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Video games may be defined as games involving electronic technology in which real-time interactive game events are depicted graphically on a screen through pixel-based imaging. Elements one would expect to find in a game are conflict against opponents or circumstances, rules determining what can or cannot be done and when, use of some player ability like skills, strategy, or luck, and some kind of valued outcome – winning vs. losing, highest scores, or fastest times, among others. All are usually present in video games in some manner, albeit to varying degrees.
In video games, the scoring of points, adherence to the rules, and display of the game’s visuals are all monitored by a computer, which also can control the opposing characters within a game, becoming a participant as well as referee. Most arcade video games, home computer games, and home video games using a television would qualify as video games. The development of the video game was shaped by film, television, and computer technology, and its influences include pinball, arcade games, science fiction, sports, and table-top games. Video games appeared during a time in which interactive art, minimalism and abstraction, and electronic music were developing, and these provided an important part of the cultural context in which the video game evolved.
Modes of Exhibition
Video games have appeared in a number of different modes of exhibition, including mainframe games, coin-operated arcade video games, home video game systems, hand-held portable games and game systems, and home computer games. The games created on the giant mainframe computers were limited to the large mainframe computers found only in laboratories and research centers. These games were experiments and were neither sold commercially nor generally available.
Coin-operated arcade games come in several forms: stand-alone consoles; cocktail consoles; and sit-inside or ride-on games. A stand-alone console, the most common, is a tall boxlike cabinet that houses the video screen and the control panel for the game. The game controls can include joysticks, track-balls, paddles that are round, rotating knobs, buttons, and weapons with triggers. Occasionally there are controls for more than one player, although single-player games are the most common.
The cocktail console is designed like a small table, with the screen facing upward through a glass tabletop. Often the game is designed for two players, with a set of controls on each end of the table and the screen between them. This type of console is popular in bars or restaurants where patrons can sit and play a video game, while setting their drinks on the tabletop hence, the name cocktail. Sit-inside or ride-on consoles hold or contain the player’s body during play.
They may even involve physical movement, usually to simulate the driving or flying of a vehicle in the game, typically with a first-person perspective. In driving and racing games, foot pedals and stick shifts are sometimes included. Other games involve bicycle pedaling, skis, skateboards, and simulated horses. Home video game systems typically use a television or computer monitor for their graphic displays, although some systems come with their own screens.
Home game systems that display their graphics on a television can be console-based, cartridge-based, or use laserdiscs, CD-ROMs, ROMs, or DVD-ROMs – home computer games also appeared on cartridges, floppy disks, diskettes, and audio tape. Console-based systems have their games hardwired into the console itself, while cartridge-based game systems have their games hardwired into cartridges or cards that are plugged into the game console, allowing new games to be sold separately.
CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs are used for most contemporary game systems, because they can contain far more data than traditional cartridges. Hand-held portable games and game systems that run on batteries can be carried along with the player. They are usually small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand, and typically have small LCD screens with buttons and controls around the screen. Some of these systems are cartridge-based as well.
Networked games involve multiple participants connected via the Internet to a video game world on a server, where they interact with the world and with each other’s characters. Some of these games have hundreds or thousands of players and run twenty-four hours per day, with players logging on and off whenever they want. Players in these on-line worlds meet, converse, and form alliances and friendships without ever meeting face-to-face. Because real people control the player-characters, the social interaction is real, albeit in a more limited bandwidth than in-person interaction.
Ethics
Like film and television, video games have been criticized for having excessive content, explicit sex, occasional racism, stereotypical characters, and an overall lack of edifying content. As graphics develop toward photo-realism, games grow more concrete in their visual representations and more like the images produced in other media, including those through which the player receives real world information, for example, television and interacts socially for example, the Internet. Combined with a simulated world in which players can act, video games can subtly influence players’ behavior, beliefs, and outlook in real-life.
Most narrative media embody world-views through the ways in which characters’ actions are linked to consequences, while video games link consequences to the player’s own actions. Instead of merely watching and identifying with a character, the video game player is an active participant in the action seen on-screen. Whereas watching martial films does not help one develop physical skills, a video game can sharpen the player’s hand-eye coordination skills and reflex responses, and stimulate aggression.
The speed at which game action occurs often requires players to develop reflex responses at the expense of contemplation, sometimes resulting in a kind of repetitive stimulus-response training in which reaction speed is crucial. These responses can vary, from abstract figure manipulation, strategic thinking, and problem solving, to the hair-trigger automatic termination in fast-action games. While games can be designed to develop a variety of skills, and termination are unfortunately among the most common.
On a larger scale, ethical worldviews can also be affected as successful game play often encourages or requires players to think in certain ways, and game narratives may link actions to outcomes and consequences that reinforce certain types of behavior. Thus it is a question of how the medium is used, how games are designed, and what values those designs embody. Online role-playing games, for example, differ greatly from other forms of video games in that they are played by vast numbers of people in persistent, twenty-four hour per day game worlds, and games are ongoing and cannot be restarted.
Some players invest a great deal of time and money in such games, building up their characters’ powers and possessions, so there is often more at stake during game play, and ethics takes on greater importance as consequences within the game begin to extend into the real world. While most people can clearly distinguish between video games and real life, ideas learned through the games can spill over to other behaviors in either positive or negative ways. Clearly there is a difference between real-world morality and that of the on-line game world.
Finishing another player’s character may be considered an act of aggression, however the behavior falls within the established rules of play, and players whose characters are terminated often come back with new characters. Yet the metaphor of termination remains, as does the fact that many people consider pretend terminating to be fun. Likewise the goal-oriented nature of video games focuses more on what a player does and achieves rather than on what a player becomes. Additionally the malleability and repeatability of most video game experiences can lead to both experimentation and desensitization through repetition, because nothing is final or irreversible when a game can be restarted or when a player has multiple lives.
Other potential effects involve the player’s default assumptions and ways of analyzing the world. For example, in most games everything is structured around the player and is present to produce an experience for the player. Other characters are there to either help or hinder the player-character, and often they speak in direct address to the player-character. Game objects exist for the player to use, take, or consume. The overall effect can be to promote a self-centered, utilitarian point of view in which players consider everything in the game world according to how it will affect or be of use to them.
At the same time, video games can have a positive influence, enhancing problem-solving skills, powers of observation, and patience. Completing an adventure game’s objective, for example, usually requires goal-oriented behavior and often single-minded pursuit. Even when laden with puzzles and ambiguity, most adventure game problems and goals are clear-cut and simple relative to the problems and goals encountered in real life. The video game may remove the player momentarily from the complex problems of real life and offer solvable, simplified conflicts and goals that can be solved in a few hours or days and for which solutions already exist.
In either case, these effects may be subtle, but repeated exposure to situations in which one is required to think a certain way can have gradual, long-term effects. Some values may find affirmation outside the games, such as over competitiveness and the accruing of personal wealth and goods. In order to regulate games and hold game makers accountable, professional codes, such as that of the Association of Computing Machines have been created.
Additionally, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board provides a series of ratings like Early Childhood – EC, age 3 and up; Everyone – E, age 6 and up; Teen T, age 13 and up; Mature – M, age 17 and up; and Adults Only – AO, age 18 and up, although these ratings are not always enforced in stores, where games might be sold to underage players. While it is true that many games in the early twenty-first century are graphically violent and sexually explicit, it should be remembered that some of the best-selling games of all time. However, the Sims, Myst, and Pac-Man, for example, have been nonviolent, indicating that it is good game design, not sex or harmful content, that sells.
