First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

Welcome to our brave new world

In a shocking moment for print media, not one but two video-games related stories have featured prominently in the news sections of national newspapers in the last two days. First, the release of the second “expansion” for the world’s most lucrative (but not the world’s most-played) online role-playing game, World of Warcraft; and, second, the sadder and more bizarre story that a couple are getting divorced because of, apparently, the husband’s unfortunate habit of indulging in some virtual heavy-petting within the online world Second Life.

What do we learn about games and society from these two stories? The message is similar in each case. People take these games very seriously. On the one hand, a lot of people spend a lot of money on them, and get very excited about big new releases. On the other hand, the playing of games can have profound consequences for lives as a whole (apparently, the divorce was related to the wife’s excessive playing of Warcraft as much as to the husband’s hanky-panky.)

Why, then, is the tone of almost all of the mainstream reporting so determinedly trivial? It’s little more, in many cases, than an elaborate kind of pointing and starting. Look at the numbers involved—the millions spent, the millions of players! Look at these sad, addicted creatures and their bizarre lives! One reason, of course, is that a substantial number of readers have little or no sense whatsoever of what these games are like. Still, when very big changes are afoot—and the rise of the video game is most definitely one of those—you might hope for some slightly more sophisticated critical engagement than this:

The new game—which costs £24.99, as long as you already have the original game—allows players to fight new enemies and find extra powers for their characters. It is set in the continent of Northrend and pitches players against the evil Lich King Arthas Menethil and his undead army.

While picturesque, this kind of thing is almost meaningless to those who don’t know the game, and entirely redundant to those who do. What on earth is this rubbish about evil Lich Kings?, non-initiates are destined to mutter, while gamers shake their heads and get on with playing. As I did, last night, in a segment of Northrend known as the Howling Fjord that has a distinctly Viking feel to it—snow, trees, mountains, wild boar. I already knew all about it even before I started, of course, thanks to the information here—and on thousands of similar websites around the world, which offer between them a minute, expert analysis of almost every recordable and imaginable aspect of the game.

And this is the crucial point—that there’s something ridiculous, redundant and slightly hopeless about most newspapers writing on electronic games precisely because those who care will already have gone elsewhere (in their millions) for information, while those who don’t care will find little that they can latch onto beyond boggling statistics and silly names. It’s a media mismatch of epic proportions—and a worrying shame for newspapers, who seem so decisively out of joint with a large tranche of future culture that I can’t quite see how they’ll ever get it right…