Video gaming in the era of the Internet

Video gaming in the era of the Internet

Remember the old times, when you had to seat in front of your TV and fight for the best joystick with your friends? But most of the time, you didn’t even have to fight, because you were alone. Jerry had been punished for having eaten all the pie his mother prepared for diner, so you didn’t have anyone to compete with. Let’s say that videogames were really expensive too, and you had very few means of discovering the game unless you bought it or if you were a videogame magazine reader. But don’t worry, this time is over. Now, if you want to play, you have the choice between your different games consoles, but also your new Asus PC. Why? Not only because you are able to insert a “Rayman” CD in your computer, but because videogames gained a large number of diverse interfaces, and the Internet development helped to shape a new gaming environment. In this article, we will see the new aspects of video gaming in the era of the Internet.

Videogames have always been a source of huge benefits for games producers and as this mean of entertainment developed, everything was an excuse to make money. For example, you took a very bad movie with a super great hero like the “Batman and Robin” of 1997, and you made a videogame of it, on PlayStation and Game.com. The worse thing in this was that marketing worked, and people bought it, because come on, you could play Batman! But even at that time, a good gamer would have known that playing “Batman and Robin” was a voluntary suicide, because some websites specialized in games critics such as “Imaginative Games Network” (http://www.ign.com/) already existed. Actually, what Internet brought to the video gaming environment was a huge source of information, allowing the consumers to pick up the good products. Today, on special websites, such as the French one http://www.fantabobshow.com/, or even on Youtube or Dailymotion, a lot of testers try some videogames for us, using what we call “playthrough” or “walkthrough”. In the economic theory, there is the idea of a disproportion of information between the offer and the demand. Thanks to the Internet, this disproportion is being reduced because expert consumers now inform less aware consumers.

If the border between consumers and producers has been reduced thanks to the Internet, it is also because this new Media permits a relation between both. Actually, as Henry Jenkins pointed out in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, the apparition of new Media produced a shift in the consumer’s behavior. Passive in the past, he is now able to participate in the Media production and, concerning our point, in the videogame production. That is what Jenkins calls “participatory culture”. For example, in 2011, a voice casting was headed by the producers of the computer game “Blue Planet”, a game of spatial battle. Fans could record their voices for the interpretation of diverse characters’ voices, and send it on the website http://www.hard-light.net/, with a chance of finally “being part” of the game. Another concept of participation is the donation: fans are able to donate a certain amount of money, online, in order to add funds for the development of a game.

Internet also permitted the democratization of computer gaming. As I already said in the introduction, video games can be really expensive, and it is even more the case when they concern new technologies, like the Wii console and its assorted games. Like always, which is new is almost always more expensive. But this is different on the Internet concerning computer games. For example, “Humble Bundles” http://www.humblebundle.com/ is a series of game bundles that are sold and distributed online at a price determined by the purchaser, and not the contrary. The games are multi-platform, DRM-free, and independently developed. Here, the purchaser is free to buy the product at whichever price he wants, but he is also able to distribute his money whether to the developers of the game, the Humble Tip which organizes the promotion, or charities.

To finish, we can refer to Jenkins’ concept of “collective intelligence” to describe the video gaming in the era of the Internet. Actually, as I said, when Jerry has been a bad boy and can’t join you to play “Mariokart” on your GameCube, nothing prevents him from building an awesome house on your “Minecraft” server. Computer games can take the form of online multiplayer games, such as “World Of Warcraft”, which is the main one, or “Minecraft” and so on. The Internet provided a huge amount of possibilities for the gamer, and being able to play collectively with everyone on earth has become extremely successful. This concept of gaming also created a new form of social network, thanks to the existence of the game servers, which permit you to be part of a special group of gamers. This is not only about playing virtually, but also talking, debating, and we can see very interesting forums on some game servers. So yes, in the era of the Internet, you can be a socialized and even clever video gamer!

Morgane Paris