SXSW 2001: Are Games Just for Geeks?

The Japanese game developer Yu Suzuki spent $70 million dollars developing a beautiful video game most of you probably haven't heard of - Shenmue, a Dreamcast game. The first game is planned as chapter one in an ongoing series of Shenmue adventure games - an epic of fatherlessness and martial arts in 1980s Japan. For all the work and rich pageantry surrounding this game, few people will ever see it.

Meanwhile it seems that nearly everyone around the age of 6 to twelve has a GameBoy strapped to their forehead. They're probably playing Pokemon - a game of fairly complex systems of evolution, competition, strategy and resource management. Will they expect to play games like this when they get older, or will most of them be happy to steal a few quick moments of online multiplayer solitaire?

DC:
Quick fast web games are some of the most popular and accessible forms of electronic entertainment. What are these games good for, besides distraction?

Katherine
You could point to a dearth of female game designers and publishers to explain the few titles that appeal to women. Why did you leave the gaming industry?

Warren:
The stories you've told, and the way they're told; your games have appealed mostly to geek gaming guys. Do you expect to reach other audiences or are your stories finding their home?

You folks are confirmed for the "Are Games Just for Geeks?" panel at South by Southwest. The panel is on Monday, March 12, at 3.30pm. I look forward to seeing you there!

Here's my thinking behind the panel topic:

The modern electronic entertainment industry hinges on this question. Millions of dollars are spent developing state of the art software, but if the market is only as large as the popular of young males, gaming will never see the kinds of cultural currency and exciting profits enjoyed by film. To date, the most experienced game storytellers have been geek dudes, and they have made some great games for other geek dudes. If we get enough female and non-geek game designers, will they make games that appeal to broader audiences? Or is there something inherently geeky about playing games, something about the activity of playing electronic games that will only ever appeal to a certain small segment of the population?

Another way to ask this question - it's said that something like 70% of American generation Y (11-24? year olds) play video games. Do we expect them to continue playing as they get older? Or, as the Pong/Atari/Nintendo generation, will most of them leave their entertainment machines in their parent's closet, playing only the occasional hand of Windows Solitaire? Visually games now rival TV and movies as something more pretty to look at. Still, the games that receive the most development time and effort, the big name games produced by the major game studios, these games never seem to break out beyond a core audience of dedicated dudes.

Is it the medium? Or the designers? Or the audience?

Here's the panelists:

David Collier ("DC")
He founded and leads Gamelet.com. Most of their work has been sponsored, branded arcade Java/Shockwave games for other web sites. He's been an advocate of small, flexible entertainment pieces that can be adapted for different sponsors or cultural twists.
Sun article with some Collier Coverage:
http://java.sun.com/features/1998/08/games.html

Katharine Jones
Currently a principal and founder at Austin design firm Milkshake Media, Jones previously spent 18 months at Austin's Girl Games. There she banged her head against the mainstream gaming industry that was largely uninterested in publishing titles that were not made for dudes. She ended up producing two electronic entertainment products targeted at girls, including Barbie's Magic Hairstyler and Teen Digital Diva.
Austin American-Statesman Profile:
http://www.covasoft.com/pressroom/news/AAS_Article_6-16-00.htm

Warren Spector
From pen and paper role-playing games to PC first person shooters, Warren has a long history in the gaming industry. His games involve the player in fantastic or science fiction virtual worlds. Today he is working on Deus Ex II and Thief III at Ion Storm's Austin office.
GameSlice interview:
http://www.gameslice.com/features/spector/index.shtml

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