The fastest-selling cultural product in history was created by people you have probably never heard of. While this year’s Oscars honored films in which the movie business sweetly congratulates itself on its own birth — The Artist, Hugo — the most dollar-sucking entertainment release ever is not a film, still less an album; it’s a video game.
Coming out last autumn, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 — a blockbuster military shooter made by a Californian game studio called Infinity Ward — took just 16 days to gross US$1 billion, beating by one day the previous record set by a film about blue people in space (Avatar).
And it was not a freak accident. Global annual sales of video games now dwarf cinema box-office and recorded music: in 2010, games grossed US$56 billion, film tickets US$32 billion and music US$23 billion. (The film industry as a whole still made more, at US$87 billion.) Even social games on Facebook are enormous business: Zynga Game Network Inc, the firm behind Farmville and Words With Friends, is responsible for 12 percent of Facebook’s revenues.
Photo: AFP
Hollywood is old-school now and one company in particular has played a pivotal role in this media revolution over the past decade: Rockstar Games Inc.
Rockstar’s banner Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series has sold a total of 117 million copies and it is a cute irony of cultural globalization that the most convincing digital simulation of New York yet made was built by a gang of Scots. In 2008, the US$1 billion-grossing video game Grand Theft Auto IV recreated in spectacular fidelity Manhattan and its environs as the setting for the adventures of Niko Bellic, an eastern European migrant intent on upward social mobility in the criminal underworld.
Later this year, Grand Theft Auto V — whose recently released teaser trailer has, like that for a hotly anticipated film, already attracted millions of views and countless pages of badly spelled fan speculation on the Internet — will move the action to a virtual Los Angeles.
In any case, violent games have only ever been one part of the wider video-game story. As well as the Call Of Duty series of military shooters (which includes the Modern Warfare sub-brand), Activision Blizzard also publishes the hugely successful elf-bothering online role-player World Of Warcraft. Just as with films, different video games are made for different audiences.
Meanwhile, another big publisher, Electronic Arts Inc, produces popular sports games featuring snowboarding or soccer and the life-simulation game The Sims.
Rockstar, in particular, wants its games to be taken as seriously as films are. It certainly pours a comparable level of resources into production, pushing games into what Ste Curran, creative director at British game studio Echo Peak and host of the video games radio show One Life Left, terms a “mega-budget era.”
For example, GTA IV had a budget of about US$100 million, it took three years to create and used a cast of 861 actors speaking 80,000 lines of dialogue. Large video-game productions now have staff (like permanent film crews) numbering in the hundreds, they commission symphonic musical scores and they continue to poach Hollywood talent. (The actor Mark Hamill, once a fresh-faced Luke Skywalker, has been playing a blinder as the Joker in the recent Batman games.)
A new mini-wave of film noir-ish detective games, such as the French designer David Cage’s Heavy Rain or Rockstar’s own LA Noire, is pushing the technique of “motion capture” to new heights, recording actors’ facial expressions as they speak and then applying those movements to digitally created physiognomies.
For the moment this has the effect of driving video games even further into what some digital aestheticians call “Uncanny Valley,” a strange no-man’s-land where the more realistic an artificial person looks, the eerier its niggling departures from reality feel. However, Cage, for one, has predicted that fully “photo-realistic” video-game characters will be possible in about six years’ time.
“Video games tell stories badly,” says game designer and critic Ian Bogost, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology who designed the Facebook game Cow Clicker, a satire on Farmville-style games that itself became a surprise hit.
Even so, Bogost says, bad game stories are “charming,” and perhaps even necessarily bad: “Maybe video games are meant to help us shed our obsession with storytelling, show us all the things between the story, like wandering around virtual space and exploring it like virtual tourists.”
Virtual tourism is, indeed, the aspect of the Grand Theft Auto games that has been much more influential for the medium as a whole than their gangster-movie envy. They made popular and compelling an “open-world” style.
If you want to progress through the game’s scripted narrative, you must accept specific missions of telegenic spatter-mayhem, but that is not all you can do. Instead, you might just wander around and soak up the sights, which these days are impressive. That video games now provide a place where you can go to relax is itself a sign of their rapidly burgeoning capacity for rich simulation.
You might not have experienced a Grand Theft Auto game yourself, but you can hardly pass the day in a modern city without seeing someone playing a video game on their laptop or smartphone. And Rockstar have had a crucial role in gaining mass cultural acceptance for the medium ever since they inspired other game-makers, according to Curran, to emulate GTA’s “potent, lucrative blend of mainstream cool and commercial success.”
Now video games have indeed become as mainstream as music and the movies. We live in an age of ambient play and perhaps it is not just a coincidence that the recent video-game trend of repurposing cities as zones of anarchic fun has coincided with developments in the wealthy real world such as urban riots and the Occupy movement. If so, roll on Grand Theft Auto V: We can still reclaim the virtual streets, if not the real ones.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
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