Charlie Brooker's How Videogames Changed the World

video games for years the domain of outsiders and geeks and people who look a bit like owls somewhere down the line gaming went mainstream and now everyone plays them 18 hours a day even George Allen gaya and while that is a lie games have infiltrated popular culture and fundamentally changed the way we interact with the world yes really now tonight I'll share my personal possibly bullheaded selection of the 25 most significant games that ever the were and we'll be hearing from videogame insiders video game like us and some reassuring friendly familiar faces so easily spooked viewers don't [ __ ] their own kidneys out with terrified indignation will show you games that broke out of the pixelated ghetto and rocked across mainstream culture we'll see games that'll make you feel guilty or make you cry or even introduce you to your soulmate in fact we'll show you nothing less than how video games changed the world because that's the title so we can [Music] today in 2013 games are almost as commonplace as shoes practically everyone plays them in some form even bacon replicant David Cameron was reportedly addicted to the Jolly food slashing up fruit ninja' on the iPad but games weren't always as graphically staggering painstakingly realistic or conceptually sophisticated as they tend to be today no they had to start somewhere gamings Big Bang happened in 1972 with the release of a simple-looking tennis simulator a game called pong [Music] Paul of course was posing I mean you know it begins with the black screen as all great moments do it meant to be kind of table tennis it was like a movie white bar that would go up and down and you could bounce a ball from side to side it was so limited so kind of basic in its function and yet curiously satisfying Paul wasn't the first video game but it was the first truly successful one and it contains much of the same basic DNA as almost every game that followed it was co-created by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell and programmer Allan Alcorn without these two legendary figures the be no video games industry at all I had completed the design and we said well it plays pretty good let's put it in a box and see if anybody will play it and all I had was a named pawn line there's no instructions there's just a coin mech and Nolan and I carried it over to Andy Capps tavern put it on a barrel and within a short time within the week or so the things stopped working and so I went over to fix it became full of quarters yeah yeah I opened it up and the quarters just gushed out filled my pockets of quarters and came in the next day and said no and I think we got a something's going on here hmm pong was incredibly simple I mean everybody knows how to evoke ping-pong it was a very stylized version of ping pong on a TV the controls are simple just a knob each to move your paddle that was also hidden depth the power allowed the ball to come off the bats in different angles depending on where you hit it so it introduced this whole idea of skill and strategy which is really really important yes it's hard to remember now but in 1972 this was cutting-edge you know I found the graphics on pong the little players the little lines they moved quite smoothly it was quite impressive and the ball moved smoothly and the ball bye-bye ball I mean square we didn't make the ball square because we thought that a square ball was cool it's the only way we could do it and so you know in some ways our I'd say the first 10 years the video game business we were always bumping right up against the edge of the technology that was allowed to us you're watching the most exciting game you will ever see on your TV set he'll start my technology may have held the graphics back but soon the rise of cheap microchips created a wave of pawn like imitators you could plug in and enjoy in your living room revolutionising home entertainment at a stroke a goal until pong came along you had to sit there and withstand whatever the TV threw at you which in the 70s with only a handful of channel was often meant a choice between a documentary about bricks or jimmy savile now suddenly there was a box you could plug directly into your TV and take control and at the time the very idea of that was mind mangling lis exciting that was the revelation the Feather you didn't feel passive for the first time not that you don't mind being passive or TV but for the first time you were doing something here the translating is something over there in the former game that was kind of mind-blowing so I think it was just the the miracle of actually being in the TV and operating something from here the couch was just that you know the game changer for me and I can remember gathering around if my whole family was like you know it's like the piano in the 1940s or so in Victorian era we all gathered round in it who amazed this idea of interacting with the television screen even though the graphics were profoundly simple there was that sense that this was this was a whole new thing that was happening TRADD TV was clearly so rattled by the obvious threat posed by the technological upstart it made desperate attempts to incorporate the new enemy into its flagship entertainment shows when Paul came out they tried to use it as part of a live TV thing and I know I'm not imagining this we Bruce Forsyth nice to see you too see ya well what else could I say hey beautiful sighs the JumpShip from BBC to ITV for a huge paper kit was a big story about in an ITV gave him the whole of Saturday night from the show that the company's net was they had people using a voice operated form upon I know I've seen this I know you're looking at me like I'm just I'm hallucinating but I've seen this ladies and gentlemen telly tapes [Applause] [Music] and even as a Keenum see thinking how this really doesn't work in the years following pong amusement arcades filled with coin guzzling monoliths became a common sight but in 1978 the success of one title catapulted gaming out of the dark and further into the mainstream it's dark bleak humans V aliens fight for death quickly hoovered up coins worldwide what space invaders did was it took arcade machines out of those arcades out of bars and suddenly they were in restaurants and cafes places where families could go I think it was the first game that really did that it took games into the mainstream I can remember the first time I saw space invaders it was at the silver blades ice rink in Birmingham we were on a school trip on a Thursday night and I remember seeing this game and putting 10p in the swamp and it was like a revelation to me it was the most amazing experience and from then on in space invaders was my life for you know you would get 40 pence dinner money each day and you could go down to the calf down the hill and get beans on toast for 20 P and have two games of space invaders case over space invaders was beautiful as a noob who'd never played you know arcade game before you could walk up you could put Tempe in and you could play for like five or ten minutes without being annihilated and that pace meant that it drew people in it also it's satisfied something which game you seem to enjoy attrition cleaning something up you have this block of stuff which had to be cleared away it's hard because it's something you can never win you clear them up and then there's a little pause and I all come back again but somehow you want to keep on doing it mastering space invaders became an overriding obsession for many this is one of the first published books by revered author Martin Amos it's invasion of the space invaders a surprisingly in-depth collection of his arcade tips with a foreword by Steven Spielberg Martin Amis has since disavowed his involvement in the space invaders tip scene and the game's appeal wasn't simply restricted to the nature of its challenge the sheer experience was equally important this was the first game to evoke a distinct mood and tone the music sped up as soon as the the aliens got closer to you and it was like that excitement and that sort of oh you know this is really responding to what I'm doing it's like a heartbeat when the space medes are coming down the screen it's dum dum dum dum it's B and you know accentuates your own kind of tension it was perfect it was very stylistic you know the shape of the alien as soon as you saw it you kind of understood it and it burnt into your into your mind [Music] as a result space invaders wasn't just an arcade hit but a bonafide a mainstream cultural phenomenon yes tonight we'll be discovering just who the Space Invader champion of the Midlands is space invaders tournaments were considered entertaining enough to be televised for God's sake and how tensely weak action of stone must be feeling there and the world of cheerful children's animation also couldn't resist the pull of the global fad of the moment every element of the invaders template had such an instant iconic purity it still resonates today with references to it popping up everywhere slick TV commercials who nod in its direction and it appears on walls around the world courtesy of street artists invader and space invaders still survives as a game we'll be in the remixed reimagined modern form but I was very honored to be asked to do it working on space invaders it's not being asked to go on stage and play with Dave Gilmour out of Pink Floyd or something like that space invaders was the catalyst for an explosion of similarly themed games in the late 70s and early 80's as pubs arcades and cafes rang to the sound of zipping lasers and white noise explosions the primitive graphics of the day were ideally suited for depicting basic shapes competing for power in black space but with this incessant focus on interstellar combat games were in danger of becoming a chiefly male obsession to gain wide acceptance once again games would need to become less abstract what they needed was some kind of likable character arguably video games first mascot he's sort of the first character I guess you know the sort of very very iconic character of video games the designer of pac-man he introduced this Japanese concepts of Cowen which is cute lots of Japanese design is based on this sense of cowboy cuteness and so not only pac-man is very kawaii very cute but also so are the ghosts and he did this because he wanted it to peel to young girls and women as well as men and in fact he's said an interview since then which sounds kind of sexist now but he's thinking of how can I make it appeal to him you know I know women like food so so he was famously he had to eat seed to seen images of a pizza with a slice taken out and he saw pac-man in that image and pikemen does have a lot character I think the reason why everything went came to pac-man crazy far away was because because he had a face even the ghosts even the enemies had character on they had memes inky blinky pinky and Clyde you know they all had very distinct personalities and you know they did their own thing in the maze Pacman's rudimentary artificial intelligence also represented to break through tricking the player into thinking that ghosts were actually alive with her own personal traits blinky the red ghost was a fast aggressive hunter inky the blue one was a dawdler pinky would anticipate where you were going and try and block you off while cried the orange one was programmed to rapidly chase you until he got too close at which point he dart back into a corner hidden layer of sophistication made the ghost seem less like computerized drones and more like fallible living characters the Packman ghosts I really liked and the cherry the idea of this floating cherry was cool and the fact that it changed when I I mean all these things were kind of pretty major steps for use this was the grammar of gaming being constructed before your very eyes and I was the first time people have the locket well why not do this it was the first video game to actually feature cutscenes as well and because there were little humorous cutscenes with pac-man and the ghosts you know before each level yeah pac-man being pursued by a ghost in pac-man getting a giant the turn round and chase the ghost off the other way and one of the ghosts would get his little robe caught a little bit would come out and see his pink leg stuck sticking out from underneath it introduced a gentle element of humor to gameplay which I think helped broaden its appeal likeable characters a big business and pac-man was no exception pat man instantly after it came out it was so enormous ly popular we start eating pac-man t-shirts pac-man lunch boxes as pac-man cartoon pac-man soon became a staple of the cheesy American Saturday morning cartoon slot winning his own goofy series as well as some irritating commercials it's a corn cereal that's coming your way for a time no quintessentially 80s commercial was complete without a [ __ ] cameo from the circular pillory pack numbers and stuff there was a pacman board game as well was terrible why terrible board game but with a big plastic pac-man that would gobble gobble it up a little and stuff and even there was the kind of wheeled knockoff stuff as well like how do you badly draw a pac-man you know I mean but a badly drawn pac-man and that's an impressive thing when you see some merchandise and you go pac-man doesn't even look like pac-man and that's when you know something's really caught on in a big way in the wake of pac-man success games began to resemble living cartoons bright cheerful worlds packed with non-threatening characters a Golden Age entertainingly celebrated earlier this year in Pixar's charmingly evocative film wreck-it Ralph my name's record Ralph Ralph you are bad but this does not mean so far so twee but that was about to change the USA and Japan had ruled gaming's roost but now the British were coming and we weren't interested in some cute yellow bubble running around a maze gobbling dots we were bringing something else with us we were bringing anarchy the early 1980s were a heady mix of the iron ladies iron fist soaring unemployment Charles and Di's sexless kissing and this footage of the Rubik's Cube that has to be included in every 80s nostalgia montage by law all of which provided the backdrop to a major revolution in British homes as the computerized future arrived now it doesn't look very futuristic looking at it now from the vantage point of the future but it did back then that's how time works the explosion of home computing that happened in the 80s was almost unique to Britain because of person Clare in 1982 Sir Clive Sinclair launched the ZX spectrum a cut-price home computer intended to automate stayed and some might say pissed dull tasks like spreadsheets and home economics but more excitingly as far as Britain's school kids were concerned the spectrum could play games often rudimentary clones of existing arcade hits but games nonetheless and for a fraction of the price of the swanky American cartridge systems and crucially the spectrum wasn't a closed system you could write your own programs for it your own games and if you didn't know how there are hundreds of available blueprints to learn from printed line by line in the back of hobbyist magazines like this I would come home and see my brother playing with his computer and learning to code it using a language called basic what was it safe did you a 10 say [ __ ] 20 go to 10 and then we go [ __ ] off [ __ ] that was my coding that's that's the couple my coding career its warned sort of a huge explosion in creativity where some brilliant people were coding in their bedrooms it was just like the punk movement you know the punk movement was very much like a DIY ethic it was like if you can't play guitar [ __ ] it pick up a guitar and play it it doesn't matter if you can't do it do it and that's what games were like in the early eighties it was like you don't anything about programming it doesn't matter try it do it release it if you ask me the ZX spectrum was the people's computer a true British original we didn't have the fastest processor its graphics were primitive and the keyboard was this notoriously awful dead flesh rubber catastrophe but it did have an immense range of bizarre and imaginative games shot through with a uniquely British sense of humor many were almost like playable sitcoms or comedy sketches there were hundreds of colourful quirky spectrum games but only one and to truly symbolize the era I mean the first thing that you are struck with is manic miner is is the hideous tomb of the beginning [Applause] [Music] it's a sort of our Allah salt it's disgusting and the colors as well so garish but there was something there's something really kind of charming and mysterious about it what's fascinating to me now about manic Reiner is is just the excitement of the rooms and how many rooms there where and and you know all you're doing I was looking at something that I do know have a few different blocks flying around but but there was something really thrilling about it what made this landmark game all the more unusual was that it was written in just six weeks by a seventeen-year-old called Matthew Smith every single spectrum owner in Britain had that game that's how good it was its absolutely chock full of humor is in the game is very much Matthew Smith I mean the guy's a legend and rightly so and a manic miner is his signature manic miner makes it onto our list for being the quintessential spectrum gained an idiosyncratic peculiarly British homebrew classic still celebrated today in clever man created homage is on the internet the spectrums chief rival was the all-american Commodore 64 a more powerful and altogether more confident system marketed with the emphasis on fun in impossibly wonderful adversities [Music] commodore games had slicker graphics and far superior sound and as well as its slew of American imports it still had room for oddball British titles one of the games that I remember most fondling that I'm most pleased to have been involved with was my old game hover bomber primarily because that was a collaboration in design with with me and my dad it's another one of these silly British comedy games that just arose one morning when we were sitting in a place where there was somebody mowing a lawn outside and we just started tossing back and forth this idea of a comedic game where somebody could be mowing a lawn and there could be a dog which gets in the way it was all all very Terry and June you know but it ended up being a really fun little game but I wasn't all rosy in the British gaming garden it was like a club no Commodore and spectrum owners didn't like each other at all long before blur addresses the racist air or anything those hideous medium rare inventions of fake clashes the commodore versus spectrum debate was a civil war a geek civil war whose repercussions offensively felt to this day good inspector was British you know it was kind of the local favorite and all that but you always knew tell me you always knew didn't it you always knew that you had the lesser machine essentially you'd be driving your triumph or us garage and then we pull up in a Cadillac which is essentially the conversation ball was with its big [ __ ] keys shifter and stuffed loads and plays still despite their rivalries Spectrum and Commodore owners could unite on one key issue and that was that the owners of the third system the BBC micro very much the Liberal Democrats of the computer world they were dicks the BBC micro was a chunky middle-class computer created for the BBC's computer literacy project a jolly well-meaning attempt to get Britain coding courtesy of jolly well-meaning but not notably sexy edutainment shows like making the most of the micro I've got here a listing of the program that I've taken off the printer and it's a reasonably sized program for a micro computer if a wonder the computer itself had a bit of an image problem the BBC was for people who are a bit posh because that was quite expensive machine so if you're a BBC you're a bit posh I was a BBC micro ok this squidgy keyboard spectrum I mean I just laughed at it square it may well a bit but the BBC was soon blessed with a killer app of its own a game that didn't just promise you the world but handed you an entire universe then let you do what you wanted in it again called elite these Spartan monochrome wireframe graphics primitive by today's standards were stunning at the time but that was only the start of it elite came out in 1984 and it was really a groundbreaking game on so many levels it was impossibly big you know what elite did was it simulated the entire universe it wasn't you know I didn't do anything by halves elite was made by two incredibly intelligent university students called Ian Bell and David Braben and technologically it was a massive massive achievement because you got these enormous galaxies into 32k which you can even work in a word document with that now that game was almost felt like fell through a time hole and 20 years in the future like have existed back then both technologically and also in terms of what they were trying to achieve in creating a living 3d world elite wasn't just a technical marvel but a conceptual one until then almost every game told you the player what to do there were rules and you had to follow them punching buttons like a lab rat Elite jettisoned the rulebook into space and let you get on with absolutely anything it was the first what we would call a sandbox game or an open-world game you can play the game in any way you want it's not linear anymore suddenly you are given a playing environment and you can choose to do mission a first or mission D first you can also choose not to do any missions you can just go out there and explore if you want to suddenly you could really control your entertainment experience in ways that we're never possible before the fantasy of exploring a limitless galaxy is a seductive one hence the success of memorable exercises in wish fulfillment such as the camp but lovable Star Trek or the rambling picaresque shenanigans of space hopping hobo Doctor Who those interstellar bomb bags had all the fun now thanks to elite you could explore the universe like Kirk or the doctor but unlike them you didn't have a deep space travel card no you had to pay your way by trading goods and the quickest way to earn big money was to trade illegal stuff like slaves or narcotics just like doctor who doesn't massive bastards could even turn to piracy blowing up other ships and stealing their cargo I'd always seen elite as imagine the sort of 17th 18th 19th century of sailing ships going across the Atlantic trading all sorts of goods you know should you just cover the normal things or should you cover the things that were deeply illegal we wanted the player to have the freedom to do good and to do bad it was like my facture in space it was make money in this universe however you want to do it if you want to sell slaves if you want to sell narcotics if that's that if that's the way to do it even though there was risk involved that's what you did if you can imagine in the mid-1980s you know we're sort of like the height of capitalism and the economics of life and the politics of life as well were reflected inside the game it wasn't overtly meant to be political at all but I think it sort of as a sort of child of its time it sort of became that way because of the money focus of the game you found yourself playing the game because you wanted that docking computer you wanted that large cargo bay or whatever and you're sort of aspired to the next bit of money and you would do anything in the game to just try and get that little extra bit because you wanted it so much there were so many new concepts in that game it was such a leap forward that I think for publishers and for the audience at the time it took a little while to get their head around it but once they understood what was possible then you could create worlds inside a computer that was just absolutely amazing Italy gave birth to an entire genre of open-world sandbox games in which the player is largely free to create their own narrative the most famous example being the briefly anarchic and morally wonky Grand Theft Auto which we'll return to later so Britain had enjoyed a mini Renaissance of early gaming but the rest of the world wasn't just sitting around giving up and going thousands of miles away somewhere terrifyingly foreign a boffin was working on a game so nightmarishly addictive it would soon enslave all of mankind and destroy the world as we knew it kind off you'll have to watch the next part to see if I've oversold that [Music] the year is 1985 and there's an audience of millions pretends to live in harmony while withstanding this [ __ ] excruciating Duran Duran performance at Live Aid the world is in flux riots are tearing across the United Kingdom are not even the glittering royal premiere of Back to the Future can stem that chaos chiefly because the two events are entirely unrelated meanwhile something was about to happen in the world of gaming that was on a par with the Beatles releasing their first single but with catchy and music when Mario first appeared as the protagonist and the challenging Donkey Kong he was known only as jump man a few years later he popped up in the somewhat bare-bones platformer Mario Brothers but it wasn't until 1985 in the release of Super Mario Brothers that he became an instantly recognizable icon Super Mario Brothers is a side-scrolling platformer game where basically you have to run from left to right going up ladders down pipes jumping on monsters collecting gold coins he's just a masterpiece of minimalist design because you get you get his personality from just this tiny tiny bit of information his design actually came from the limitations of the console at the time you know the blue overalls the red cap the mustache all of which came about because you know they couldn't really render anything more complex than that so it was Wade white bloom breakfast Archie was as simple as that you know was born of necessity that's why it's curious that he's become the kind of iconic playing character the years now Matty would just mean his games to me if I'm being honest always friendly and always beautiful we play always beautiful we play has never really filled and I think that Mario just represents all the rate stuff and gaming or that that pure kind of fun stuff the essence the essence it is all there and Mario again it's this idea of complexity hidden behind simplicity so Super Mario games look simple they look beautiful they look like they're for everybody and they are but they're also really really difficult games you know [Music] oh here's the hallmark of just how well judged Mario's level of difficulty is in the process of playing it you'll die hundreds if not thousands of times but each time you'll blame yourself not the game and it's that constant sense that next time you can do better that Spurs you on keeps you playing in fact the Mario platforming format is so compelling it appeals to absolutely everyone from the under thighs to the under fat was become a master of the Nintendo machine I think I've become very good at defeating all sorts of tiny little two-dimensional enemies yes Salman Rushdie became a Mario addict during his virtual house arrest even but his addiction to good use with his children's novel Lucca and the fire of life seemingly directly inspired by the game in this the hero traverses levels saves his press and has multiple lives which probably seems like a particularly brilliant concept when you're living under a death sentence you can't really talk about Super Mario success without mentioning coogee condos music design [Music] was brilliant because every melody is like memorable there's so many bah-bah-ba-wa da Dada da Dada Dada Dada Dada Dada Dada Dada that's the sickest one I think I swear any rapper would just be like that's the that's the best rap d ever I think videogames have influenced my whole like reason for wanting to make the music I make you know that kind of ate the energy 16-bit energy it's kind of inspired a lot of especially a lot of the earlier stuff that I made with like tiny massively it just had a very important effect on the way I think about music and see music and get inspired with music as well Mario was created by Shigeru Miyamoto seen here winning a BAFTA in celebratory scenes no other game designer has ever been able to replicate that you sheer joy of exploration and childhood wonder like Shigeru Miyamoto people talk about Miyamoto as their Spielberg of game design and he very much is he's a man who creates wonder on the screen like no one else in fact Miyamoto isn't just the Spielberg but the Walt Disney of games responsible for an unprecedented number of treats including the beautifully designed and widely beloved Zelda series unlike many video game mascots which tend to be a crash bandicoot in the pan Miyamoto's creations have endured largely because the games they appear in tend to be very well made Mario in particular has become almost a kite mark of quality if you've grown up with Mario then he's part of your life and so there are no parents who want their children to experience Super Mario and there were and have the excitement and joy of problem solving and winning games that mode that they did with the Mario characters and it's a joy to watch my children sort of enjoying it back on earth in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell marking the end of the Cold War in the Eastern Bloc and these weren't the only tumbling blocks and falling bricks the Soviets had to contend with [Music] well I think there's good puzzles throughout the ages and I think that Tetris is like the perfect incarnation of a traditional puzzle game in video game form everybody is familiar with putting puzzle pieces together and it just combined that with reflexes and that is kind of like the perfect melding of two worlds like sports and puzzles when video games started out there were things that anyone could play stuff like pac-man Donkey Kong there were things that literally anybody could understand Tetris is just like that games have gotten more complicated but Tetris was fit shaped together the minute you limb hope you play Tetris you've already succeeded at it and there's no many games you can say that about the minute you land or this block goes here or that's fats on here or then that first idea that goes boom and you've already succeeded right away the minute you lay on that you're when in utter and I think that's the magic of Tetris that's what makes it completely compelling ready for the start it's just a design that's so perfect that every single game designer who looks at that thinks I really wish I could have made that it's so simple but so beautiful Tetris is straightforward design was largely a result of the way it was created computer engineer alexey pajitnov wrote it on the defiantly and non game z soviet and utilitarian electronica 60 terminal it was pretty much in the dying embers of the Cold War is one of the first products that moved from east to west and interestingly he never actually made any money out of it until very recently because it was effectively owned by the Russian government tetris was perhaps the first game that was compelling to the point of being addictive while playing you were dimly aware that some kind of a rational appeal had completely equipped your mind it was like ah like a sickness like absolutely like a sickness because it was a constant can I do this I can do it I've won can I do this of one of one of one of one of one panic panic panic men eventually you would lose but there was always success was always just a couple of button presses over it was always a couple of button presses away so it was just a constant reward there's a concept called flow in video game playing and in fact it happens outside of video game play as well and it's where a person will be completely immersed and engaged in the task at hand and everything else just disappears and falls to the wayside years ago the repetitive nature of knitting was quite often used to help people with a low level mental health issues low level depression and Tetris is a similar kind of environment to that have you handed me Tetris right now I would play it for an o1 heartfully Tetris for me was a hugely significant game because it was the first game I ever got on my gameboy which was basically your conduit to life and entertainment as a child modelling Tetris with every game boy was a masterstroke here was an addiction you could carry around with you for a cheeky hit now and then just like cigarettes but a bit less defi I tried to thank how many you know bus stops and train stops were a mess because of it but you know it was that sort of thing you can just take it out in your pocket and play it whenever he had and you know any moment of downtime and that's something we're still seeing today with mobile phones its lineage leads to things like Angry Birds the whole kind of casual mobile scene pretty much had his ancestry in the likes of Tetris even as the Russians were talking up their first big hit with Tetris meanwhile on our side of the Iron Curtain Hollywood was starting to get seriously involved in the games industry games were being created by the people who brought you Star Wars you know Star Wars what was interesting straightaway about the the Lucas arts studio was that obviously it was it was under the umbrella of Lucasfilm George Lucas's company so it was the first connection between film and games Lucas arts started and it had a mandate to to stay small and not lose any money and to be the best I think we're the three slogans they had and also don't use Star Wars we want to like maytee wonders George wanted this new company to stand on its own legs early LucasArts efforts were action games which while technically cutting-edge didn't have much of an impact what these games were missing was a coherent story something you'd think Hollywood would excel at the first attempts at computerized interactive fiction such as Zork here consisted of nothing but text on a screen a kind of playable novella you navigated through by typing in instructions like go north and get lamp this spectrum adaptation of The Hobbit added crude graphics to the sea of text not quite Peter Jackson it wasn't until LucasArts turned the genre into a point-and-click cartoon the interactive storytelling came of age when anyone asks me what my favorite videogame is it's not your grand theft doors it's not your um just you know you call it Joey's its Monkey Island [Music] The Secret of Monkey Island was a brilliantly realized comic adventure overflow the character and charm what I loved about the McCallum series was the fact that they're romantic at times the the main character the protagonist was a guy running of Guybrush Threepwood this I want to be pirate who just really didn't have it in him he didn't have the guts he didn't have the the nautch to become this famous pirate he'd always wanted to bathe we had Alain Marley the love interest in the piece she was funny the script was excellent the main antagonist the main body who a ghost pirate by the name of love Chuck and I loved that character so much I've actually got a tattoo on my leg of the man himself not only is it a beautiful program game and a wonderful looking and really very lovely visuals to it with the distinctive but also at the same time I also had a very strong character sense of humor about it you know kind of a tone basically in the way that a good movie has a tone like so few games are genuinely funny and this game was not only funny and it's writing it used its mechanics to set up a lot of the comedy if you remember there's a sword fight in Monkey Island that you have to win but the way that you win it is not by being better with the sword but by having the funnier comebacks there's basically an insult sword fights the character that you're fighting against well insult you in some way and then you've got a various choices of what's what's the funniest retort what's the funniest comeback and as you would win the argument is you'd win the fight of witty rejoinders the fight would go in the same direction I mean we were so influenced on monkey island by like The Simpsons but also I think Monty Python in a way like the Holy Grail was doing to the Arthurian legend we were hoping to do to pirates fittingly for a game forged from many different influences some believe monkey on internet be quite influential itself pointing out similarities between the game and the vastly entertaining Pirates of the Caribbean movies both the game and the film feature a reluctant swashbuckler who attempts to rescue his wisecracking love interest from a motley crew zombie pirates with a scary undead leader there are even individual moments that seem vaguely familiar for instance here Guybrush Threepwood solves a problem by using a coffin as a boat bit like Jack Sparrow did in Dead Man's sorry none of American side ship all of which I'm sure is a total coincidence it's hard for me to watch those movies and not see little glimpses of Monkey Island in them but I mean Monkey Island was really based on the pirates that Caribbean ride I mean that was my whole influence for that game so it's it's kind of a full circle thing Monkey Island is a place on our list for bringing cinematic storytelling techniques to interactive fiction and it's spirit lives on in advanced contemporary games like the grim murder mystery la Noir and this year's flawed but interesting beyond two souls for the mission sake Trinity Eden for killing you and no promises they're impressive but a bit po-faced nothing sensors have the humor of monkey island all this stuff about spinning yarns was all well and good but when wood games learn to focus on the really important things like teaching children how to maim and kill the answer fortunately was soon bang the early 90s were brimming with firsts the first President Bush was gleefully waiting the first Gulf War the first McDonald's opened in Russia and something called the world wide web became publicly accessible for the first time popular youth culture meanwhile was entranced by slacker demand the ground seemed as detailed on gaudy entertainment shows like the word but there was also a new wave of cultural icons hailing from Japan whose specialist subject on mastermind would have been kicking the [ __ ] out of each other [Music] Street Fighter 2 looks incredible it's the game that made gaming cool arcades had to draft in more machines just to accommodate for the demand for it you know it was just such a such a huge huge phenomenon Street Fighter 2 is a prime example of why games are good because you've got a friend and you see let's have a let's just have a you know a reasonable game of Street Fighter yeah sure let's have a game of Street Fighter and you end up screaming at them I'm going to kill you I'm going to kill you but it was Greeks it was competitive and it was so unlike anything that I'd ever played before to be honest cuz it's just two characters punching each other and the fees [Music] it was definitely competitive especially when you play with bad winners I call them bad winners because while they're knocking you the hell out they're just like yeah take that and you just just getting totally trashed up there have always been head-to-head games pong was a head-to-head game but they tended to be simple tests of reflexes until Street Fighter 2 came along this too was a test of reflexes but also crucially a test of memory agility and strategy now unless you know what's going on it looks fairly mindless but it's actually far more complex than it appears I think the key thing about Street Fighter 2 was that it popularized the idea of kind of complexity in the control systems it was one of the first games to introduce the idea of special moves so each one of the very colorful characters had their own way of fighting to perform say reuse rising dragon fist your fingers have to perform quite a complex dance on the controllers you have to memorize and then perform this move at lightning speed which makes it a bit like mastering a musical instrument someone playing Street Fighter 2 is making hundreds of strategic decisions at lightning speed it's basically scissors paper stone but on a bewilderingly complex scale people who are playing Street Fighter 2 now it's still really competitive and they're doing frame-by-frame analysis of where the vulnerable windows are and like when you can use which attack and what blocks what what doesn't block what and it's um it's just crazy that's why it's so satisfying when you win you aren't simply thumping someone in the face you're outwitting and outperforming them while thumping them in the face Street Fighter 2 influenced a whole raft of other beta maps of growing complexity such as the phenomenal Tekken series which as you can see became increasingly more violent still at least no one's ever inspired to actually do that kind of thing in real life as a consequence of playing the game can I remember when I was a kid and my brothers made me fight with another kid and it was just like a little kind of spar with with another young kid that was my age everybody thought I was gonna lose me and I actually used Tekken moves to win whoo it's so Doug but I actually do fun with my little Eddy going and full boobs my missus still laughed at me about that like I remember my brother saying that around the table and I was like oh she actually did it that's how much I was into Tekken it's so wrong oh well at least they just kicking and punching each other he's not like games are full of people running around shooting guns by 1993 there had been a few games in which you shoot people with guns from a first-person perspective like the fun nazi culling excursion Wolfenstein 3d but it was the release of our next game that truly cemented their place in history [Music] doom was a flabbergasting ultraviolent descent into bloody hell the first timers will do my jaw was on the floor it was absolutely stunning doom was one of the big holy [ __ ] moments in games history I remember I had been working at PC Gamer for about a year when that had come out and you know we were experienced video game people you know we're all we all did that for a living and doing was one of those moments where the first time we saw it were like what is this the modern-day shooter is do essentially its design effectively created the first-person shooter with the Wolfenstein before doom doom popularized it because it was a it was the perfect implementation I think at that time of the idea of seeing a view inhabiting the character and the camera view being your view of the world in fact this groundbreaking first-person view point was actually a happy accident the reason why we made the game's first person when we started was because it took less processor time to actually not draw character in front of use oh the game feel faster because of it there was something very lonely I know it's not a shock for some people to imagine computer players as being computer game players as being lonely but dealing was one of those games I used to dream about you know it there was a feeling of real isolation to it you know and I found that quite powerful at times isolation is scary doom was scary very scary honestly young people here in older people talk about how dome was scary must be like you know when you read those stories are hoping people who saw the first cinema and they would see a tree in common and they would run the cinema you know I mean you hear those stories maintained all laughing these ideas they thought it was a real train come in but you know what things can have an incredible effect on you when you when you're first experienced and then the reason why I do miss terrifying from you is because their world doors on it that could open and shut and that's you know that seems like caveman stuff for being scaled up as these a shadow or something but the fact is about doors and you could hear things behind the doors that wasn't credible kinda leap for well that was an incredible and incredible thing one of the things that makes doom scary is just obviously the darkness and the game and it's also scary in that um enemies you can hear them wandering around and so you know they're there somewhere and just hearing that not seeing it is a scary thing and also you know that you could go through the hallway and accidentally step on the wrong thing and all of a sudden the wall opens up next to you and stuff is coming out at you doom was packed with so many innovations it was almost embarrassing but his biggest innovation of all was the immersive and compelling multiplayer mode I came but I was actually working a game development studio and one day we all went in one Saturday we all went in and set up the computers set up the local area network so that we could all play Doom together and was my first experience of being in a game world with a whole bunch of friends playing together beating enemies and being aware of each other the whole idea of telepresence the idea of being aware of each other in a game world it was fascinating it was so so compelling we just played for 12 hours straight the beauty of video games is that it adds add a dimension to friendship that nothing else does going to see a film with your friends nothing compared to being an app you know shoot-'em-up or a game with your friends and doom was the first game that really allowed us to experience that yeah although it's hard not to notice that experience he's kind of violent in this regard doom was a child of its time by 1993 technology had improved to the point where in-game characters could be represented or be crudely by real people as in the notorious Mortal Kombat here and the sight of these real people maiming and mutilating each other was a step too far for some when a player wins the so-called death sequence begins the game narrator instructs the player to finish and I quote finish his opponent the player may then choose a method of murder ranging from ripping a heart out to pulling off the head of the opponent with spinal cord attached every generation seems to have some sort of cultural moral panic whether it's you know Elvis Presley's hips or video nasties or ever and in the 90s it was video games it was games like doom you know and Mortal Kombat that had what were perceived to be stupid gory terrible graphics which when you look at them now is ludicrous because of course it's just basic looks like people made out of sea facts getting blown up just as controversial was the frankly crappy night trap which came on the exciting new cd-rom format threatening to turn games into full motion video nasties five teenage girls have disappeared after spending the night at the old makesure a winery house of mr. and mrs. Victor Martin it's like a television program in a lot of ways and the purposes you're part of a crack team is protecting some girls on a slumber party so the gameplay is basically clicking on CCTV cameras and setting traps for these kind of vampire things that are coming and because it's video and not graphics and especially at the time I think it was later because it was it wasn't the clunky graphics of the eighties this was filming you are watching and it's fit it is quite disturbing to watch it actually because it does feel very voyeuristic I understand why it was controversial because even today if you made a game today where the concept was spying on you know college girls in their lingerie via various security cameras and kind of stalking them around this house that would be very controversial now back then I can understand why people had the reaction that they did it has been quite a leap from pac-man to night trap night trap which just to be clear was a deeply [ __ ] game was such a hot potato it featured heavily in a US Senate hearing on video game violence which led to ToysRUs taking it off the shelves mortal kombat and night trap are not the kind of gifts that responsible parents give night wrap which adds a new dimension of violence specifically targeted against women is especially repugnant significantly it led to the creation of the u.s. video game rating system a voluntary code designed to alert parents to content that might be unsuitable for their disgusting children this had a two-fold effect on the one hand the games industry was aware it was being watched but on the other hand the introduction of ratings meant games could now be conceived and marketed explicitly as not for children suddenly developers had a green light to pursue nasty games for nasty adults leading to further controversy with the death pact pedestrian splattering Carmageddon being briefly banned in the in 1997 and the LP alarming grand theft auto making its debut that same year lots of people are time morale campaigners were trying to link video game violence with real-life violence and we saw this but later on with them with the Columbine tragedy which lots of people tried to suggest that the two kids that involved in this we're heavy we're heavy games plays every time there is any sort of violent act in the news it's always reported like and the shooter was a big fan of you know grand theft auto or call of duty and it's like well that's because he's an 18 to 35 year old man that's probably what he's a fan of that game not because he's a psychopath recently in the USA the National Rifle Association has tried to shift blame for a spate of mass shootings away from the availability of firearms and onto the shoulders of videogames through vicious violent video games with names like bullet storm Grand Theft Auto Mortal Kombat and splatterhouse ironically the NRA makes some crude target shooting and varmint hunting games of their own furthermore not everyone is convinced of a link between violent games and violent behavior I think there might be violent people that play these video games but I don't think these video games turn you into violent people we should move on we should talk about some of the positive aspects of video games or some of the genuine challenges we can make to the industry like where are the positive female role models in games but you know if we carry on with this debate it amazes me that it's lasted for so long dedicated gamers tend to reflexively scoff at any suggestion games might be too violent but it's clear that even the most hardcore splatter movies don't dwell on biological destruction to quite the same gleeful degree as many games do increasing graphical fidelity means the debate will intensify as the portrayal of violence does it's easy to laugh at the low-tech depiction of death in the early Mortal Kombat games but the recent Mortal Kombat 9 features extreme and upsetting imagery that would be almost entirely unthinkable in most other media flawless victory despite scenes that shocking Mortal Kombat 9 failed to generate any real controversy but then many games still fly somehow under the cultural radar and consequently aren't called upon to justify themselves I'm traditionally quite nonchalant about violence in video games I played the [ __ ] out of things I doom and snipe early but even I find that basically unacceptable which either means I've become a terrible worse in my old age or games are becoming so forensically graphic they're reaching a tipping point some games have a more mature and responsible attitude to depicting violence than others some are outright irresponsible others I think do it in a much more mature and responsible way and so other than there's anything inherently bad about expressing or exploring the subject of violence in video games just as there is in any media but certainly there is violence in the real world there's gonna be violence in any artistic reflection of the real world of video games are no different and when women in games aren't being gruesomely sawn in half they're often being simplified patronized and objectified you'll never be a match for me but the games industry's treatment of what I tactfully won't refer to as the titty gender was about to be challenged as will say after this break picture the scene it's the mid-1990s and no one knows what to make a human kind Spock's the existence anymore because OJ Simpson has just left caught an entirely innocent man bearings bankers collapse thanks to rogue trader Nick Leeson and in the world of pop middle-class kinks fans blurr are going head to head with dirge spewing musical chimps tea party oasis in a battle literally no one gave a [ __ ] about even at the time meanwhile bruised by the beating it took over flogging violent games to kids the games industry suddenly hit on a new target market people off their faces on ecstasy or clubbers as they're technically No did you take it yourself here we have a normal healthy young man and here we have a fellow who's been experimenting with Playstation for only movements enter the slickly marketed PlayStation positions as the post club post spliff entertainment medium of choice briteling with trippy visuals and credible soundtracks PlayStation Move gaming on and that gaming was now something that young adults did and not just men who lots of women played wipeout lots of women played the early PlayStation games they understood that there was something powerful about putting a woman on screen to miniver scheme that I became obsessed with it was the only game really at the time where there was a women involved in a woman with a couple of guns shooting some stuff and being pretty kick-ass partly inspired by the gutsy female image of singer Neneh Cherry and post-punk tune feminist Tank Girl tomb raiders lara croft owns a place on our list for being gaming's first true female icon this was the era of loaded in FHM and Lara Croft somehow was kind of a virtual representation of that whole idea she was kind of sexy Mario the sexy Sonic there's been so much discussion about Oh was she you know an object of female empowerment or was she an object of male titillation when I was you know what 10 years old playing that game that didn't matter to me all I saw was a woman where previously I'd only seen a man and that was huge for me having ruled the late 90s brightening up trendy magazine covers and appearing in irreverent soft drinks ads the 2000s would be less kind to lara despite or perhaps because of being portrayed by the equally unrealistic angelina jolie and a pair of noisy were not very good Hollywood action flicks but then in 2013 Tomb Raider was rebooted and reimagined with an increased emphasis on story and Lara's character I finally set out to make my mom another key difference this time the lead writer was female I didn't really like the way that she'd been adopted by the wider media and somewhat over sexualized and I felt that as a younger female gamer I was sort of being pushed away from the franchise and so when I took on the role of helping develop this new younger Lara I really thought about what myself as a gamer when I first started out would have liked and what the younger me would have responded well to you can look at the journey of video games and mirror it with the journey of Lara Croft as a character at the beginning she was a look because video games were mostly about looks and then as times gone on Vera's Lara's creators have tried to make her more of a character more of a relatable person and similarly all video games have been trying to tell stories that are more human and more relatable the new Tomb Raider reboot feeds into that what you've got there is a character who was once an avatar and there's now becoming a person this shift reflected a debate about gaming's depiction of women that was already well underway in many ways games still seem psychologically lodged somewhere around 1978 full of eye candy dolly birds without much to say for themselves and the voices questioning this have been growing ever louder in 2012 when cultural critic Anita sarkeesian launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a series of short films about female stereotypes in games some male gamers reacted by bombarding her with rape and death threats I don't believe video gamers are sexist and I don't believe most games are sexist but also you look at video games and you can't deny that there are things in them that are not flattering to women and they make you roll your eyes the sigh or sometimes make you really angry and I think that it's it's not so much gaming culture that some friendly to women its internet culture even today a huge number of games still place you the player in the shoes of a boring cookie-cutter Caucasian hetero dude with a dick and a gun and [ __ ] all else of interest but there are some exceptions Mass Effect's a good example of a mainstream video game like one that a lot of people buy that does include something other than straight white men and for that reason it has a very devoted following among people who aren't necessarily straight white men in Mass Effect's your character is basically bisexual by default you can flirt with whoever you want and force your relationship with whoever you want and it's sad that that's progressive but you know in a video game of that kind of size it is progressive didn't know you were such an optimist you have that effect on people meanwhile back in the late 1990s those cool adult gamers weren't content to simply experiment with things like female protagonists such as Lara Croft no they wanted whole new kinds of experience games had become set in their ways there were too many predictable platformers or metronomic fighting games or by-the-book shoot-'em-ups what was required was an entirely new kind of experience an entirely new kind of game and that's precisely what turned up wearing a bobble head [Music] right for the wrapper is a game about a musical dog who learns the value of self-belief by rapping with a kung-fu onion now while you just press buttons along with the beat it was incredible and it was such a simple really clever use of the the controller you know you had to hit the things in sequence the first time I became over that boom boom ba boom boom ba boom you know that kind of very simple Simon Says kind of game play Simon sets the pace you follow right along Simon Says style rhythm action games began with the endearing the advertised computer smart-arse Simon Simon has a brain you wanna do what Simon Says or else go down the drain Parappa turned this basic concept into a playable psychedelic musical pop-up book the songs are that they're so catchy and insane [Music] I often listen to the onion man sold out for the driving school ones there's the one where they're all waiting to go to the toilets there's the driving school on did I say that already yeah prop where the rapper was appealing because it made people like me who have absolutely no musical ability whatsoever feel like they did that was a lot that was a big part of it to feel the fact that you were pressing buttons in time it's no musical talent not whatsoever but you felt like there was Parappa the rapper led to games like Guitar Hero in which you use a simplified push-button guitar to play along to recognisable hits from big-name acts later games added far more realistic instruments meaning players were genuinely improving their skills however old they were or weren't as you can see from this charming footage the very latest rhythm games have taken this to its logical conclusion you now connect a real guitar directly to your console in fact they're not marketed as games anymore but bona fide a musical education tools not a bad legacy for a cartoon dog in a hat although parappa himself has been largely forgotten relegated to appearing alongside 50 cent as a pop-culture reference and subversive comedy shows do never return my phone calls so now heat bullets and lick my balls it's a rarity talking about games on TV TV doesn't often do games and one of the key reasons for that is that TV commissioners believe no one wants to watch other people playing them which is a valid point I mean picture two dweebs playing some baffling point-and-click strategy game it's not like anyone's gonna fun no pack out a stadium to see their this illuminating documentary footage depicts emotional South Korean fans watching their idols in action and who are their idols these guys [ __ ] hot Starcraft players the Koreans are quite into Starcraft [Applause] a densely complex war sim starcraft is basically fast-paced space chess Starcraft is a real-time strategy game of building up a base and sending off soldiers to kill people but at a pace that will take whole years off your life Starcraft is really interesting in that it has emerged as the first sort of competitive sport of gaming if you look at country like Korea for example is it stuck off is effectively the national sport I mean there are cable television channels dedicated to Starcraft the ki Starcraft play players in Korea superstars they have fans they have a screaming adoration as you can see it invokes on paralleled excitement amongst commentators I think people they just enjoy watching people that are good at things you know I mean I mean it's almost like watching a virtual piano plinth and stuff when you watch some of these guys please start from the fingers that are blocked when the planet and it's kind of fascinating never mind fascinating the Korean audience finds the game shout out loud shitty fine [Applause] shortly afterwards the year 2000 arrived in a flurry of optimistic fireworks and humankind wondered what majesty the new century would hold and it turned out the answer was a voyeuristic reality show in which eager tastes entertain the nation by sharing a bog for six weeks but they weren't the only housemates that were in trancing Millions [Music] assumes in some sense is kind of a life simulator where you create little people personalities they then live their lives in the game you can create houses for them looking at jobs they can follow they can have kids following in the footsteps of the voyeuristic satai The Truman Show in which the world tuned in to watch the mundanity of a suburban life the sims tapped into our desire for a perfect domestic existence it certainly appeals to that part of you that wants to escape into another world and create another version of yourself almost too similar to what your real life is I was living on my own when I first played The Sims and I thought I'd try it out it didn't really go for I didn't enjoy it I just thought I couldn't see the point of it to be honest but I was playing it and it was in the very early stages of the game when you just buy a flat and I know just do all these little green patches on the floor and the sound of flies near the green patches and I realized that as the game progressed more of these would build up and then I figured it out that it was wastepaper bins you put wastepaper bins in each room and then those little green things stopped appearing and there I was playing the game and they thought maybe I should pull wastepaper bins in my flash The Sims wasn't just idle play it was stressful you had to micromanage every aspect of your sims existence from how many bins they had to how often they went to the toilet you had to eat healthily exercise loads and generally behave if you wanted a good life and that good life was rigidly defined as a well-paid job a smiling partner and a tiny house full of possessions maintaining all of that became increasingly difficult it took the American suburban dream and turned it into an endless point-and-click pain in the ass it was actually meant to be a satire of US culture and I think most people didn't get that and the promise of the game really in the Sims is that you have all these objects and each one has like little ratings you know the couch will improve your comfort this much but each one of these objects becomes kind of a ticking time bomb they can break they can you know catch a fire they can come to and you find that these objects that we you're buying to basically make you some happy are now making your some miserable but even though the Sims routes lanes satirizing consumerism it soon became a capitalist cash cow itself with a barrage of distinctly an ironic branded spin off packs he had to pay for I don't think the Sims will ever be as popular again as it was when it first released and I think the reason why is because we are the sons no really each other other Sims when you look at social networks and you look at Facebook and stuff like that you know you know how that top-down view ernie people's leaves the sims created a realistic world but then just made you conform in it luckily a game was about to come along that would let you indulge your darker side [Music] on September the 11th 2001 millions feared the world was about to slide into chaos weeks later a videogame consisting almost entirely of nihilistic urban anarchy assured in a new age of morally blank freedom for games [Music] and love the feeling of dropping into what is a pretty realistic simulation of a working of city and then just causing haver it's just sources like perfect escapism for me early incarnations of Grand Theft Auto were somewhat primitive and looked vaguely reminiscent of the rebellious bedroom coded ZX spectrum games that were part of its genetic code despite being set in an exaggerated version of the USA it was a defiantly British game made in Scotland from mudders Grand Theft Auto arrived at DMA design a small Scottish tournament team in Dundee and it was something they'd worked on their very small team had worked on it for like four years and it was thought of in their studio at that time as kind of like the runt of the litter then in came salmon dan Houser who took on a publishing deal with EMA design they became the country juices of the game in a very very changed from when Grand Theft Auto 3 came out they used 3d visuals which made the game feel more mature but it was also much more aware of wider cultural issues they had lots of cool music in it and again there was a sense of anarchy to it it was more out of control this time I'm only pretending to play that Grand Theft Auto 3 was an immense blockbuster revolutionising a franchise that has become one of the most lucrative entertainment properties in history with an influence that stretches beyond the world of games if you watch the film drive with Ryan Gosling that film I do not believe that film would look the way it does if it wasn't for Grand Theft Auto you know lots of people say that the director essentially made a non-interactive version of Grand Theft Auto his working in the world of Drive as its depicted in that film is very much influenced and inspired by Grand Theft Auto I think but unlike cinema most of the stories told within the world of GTA are ones the player effectively writes themselves using the freedom of their own actions the other day I stole a car I'm shooting someone in the heads I'm away for shooting shoot him again shoots him again now we're two very peaceable cat-loving ladies school I think I can rationalize it because I know it's not real it's not real yes and if rib-tickling viral videos are anything to go by GTA's world of fantasy indulgence even seems to appeal to older players especially those with an axe to grind against energy companies some reason this level of anarchic freedom seems to upset people parents listen up because here's what you need to know tonight in Grand Theft Auto your son or your husband or your boyfriend or whoever can hire a prostitute have sex with her and then beat her to death with a baseball bat well GTA is the gift that keeps on giving for tabloids I mean Parliament debates it there are motions tabled in the House of Commons on it there are endless commentators who judge it to sort of be something linked to the devil if you're a parent and you allow your son or daughter to watch this even if they're beyond 18 years old you're a lousy parent in my opinion it is the definitive moral panic guy please don't make me ruin all the pre-work your plastic surgeons have been doing Grand Theft Auto is pretty much the Frankie Boyle of the gaming world really its controversial Scottish nihilistic hard to defend in The Guardian and to what end well because it just wants to make you laugh of course yeah shut it pal you'll leave here with an [ __ ] like a yawning hat boys mate it is interesting being a Brit living in the United States I think people outside of America tend to look at the American world from the outside a little bit more cynically we look at American culture and American values with a little bit more cynicism than people inside American society do you have to be on the outside to hold up a mirror and that may be what the reason why GTA has been fairly successful as a piece of satire again I think the satire the commentary in GTA is often very crass I think they missed the target as often as they hit it but again the fact that they're trying goes beyond a lot of what a lot of triple-eight big-budget video games ever try to do it's a giant cartoon grand theft auto in and it's not exactly a subtle representation of anything but then it's not meant to be if you want a subtle representation of something else read a lovely book by Jane Austen Grand Theft Auto is all about causing mayhem and not giving a fig about the consequences but increasingly some games are prompting players to consider the repercussions of their actions and they do it with surprising grace [Music] [Applause] Shadow the Colossus was a really fascinating game in a lot of ways it was really meditative game you played a character who lived in a fantasy world whose mission was to rescue a princess which is a very basic video game setup your job in the game is to bring down these huge creatures it's like seven huge boss battles where the buses are not only monsters but so big that they're almost a landscape in themselves and gradually as the game goes on your feelings as you bring down these monsters become more and more complicated because every time you killed one of these creatures you realize you just killed something magnificent something large like larger than life that's beautiful majestic animal and you just slaughtered it for some unknown reason and every time you did one of those things your characters your character designs slowly morphed and became darker and darker and and you realize you are the villain of this world Shadow of the Colossus was significant because it helped forge a new way of looking at games one in which the player could no longer be entirely certain they were the hero it also influenced recent indie titles like papers please which despite its basic appearance is a complex game that causes the player increasing discomfort papers please is a game where you're a customs officer working on a fictional border at a made-up country and you have to check everyone's paperwork to see whether or not they can come into the country all the mechanics is like someone approaches kind of the checkpoint and hands you their papers and they might ask you to let love the man they have family to someone that's starving inside or they're trying to bring some of them but your job is just to check other papers Forge do they have all their papers and then whether to allow them to get in or reject them you quickly realize you've got to be a bit evil if you don't make the quota every date for stamping enough people through you don't get enough money to feed your wife and kids and it's a sore game that you play and you realize why people do bad things it puts you into a position where you slide and you go alright we'll just one person then before you know it you're completely corrupt and you never really noticed it happening through those mechanics you feel like a feeling that's so unique to gaming you feel guilt and a movie can't make you feel guilty a book can make you feel guilty but here's like I'm making an action and someone can curse me because of it and I feel guilty and it's it's it's kind of brilliant in that way games excel at making you stand in other people's shoes not just the shoes of corrupt Eastern European officials but creatures so phantasmagorical so beyond our imaginations they don't even need shoes imagine that you can't [Music] something happened in the mid-2000s with the rise of what's called the massively multiplayer game and this for me was the points at which the line between games and reality started to get quite blurred my wife got super into it selling my son and what was nice was an edge of fact he became quite a nice mother and something to do together you know it's very interesting you know they would go on rage together you know where else can a woman a grown woman whose mother deverel children and written several hit movies go out with their son skin some animals kill a troll okay win some gold and still see a lovely bit of scenery in another new mythical City no way the problem with a game this seductive is it can also be quite addictive regularly I would play for 14 hours straight when I would be raiding I do couple raids a day and then I have to do upkeep in between the raid you hear of people who will sit there especially man I have to say who will sit there with with buckets or bottles attached to their nether regions so they don't have to move they can play constantly just pee in a bottle the cliched image of World of Warcraft players is addicted shut-in husks neglecting their own lives was memorably satirized in this South Park episode yeah never mind World of Warcraft that is the tragedy of all games isn't it the way they steal you away from the real world where all the normal people live and encourage you to stay indoors gamings just such a sad sedentary pursuit isn't it it's totally unlike say the way you're sitting there in a darkened room passively watching me say this boxset of a silver bullet in this everyone who complains you burn playing Far Cry 3 for 30 years has sat you far more of that in terms of games of throne Breaking Bad all which was a pretty sedentary activity nice and no one down on boxsets no-one's going all these are appalling these are box sets are making our children fashion so that's always been the one I won't slam I've been watching box seriously well of course they have because I what Dirk Lurgan fergan the new Scandinavian murder thing how is that different to playing Grand Theft Auto 5 yes you may turn the word or to Danish as laughs but it's exactly the same experience in fact it's more passive at least my toms are getting a worker never mind a workout for your thumbs what about your other fingers early video games were simple and so therefore anybody could sort of pick them up and figure out what to do then there were over lays upon overlays upon overlays of complexity to where if you picked up a ps3 controller it looked a little bit like the cockpit of a 747 the minute you went to a one button gestured thing it empowered a whole bunch of new gamers and that was really the power [Music] it sounds too good to be true being able to play a game of tennis in your lunch hour and you don't even have to take your suit off it was the first time you can actually play games with your family and have a level playing field you know you can hand the controller to your grandma your mom and say let's play tennis and they might well be you at it and for a long time gainer that was a great experience Wii Sports is on our list not because it's one of the best-selling games of all time shifting over 80 million copies but because it's one of the most accessible turning gaming into an even more mainstream pursuit that can be easily marketed at anyone who can do this saw or this or this all right this one's my favorite chop chop how could be your mom if you want [Applause] after the spectacular coming of the we was the Microsoft Xbox Kinect which did away with the controller and instead watched you with his BD camera I and judged or every action like all wells Big Brother but fun the new incarnation of the Xbox comes bundled with this more advanced bulkier version of the Kinect which can now analyze your heartbeat and facial expression gesture technology has now dribbled out of gaming and into other everyday gizmos like smartphones and even televisions which now routinely require you to wave at them like some kind of peasant as we can see from this unsettling advert and the gaming world hasn't finished invading your life just because it's taught you to perform a few gestures like some kind of Gibbon no as we'll see it's after nothing less than your soul 2007 was grim even the launch of the spangly new iPhone couldn't distract anyone from the unrelenting misery of the global economic crisis what could you do for cheap escapism the cinema was full of crappy three calls in a new Transformers movie so that was out and thanks to the smoking ban pubs now stank of sweat and ass gas fortunately there was one form of entertainment that's still delivered and it chiefly delivered by letting you shoot people in the face this action-packed epic is very much the Citizen Kane of remorseless gunfire modern warfare is about putting you into the shoes of a soldier putting you in the middle of a battle and not just as you know the lone superhero but as part of this giant machine you know it's it's a world going on around you the Call of Duty franchise is impeccably produced and fun to play but also so brutal many find it hard to stomach for my money the most disturbing mission in modern warfare is death from above a mission which puts you in an ac-130 gunship and puts a kind of grainy film over the cameras you're looking down at shooting at targets you can't even recognize it's the only mission in one warfare that could be photorealistic because the real-life footage we see on the news from ac-130s is grainy and it's tremendously disturbing because you can't make out what these figures are it could be it could almost be a statement but it's not it's just there so you can have fun and that's very dark every Call of Duty game seems to have its banner moment which is almost deliberately conceived oh this will be the level that will get us all the headlines in the Daily Mail and you know the Sun and these are the things that people will complain about I think that's a little bit cynical the game success also lends the debate about violence an interesting new kink many of the guns it features are real-world weapons licensed with the manufacturers full consent it's a kind of grim product placement which means the game doubles as a shop-window for future gun owners albeit inadvertently trouble is some of its more fanatical fans to the very last people you'd want only guns or even rocks to be honest ecology is the prime example of a game with a horrible player base in terms of behavior only those are those a joke the comedians tailcoat arrest a class which is just basically the most offensive joke he can possibly tell and plane ecology Riverhead set on as late lesson in tea a children's choir sang the longest most value arrest the class joke and yell for hours as intolerable all of that could lead you to believe that present-day gaming is horrible not necessarily video games are in an amazing place right now because you've got these giant blockbuster games that are like giant Hollywood movies and then you've also got the equivalent of the independent film scene you've got games that are made by one person two people little teams who are saying something that they want to say just like indie films came about when the cost of making films was drastically reduced now with tools and publishing options are available for essentially the little guys who just want to put their game out there games that don't have as much appeal but costs so much less they can recoup their investment with just a few thousand sales suddenly it seemed the idiosyncratic bedroom coder of the 1980s was back with a vengeance like someone had turned back the clock and an unusual time twisting indie platformer game called braid led the charge [Music] raid is it's a puzzle platformer it was created by Jonathan blue on the surface it's all about a guy tomb trying to rescue a princess from a horrible monster you first pick it up yeah I'm just playing a platformer game but then going into kind of the fourth dimension of playing with concepts of time and reversing and speeding up and and and manipulating time in a way that took something that looked familiar and completely reinventing it one aesthetic thing I didn't like about it was the main character just didn't care for the little guy he looked like a sort of squashed Hugh Grant you know that's just my that's just my taste you know I I'm not a fan of miniaturised Hugh Grant's breathe is almost a game that's came to too smart for its own good almost the feel though I kind of feel like it's a game you admire by remember definitely remember reaching a point where I was late I'm not really having fun anymore and that's Fame that's absolutely Fame because I think for indie games to have to explore what a gamers grade owns a place on our list for proving indie games could sell paving the way for other individual and experimental titles braid was swiftly followed then by limbo which we again was a beautiful style eyes very emotionally wrenching story of a small boy walking through kind of material landscape journey he's probably the most famous example the wonder of that fabulously beautiful incredibly emotionally involving there's a point where then they've a fella just can't quite make it up a snowy mountain and Jesus you could get you many of the new wave of indie titles Hawke back to the retro past offering subversive or surprisingly imaginings of gaming's heritage and indie games aren't something you have to seek out in some obscure hobby shop today you can buy them without leaving the comfort of your own hand there's this whole line of video game genealogy that starts off with the arcades and moves through the game boy and stuff like Tetris and Mario and ends up with modern arcade like mobile games like candy crush and Angry Birds games started off as something that everybody played and now they're again something that everybody plays lots of people that didn't we think of themselves as gamers we'll play something like Angry Birds because it's like a time killer because wherever you are whatever you're doing if you're in a doctor's waiting room if you're on the bus if you're bored on the tube you can play Angry Birds and it kills that dead time with its intuitive visually appealing game play Angry Birds is brought in Tech's handheld pleasure to millions just like your mum has Angry Birds is is a nice enough game I don't think it's the best game in the world but I mean certainly it deserves to be a success whether it deserves to absolutely rule the entire universe the exception of anything else I really don't know why even yesterday when I was going to buy my train to come down here I looked over that the ticket clock phone that was lying next to the ticket window Angry Birds is just everywhere like pac-man way back yonder Angry Birds has become an unstoppable Kitty wink merchandising phenomenon with branded goods cartoon shows theme park rides at all but Angry Birds isn't the only indie game to have built an empire our next game is if anything and even more impressive achievement minecraft was just one of those bits of gaming genius I think you can sum up the appeal of minecraft effectively by just saying it's it's Lego of video games minecraft is an open-world game which lets players shape their environment by placing or destroying blocks it's easy it's creative and it's social the beautiful thing remain craft is that you see people playing together to create something to build some massive project people come together it bailed replicas of the Starship Enterprise and stuff like that with an maintainer and that's a lovely thing cos most of the time end games people come together to destroy stuff and each other minecraft became a hit selling over 33 million copies and its most enthusiastic fans are children children can interact with Minecraft and it allows them to be creative in a way that nothing else does like reading a book is great wonderful but it doesn't allow them to be part of that fantasy minecraft does and they create these huge worlds for themselves these huge structures not because someone is telling them to but because they want to and they're probably learning so much about teamwork and design and architecture and the environment just through playing this game you get lots of teachers now a jogger fee teachers use minecraft to get children to design villages so you get physics teachers now using Minecraft to teach kids about simple mechanisms it really communicates to kids like my children my son's play Minecraft a lot my older son is on the autism spectrum to him minecraft is so valuable because it's a world of logic and creativity which he immediately understands and this is the same for all children like it's really helped my son in a lot of ways to kind of express himself which is really profoundly important and you know I've got I'd love to shake the make of that game by the hand because I think he's kind of changed my son's life so the world of games has become like the world of cinema with multi-million dollar blockbusters to one side and low-budget cerebral indie titles on the other but now there are signs of a third way urging for seeing the beginnings of the gaming equivalent of the critically acclaimed HBO box set where did you get the money for this drugs I sell hardcore drugs oh good we started helping out with the mortgage then yeah you wish the last of us is the story of these two survivors in the world that has been ravaged by this pandemic and we follow Joel this middle-aged survivor who's willing to do anything it takes to survive cross anymore 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 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 on a plane it's not weird and she can't really kind of understand it and she sort of brings a unique perspective because of that she but she can't envisage a time when when young teenage girls were just sort of obsessed with with kind of boys and looking good that's completely alien to her is this really all they had to worry about boys movies deciding what shirt goes with wishes skirt it's bizarre like any self-respecting boxset 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 removed a character around I must have looked if I'm really glad my wife didn't come in but I was just kind game designers are getting older you know games 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 scoring mechanics but as an emotional experience in the next five to ten years we're gonna 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 a 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 futures they're marked new emphasis on integrated social networking features now why would game systems want to include social networking unless maybe social networking already functions like a game [Laughter] [Music] Twitter is a massively multiplayer online game in which you choose an interesting avatar and then roll player persona loosely based on your own attempting to accrue followers by repeatedly pressing lettered buttons to forum interesting sentences the biggest way in which video games have affected our world for me is the increasing gamification of real-life stuff like Twitter is a game it's about you know small achievements adding up to bigger ones and it's about playing the rules of whatever you're in gamification means applying the mechanics of video games to real life now often this boils down to incentivizing people to perform the same action over and over again each time mario headbutts of blocky gets a coin when he gets a hundred coins he gets an extra life and these perpetual little Pat's on the head compel you to bash those blocks for hours by supplying a constant stream of fun sized rewards social networking has by accident gamified 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 realize 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 or when I do a tweet how popular tweets gonna be and I try to guess ahead of time like how many retweets is that gonna get and how many favorites they're gonna get in terms of the competition especially between like celebrities or people with the verification tick every time I see someone but every time someone's talking about someone they're talking about how many oh I've got 50,000 I've got a million followers I've got this and it kind of very much reminded me of a lot of games like that it was always about how many points you got and it ups your profile makes you feel like you're doing something in your life what I do in Twitter a lot is just project a false persona and it's like that avatar thing you know I mean it's late one with a walk anything like that the way I am on Twitter is nothing like that we are min released that feels like a game some things you know I mean I feel a sociopath 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 non-existent worlds they've helped bridge the gap between eastern and western culture they've provided a safe space to run right to fantasize 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 all 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 responsive cheerfully invited them in and that trends just going to continue until whole areas of our existence have become games in fact you'll scarcely be known as you anymore 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 program now I mean I'd say game over but I only a prick would say that get out of my show [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Zander Ezekial

Views: 352,647

Keywords:

Id: 32wN4IIDW1o

Length: 97min 35sec (5855 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 01 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Back in 1984, 9 year old me completely blanked "Elite" because it looked "boring". 33 years later I love (the new) Elite: Dangerous and spend a bit too much time flying around in it in VR.

Gaming has come a long way and who knows where it'll be in another 33 years. I am however 100% convinced VR and AR gaming will be a big part of future gaming.

[u/[deleted]]

UK Mirror - https://vimeo.com/86920129

[u/Comeoffit321]

Blocked.

[u/018118055]

Charlie Brooker (TVGoHome*)

[u/Whitegook]

While this documentary is fun it's pretty shit Discovery channel level entertainment - not very much documenting or exhibiting or analysis of historical events and forces that brought us to where we are today. It's basically just, 'hey remember that (which probably only people in the UK remember), yeah that was awesome, now let's have 5 people just talk about their favorite memories about that, look how informative and educational we are, also we're edgy because we said fuck!'

[u/txnmxn]

At first glance I thought he was jack black

[u/Mentioned_Videos]

Other videos in this thread:

Watch Playlist ▶

VIDEO	COMMENT
How Video Games Changed the World Documentary	+34 - UK Mirror -
First Impressions of Elite Dangerous VR and HTC Vive	+6 - Yup and it's as awesome as it sounds.
Robocop Title Theme (Gameboy version)	+3 - It's actually the Gameboy version :) (I thought it was the C64 version when I first heard it, but I owned a C64 and not a Gameboy when I was a youngster!)
Dilbert 3	+3 - You may also know it from this classic work of art.
Robocop Spectrum Title Music	+2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=os57CXh6COw
UNCANNY VALLEY	+1 - that episode reminded me a lot of this
A New Era Official CS:GO Frag Movie - IEM Katowice 2017	+1 - Look at these lonely guys sitting in front TV screens wondering what to do.
Charlie Brooker's How Videogames Changed the World	+1 - Tomb Raider GTA III
Kraftwerk - Computer Love	0 - I'm not disagreeing, but it's the same "give me an excuse to be introverted" kids that have always been playing video/board/card games. There really hasn't been that big of a change, unless you count graphics: It's still a lonely guy sitting in front...

I'm a bot working hard to help Redditors find related videos to watch. I'll keep this updated as long as I can.

---

Play All | Info | Get me on Chrome / Firefox

[u/JuanPabloVassermiler]

Their explanation of fighting games was concise and spot-on.

[u/turnipisrael]

Definitely thought that was jack black as I was scrolling.