Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [106]
The second era flared up with the NES’s popularity, especially with a certain overalled pipe fitter. This is Mario’s generation, starting with Donkey Kong. Call this era the D-pad era. The new paradigm of third-person took hold, making most every video game a gussied-up puppet theater where the toy du jour finds treasure and stomps enemies. Phrased another way, they were hunter-gatherer simulations. Mario, Sonic, Master Chief, Niko Bellic—it’s all playing atavistic caveman, rolling around in the basement of Maslow’s hierarchy of need. The message of the D-pad medium was third-person play. Even when joysticks returned, they were small thumb-size affairs used just like the D-pad. Computer keyboards? D-pads with extra buttons.
This era is still going on, but it’s overlapping with the third era. We now live in the first years of the motion era, started in 2004 with the Nintendo DS. (It had been nascent for decades, of course, in arcades and a garage sale’s worth of one-game-only peripherals for consoles.) One by one, players started drifting toward video games, with simple new control schemes: press the screen, wave a wand, strum a guitar. Not games as much as activities. You can be sure all eighth-generation game systems will come standard with motion-control setups.
These activities are basically all joystick-era games in philosophy. More lively, with a nebula’s improvement in graphics, but the same concepts: play at shooting, play sports, play with friends, basically just play. The character-driven D-pad ethos was too cumbersome: it was time to take a step back and perform activities without a fictional world being at stake.
As it stands now, the core gamers are loyal D-padders, and the casual gamers drift strongly to the motioners. There’s overlap and crossing over, but most people, like most games, fit into one camp more than the other. You can be sure that Nintendo will have a load of Mario games for years to come, for both camps. Mario is uniquely suited for such transition: games such as Mario Paint, Tennis, and Golf establishing him as a Renaissance man.
Most all other game characters are, to their detriment, actual characters, with personalities and story lines specific for their game. They’re often ramped up to absurd levels: look at any afro’ed character, ridiculous weapons like Gears of War’s chainsaw bayonet, or women who dress like strippers (this includes, sadly, almost all female characters). They try so hard to set themselves apart from Mario’s blandness, by whatever means necessary. And all this screaming for attention had made them stuck in a single game genre.
The motion era’s trademark is a return to the joystickers’ style of game play. Like swing music and bell-bottoms, the base-level creativity of early game developers is returning. What is a minigame, after all, but a joystick era game, now economically repriced to come forty to a pack? Some stink, just as some games back then stunk. (Recall sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon’s valuable law: 90 percent of everything is crap.) But developers are learning how to design creative short games, sports simulations that aren’t steroid fests, and innovative puzzle games.
Video games have changed the world in the forty years since Pong told us to “avoid missing ball for high score.” A new medium exists, produced by a multibillion-dollar industry. Its rise paralleled computers’ prominence: now many homes have one of each. It’s changed how people behave: business gurus preach that gamers are more selfmotivated employees if you give them tasks to accomplish instead of instructions to be obeyed. Games’ geeky scenarios have propelled science fiction and fantasy into the mainstream. Entertainment went from being something we saw in crowds to something we experienced as single