There are few more visible proponents of game culture in UK media than Charlie Brooker. The presenter, writer and satirist started out as a games writer for PC Zone magazine in the 90s, before setting up his scurrilous TV listings parody site TVGoHome. From there, he took his caustic wit to television, co-writing the sitcom Nathan Barley with Chris Morris, and presenting satirical shows Screenwipe, Newswipe and Ten O’Clock Live.
But at heart he is still a gamer and on Saturday he is hosting a two-hour documentary, How Video Games Changed the World, which looks at the ways gaming has shaped culture and society – even if many people still dismiss computer games as something kids do instead of going out to play or reading.
Here, we speak to Brooker about the documentary and about games culture in general, from the violence of Mortal Kombat to the “con” of free-to-play.
Can you tell us how the documentary came about? It seems that it’s difficult to get programmes about video games commissioned…
Well, in 2009, I did Gameswipe, which was a sort of games-flavoured spin-off of Screenwipe. And it’s bizarre because when it was shown on BBC 4 I think it actually did better than Screenwipe in terms of viewership, but there wasn’t much hunger for a follow up from the channel generally. I think that’s because games are still seen as a niche pursuit; you’re constantly bumping up against the assumption that they’re all for teenage boys.
We did have conversations with the BBC about doing a documentary series about games… but the thing is, games are a strange area. It’s kind of like internet culture, it feels slightly divorced from the real world. So most of the time, you need to have a commissioner who knows about video games, so they understand that they’re interesting to the masses.
And it’s not just about understanding, I suppose, it’s also about knowing how to communicate what these things are?
A language has been built around video games, which is alienating to many people. And lots of people erroneously think that games aren’t for them – even as they’re playing Angry Birds or Words With Friends.
So you’re sort of combating all of that, and any TV commissioner’s job is to make sure that they’re making programmes people are going to want to watch. There’s just a reticence there. So as a result most games programming tends to be either aimed at teenage boys or incredibly defensive. How many times have you seen a mainstream news report that begins, ‘these days video games are big business!’ What? That’s still news? And that’s where you’ll see most games coverage – on the news when you have people queuing for the latest Call of Duty or whatever. We’re fortunate because Tabitha Jackson who commissioned this programme doesn’t know about games but realised their importance; she told us that what we needed to do was keep harking back to wider culture, to place games in context. Which is what we’ve tried to do.
Manadatory Credit: Photo by Michael Bowles / Rex Features (1489516c) Call of Duty soldiers man the midnight launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 – the sort of game story that tends to make the TV news. Photograph: Michael Bowles/Rex Features
So the documentary is for a mainstream audience?
Yes, but whether they’ll show up or not I don’t know. Maybe they won’t realise it’s for them. It’s interesting because most of the production team – myself, the producer Dan Tucker, and all the writers we’ve had on the show – we all know a lot about video games. But we’ve also had Annabel Jones, our exec producer, who is sort of the canary down the coal mine. She knows nothing about games and it’s been quite useful. She’d come along to the edit and watch a section, and say something like, ‘what is a platform game?’ You’re trying not to alienate those people. Hopefully we’ve struck the right balance. But there is a lot of explaining to do. That’s why most games programming tends to be explanatory rather than exploratory.
It’s the same as when I write stories for the newspaper. As a games specialist, I have to shed years of assumptions about what people know, and it’s hard not to end up with an article that basically just explains what games are.
Exactly. When will that end? This doesn’t exist on the internet – you don’t have to explain what games are there.
I wonder if part of it is that technology is so intrinsic to the gaming experience. We’re going through a console change at the moment so everyone is having to talk about hardware again. But with, say, film coverage, they don’t have to continually talk about new cameras or projection equipment.
Yeah, that’s true. It was interesting when the Hobbit film came out and there were all these discussions about frame rate – it reminded me of writing for PC Zone in the 90s. Imagine you turn up at the cinema and they don’t have the right 3D accelerator card, and you have to wait while someone downloads a driver…
One thing we pinpoint in the show is that, when you look at the evolution of games, they were quite a blokey pursuit for a long time. But then colour came along, and designers could start representing cute little characters. The point at which games started to resemble little cartoons was the point they became locked in the public consciousness as a thing for children. We’ve been fighting that ever since.
So how did you come up with your twenty games? What was the criteria you applied?
We sat down – myself, the producer, and the writers, Matt Lees, Cara Ellison and Jon Blyth – and we sort of came up with the list. We discussed back and forth and decided early on that it should be chronological rather than grading these games in terms of importance. We also decided that it didn’t have to be a list of the best games, just the most significant. This is why Night Trap is on there – it was significant in terms of age ratings coming in.
I’ve seen some people comment, “oh, why does every video game programme have to be a history of video games?” The reason is, as you go along, you do have to explain the grammar of gaming. That’s easier if you start with the basics, you have to start in a sort of tutorial mode. Any gamers tuning in who moan about how we’re starting with Pong, should bear in mind that almost every game they’ve ever played starts with a tutorial – we’re not patronising them half as much as that.
So yes, it was a tricky list to come up with and any of the titles could be substituted for something else. There are also some glaring omissions that people will complain about. Zelda for instance. I wanted Xcom on the list but you can’t really argue that it’s a hugely significant title in the history of gaming in terms of influence. But Monkey Island is on there to represent interactive storytelling and the involvement of Hollywood. Starcraft is in there to represent esports. It’s video gaming boiled down to a sort of… thick sauce.
The Secret of Monkey Island – featured in Brooker’s documentary for its classic depiction of an interactive narrative. Photograph: /PR
Did you learn anything new about games during the process of making the programme?
I suppose yes, it did. When you lay it all out like that. I understood why I’ve never really connected with Mario. I love the Mario games but I could not give a shit about Mario himself. He could be anyone; he’s become an icon despite having no personality that I can discern. It’s weird actually – Mario is probably one of the most accessible games, but it’s also the hardest to talk about to someone who doesn’t play them. All you can say is that they are brilliantly designed. It’s all about the experience.
I also realised what a weird and unique medium it is, in that it does have this barrier to entry. It’s interesting how these technological leaps suddenly propel things forward – you know, gaming suddenly sprouts an interesting new limb that it works out how to use, be that colour graphics or 3D graphics or Wii-style gesture inputs. And at the same time the technological leaps have the side effect of complicating what’s going on.
As a gamer what you’ve been doing your whole life is learning a foreign language. When you hand someone a controller who doesn’t play games, they approach it gingerly. It’s exactly the same as when people who aren’t confident of a foreign language try to order something in a restaurant when they’re abroad. The programme made me think about that a lot more.
Did it make you reconsider any of your beliefs about games?
I think my attitude to violence in games is slightly shifting. I’m sure people will see this as evidence of me becoming soft. I loved things like Carmageddon which was basically a splatter comedy. Doom was obviously incredibly violent. I loved playing Tekken, I played it shit-loads in the nineties. I don’t believe that games make you violent, but… we have some game footage in the documentary that we’ve had to get signed off by the head of the channel. You cannot broadcast it without having properly considered the editorial context of what you’re showing, the time slot, who is watching, what you are trying to say… it’s just unacceptable otherwise.
This is only a small minority of the games we talk about, but it’s things like the latest Mortal Kombat and Sniper Elite. We were asked to take out one little clip of someone machine-gunning a pedestrian in the face in Grand Theft Auto and then getting run over by a bus. We had to slightly slip the shot so you couldn’t see the bus going over their head or it was editorially unjustified.
I think that’s one of the key issues – the violence of games, when placed in the context of linear media, looks deranged and almost psychopathic.
There are things that would be utterly unacceptable in any other media. I looked at a scene from Mortal Kombat 9 with a woman being vertically sawn in half on a buzz saw as she screams. I look at that and think ‘that is so horrifying’. I have to remind myself that if I was 23 and I was playing this game with a bunch of friends, that would probably be hilarious. It’s the context – what you’re doing in that game is killing your friends in an over-the-top way. It’s all a sort of joke. But at the same time, it is incredibly graphic footage of a woman being sawn in half by a buzz saw.
I think that because games tend to fly under the cultural radar they’re often not really called upon to justify themselves and so consequently they often don’t even try. They just throw things in which are very troubling and which don’t help the image of games as a whole. When we used that clip from Mortal Kombat it caused more debate than anything else in the programme: the lawyer flagged it up, the channel flagged it up… We had to have a whole discussion on whether we showed it or not. In a television programme you’d have to have a very good reason to show that, but in a video game you may see that happen 25 times in a night.
And that’s why violence in games has dominated the wider discourse on games, I suppose. Because it looks just so insane to those outside of gaming. You can see how certain connections are made…
I really don’t think violent games turn gamers into violent people. I mean, if you look at Carmageddon now, it’s ridiculous, it’s Pythonesque, it’s like one of those early Peter Jackson horror comedies. The notion anyone thought that was worth banning is bizarre. But as graphics become more explicit, the industry will be called upon more to justify violence. And if games want to become a more mainstream pursuit they will have to justify those things – even if the justification is, ‘hey, this is a splatter movie’.
Anyway, this is something I’ve been thinking about. Games have been locked in a room and they’ve invented their own language, like mad twins.
Carmageddon: essentially a Monty Python sketch in the form of a blood-splattered racing game Photograph: /PR
And game culture is still really defensive isn’t it?
It’s massively defensive. Gamers are used to hearing their entire interest being disparaged as pointless and childish. So if you ask, ‘is it really on to have S&M nuns being slaughtered by a man in an advert for a game?’ some tend to react as though you’re calling all games disgusting. You don’t get that with cinema. If you criticise the Human Centipede 2, everyone knows you’re not suggesting that Wall:E should be banned. So yes, gamers are defensive and insular, and games are locked in a terrible cycle from which they can never escape.
Do you not think that the rise of indie games is a possible release from this ghetto? Titles like Gone Home and Papers Please have shown that games can talk about humanity and emotions…
Sort of. There’s a crossroads here, much like in cinema where you’ve got blockbusters on one hand that are just enjoyable theme park rides, and you’ve got low budget experimental, quirky, playful titles on the other.
If you look at The Last of Us, that’s more like a TV box set. Increasingly, film makers are looking at television and thinking, hang on that’s interesting, you can make a risky 25-part series that works across five seasons and is edgy and challenging and people will go with it. That’s hopefully where gaming is going to head.
But indie games are kind of becoming the equivalent of what the Edinburgh Fringe is for comedy commissioners. Actually, they’re like the short film industry, where people work on small projects and then get snapped up to make bigger films and bigger films until they’re making Inception. Indie games are the Galapagos Islands – a place where weird little mutations can occur which, simply by existing, will affect the mainstream. But again, this has happened because of technology – because consoles got an internet connection. I mean, shareware has always existed but it hasn’t always been as accessible as switching on Xbox and downloading Limbo, or to going to the App Store. That is a huge ecosystem of mental little games.
And because of the way indie games are priced, people are perhaps more likely to try something unusual or challenging, maybe?
Rab Florence makes an interesting point in the documentary. He says he played Braid up to a point and then he decided he wasn’t enjoying it anymore and stopped playing it – but that was fine because it’s what an indie game should do. It should explore what a game is. It’s okay for it to be not much fun, in some ways. It can be something you admire rather than just something you consume as a piece of popcorn entertainment. That market not only exists now, it is thriving.
You mentioned the App Store as a hotbed of indie titles, but it has also introduced this very divisive new business model of free-to-play and microtransactions. And these are now finding their way into full-price console releases. What do you think about it all?
I find it very fucking annoying sometimes. It feels like a con. I mean, something like Killer Instinct, where you get a fighter for free and then pay for the rest – that actually sounds like a pretty good deal. That just reminds me of shareware. But you don’t want to feel like you’re playing something that’s been deliberately hobbled. I hate the free version of games where you get payment reminders popping up on the screen or if you’re a bit clumsy with your thumbs you end up accidentally downloading a new type of hat. That feels like flying on a budget airline where you’re charged for breathing, or if you sit next to a man with a moustache you have to pay an extra £20. On that front it’s irritating. It’s like being constantly fined by tiny policemen.
But then, the amount of games I’ve paid fifty quid for and then played maybe 15% of… it would make me vomit if I actually added it up. Whereas if I’m paying incrementally, like watching a series of TV shows that I download individually, I can give up and leave whenever I want. Maybe I’d be happy if I was paying for each level – as long as each one was more brilliantly designed than the last. That would be the right form of microtransaction.
Are you interested in the new consoles, by the way? They’re doing microtransactions as well…
I have a PS4 but I haven’t even got it out of the box yet. And I’m worried about the Xbox One, I’ve heard about the juddering TV picture. How are they going to fix that? It sounds like an almighty fuck-up. It reminds me of when I used to have to buy step-down transformers to play old Japanese consoles. Why didn’t Microsoft see this coming?
So, how do you think games have changed the world? I ought to ask that considering the title of the documentary…
Erm, good question. At first I just thought it was a good click bait title, but when you think about it, games have changed the world in lots of way. Minecraft is a very clear example – it is a game that is also an educational tool, and it’s a collective experience. But really, it’s probably not that individual games have changed the world, it’s more about what games in general have taught us. Bear in mind that most people’s first experience with a computer was probably via some sort of game, so the degree to which they have helped us interact with machinery is world-changing.
Minecraft: bringing community and creativity to over 33 million gamers wordwide
One thing we are seeing is the gamification of other media and services, like corporate websites…
Yes. I wrote a column about this once, but I genuinely believe that if there was an app that let you toss virtual coins out of your phone on to a computer screen, if you could toss a 10p piece at the Guardian website, it would be a brilliant modern currency. If it was as satisfying as flinging an Angry Bird, it would be revolutionary. Imagine if every time you wanted to purchase something on an app store, you didn’t just press buy, you flung an Angry Bird at it – and if you hit the target just right you may get 30% off… you’d buy shitloads more stuff wouldn’t you? Maybe I should copyright that.
And there are so many other systems that work like games and use the same mechanisms of reward and compulsion. Fitness applications for example…
A while ago I took up running because I had an app that slightly turned it into a game. I’d never ever understood why anyone would willingly do exercise until I got an app that allowed me to unlock little achievements. The minute that happened, it was something I felt compelled to do. Just getting that little bit of positive feedback was enough to get me to completely change my behaviour, to the point where I lost two stone.
In terms of culture though, do you see a point in which games become a medium for, say, satire and social comment? I mean, could Black Mirror have been a game?
It’s funny you should ask that, because I’ve had exactly the same thought. We’ve been looking at doing more of Black Mirror and I was wondering if I could do one as a game. I mean, in one previous episode, 50 Million Merits, we show a nightmarishly gamified future, which is based on a cross between the App Store, freemium games and Kinect. And also in White Bear, the people hunting the main woman down are based on characters from the Rockstar game Manhunt.
So it’s something I’ve been interested in, I’m just not sure how it would work. If you look at something like Papers Please, that gives us some pointers. A game that shoves you into the shoes of someone in a comically bleak situation is probably the way to do it. I doubt I’d be the right person to pull it off, though – it would need to be someone much younger.
That’s it, it may just be a question of time. I feel that something like Papers Please could one day be put on the front of the Guardian website when the subject of immigration or border control came up…
Yes, it would almost be the equivalent of a political cartoon. That’s an interesting idea and we’ll definitely see it in the future. As more and more idiosyncratic personalities are reflected through this medium, we will inevitably, at some point, get the Jonathan Swift of games. They will produce something that no one saw coming. I just can’t… I just can’t see what it is. But someone is out there. They’ve probably already been born. They just need to get a fucking move on.
Maybe it’ll be your son?
Maybe. He is quite sarcastic.
• How Video Games Changed the World, is showing on Channel 4 at 9pm, Saturday 30 November
• Ignore the GTA 5 sceptics: adults do play video games
• Minecraft at 33 million users – a personal story
