The success of games can be traced back to the troubles that television schedulers encountered in the 1990s with the zapper.
During the last decade, everybody trying to sell television advertising space had to confront the question: what do you do about people who zap repeatedly from one channel to another particularly during commercial breaks?
Zappers were viewers whose attention spans were so short that their behaviour resembled that of a gamer, continually zapping the screen as they changed channels with the remote control looking for new, novel content before moving on. It was an advertiser's nightmare.
TV executives went searching for answers and found them in games. American Idol, says media academic Henry Jenkins, is an example of TV retuned to suit the zapper. It contains elements of the TV experience that loyal and casual viewers also enjoy, but it is built essentially to pacify the guy with his or her finger on the remote.
To entice the zapper into becoming a loyal viewer, or at least a repeat viewer, TV shows like American Idolare now geared around short three to five-minute segments, each with its own emotional charge. The idol wannabe performs, the judges criticise and pronounce, and a temporary emotional high is reached, all within five minutes, and better still it happens six to eight times a show with a cliff hanger, who will make it to next week, at the end.
Gaming similarly involves frequent, repeatable highs as you progress through a game's various levels. They represent a new phase in people's expectations of dramatic context.
Second Life, the virtual world currently being hyped by computer hardware giant IBM, is another example of gaming's broadening impact. Looked at with detachment, Second Life is little more than internet messaging using game-style characters to represent us, the messagers. It's the SIMS online.
Second Life though provides one clue as to how we will interact in the near future with TVs, PCs and home products. The Nintendo Wii, the latest games console, provides another.
How we will interact with machines is one of the big puzzles for the converging computer and consumer electronics companies who are keenly aware that the mouse is a poor "interface" for human-computer interaction and the remote control is a nuisance. Games consoles offer ways to explore alternatives.
The console is what we will use to interact with tomorrow's home entertainment system, TVs, computers and household controls. Enter the Wii.
The Wii was the must-have gift for Christmas 2006. Whereas Microsoft and Sony, the two leading games console providers, have taken the sophistication of games' graphics to new levels, Nintendo focused instead on interaction.
The Wii allows its users to play games, as if in real life. The users' motions, (for example, when playing pretend tennis) are picked up by sensors and used to simulate interaction with the cyber-reality of the game. This is called a Haptic interface.
A similar fusing of realities is behind Second Life. According to Irish blogger and entrepreneur James Corbett, the next big step forward in games and human/computer interaction will come when the Wii interfaces with virtual worlds. At that point our avatars, the comic figures that represent us, the viewer or user of Second Life, will be representing our actual movements. We will virtually exist in a more real sense, if that's not too heavy a paradox. Our online games will simulate for real intensifying the dramatic context of the online world just as games have for television.
Another argument is that the big names in games, such as producer Electronic Arts and indeed Microsoft, have crowded out the true gaming spirit. But there is a gamer equivalent to the blogger, people who have their own ideas for how games should be built and played, whatever the big corporations say.
This grass roots movement is what's pushing the Wii-type interface into Second Life and into a new generation of games which reside for now in their imaginations. How long before they show up on our TV screens?
Next: Mixing realities.
Words in your ear
SIMS- a "game" that allows its users to simulate a town, university or other aspect of social life.
Wii- a radical new games console created by Nintendo that uses a haptic interface.
Haptic interface- a way of interacting with screens based on simulating human movements.
X-Box- Microsoft's gaming console.
Second Life- an online virtual world made up of avatars and 3-D buildings and furnishings, which has close to 4 million "inhabitants".
