Case #2: Recession Gaming Turnaround!

(Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the game)

Recession. It's a bit of a dirty word right now, in the same way as the term 'credit crunch' conjures images of an oversized, currency hungry pac-man, slowly chipping away at those reserves of cash usually calmly reserved for the winter gaming deluge. 'How', I hear you plead pitifully, 'can I possibly afford Left 4 Dead, Fallout 3, Prince of Persia, LittleBigPlanet, whilst food and petrol, public transport and top hats are getting ever more expensive?' With Epic's portentous talk of penalising people who buy used games, the situation looks ever more grim.

There is however, an intriguing possibility, one that occurred to me whilst traversing the gorgeous African countryside, sun setting on a landscape littered with strife and...well, diamonds left lying around in bushes by mercenary amnesiacs. The positive possibility is this: Gaming will follow the same fate that cinema did. Let me set the scene, and you tell me if it sounds familiar.

Starting out, in the very first instance, as a moving image created by spinning a slotted wheel of thick paper around a stick, 'moving pictures' slowly made the progression into 'Nickelodeons'; minute long films that cost a nickel and were viewed through an eyepiece in the early 20th century. It wasn't long until production contexts started to change, and a few bright sparks had the idea of making some serious money from them. Of course, the collapse of Wall Street, whose brightest minds were fixed firmly on the impending crunch at the same time, was soon to change everything. The crash of 1929 affected the whole world, but more immediately plunged America into a despondent state of poverty and joblessness (much like the Gears of War 2 Lancer edition...) Films, however, marketed to the masses as harmless escapism, continued to be popular, and for many were the sole item of expenditure. Thousands would pay, week in week out, to see the same film again - just because it meant an escape from the harsh reality of their lives. Throughout this period films were still considered as 'pulp fiction', aspiring to nothing more than a few laughs, a few tears, and a little profit. Soon after however, and to this day, the film industry has been growing in popularity, revenue, profile, and numbers.

Ring any bells..?

I'm not saying by any means that what we're suffering now is in any way as severe as the wall street crash and the Great Depression, but the parallels remain. The earliest games, we have learned, were nothing more than curious experiments. Pong, however, entertained as much as it invited interested sighs. For years, computer games were seen as a primary pastime of geeks and computer programmers, and nothing much was done to change the status quo. To skip forward a few years, we're slap bang in the middle of a 'gaming as art' debate that no-one in the mainstream media seems to take seriously, and similarly stuck in the middle of a global economic crisis, where, purportedly, one of the only survivors will be the gaming industry. Technology is advancing, retailers such as HMV normally famous, as their logo suggests, for music have admitted a probably reliance on games for their best profit margins. Despite earning bugger all, an exact sum rendered even more hopeless by inflation, I still managed to buy Fable 2, Farcry 2, Fallout 3 and more besides, within weeks of their release dates.

What is to say, that following this downturn, gaming won't rise like a phoenix from the ashes of other industries? What's to say that the surge of indie developers, increasingly common shocks such as EA developing good, original IPs, isn't pointing to an apocryphal game in the near future, lauded by The Guardian as well as by Edge for its artistic sensibilities, poetic control scheme, and finely tuned sense of pwnage? If we continue this parallel, somewhat ironically, we see the Wii to represent the Hollywood Blockbusters, or perhaps the mainstream studio, whereas PS3, Xbox360 and the DS are increasingly looking like the companies/studios home to the really interesting games for the discerning gamer. I'm talking LittleBigPlanet, Mirror's Edge (despite its regressive OldSkool flaws) and The World Ends With You.

With the advent of the Wii, combined with the insanely popular Madden, Fifa/Pro and NHL series', along with the DS, PSP and now the iPhone, gaming has been blown wide open, available and appealing to anyone with a molecule of creativity or the desire for escapist entertainment. With better value for money (often), social aspects and availability, I'm confident that we may well see computer games replace cinema as the dominant escapist mode. Roll on pretentious indie art house gaming...oh wait, Jonathon Blow, you already did. May you be the first of many.