Present Tense: This column will be about computer games. Please don't turn away.
I mention that only because the subject appears to be regarded by newspapers as an effective reader repellent. Millions play computer games, but it seems that few want to read about them. It is a thriving, multi-billion-euro cultural behemoth, but there are more interesting thriving, multi-billion-euro cultural behemoths elsewhere.
For the first time in about a decade, I've been playing computer games. I've been spending time on an Xbox 360, a machine that plays games, downloads movies and is so addictive that if it housed a microwave and a mini-fridge then you'd only have to get up whenever the sofa needed replacing.
Largely, I've been playing Halo 3, the final instalment of the best-selling series in which the player takes the role of "a biologically-altered super-soldier who must defeat the Flood unleashed by the Covenant". More accurately, the player must ignore the story and just shoot lots of things to survive and reach the next level. Which makes it, in a way, not that much more advanced than Donkey Kong. Except that its barrels actually look like barrels.
In fact, there's been a bit of a debate among gamers in recent months about how computer games have not necessarily matured with their players. It is 35 years since Pong. Think of what cinema achieved in its first 35 years after the Lumière brothers projected images on a screen: Charlie Chaplin, Cecil B DeMille, DW Griffith, Luis Buñuel, Sergei Eisenstein and Fritz Lang. What have games given us? Pacman, Mario, Lara Croft and Sonic the Hedgehog.
Okay, that's a terribly trite statement, because there are some beautiful and ambitious games out there, many of which enrapture large audiences.
But it's not enough for some.
"Games boast ever richer and more realistic graphics, but this has actually inhibited their artistic growth," argued Daniel Radosh in the New York Times in September, after three days of eye-blurring play with Halo 3. "The ability to convincingly render any scene or environment has seduced game designers into thinking of visual features as the essence of the gaming experience." Worse, he complained, the genre can't break free of another medium it has pretensions to supersede. "Many games now aspire to be 'cinematic' above all else." Not so, claimed Slate.com's gamer. "Reviewing the game on the merits of its single-player campaign is like judging a deck of cards based on how fun your last game of solitaire was." He argued that a game such as Halo 3 should instead be lauded for the way in which it offers open-ended artificial environments, which the player can reshape and jump into alongside players from all over the world.
This debate is seldom picked up in a wider media that tracks every trend in music or movies, and which frets constantly over standards in each. Games are confined mainly to the business or technology pages, or, pejoratively, when discussing the obesity crisis. Titles are reviewed in some publications, but not with anything like the same attention given to movies or music.
There are some obvious reasons for this. Games are predictable. For all the bluff put into the story on the back of computer game boxes, many of them actually require players to do only one thing: ignore the story and just shoot lots of things to reach the next level.
Game design is also too collaborative to throw up great individuals.
This week, Irish-based company Havok won an Emmy. No one seemed to be able to explain what exactly it was for. They add to the realism and interactivity of games, was the standard line, although one paper just went with "Game Geeks Win Award".
Cinema and music offer collective experiences, while gaming is still seen as pretty anti-social. Games offer collective experiences too - with the new generation of consoles tapping into social networking - but it's not the same as getting several hundred, or tens of thousands, of people in the same space to enjoy the same event.
Meanwhile, cinema has personality, unpredictability and the possibility of a great performance. The only great performance in computer games comes from the player, and nobody else cares.
Listen to this games expert on Slate.com talking about his personal highlights from 2007, and see how many syllables you get through before losing consciousness. "So there I was, minding my own business, flying my Rupture-class cruiser in a low-security star system called Klogori. All of a sudden, a Thorax blastership flown by a pilot from the then-powerful RISE alliance appears on my heads-up display . . . ". Which reminds you that, in 35 years, the genre has yet to throw up a great critic either.
So, for the moment, this cultural giant - which increasingly influences cinema, drives technology onwards, generates huge revenue, and occupies millions of people - remains somewhat in the shadows. It seems as if it still has a little way to go before it overcomes its enemies and gets to the next level.
