Video Game and Traditional Media Forms
With the rapid convergence of all media types into a digital form, video games are also beginning to affect, and be affected by traditional media forms.
In the history, the Television engineer Ralph Baer, who conceived the idea of an interactive television while building a television set from scratch created the first video game. Video games are now also being exploited by pay-TV companies which allow you to simply attach your computer or console to the television cable system and you can simply download the latest game.
Games act in television, with the player choosing to enter the artificial world. The constructed meanings in video games are more influential than those of traditional media forms. The reason is that 'games interact with the audience in a dialogue of emotion, action, and reaction'. The interactivity means this occurs to a depth that is not possible in the traditional media forms.
Computer games have developed in parallel to both the video game and the arcade video game. The personal computer and the new console machines such as the Dreamcast, Nintendo GameCube, PlayStation 2 and Xbox offered a new dimension to game playing. They have now largely been replaced by the Xbox 360, Wii and, the PlayStation 3.
Games are the first new computer-based media form to socialize a generation of youth in a way that traditional media forms have in the past. Therefore, the 'MTV generation' has been overtaken by the 'Nintendo generation'; however, some refer to the current generation as the 'iPod Generation'.
Because they straddle the technologies of television and computers, electronic games are a channel through which we can investigate the various impacts of new media and the technologies of convergence.
Read more about this topic: Video Game Culture
Famous quotes containing the words video game, video, game, traditional, media and/or forms:
“It is among the ranks of school-age children, those six- to twelve-year-olds who once avidly filled their free moments with childhood play, that the greatest change is evident. In the place of traditional, sometimes ancient childhood games that were still popular a generation ago, in the place of fantasy and make- believe play . . . today’s children have substituted television viewing and, most recently, video games.”
—Marie Winn (20th century)
“It is among the ranks of school-age children, those six- to twelve-year-olds who once avidly filled their free moments with childhood play, that the greatest change is evident. In the place of traditional, sometimes ancient childhood games that were still popular a generation ago, in the place of fantasy and make- believe play . . . today’s children have substituted television viewing and, most recently, video games.”
—Marie Winn (20th century)
“Life is a game in which the rules are constantly changing; nothing spoils a game more than those who take it seriously. Adultery? Phooey! You should never subjugate yourself to another nor seek the subjugation of someone else to yourself. If you follow that Crispian principle you will be able to say “Phooey,” too, instead of reaching for your gun when you fancy yourself betrayed.”
—Quentin Crisp (b. 1908)
“The traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lens and the Cinerama screen tend to narrow it.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)
“The media transforms the great silence of things into its opposite. Formerly constituting a secret, the real now talks constantly. News reports, information, statistics, and surveys are everywhere.”
—Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)
“Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told:
It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws,”
—Robert Browning (1812–1889)