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 They have now largely been replaced by the Xbox 360, Wii and, the PlayStation 3.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)
“These people figured video was the Lord’s preferred means of communicating, the screen itself a kind of perpetually burning bush. “He’s in the de-tails,” Sublett had said once. “You gotta watch for Him close.””
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.”
—George Berkeley (1685–1753)
“To minor authors is left the ornamentation of the commonplace: these do not bother about any reinventing of the world; they merely try to squeeze the best they can out of a given order of things, out of traditional patterns of fiction.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“The media have just buried the last yuppie, a pathetic creature who had not heard the news that the great pendulum of public conciousness has just swung from Greed to Compassion and from Tex-Mex to meatballs.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“‘Tis education forms the common mind,
Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)