There is no doubt about its economic power: a global turnover of 180,000 million euros in 2021 for 25,000 from music and 40,000 from cinema. Video games are the cornerstone of world entertainment and governments try by all means to boost their production. What may not be so clear to many is that video games today are also a cornerstone of culture. That they are experimental, disruptive, non-conformist... that they are art, underlined the journalists Jorge Morla and Borja Vaz, authors of El siglo de los videojuegos (Arpa). A book that arrives in bookstores on Wednesday, just after the Thyssen Museum has held the conference Videogames, the tenth art, and which points out that the "generational hack" causes lovers of traditional culture to run the risk of losing the culture train to come. Some video games that now feed the rest of the arts, as shown by the success of the survival series The last of us, born from a game that appeared in 2013. And that, whether we take it into account or not, have the power to change the people and, like any hegemonic culture, there is Hollywood, to change the discourse of the world.
"Videogames are now the most interesting field of experimentation that exists," says the writer Justo Navarro, director of the Andalusian Center for Letters and author of the essay El videojugador (Anagrama). “We are writing literature in the 19th century way with 21st century machines. Perhaps this mismatch can be filled with other types of fictions, narrations, in which images can enter the same document, refer to another document. Perhaps a novel of the future will include video games through which the characters move and with which they play and that somehow modify their lives every day”. And he points out that the video game “gathers and assumes as a vampire almost all the characteristics of the previous arts, such as radio, cinema, and television in their time. And as vampire art it is the art at this moment chosen by the public and consecrated as the great art of the current cultural industry”.
Iván Lobo, founder of the referential Gamelab videogame congress, warns that videogames are “perhaps or perhaps not the most important medium of our time, with the potential to reach people and put them in communication like never before seen in any medium. creative or artistic And the disconnected generations, who have always consumed not very positive communication about the video game, still find it difficult to recognize its influence, and have decided to use other words to call it, such as the metaverse, which arises from the shame of talking about the video game”.
Because the fact is that the video game, Morla and Vaz point out in their book, transforms the players and, also, the world, as the economic battle around them shows, with tons of money from China invested in its video game industry and with the Saudi sovereign wealth fund investing $3 billion in Nintendo and another $3 billion in Activision Blizzard, EA and Take-Two. An Activision Blizzard with video games like Call of duty, World of Warcraft or Candy crush, whose purchase by Microsoft has just been blocked by the British regulator. Vaz recalls that if the purchase does not materialize, Microsoft will have to pay 3,000 million to Activision, and yet we are talking about the 782 that Fox will pay to Dominion so as not to go to trial for falsehood: there is no awareness of the real importance of the sector.
A sector whose products are today of an unthinkable sophistication. “Someone who thinks about Martians has stayed in 1978”, Vaz smiles. And Morla says that, beyond the fact that it includes the rest of the arts, “the video game is now developing its own poetics, which has to do with mechanics and interaction, its own calligraphy that you cannot experience except in a video game. It is not the same to see a character doing terrible things in The last of us than a game that forces you to do terrible things. And it is not the same to read in a book how a detective solves a mystery than to do it yourself with the keys to What remains of Edith Finch. He questions you in another way ”. Vaz stresses that "an action can transmit to you as much as a declamation or a score", and says that in video games there are "moments of anagnorisis, of realization, of discovery, which remain imprinted in the memory of the players, that experience of first time they looked at a wide horizon and were able to say 'I can go there'”. And he remembers that in one of the levels of What remains of Edith Finch there is a cannery. “To transmit the inner world of an employee in it, with a very mechanical, dehumanizing job, with one hand you have to make the robotic, constant and repetitive movement of passing the fish through a guillotine, and with the other you control the internal imagination of the employee. character, the abstractions he needs to cope with a reality little given to poetry. It doesn't tell you or show it to you, which is what the cinema could do, it makes you participate in that action, and it conveys to you the intrinsic truth of a character. It's a revelation."
Videogames that today are ideal for feeding other media, because, Vaz points out, "creating a videogame implies creating a world, beyond stories, plots or characters, with its own internal logic, with dynamics that function as story generators" . In this sense, remember that Disco Elysium, by Estonian Robert Kurvitz, which caused a lot of impact last year and which is "a fable set after a failed communist revolution, a detective story with a huge social component", has a script of more than a million words “It is a substrate with a lot of potential to be adapted. There are so many projects underway, ”he recalls. Of course, artificial intelligence could not be missing. Morla says that today “the degree of interaction of the player with the work is unleashed. Artificial intelligence has always been inside videogames, in enemies, pets, companions, but now there are videogames like Skyrim, set in the medieval world, which has introduced ChatGPT to the thousands of characters it can have, and that It has transformed the relationship they have with you.” After the classical arts, cinema was called the seventh art; to photography, the eighth; to the comic, the ninth, and the video game would be the tenth. "Maybe the eleventh is done by artificial intelligence and they give it the Nobel Prize," Navarro smiles.
