Part One: Up, Up, Down, Down

The pace of cultural change in the western world has accelerated so rapidly that it's reached the breaking point, according to the late anthropologist Margaret Mead. And that was before the Net, and the ascent of role playing and electronic gaming. No longer a subculture, gaming is becoming our ascendant culture, growing more than any other cultural form, sparking a moral panic and affecting the way people think, play, learn, communicate and work. First in a series.

"The future of technology is about shifting to what people like to do, and that's entertainment...I'm telling you: all the money and the energy in this country will eventually be devoted to doing things with your mind and your time." --- AI pioneer Marvin Minsky.

Up, Up,

Down, Down,

Left Right, Left Right, BA Start.

Recite this combination to millions of younger Americans, especially males, and it's like a secret handshake: the cheat code for Contra and other games for the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Most will know that for two-player mode you insert "select." Recite the same sequence to most older people, and they'll think you're mentally ill. But the beautiful thing, e-mails James Sumner of Yale, "is that all I have to do is start "up, up, down, down ..." and any male my age will finish it."

"I would recognize it anywhere, instantly..." one gamer e-mailed me when I sent him the sequence. "Until my dying breath ...It's a cheat, that you use to get 30 lives instead of 3 ... You press that combo while the intro screen is sliding by, then start the game and you get 30 lives ..."

Another answered this way: "Sure, I know it, it's a reflex, a neuron. My parents still think gaming is a weird hobby. But for me, it's a way of thinking, a password."

In his remarkable new book Playful World, Mark Pesce reminds us of Mead's observation about the pace of change in the Western world.

In earlier times, Mead had written, elders could educate the young in their traditions and wisdoms, passing along important lessons that would serve the youngsters well.

In the past generation, though, cultural development -- centered around new forms of popular culture, mostly involving computers, has so intensified that the generational transmission of values has become even more outmoded, increasingly irrelevant. What's evolved is perhaps the widest gap --informational, cultural and factual -- between the young and the old in human history. In many ways, gaming is at the center of this chasm.

Adults still insist they have lessons to teach the next generation. But the young have come to believe, with increasing justification, that their elders know much less than they do, and have little worth passing along. All they have to offer are boring and outmoded educational systems, political structures that no longer work, and exhausted forms of fading, sacrosanct, heavily subsidized "culture."

Obviously many older people do have useful things to pass along, especially their experiences with life and their accumulated perspectives. But there are also cultural and technological advances, more all the time, that they simply can't grasp. It often seems that only adolescents really have the time, instincts and motor skills to grasp the mechanics of cutting-edge gaming, programming and other digital technologies.

This chasm first opened on the cultural front, with the evolution of distinctly youth-centered entertainment forms like hip-hop, rock 'n' roll and then Nintendo and Sega; it's widened as gaming has expanded beyond its subculture status. Gaming isn't just a hobby any longer. In fact, it needs a new label, something like VI -- Virtual Imagination. Well on the way to being culture itself , gaming has all sorts of implications for education, work and politics.

Gaming has exploded in the past few years until, according to Steven Poole's book Trigger Happy, videogame sales now equal movie ticket receipts. Sales of game consoles and software in the United States will top $17 billion a year by 2003 (the music industry, by comparison, reported revenues of $15 billion last year).

The average American child plays videogames forty-nine minutes a day, but games are no longer the province of kids; 61 per cent of videogamers are eighteen or older, and more than a quarter are over thirty-six. Videogames are no longer bounded by gender, either: players are evenly divided between men and women.

This revolution has spawned its own vast, diverse and complicated media culture -- gamespy.com, avault.com, gamespot.com, ign.com, ugo.com. These sites teem with games and reviews, from programmers, writers, artists and designers. Media sites like Myvideogame.com and gamecritics.com report on story lines and offer essays on the creative shortcomings of game programmers.

Newer sites like Joystick101.org are gaming weblogs; they fuse gaming with individual stories. Recently, that site ran stories about a player named Sheyla who faked her death in a ploy for sympathy from the Everquest community; the stories linked to a story about the kind of gaming work ethic that prompted a Starcraft programmer to bring his laptop to the hospital birth of his daughter. Ign.com covers Quake III like MSNBC covered the presidential election. Academics all over the country are using the Sim games to teach urban planning and financial and social interaction.

And eBay now routinely auctions off characters and property from games like Ultima Online to newbies who don't want to spend years developing their own characters. The gaming industry employs thousands of writers, artists, producers, animators, filmmakers designers and programmers.

Virtual characters are now sometimes worth thousands of dollars, something inconceivable outside of Hollywood just a few years ago.

No other form of culture is ascending as rapidly. Compared to gaming, traditional kinds of culture -- some elements of book publishing, opera and classical music, dance, appear declining and endangered.

Next: Gaming and Moral Panic.

Comments

Not quite

[Shotgun]

Adults still insist they have lessons to teach the next generation. But the young have come to believe, with increasing justification, that their elders know much less than they do, and have little worth passing along.

I used to feel this way, but it seems that the older I get the less I know, and the smarter my father becomes. The young always think they know better. You can only know what you've experienced or learned from others, with the former definitely being of higher priority. Age is a limiting factor on how much you can have of either. The young have a relatively limited perspective, by definition, and therefore problems often appear simple and answers obvious. It's not till you get older that you realize that you're a dolt.

(Note to teenage flamethrowers: Yes, I know. You're smarter/more experienced/more mature/etc than everyone else. You don't need to remind us all. Thank you.)

No other form of culture is ascending as rapidly. Compared to gaming, traditional kinds of culture -- some elements of book publishing, opera and classical music, dance, appear declining and endangered.

Maybe they're declining because they're boring or being replaced by something more obtainable. Maybe they're only being replaced as entertainment for some. Video games are not a culture. They are entertainment.

In years past very few people ever had the opportunity to see an opera. The best that most people could get would be the county fair. Now everyone in the Western world is able to afford to hear music from their favorite artist, be it through CDs or radios. Concerts and TV have replace operas. Rock has replace classical music as the most popular, because now the populace chooses what's popular as opposed to the select elite rich.

Nothing has changed here, except that now more people have the money to buy their own choice of entertainment. Bother yourself to pull up a chart of Maslow's Heirarchy of needs and you will see that this is as it should be. Except for some extreme cases, the Western world has conquered homelessness, hunger, and all the other lower order needs. With nothing left to conquer, men (and boys) turn to destractions.

BTW, so some boys from one generation remember a secret code to a popular game? Do they know what the name of an oversized marble is? Gee, it seems that all the boys from the previous generation knew that. Did the marbles culture die?

Another conspiracy theory..

[Oztun]

Another Jon Kat's conspiracy theory with no merit. I grew up playing video games and knew the cheat code immediatly. When I was a teenager I did believe I knew more then my parents, true. My parents when younger didn't have video games and they had the same belief in the 60's. I'm sure their parents went through the same thing. It's called being a teenager. My parents taught me many things I failed to listen to growing up. Now however I'm 26 years old and realize they were right and I was wrong on a whole lot of things. This whole process just happens a lot more and a lot faster these days because of better communication and more crap to think about.

Nothing has changed much except that most parents aren't raising their kids and teaching them the lessons they need for when they decide to grow up. These are just my own rants and any opions different from mine are wrong. Just kidding =P

The fall of the global empire?

[mesozoic]

There are those who say that the Roman empire collapsed partly because it went from a society of participators--athletes, intellectuals, etc.--to a society of spectators--the Coliseum, theatre, etc.

Could it be that video games are turning our society, the global empire, into another society of spectators?

Food for thought. I'm just poking for ideas; don't think I'm that much of a pessimist.

Re:What a monoculture!

[jaga~]

To think that 'some pimply kids twitching and flicking themselves into early carpal tunnel syndrome' is all that the recent interest in interactive story-driven environments is, much less that it has and will have no affect on cultural development and the methodology of learning and progression is ignorant outright. Video games have a very strong influence on a very large and growing percentage of the population of our country. That's like stating that TV is this new thing that only rich people use and it wont ever replace or change radio.

The future of entertainment will develop into a more interactive environment where users decide outcomes in increasingly chaotic story-threaded algorythms. Watching a movie once or five times can be great but 100 might be stretching it. Hopefully in the near future a game will be something you can sit down and play endlessly, and have no fear of 'beating' if properly done. This is the strong interest in online gaming and why PC game companies like id and Epic have recently focused on online multiplayer games; these unfortunately lack the story to gain the interest of many older/more 'serious' gamers but I suspect that is changing already. Games and gamers help define our culture at this point and taking advantage of the obvious interests of people who play games is good for companies (money) and can also be beneficial to parents and teachers in general (learning). I don't think this represents a monoculture at all, it displays one of the developing cultural changes brought about by the advent of technology and we should all appreciate it.

Not just in Contra...

[dark_panda]

... being one of those Nintendo kids, the code mentioned also works for these other games (mostly Konami):

• Life Force on the NES at the title screen for 30 ships
• Gradius III for the SNES, which dun blows you up when you pause
• Operation C for the Gameboy at the title screen for level select
• Gyruss for the NES at the title screen for 30 ships, although you have to enter it backwards (and Gyruss was released by Ultra, a subsidiary of Konami or something to that effect)
• Legend of the Mystical Ninja for the SNES. Actually, you couldn't enter the code, but if you talked to somebody in the game, they mention the code as a bit of Konami history heritage
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles In Time on the SNES. At the # of players selection screen with the second controller, it gave you 10 lives and a stage select
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project on the NES. At the title screen, it gives you access to an options screen
• Tendrils for the Playstation's Net Yarouze. I'll admit, I never heard this one before, but I found it on Google and it's pretty funny. Look it up yourself.
• There's also a band evidently called Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right BA Start. I think they're from Ohio or something.

I'm sure there's a few more games to use The Code on, but I can't remember any more of them. I'm surprised I could remember those ones. But that's what you get for trying to substitute real life for Nintendo's version of it.

Damn you Nintendo. Damn you.

J