Arts & Culture
Come out of the bedroom!
Published 19 September 2005
Video games - Deploying friendly brands is the latest tactic from a gaming industry trying to escape the geek tag
The domestic personal computer has never quite delivered the Norman Rockwell utopia it promised. The photographs on the packaging clearly signified that this new machine was going to be the epicentre of the modern family. We would gather round, staring in wonder as it showed us new ways to process words, construct spreadsheets and learn languages. We only need dare to dream, and the likes of Clive Sinclair would set us free.
For middle-class parents of boys in the early 1980s, the home computer appeared to offer the holy grail of enjoyable information. Just as Jamie Oliver smuggled healthy, finely diced vegetables into pizza sauce, the home computer promised to educate while engaging their young: they would learn without even realising they were doing it. It would "help them with their homework" and develop productive pastimes. Of course, this wasn't to be. Just as the machines had invaded the living room, games invaded the machines. At which point, the computer found it-self exiled (or more usually kidnapped) to a teenager's bedroom. There it stayed, entertaining and teaching a generation growing up in the post-industrial age of information. All you needed was the time to learn. This was how you grew a nerd.
Several decades on, the cultural tide is turning. Having spent many years in a sweaty kingdom of odd socks and teenage angst, video gaming is at last ready to leave the bedroom and come back downstairs to join the family. But there's a problem. While those privileged to have access to these machines (teenagers) have been frantically developing a new literacy, those on the outside (parents) have grown suspicious. Men born before a certain year, and most women of any age, are at best unfamiliar and, at worst, deeply suspicious of the video game. Tired jokes about having to ask their ten-year-old child to program the video recorder are markers of a deeper anxiety. Adults don't know how to play. Not like this.
Historically, the controller has been the largest barrier to participation. Virgins often immediately feel panicked by the complexity of the object. It is no accident that the most successful "social" games of recent years have dispensed with them altogether.
Jonathan Smith from Giant Interactive Entertainment does not like the word simple (too many negative connota-tions). He prefers "accessible". "There shouldn't be anything intrinsic to video games as a form that precludes other people from entering," he says, "but it came to our attention that there were very few games which, as parents, we could sit down and play with our children." Giant Interactive Entertainment is a games publisher whose first title, Lego Star Wars, was launched earlier this year.
At first, it sounds like a suspicious union - the cynical conflation of two well-established "young player" brands into a toy that most children greet with eagerness, namely the video game. Lego, having already moulded a very successful line of coloured plastic bricks based on Star Wars, calculated that the notion of moving into the electronic arena was probably easy. You can read that as risk-averse cynicism or as economic and cultural pragmatism. Smith explains: "If you give a child a choice between a game that's based on Star Wars and a game that's based on the work of Ursula Le Guin, they'll probably choose the game which is based on the imaginative world they are already engaged with. There's nothing wrong with that. It's about the quality of the experience they then have within that world."
Possessed of an extraordinarily focused rigour, this project works its two brands with energy. The instruction leaflet has hilarious asides written specifically for children, and several knowing nudges at scared parents who might not know a console from a cookbook. It attempts not to simulate Lego but to distil Lego-ness, if such a thing were possible, and translate that essence into the world of Star Wars. Smith talks enthusiastically about how experiences sit along a relative scale of, more or less, "Lego". By way of an example, on our way to the station after our meeting, we see a man fall off his bike into a hedge: "That wasn't very Lego," Smith comments.
Central to "Lego-ness" is the concept of permission - to build, to experiment, to play with the infinite possibilities of reconfiguring plastic bricks. Equally, the Star Wars element is about using George Lucas's characters and iconography with the freedom of movable bricks.
Contrary to the standard convention of narrative (and ludic) excitement, which is so often generated by a sense of jeopardy (cars crashing, buildings exploding, rockets firing and so on), Lego Star Wars puts great effort into making you feel safe - you are constantly forgiven for any mistakes and you can't die. "Children play best when they feel safe," comments Smith. "In fact, everyone does." Indeed, Smith maintains that to make games which are more fun for children to play is to make games that are more fun for everyone. Does he see any parallels with the recent phenomenon of Philip Pullman's or J K Rowling's crossover literature? Are adults being infantilised? Or, rather, are they simply being given permission to revisit their sense of wonder in a credible context? "It's an imaginative posture," he says. "The world we have created maybe shares that freedom. A Lego world exists only to be played with."
In conspicuously declaring an intention to move away from fearsome car chasing and make inclusive experiences that, in the time-honoured ad phrase, "the whole family can share", Giant - along with other innovators - is clearly attempting to make video games seem like an agent for bringing families together, rather than one that fragments them.
This is crucial for an industry keenly aware that mainstream media coverage usually extends only as far as "games make your children evil". (Or, more prosaically, obese.) The humble console itself is at the heart of this transformation, hoping to make the giant leap from a scary object understood only by nerds, into a toy firmly embedded within the heart of the family, rather like the dog-eared set of Monopoly or the much-loved Scrabble board. I'm awaiting a Twister video game with fervent anticipation. Now that really would be Lego.
Lego Star Wars is widely available on PS2, Xbox, PC and GameBoy Advance and will shortly be released on Nintendo GameCube
www.legostarwars thevideogame.com
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