However, and now you brain should start to wake up, the question should rather be: What information is it interesting to televise. In other words. What are people interested in. Actually the keyword IS information. And lo, the internet as arisen already to fill that need. It is an expression of every kind of information it is possible to spread via the two kinds of output you with ease can get from a devise. Sound and image. But the internet is not delivered through a TV. It is delivered through a computer. The key difference is that the computer tries ever so hard to streamline interactivity, and be a tool for effective expression. Until recently the only interactive feature you could get was the ability to sift through text alrady put there by professional actors, but with the rize of web 2.0 this changed to a more balanced interactive state, with the professional acteurs, i should rather say, merely moderating the flow of the internet. This developement has been both slow and fast. Fast as in unpresendented in human history, but slow as in - why didn't this developement happen sooner?
The internet is slowly moving into the fast- track, with more and more of human activity (both social and professional) being moved to the web, the web is taking on the traits of human life. It is becoming so instantanious, that if you are not in it, you are disconnected. The choice of words is of course not arbitrary. With the net moving at the pace of society, it is litteraly impossible to keep updated all the time, even if you extremely limit your interaction; say to one site. The number of comments, links, and meta- information (information in other mediums pertaining to this source) is nearly impossible to keep tabs on.
I am sidetracking. Interesting as the flow of the internet is, what I'm about to comment on is more specified. Splitting all televised, interactive and interesting in two groups; the useful, and the entertaining, will on one side leave you with news, wiki's and blogs, and on the other on videogames.
I'll admit, there are a few more categories under which gaming falls, but the three mentioned above I feel are the most imporant. Videogames is an artform. It is the expression of an idea by a few individuals in the form of audiovisual, interactive art. The genre is very young, and under enormous developement. Only a few years now, four or five, has the medium been mature enough, and the technology been developed enough for a truer expression of the "real" ideas out there. The old gaming systems out there were extremely limiting on the artsists. Forcing composers to make music for midi, and animators to limit themselves to thirty pixels in as many variations, and though there are still limitations, they are not nearly as infringing as before.
Hideo Kojima, a well known game director and writor expressed that in the current console generation, he could take many more steps toward making the experience real, and thereby further consolidate is vision with his expression. This shift is extremely important, as it signals that an era where the interactive entertainment can near its completeness as an artform is drawing closer.
For many developers the question now is: What can we do that hasn't been done before?
It is an honest question. Within it lies hopes of success and money, but it isn't the question of a true artist. I'll make the argument that the few game creators who have really shone in innovation and art, like David Cage, That game company, Hideo Kojima and Fumito Ueda, has asked two completely different kinds of question. Which are; What can this medium do, which no other medium can? And; What would be the best possible way to express this idea?
The concept of interactivity entails amongst other things that you have the possibility to change the story, visuals, sound and characters of the experience. This has in fact been explored to some extent. In small ways first; as the sounds of bottles being picked up, or the blodsplatter on the wall, to the more wiki like level creation in Dungeon Keeper and LittleBigPlanet. Story is probably the hardest part to make interactive. Here the RPGs were the first pioneers, alowing to to a minor degree to choose dialogue, and later on with Farenheght (Indigo Prophesy) to change the wole story in some small way. In fact. A better example might be net- hack, which has had amateur developers ad more functionality over the years, in the end making a quite extensive game.
However when it comes to interactivity, the ability to interact has actually been limited severely by technology. To understand my position, contemplate the idea that "anything sufficiently advanced will seem like magic", and then apply that magic to what you would like to to interactively within a fantastic setting. What is that say you? Break china with your hands? Come on, be more imaginative. Mould clay with your hands, which you then blow life into. Talk directly to in game characters; no more button pressing for dialogue. Get 1 to 1 controll over your avatar. Well. Now we are getting somewhere!
These are actually not my own mad ravings. I can still remember the glee in Peter Molaneux' eyes when he described project Natal. But it in itself was ofcourse inpired from many other previous sources. What is unique with the current developement in input devises for the int
eractivity in games, is that these new features will give players more direct controll without using buttons or light guns or whatever. But these developements again put more preassure on the games, making the current generation advances too feeble to support the updated visions of the artists.A logic step for the interactive medium, is to give more creative power to the game itself. Although difficult to envision, you could have personlaties created on culture- evoutionary trees, movement created on the foundations of digital logic (i.e. physics), and just about procedural everything. Saying procedural everything is fun, because it turns the artists imagination up- side down, as the game world become defined not by what the artist puts in, but what he chooses to leave out.
Would an untamed game, by this definition, be an untamed hallucination - more like a lucid dream than real? I actually don't believe that kind of interaction will come in games. For two reasons; it would not be interesting as a game, and it would cost a lot to develop.
Also we should remembered the wize words of the web- comic XKCD: No matter how powerful your tool is, you must always in the end in a concrete manner define your expression. Meaning that if you had an all powerful machine that made your drams into a movie, you would still have to write the dialogue, "film it", cut it, act it, decide costumes and much much more.
But if we move that far. It's not a game anymore.
Limiting a game to a shade made of the penumbras of two eccentric cirkles labeled "what a game should do" and "what a game could do" will give you all the possible outcomes for both the good and the bad. I for one have high hopes for this genre in the years to come. And look forward to following the artform as it developes, discovers its roots and limitations, and above all. Provides entertainment!
