Band – computer games: the incomprehensible medium

When the cinema was popularized as a mass medium at the beginning of the 20th century, a mere audience attraction quickly became an integral part of a culture of modernity. Intellectuals reflected the new medium and its potential, in art, avant -garde expression was promised. Computer games often had to endure a comparison to the film. Isn’t it also a medium that symbolizes the upheaval of an entire culture era, this time to digitality?

Measured by this, however, we are still at an early reflection level with the computer games. The digital games have been around for over 40 years, now literally plays half the world and for a long time the market has accumulated correspondingly high sales, with game titles whose production budget is reached to some Hollywood productions. And yet the examination of the medium remains behavior. This is not only due to the nimbus of the game, which sounds too much after children’s stuff for science and high culture. It also moves from a difficulty of the medium itself: there are games that tell epic stories, mend cinetically and create characters that live on the imaginations of the recipient independently. But nobody would come up with the idea of ​​booking the block of “Tetris” or the mobile phone game “Candy Crush” as a big narrative. In the area of ​​tension between narrative medium and the mere repetition of defined regulations, computer games are still in self -discovery. It is correspondingly difficult to find a language and an expression for these various phenomena that remain under exposed culturally and yet have become indispensable from society.

The band »Computer Games is now taking this problem. 50 central titles «, edited by the philosopher Daniel Martin Feige and the game researcher Rudolf Indderst. In order to approach the core of the diffuse medium, they assume the individual phenomena and gather contributions from various authors from science and game culture to the question of what actually important computer games.

Unmanageable bandwidth

The selection of the games considered important is already a struggle with the medium. Because despite the chosen width, the editors do not offer a canon: important games are missing, other decisions of the selection are really surprising. But especially in border determination, the reflection can be initiated, which is considered an important representation of the medium – which is ultimately assuming.

It is obvious how the editors discussed in a short conversation at the beginning of the volume that a temporal range of game development should be covered in the volume. Titles such as the first commercial computer game »Pong« from 1972, in which Tennis was played in the highest abstraction, are therefore in addition to contemporary titles such as »Baldur’s Gate«, which first caused the classic role -playing game enormously in 1998 and whose third part caused a sensation with its game depth in 2023. This alone makes it clear what variety of game variants, but also a distinction in complexity or graphic representation you get to do. The volume must therefore also take into account the numerous genres: from simulations from history (“The Settlers”) or mere everyday life (“The Sims”), the titles about the classic jump-and-run “Super Mario Bros.”, puzzle or sports games, space flight simulators (“Wing Commander”) to adventure playing and fantastic role-playing worlds.

But these merely formal criteria of diversity and era would hardly be able to explain why certain games have now gained greater cultural meaning than others. Games in the cultural industry are relevant through their mass suitability, which is characterized above all in commercial success and serial. But they also become important due to their special features: In his contribution to the rather unknown game “Planescape: Torment”, Feige emphasizes, for example, that it is “one of the narratively ambitious computer role -playing games of all time”. Due to the special depth of the narrative, but also through innovations in play mechanics or narration, games become “central titles” for the medium.

Characteristics internally and outside

At this level of meaning, less commercial success counts than the formative effect of individual games on the development of the medium. Titles like the iconic “The Legend of Zelda” not only have an enormously successful game series that continues to this day, but also laid standards for adventure games, so-called action adventures. As early as 1986, the game classic was established the principle of an open virtual world to be explored by the player, which has grown to gigantic open worlds in today’s games.

Elsewhere there are titles such as “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare”, only the fourth part of the game series, “The Witcher 3”, “The Elder Scrolls V” or “Grand Theft Auto V”, because only these games have led to certain breakdowns. How innovative or groundbreaking these developments are actually on a different sheet. For example, the seventh part of the racing game series “Burnout” is explained that he has “deeply shaped the subsequent arcade racer and changed to this day. Ultimately, however, “Burnout Paradise” only made it possible to explore the virtual environment and to provoke in spectacular crashs. Rather, the mass effect seems relevant here, so that the former presidential candidate Barack Obama 2008 had campaign advertising on the advertising in the game.

Likewise, it is a relevance critium for the selection of how the games themselves left an impression in culture – and the other way around as they process culture. All young people know that a dance form from the game “Fortnite” from 2017 flowed. The game “Pokémon” justified the “most sales of media franchise of all time” in 1996 and a “transmedial and global phenomenon”. The gimmicks and merchandise articles around Pikachu and Co. are hard to imagine and testify from the youth culture, said Hilako Kato in the article, a “capitalism-amusement power that in particular feel the parents of Pokémon crazy children”. The game “Minecraft”, with its specific aesthetics of a endless endless world, has also taken care of a hype since 2009 that extended to the blockbuster cinema this year. It is not only the exploration and the establishment of a “world as a huge kit”, as Jacob describes Birchen, but has been building a community of detail and entire cities on the Minecraft servers for many years.

Games also triggered social debates, such as in the case of “Doom”, which can be described as “the most important digital game from a media theoretical point of view”. Not least because it was the focus of debates about killer games as a synonym for the entire genre of the first person shooter, the supposedly brutal effect of which was held responsible for “shootings” and amo runs, especially in US schools. When the MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) “World of Warcraft” had its breakthrough from 2004, the concern about excessive media consumption and gambling addiction became the recurring motive for public discussions.

From the diagnosis for analysis

To what extent play a zeitgeist and cultural processes, René Bauer and Beate Suter, for example, highlighted the hack-and-slay classic “Diablo” from 1996: The game for a hero who has to descend through a medieval village to the depths of hell shows the signs of a new world order of economization. “If you have worked on Excel a day, you switch to Diablo in the evening to continue there. (…) These radical games with the motto ›Work packed nicely‹ are liberalization with other means. «However, the actual analysis remains thin if this connection is to be that the game principle revolves around a character to be optimized.

There is undoubtedly a lot of attraction of certain titles in the fact that they playfully reproduce the mechanics of optimization, repetition and quantification on which (digitized) capitalist society and its productivity constraints are based. Think, for example, of mechanics of »farming«, in which monotonous repetitions to acquire certain currencies and resources in the game are necessary to unlock a level in the addictive mobile phone game or to achieve the next stage and better equipment in the fantasy role-playing game. In fact, we play work processes here that extend into leisure. But such relationships have to be worked out analytically, instead of adding them up as much as general marginal notes of the game description.

The band cannot and should not afford this knowledge. The similarities and differences of the games as a medium, their basic development tendency and socially necessary prefiguration can be guessed at in the review, but not yet generally determined. However, the polyphonic compendium takes this into account and reveals points where such an analysis can start. Even if the question is not answered directly, it gives a brilliant impression when reading is a impressive impression of what complex digital social medium we are dealing with – in short: an idea of ​​what a computer game is.

Daniel Martin Feige/Rudolf Inderst (ed.): Computer games. 50 central titles. Transcript, 420 pages, Br., € 39.