How Video Games Changed the World Page #14

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cross kind of any moral line

and, through circumstances, he ends

up teaming up

with this 14-year-old teenager,

girl, Ellie.

I need a gun. No, you don't.

Joel?

I can handle myself. No!

I think Ellie in The Last Of Us

was a great female character.

She's young, but she's very capable,

but she's also got

this interesting vulnerability

and she's not grown up in our world.

I've never been in a plane.

Isn't that weird?

And she can't really

kind of understand it

and she sort of brings a unique

perspective because of that.

She can't envisage a time

when young teenage girls were just

sort of obsessed with boys,

and looking good.

That's completely alien to her.

Is this really all

they had to worry about?

Boys? Movies?

Deciding which shirt goes

with which skirt?

It's bizarre.

Like any self-respecting

box set drama,

the game gradually

and inexorably moves towards

a fulfilling,

some might say devastating climax.

For the first time in my life,

I was crying, as I held a controller

and moved a character around.

I'm really glad my wife didn't come

in, but I was just kind of going...

Oh, my God.

Game designers are getting older.

Lots of the big game

designers are in their 30s and 40s

and they have children,

and they suddenly are thinking

about games in a different way.

Not as systems,

not as scoring mechanics,

but as an emotional experience.

Oh, baby girl.

It's OK, it's OK.

In the next five to ten years,

we're going to see

more games about emotions

and about social situations,

about politics and about society,

because we are now living

in an age where we understand

what happens around us in a very

interactive and very digital way.

So here we are now in 2013 with

games at a bit of a crossroads.

From the monochrome simplicity

of Pong, they've transformed

via this series of technological

and conceptual shockwaves

to become the most varied form

of entertainment

since the written word.

But one thing we've seen

throughout this show

is that gaming never stands still.

And, sure enough, a new generation

of hardware has just arrived,

bringing with it a fresh set

of capabilities which is going to

overturn everything

that went before.

As their slick promo

material makes clear,

the new PlayStation 4

and Xbox One are both more powerful

than their predecessors,

but perhaps the biggest clue

to gaming's future

is their marked new emphasis

on integrated social networking

features.

Now, why would games systems want

to include social networking?

Unless maybe social networking

already functions like a game.

Twitter is a massively multiplayer

online game

in which you

choose an interesting avatar

and then role-play a persona

loosely based on your own,

attempting to recruit followers

by repeatedly pressing

lettered buttons to form

interesting sentences.

The biggest way in which video games

have affected our world,

for me, is the increasing

gameification of real life.

Stuff like Twitter is a game.

It's about small achievements

adding up to bigger ones.

And it's about playing

the rules of whatever you're in.

Gameification means applying

the mechanics of video games to real-life.

Now, often, this boils down

to incentivising people

to perform the same

action over and over.

Each time Mario headbutts a block,

he gets a coin.

When he gets 100 coins,

he gets an extra life,

and these perpetual little

pats on the head

compel you to bash

those blocks for hours.

By supplying a constant stream

of fun-size rewards,

social networking has, by accident,

gameified whole aspects

of our lives.

Every second, another little

gold coin for you to collect.

More followers, more retweets,

compelling you to

interact over and over again.

These are games we don't even

realise we're playing.

Every day, you have a drama and you

have everyone sort of piling in

to be the one to talk about,

to be the one who gets retweeted.

It has become kind of a game

that I find myself gauging,

when I do a tweet,

how popular it's going to be

and I try to guess ahead of time,

like, how many retweets

is that going to get, and how many

favourites is that going to get.

In terms of the competition,

especially between, like,

celebrities or people with

the verification tick,

every time I see someone,

or every time someone's talking

about someone,

they're talking about,

oh, I've got 50,000,

I've got a million

followers, I've got this.

And it very much reminded me

of a lot of games like that.

It was always about how many points

you got. It ups your profile

and makes you feel like you're doing

something in your life.

What I do on Twitter a lot is just

project a false persona.

And it is like that avatar thing.

It's like World of Warcraft

or anything like that.

The way I am on Twitter is nothing

like the way I am in real life.

That feels like a game, sometimes,

you know what I mean?

If you're a sociopath,

feels like a game.

So, how have video games

changed the world?

Well, they've entertained us,

they've put us in the shoes

of cartoon characters

in fantastic settings,

they've made spatial reasoning fun,

they've allowed people to connect

and explore nonexistent worlds,

they've helped bridge the gap

between Eastern and Western culture,

they've provided a safe space

to run riot,

to fantasise out loud without anyone

actually getting killed,

they've handed a generation

of creative thinkers

a whole new set of tools

to express themselves with,

and they've inspired

and instructed millions of children.

Not that anyone cares about them!

But, perhaps most significantly,

possibly sinisterly,

games have now burrowed, by stealth,

into aspects of our social lives

online

and we, in response,

have cheerfully invited them in,

and that trend's just going

to continue

until whole areas of our existence

have become games.

In fact, you'll scarcely

be known as you any more.

You'll just be known as Player One.

You might as well change your name

by deed poll now and have done with it.

That's the end of the programme now.

I'd say game over,

but only a prick would say that.

Get out of my show.

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