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ADULT ENTERTAINMENT
Video games aren’t just a childish, mind-numbing pursuit. Actually, they might make you a better person.

Text: NICK ROCKEL

Video games make you dumb. That, crudely put, was the message last summer from researchers at Tokyo’s Nihon University. In a study of 240 people between the ages of six and 29, neurologist Akio Mori and his colleagues found that subjects who played computer games several hours a day suffered a permanent decline in brain activity. Hard-core gaming, the study concluded, all but switches off the prefrontal cortex, responsible for emotions and critical thinking. The results: tetchiness, social withdrawal and the inability to concentrate. Professor Mori recommended that children spend less time at the PlayStation and more time outdoors.

"It’s an absurd claim. I simply don’t believe it," scoffs Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Far from being harmful and culturally worthless, video games are actually an emerging art form, argues Jenkins, who helps his clients "push [their] games to the next level artistically." Like film in its early days, video games are becoming a more stimulating and challenging entertainment medium, with the power to explore moral questions and give us insights into the human condition.

Is this the future of video games – social-sciences laboratory meets edutainment? Already, so-called "interactive entertainment" outsells the Hollywood box office. Americans spent a record US$9.4-billion on game software and hardware in 2001 versus $8.4-billion on movie-going, according to The NPD Group. For 2002, that figure could reach more than $13-billion. The average gamer is now 28 years old, which may surprise critics who view the industry as a bad influence on impressionable kids. In fact, 90 percent of video game buyers and 61 percent of players in the U.S. are 18 years and over, reports the Interactive Digital Software Association. It seems that many people who grew up playing video games never stopped. But at the same time, innovations in gaming are attracting a new audience of adult players.

Both adults and children demand increasingly elaborate experiences for the $80 or so they pay for a new title. Technology is racing to keep up – and often, the latest tricks come wrapped in a spectacularly bloody package. The bestselling console game of 2001 was the ultraviolent gangster opus Grand Theft Auto 3, which carries a Mature rating. But unlike Quake and the other "shooters," this game invites second thoughts about the killing and maiming that takes place onscreen. "I have seen a number of game designers really grapple with the ethical dimensions of how they deal with violence," says Jenkins.

Twenty-eight-year-old David Seymour, a game designer with Vancouver’s Radical Entertainment, says that GTA 3 and its recent follow-up, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, offer something new: meaning. "The violence in Grand Theft Auto 3 is contextualized violence. Suddenly, there’s a city, and there’s innocent bystanders, and there’s law enforcement…" The personal choices that each player makes says something about how he or she relates to others. "That’s where I think games are starting to have worth, as social simulators."

Socializing in simulated worlds is what gives gaming on the Web its mass appeal. "The only stuff I’ve bought lately has been on-line stuff," says Vancouver business consultant Kerry Morrison, 26, who participates in multiplayer sports tournaments through his console. Like many gamers, Morrison prefers a subtle human opponent to a more predictable computer one. The industry has high expectations for Electronic Arts’ new The Sims Online, a Web-based massive-multiplayer version of its popular title. Part game, part chatroom, part movie, The Sims Online lets a player’s character or agent inhabit a world populated by millions of other gamers.

If video games are going to evolve into truly rich social realms by shedding their formulaic, repetitive qualities, game AI (artificial intelligence) will have to make some big strides. David Seymour explains that the current generation of consoles only has enough processing power to make game agents move convincingly never mind spontaneously interact with each other or comprehend the world they inhabit. Still, advances in game AI have resulted in products like Nintendo’s recent Animal Crossing. In this children’s title, time continues running in the imaginary world when you shut off the game – meaning that when you’re away the action continues to unfold, just like in reality.

Gamers will soon enjoy a whole new magnitude of realism, according to John G. Taylor, director of a London, England-based company called Lobal Technologies. Professor emeritus of mathematics at King’s College London, Taylor is helping build a Language Acquisition Device (LAD), software that uses a neural network to learn and employ language the way the human brain does. Lobal has a demo of the LAD that can converse in brief sentences, and this fall, it plans to release a commercial -version with a primitive vocabulary of some 500 words for video-game developers. "The player will be in communication with a ‘person’ now," says Taylor.

Furthermore, as computers grow more powerful – and on-line games tap into beefy mainframe servers – Taylor predicts that it’s only a matter of time before this "personhood" occurs. "Given [that game] agents have some of the intelligence structures of ourselves, they can then illuminate the human condition," he says. "In the end, the agents will be able to simulate human societies and be the domain of sociologists and psychologists, to run their own simulations." Taylor suggests that neuroscientists could eventually build a detailed working model of consciousness by studying how the mind pays attention to things.

"Not to be pessimistic, but some of these claims are pretty exaggerated," says Andrew Vardy, a PhD candidate in computer science at Ottawa’s Carleton University, who thinks the true purpose of video games is to escape reality, not mimic it with mathematical approximations of consciousness. "AI remains a vexing challenge," concurs Henry Jenkins. "We’re a long way away from the Holodeck."

In the meantime, many game developers are excited about a new graphical programming language called Cg. Its developers hope that Cg will eventually allow for the creation of tool kits consisting of virtual runtime worlds with permutable sets and actors like those in the 2001 film Final Fantasy. Games may already resemble movies in their use of cinematic sequences, strong storylines and well-developed characters (the hero of Vice City is voiced by Ray Liotta), but Jenkins believes that the two mediums could diverge: "Hollywood may not be the best model for what the future of games will look like. They may have more in common with architecture or dance. The first thing we’ve got to do is separate the issue of games as a meaningful art from games as a storytelling art."

Forget art for a moment. David Seymour is waiting for the day when computers will deliver a "nice, tight, visually seamless social simulator that lets you plug in all the characteristics of your employer and then simulate asking for a raise." Or a game that replicates the minutiae of competition for land and resources between two neighbouring tribes. "What if you had a whole generation of 12-year-olds that really knew why war happened?" It could make them smarter. It could even mean a world where everybody plays together.