Maybe video games are stupid. Maybe theyâre junk or trash or action movies, at best. Perhaps they are not at all making the world a better place.
And maybe itâs not an old personâsome out of touch politician who once bumped into a Pong machineâwho will declare this.
Maybe it will be someone young, someone who Occupied Wall Street or someone who is in the exact target market for big-budget video gamesâtheyâll be over 17 and under 35 years of age; male; with money. Maybe that person will declare that video games are not worth their time. And maybe there will be people who agree with them.
Jade Raymond doesnât want a new, younger generation to be the next generation to sneer at them. She loves video games. But Raymond, whose 210-person studio at Ubisoft Toronto is making the next huge-budget Tom Clancy Splinter Cell action game, understands why games could start turning off the very people who are supposed to like them. Sheâs not the only one
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A couple of weeks ago, Raymond and I chatted in the lobby of a hotel in San Francisco a few hours before she would deliver a rant at the Game Developersâ Conference. Our talk turned out to be a rant preview, one that dovetailed with a new book by the game designer and writer Anna Anthropy, who charges, for somewhat different reasons, that are are big problems with who games are for and who they alienate.
And now I canât shake the thought: what if itâs becoming cool to hate video games now? What if the next generation of our culture thinks games are so out of touch that they dismiss them as the wasteful rich pastimes of a more self-indulgent generation?
Raymond surprised me in San Francisco by telling me a story about a 21-year old employee who no longer wanted to make video games. Young. Bright. Thought he had his dream job at Ubisoft Toronto. But he became uncomfortable about what his career amounted to, about what games stood for. So he quit.
âHeâs like, âI really wanted to do this, but now I realize weâre stuck in this place.â
Raymond has heard this from other younger game designers.
âIâve had a lot of people come, in serious one-on-ones, to talk to me about: âIâm thinking of leaving the game industry.â
âThey donât like the messages. They donât like the idea that every game is a war game, that weâre reinforcing this. A lot of these guys are really spiritual. They spend time thinking, trying to find meaning in the world, and it bothers them.â
In her new book, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, game designer Anna Anthropy delivers a similar disappointed assessment of gamingâs fixation on the same tired tropes. âMostly videogames are about men shooting men in the face,â she writes. âSometimes hey are about women shooting men in the face. Sometimes the men who are shot in the face are orcs, zombies or monsters.â The few games Anthropy finds that star women tend to render them as waitresses or shop-owners.
âThis is not to say that games about head shots are without value,â Anthropy writes, âbut if one looked solely at videogames, one would think the whole of human experience is shooting men and taking their dinner orders. Surely an artistic form that has as much weight in popular culture as the video game does now has more to offer than such a narrow view of what it is to be human.â
No one needs to tell Raymond or Anthropy that all video games arenât war games (or Diner Dash). They know that. But they see the patterns and they are alarmed by the narrow range of topics in games.
âIâve always been really excited about games,â Raymond says. âI got into the industry because I saw the potential. But we continue to be stuck in this sort of teenage narrow-band of themes that are action games. I kind of wish we were talking about some bigger topics and other issues.â
At her rant later that day, Raymond would talk about a hypothetical war game. It would be a shooter, as most of them are. In a twist, youâd be a woman. Youâd fight somewhere hot. Youâd be able to layer down, but if you did you might hear a snicker or get a catcall from a soldier nearby. That wouldnât be the game. Itâd just be part of it. It would make the game⊠real.
Both Raymond and Anthropy believe that the big money in games is one of the big problems. Budgets swell. Profit margins narrow. A willingness to take risks diminishes, and so the same kind of games are made again again. âThe problem with video games is that theyâre created by a small, insula group of people,â Anthropy writes. She compares game-making now to book-making in the era before the printing press, when every book in Western culture was the Bible or a book that supported it. Mainstream games are that narrowly-pressed today, she writes. âThe population who creates games becomes more and more insular and homogeneous: itâs the same small group of people who are crating the same games for themselves.â
In Anthropyâs persuasive book the problem is a lack of plurality of voices. She rattles off the names of lesbian comic book creators and then opines, âWhy are there no dykes in video games?â Behind every major video game she sees a man, and if sheâs oversimplifying, she is just barely. And if sheâs neglecting to mention the improved diversity among indie game creators, thatâs just her point. The games of the underground are more diverse and interesting. The games of the mainstream, she argues, are not, which brings us back to Jade Raymond, who works on some of the most mainstream games around for one of the biggest big-money publishers in the business. If even Jade Raymond is restless, this is no niche problem.
Raymond makes blockbusters. She admits she can still enjoy some mindless entertainment. âIâm a huge fan of action movies,â she says, âI love to just go watch and turn off my brain and watch big explosions. But there are other types of things we should be doing, too. I just wonder why there are not so many efforts to go outside of that box.â
In theory, Raymond is an insider. She may not be a man, but sheâs an establishment figure, a manufacturer of the big-budget stuff for which Anthropy holds little hope. Anthropy assumes outsiders, non-professionals and indie creators are fed up with big gamingâs homogeneity, but Raymondâs dissatisfactionâand what she says she hears from some of her younger designersâis an outcry from within. Through people like her, maybe even big-budget games will change, or at least budge.
Whatâs the problem? Itâs not just what games are about. Itâs what theyâre not about.
Raymond believes blockbuster games miss a whole lot, and risk losing a generationâs interest because of it. Look at everything gaming is missing, she told me the morning when we spoke. She just rattled them off, topic after topic, barely touched by big-budget games:
âAll the stuff that happened with the Arab Spring, internet freedom and just generally whatâs going on with peopleâs privacy and all of those kinds of things as tech moves along⊠the growing class divide, all the Occupy Wall Street stuff. Thatâs the kind of thing thatâs been brewing for a while. These are really big stories. They are being dealt with in other media. You can see films that are already out addressing these things. Books. Documentaries. But for some reason games donât touch those things.â
These social issues and current events captivate a newer generation that Raymond believes are more prepared to dismiss the video games that ignore them. âI think itâs a mistake to think that target audience doesnât care about meaning.â It would be a mistake, she believes, for the people making games to think players wouldnât appreciate some of heat and texture of the real world. She knows this because sheâs had some of that target audience that works in her studio quit the business.
For Anthropy, the answer is in the video game version of the printing press, in the democratization of tools that empowers anyone to make a video game about anything. That kind of thing happens outside of Raymondâs Ubisoft or other Bible-printers such as EA, Activision and the rest of the big companies that primarily create killing-games with teams that wouldnât fit in an elevator.
For Raymond, change can happen within the mega-companies, but itâs only going to work if people are brave enough to try andâhereâs the twistâif more diverse content can be fun. The two-year turnaround for making a game only slightly excuses the lack of timeliness of most video games, the lack of connection to modern problems in the economy or the Middle East. The bigger issue is that putting protest movements or an experience of victimized sexism in your game doesnât necessarily up the fun factor.
âWhen youâre making a game, fun wins out,â Raymond says. âAnd if youâre thinking you will try to do this intellectual thing, you might go back to what you know is more funâor itâs the first thing to cut. There are so many games out there that just arenât even trying.â
Raymond has tried to make her games carry some weight, to make them matter. She was one of the top people at the Ubisoft team behind Assassinâs Creed. They tried to make an action game with some intellectual heft, pulling together a conspiracy story inspired by real history and immersed in mid-millennial cultures usually ignored by video games.
Sheâs trying again. âWeâre trying with the next Splinter Cell that weâre developing at Ubisoft to try to have some statements about certain things built in there,â she said, though the game is so secret now that she declined to elaborate.
An older Splinter Cell game. Images of Ubisoftâs new SC have not yet been released.
Raymond didnât leave me with the impression that her big-budget action-spy-thriller was suddenly going to be a game about picketing the power elite. She did give me the impression that, with Ubisoftâs blessing, this new Splinter Cell might have ideas in it that someone who thinks about todayâs news would find stimulating.
âI think we need to push a bit harder,â she said. âI think itâs possible to have something thatâs entertainment and full of wow and explosions and has a bit more depth for those who care to pay more attention to that. I think we can deliver those things in a way that the people who donât care wonât notice.â
Jade Raymondâs message is this: young people, the very target audience that video games are blitzed to, are not looking for a brainless escape every time they put a controller in their hand. They care about the world. They care about life. She wants games to still be relevant to them. She knows itâs not easy. In fact, it might be harder for her than for the freer Anthropy, who, as an indie creator is more beholden to her muse than to a companyâs money.
Raymond knows it is hard to make serious issues fun. She knows that making a game more of an activist thing could make gaming less of a pleasure. But sheâs also had people who get paid to make video games walk up to her and say they want nothing to do with modern video games anymore.
Look at how she describes the leeriness she sees in some of her younger team members, and let her choice of words sink in: âA lot of the younger people who are in the industry, one of the things that really matters to them, is they donât want to feel like theyâre making gamesâŠâ
She catches herself.
âTheyâre kind of sick of the games beingâŠâ
She catches herself again.
Who wants to insult the thing they love? She doesnât want to go there. She canât go there. Sheâs making a Splinter Cell, for godâs sake, a Splinter Cell that she hopes will be as fun and as interesting as she could ever hope it to be.
The people who were supposed to think games are out of touch were supposed to be old. That theoryâs fallen apart. Jade Raymond wants big-budget video games to stop risking losing the young. Some, like Anna Anthropy, would say big-budget video games have already lost an even bigger group of people than that.
(Top photo: Occupy Wall Street-inspired protest at the University of Berkely, California. | Max Whittaker, Getting Images)
