(no subject)

This is a very, very cool article about videogames finding their own voice. The opening paras sum it up pretty nicely.

After being feted by dedicated gamers and journalists alike for so many years, there's something genuinely uplifting about seeing advertisements for Spore on prime-time television in the UK. There's something even more uplifting about the genuine excitement the game has created among more casual gamers, and even some people who don't play games at all.

The reason it's uplifting is because Spore is, in a very pure sense, a videogame. Where other games that excite great public attention - Halo, Grand Theft Auto and their ilk - owe huge creative debts to other media, most notably movies, Spore's genesis and creative evolution is the story of an experience that simply has no parallel in any other medium. It was born, developed and is now being finally released as an interactive experience.

What this represents - to me, at least - is a clear example of this medium's own voice. It's a phrase spoken clearly and distinctly in the language of videogames, largely free of loan words and borrowed phrases from other creative media - a form of expression unique to this new medium.

The difference between videogames which owe so much influence to movies, and videogames which stand on their own two feet is a really important one, I think. The industry can either be Hollywood's bitch, or it can be its own new, independent thing the likes of which cannot be found anywhere else. To me this is a very exciting artifact from a possible Future (God knows it was an exciting artifact from our recent past,) and the fact that Spore is not only just that, but good and selling well gives me a lot of hope.

I bring this up because, to me, the twenty-year-and-ongoing ouroboros of cultural recycling we've signed up for is a wasting disease that leaves us creatively impoverished and - over generations - we run the risk of having no idea what it means to look outwards. So the possibility of a new media reaching up through the pavement and surviving on its own terms leaves me feeling a little lighter around the shoulders.