Play’s Republic

While watching TV this weekend, I realized that commercials have finally lost all meaning to me.  The images and the ideas and the sounds have devolved into 15 second barrages of signals and signifiers that coalesce into an incoherent “blah”.   At its heart, commercial advertising hopes to model my entire value-system with short and sweet abstractions — an ironic image here, pop song there, art deco logo in the middle — but somewhere along the way advertisers outdid themselves.  The semiotic domain became overcrowded, oversimplified, and self-contained to the point that the movements on the screen are ____  (I have no good word to end this sentence.0

(Also, on some level I should applaud the horrific state of commercials, because I’m in favor of abstractions and signals/symbols, of absurdist imagery and illogical bouts of performance — but, on the other hand, they’re simply terrible.)

That said, I find myself wondering if the regression of TV ads is in someway indicative of the future of video games as product.  With each new video game generation, games (on average) are becoming more regular and derivative, as sequels compromise the majority of market sales, as developers continue to push their games on multiple platforms, and as certain “killer-aps” set the standard for all other games in the genre.  While there is certainly still room for independent and creative game development, the economic viewpoint continually suggests that reduction and reproduction are becoming standards of the industry.

I’m not exactly sure what my point is here — Commercials are terrible.  Commercials are derivative.  Therefore, a derivative trend in gaming will be terrible.  Something like that.  I keep coming back to the idea that gamers need to be taught what kinds of games they enjoy.  Obviously people love Zelda, even if Ocarina, WindWaker and Twilight Princess are all essentially the same game.  Obviously people love Madden, even if it comes out every year with almost identical features.   But i guess what I’m saying — which in retrospect is obvious — is that we have to leave room for the games that come out of left field.  Katamari, for example.  Or games that take huge risks.  Shadow of the Colossus.  There is so much potential in non-standard game development.  I realize this has become the rambling of a video game apologist, but seriously, we have to do something to make sure games don’t turn into commercials.