Charlie Brooker: How Videogames Changed the World.

deaddogsmoking

First broadcast November 2013.  Charlie Brooker  Al Alcorn Malorie Blackman David Braben  Nolan Bushnell Susan Calman  Felicia Day  Pete Donaldson  Neil Druckmann Robert Florence  Ellie Gibson  Ron Gilbert  Berni Goode  Labrinth Matt Lees Graham Linehan Keza MacDonald Jeff Minter Peter Molyneux Rhianna Pratchett John Romero Jonathan Ross Kate Russell  Tim Schafer Peter Serafinowicz Quintin Smith Keith Stuart Tom Watson Gary Whitta   Aoife Wilson  Will Wright  Vince Zampella Dara Ó Briain

Transcript

00:00:00Video games. For years, the domain of outsiders and geeks and people who look a bit like owls.

00:00:05Somewhere down the line, gaming went mainstream, and now everyone plays them 18 hours a day, even George Alagaia.

00:00:10And while that is a lie, games have infiltrated popular culture and fundamentally changed the way we interact with the world.

00:00:16Yes, really.

00:00:17Now, tonight, I'll share my personal, possibly bullheaded, selection of the 25 most significant games that ever there were,

00:00:23and we'll be hearing from video game insiders, video game likers, and some reassuring, friendly, familiar faces

00:00:29so easily spooked viewers don't shit their own kidneys out with terrified indignation.

00:00:33We'll show you games that broke out of the pixelated ghetto and romped across mainstream culture.

00:00:38We'll see games that'll make you feel guilty, or make you cry, or even introduce you to your soulmate.

00:00:43In fact, we'll show you nothing less than how video games changed the world.

00:00:48Because that's the title, so we have to.

00:00:59Today, in 2013, games are almost as commonplace as shoes.

00:01:15Practically everyone plays them in some form.

00:01:17Even bacon replicant David Cameron was reportedly addicted to the Jolly Food Slash-'Em-Up Fruit Ninja on the iPad.

00:01:24But games weren't always as graphically staggering, painstakingly realistic, or conceptually sophisticated as they tend to be today.

00:01:31No, they had to start somewhere.

00:01:33Gaming's big bang happened in 1972 with the release of a simple-looking tennis simulator, a game called Pong.

00:01:40Pong

00:01:50Pong, of course, was very simple.

00:01:52I mean, you know, it begins with a black screen, as all great moments do.

00:01:56It's meant to be kind of table tennis, but it was like a moving white bar that would go up and down, and you could bounce a ball from side to side.

00:02:05It was so limited, so kind of basic in its function, and yet curiously satisfying.

00:02:10Pong wasn't the first video game, but it was the first truly successful one, and it contains much of the same basic DNA as almost every game that followed.

00:02:18It was co-created by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell and programmer Alan Alcorn.

00:02:23Without these two legendary figures, there'd be no video games industry at all.

00:02:27I had completed the design, and we said, well, it plays pretty good, let's put it in a box and see if anybody will play it.

00:02:34And all it had was the name Pong on it.

00:02:36There's no instructions, there's just a coin mech, and Nolan and I carried it over to Andy Capp's tavern, put it on a barrel,

00:02:42and within a short time, within a week or so, the thing stopped working.

00:02:46And so I went over to fix it.

00:02:48That became full of quarters.

00:02:51Yeah, yeah, I opened it up and the quarters just gushed out, filled my pockets with quarters,

00:02:55and came in the next day and said, Nolan, I think we got a, something's going on here.

00:02:59And we go, hmm.

00:03:02Pong was incredibly simple.

00:03:03I mean, everybody knows how to play ping pong.

00:03:05It was a very stylised version of ping pong on a TV.

00:03:08The controls were simple, just a knob each to move your paddle.

00:03:12There was also hidden depth.

00:03:13The parry allowed the ball to come off the bats in different angles, depending on where you hit it.

00:03:17So it introduced this whole idea of skill and strategy, which was really, really important.

00:03:21Yes, it's hard to remember now, but in 1972, this was cutting edge.

00:03:26You know, I found the graphics on Pong, the little players, the little lines,

00:03:31they moved quite smoothly.

00:03:33It was quite impressive.

00:03:34And the ball moved smoothly, and the ball, by ball I mean square.

00:03:39We didn't make the ball square because we thought that a square ball was cool.

00:03:43It's the only way we could do it.

00:03:45And so, you know, in some ways, our, I'd say the first ten years of the video game business,

00:03:52we were always bumping right up against the edge of the technology that was allowed to us.

00:03:59You're watching the most exciting game you will ever see on your TV set.

00:04:03Telstar by...

00:04:04Technology may have held the graphics back, but soon the rise of cheap microchips

00:04:07created a wave of Pong-like imitators you could plug in and enjoy in your living room,

00:04:11revolutionising home entertainment at a stroke.

00:04:14Oops, a goal.

00:04:15Until Pong came along, you had to sit there and withstand whatever the TV threw at you,

00:04:20which in the 70s, with only a handful of channels,

00:04:22often meant a choice between a documentary about bricks or Jimmy Savile.

00:04:26Now, suddenly, there was a box you could plug directly into your TV and take control.

00:04:31And at the time, the very idea of that was mind-manglingly exciting.

00:04:36That was the revelation.

00:04:37The fact that you didn't feel passive for the first time,

00:04:39not that you don't mind being passive with TV,

00:04:41but for the first time you were doing something here that translated to something over there

00:04:45in the form of a game, that was kind of mind-blowing.

00:04:47So I think it was just the miracle of actually being in the TV

00:04:51and operating something from your couch was just the game-changer for me.

00:04:56And I can remember gathering around it with my whole family.

00:04:58It was like the piano in the 1940s or something, Victorian era.

00:05:03We all gathered around and were amazed at this idea of interacting with the television screen.

00:05:07Even though the graphics were profoundly simple,

00:05:10there was that sense that this was a whole new thing that was happening.

00:05:13Trad TV was clearly so rattled by the obvious threat posed by the technological upstart,

00:05:18it made desperate attempts to incorporate the new enemy into its flagship entertainment shows.

00:05:23When Pong came out, they tried to use it as part of a live TV thing,

00:05:27and I know I'm not imagining this, with Bruce Forsyth.

00:05:30Nice to see you! To see you!

00:05:32Nice!

00:05:34Well, what else could I say?

00:05:35Bruce Forsyth had jumped ship from BBC to ITV for a huge pay packet,

00:05:38it was a big story back then, and ITV gave him the whole of Saturday night.

00:05:43On the show, the competition they had was they had people using a voice-operated form of Pong.

00:05:47I know I've seen this. I know you're looking at me like I'm just hallucinating, but I've seen this.

00:05:52Ladies and gentlemen, Telly Tess.

00:05:54Aw!

00:05:57Aw!

00:05:59Ooh!

00:06:01Ooh!

00:06:03Ooh!

00:06:05Oh, it's exciting!

00:06:07And even as a kid, I remember watching this.

00:06:11And even as a kid, I remember thinking, wow, this really doesn't work.

00:06:15In the years following Pong, amusement arcades filled with coin-guzzling monoliths became a common sight.

00:06:20But in 1978, the success of one title catapulted gaming out of the dark and further into the mainstream.

00:06:33This stark, bleak, humans-v-aliens fight to the death quickly hoovered up coins worldwide.

00:06:39What Space Invaders did was it took arcade machines out of those arcades, out of bars,

00:06:44and suddenly they were in restaurants and cafes, places where families could go.

00:06:49I think it was the first game that really did that. It took games into the mainstream.

00:06:54I can remember the first time I saw Space Invaders.

00:06:58It was at the Silverblades ice rink in Birmingham.

00:07:01We were on a school trip on a Thursday night, and I remember seeing this game and putting 10p in the slot,

00:07:07and it was like a revelation to me. It was the most amazing experience.

00:07:11And from then on in, Space Invaders was my life.

00:07:15You would get 40p dinner money each day, and you could go down to the cafe down the hill

00:07:20and get beans on toast for 20p and have two games of Space Invaders.

00:07:26The pace of Space Invaders was beautiful.

00:07:29As a noob who'd never played an arcade game before, you could walk up, you could put 10p in,

00:07:35and you could play for five or ten minutes without being annihilated.

00:07:40And that pace meant that it drew people in.

00:07:44Also, it satisfied something which gamers seem to enjoy, attrition, cleaning something up.

00:07:49You had this block of stuff which had to be cleared away.

00:07:52It's odd because it's something you can never win.

00:07:54You clear them up and then there's a little pause and they all come back again.

00:07:58But somehow you want to keep on doing it.

00:08:00Mastering Space Invaders became an overriding obsession for many.

00:08:03This is one of the first published books by revered author Martin Amis.

00:08:07It's Invasion of the Space Invaders, a surprisingly in-depth collection of his arcade tips,

00:08:14with a foreword by Steven Spielberg.

00:08:17Martin Amis has since disavowed his involvement in the Space Invaders tip scene.

00:08:21And the game's appeal wasn't simply restricted to the nature of its challenge.

00:08:25The sheer experience was equally important.

00:08:27This was the first game to evoke a distinct mood and tone.

00:08:33The music sped up as soon as the aliens got closer to you.

00:08:37And it was like that excitement and that sort of, oh, you know, this is really responding to what I'm doing.

00:08:44It's like a heartbeat when the Space Invaders are coming down the screen.

00:08:46It's dum-dum-dum-dum.

00:08:49And it, you know, accentuates your own kind of tension.

00:08:52And it was perfect.

00:08:53It was very stylistic.

00:08:55You know, the shape of the alien.

00:08:57As soon as you saw it, you kind of understood it, and it burnt into your mind.

00:09:08As a result, Space Invaders wasn't just an arcade hit,

00:09:11but a bona fide mainstream cultural phenomenon.

00:09:14Yes, tonight we'll be discovering just who the Space Invader champion of the Midlands is.

00:09:18Space Invaders tournaments were considered entertaining enough to be televised, for God's sake.

00:09:23And how tense Louis Coxon of Stoke must be feeling now.

00:09:26And the world of cheerful children's animation also couldn't resist the pull of the global fad of the moment.

00:09:32Left a bit. Steady. Right. Right a bit. Fire.

00:09:37Every element of the Invaders template had such an instant iconic purity,

00:09:41it still resonates today, with references to it popping up everywhere.

00:09:44Slick TV commercials nod in its direction,

00:09:47and it appears on walls around the world, courtesy of street artist Invader.

00:09:52And Space Invaders still survives as a game, albeit in a remixed, reimagined modern form.

00:09:58Well, I was very honoured to be asked to do it.

00:10:00Working on Space Invaders is like being asked to go on stage and play with Dave Gilmore out of Pink Floyd, or something like that.

00:10:08Space Invaders was the catalyst for an explosion of similarly themed games in the late 70s and early 80s,

00:10:14as pubs, arcades and cafes rang to the sound of zipping lasers and white noise explosions.

00:10:20The primitive graphics of the day were ideally suited for depicting basic shapes competing for power in black space,

00:10:26but with this incessant focus on interstellar combat, games were in danger of becoming a chiefly male obsession.

00:10:34To gain wide acceptance once again, games would need to become less abstract.

00:10:38What they needed was some kind of likeable character.

00:10:50Pac-Man was arguably video gaming's first mascot.

00:10:54He's sort of the first character, I guess, you know, the sort of very, very iconic character of video games.

00:11:00The designer of Pac-Man, he introduced this Japanese concept of kawaii, which is cute.

00:11:05Lots of Japanese design is based around this sense of kawaii, cuteness.

00:11:09And so not only Pac-Man is very kawaii, very cute, but also so are the ghosts.

00:11:13And he did this because he wanted it to appeal to young girls and women as well as men.

00:11:17And in fact, he's had an interview since then, which sounds kind of sexist now, but he's thinking of how can I make it appeal to women?

00:11:23Oh, I know, women like food.

00:11:25So he was famously, he'd seen images of a pizza with a slice taken out and he saw Pac-Man in that image.

00:11:33And Pac-Man does have a lot of character.

00:11:35I think the reason why everything went kind of Pac-Man crazy for a while was because he had a face.

00:11:41Even the ghosts, even the enemies had character and they had names.

00:11:44Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Cloud.

00:11:46They all had very distinct personalities and they did their own thing in the maze.

00:11:51Pac-Man's rudimentary artificial intelligence also represented a breakthrough,

00:11:55tricking the player into thinking the ghosts were actually alive with their own personal traits.

00:11:59Blinky, the red ghost, was a fast, aggressive hunter.

00:12:02Inky, the blue one, was a dawdler.

00:12:04Pinky would anticipate where you were going and try and block you off,

00:12:07while Clyde, the orange one, was programmed to rapidly chase you until he got too close,

00:12:12at which point he'd dart back into a corner.

00:12:14This hidden layer of sophistication made the ghosts seem less like computerised drones

00:12:19and more like fallible living characters.

00:12:22But the Pac-Man ghosts I really liked.

00:12:24And the cherry, the idea of this floating cherry was cool.

00:12:26And the fact that it changed when it ate.

00:12:28I mean, all these things were kind of pretty major steps forward.

00:12:30This was the grammar of gaming being constructed before your very eyes.

00:12:34It was the first time people have thought, OK, well, why not do this?

00:12:36It was the first video game to actually feature cut-scenes as well,

00:12:39because there were little humorous cut-scenes with Pac-Man and the ghosts before each level.

00:12:44You had Pac-Man being pursued by a ghost, and then Pac-Man getting a giant,

00:12:48and he'd turn around and chase the ghost off the other way,

00:12:51and one of the ghosts would get his little robe caught and a bit would come out

00:12:54and you'd see his pink leg sticking out from underneath.

00:12:57It introduced a gentle element of humour to gameplay, which I think helped broaden its appeal.

00:13:02Likeable characters are big business, and Pac-Man was no exception.

00:13:06Pac-Man, instantly after it came out, it was so enormously popular,

00:13:09we started seeing Pac-Man T-shirts, Pac-Man lunchboxes, there was a Pac-Man cartoon.

00:13:15Pac-Man soon became a staple of the cheesy American Saturday morning cartoon slot,

00:13:19winning his own goofy series, as well as some irritating commercials.

00:13:23Now, Pac-Man isn't just a game you play, it's a crispy corn cereal that's coming your way.

00:13:31For a time, no quintessentially 80s commercial was complete

00:13:34without a whorish cameo from the circular pill freak.

00:13:40Pac-Man was on stuff. There was a Pac-Man board game as well.

00:13:44It was terrible, a terrible board game, with a big plastic Pac-Man

00:13:47that would go about gobbling up pellets and stuff.

00:13:50And even there was the kind of weird knock-off stuff as well.

00:13:52Like, how do you badly draw a Pac-Man, you know what I mean?

00:13:54But a badly drawn Pac-Man.

00:13:56And that's an impressive thing, when you see some merchandise and you go,

00:13:59that Pac-Man doesn't even look like Pac-Man.

00:14:01And that's when you know something's really caught on in a big way.

00:14:04In the wake of Pac-Man's success, games began to resemble living cartoons,

00:14:08bright, cheerful worlds packed with non-threatening characters,

00:14:11a golden age entertainingly celebrated earlier this year

00:14:14in Pixar's charmingly evocative film Wreck-It Ralph.

00:14:17My name's Wreck-It Ralph. I'm gonna wreck it!

00:14:19Ralph, you are bad guy.

00:14:21But this does not mean you're bad guy.

00:14:24I don't want to be the bad guy anymore.

00:14:28So far, so twee, but that was about to change.

00:14:31The USA and Japan had ruled gaming's roost, but now the British were coming,

00:14:34and we weren't interested in some cute yellow bauble

00:14:37running around a maze gobbling dots.

00:14:39We were bringing something else with us.

00:14:41We were bringing anarchy.

00:14:51The early 1980s were a heady mix of The Iron Lady's Iron Fist,

00:14:55Soaring Unemployment, Charles and Di's Sexless Kissing,

00:14:58and this footage of the Rubik's Cube

00:15:00that has to be included in every 80s nostalgia montage by law.

00:15:04All of which provided the backdrop to a major revolution in British homes

00:15:07as the computerised future arrived.

00:15:10Now, it doesn't look very futuristic looking at it now

00:15:12from the vantage point of the future, but it did back then.

00:15:15That's how time works.

00:15:18The explosion of home computing that happened in the 80s

00:15:22was almost unique to Britain because of Clive Sinclair.

00:15:27In 1982, Sir Clive Sinclair launched the ZX Spectrum,

00:15:31a cut-price home computer intended to automate staid

00:15:34and some might say piss-dull tasks like spreadsheets and home economics.

00:15:38But more excitingly, as far as Britain's school kids were concerned,

00:15:41the Spectrum could play games,

00:15:43often rudimentary clones of existing arcade hits,

00:15:46but games nonetheless, and for a fraction of the price

00:15:49of the swanky American cartridge systems.

00:15:52And crucially, the Spectrum wasn't a closed system.

00:15:55You could write your own programmes for it, your own games.

00:15:58And if you didn't know how, there were hundreds of available blueprints

00:16:01to learn from, printed line by line in the back of hobbyist magazines like this.

00:16:06I would come home and see my brother playing with his computer

00:16:09and learning to code it using a language called BASIC.

00:16:12What was it? Say... What did you write? Ten.

00:16:15Say, fuck, 20, go to ten.

00:16:18And then we go, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

00:16:21That was my coding. That's my coding career.

00:16:24It spawned sort of a huge explosion in creativity,

00:16:28where some brilliant people were coding in their bedrooms.

00:16:32It was just like the punk movement.

00:16:34You know, the punk movement was very much like a DIY ethic.

00:16:37It was like, if you can't play a guitar, fuck it, pick up a guitar and play it.

00:16:41It doesn't matter if you can't do it, do it.

00:16:43And that's what games were like in the early 80s.

00:16:45It was like, you don't know anything about programming?

00:16:47It doesn't matter. Try it. Learn. Do it. Release it.

00:16:51If you ask me, the ZX Spectrum was the people's computer,

00:16:54a true British original.

00:16:55It didn't have the fastest processor, its graphics were primitive,

00:16:58and the keyboard was this notoriously awful dead-flesh rubber catastrophe.

00:17:03But it did have an immense range of bizarre and imaginative games,

00:17:07shot through with a uniquely British sense of humour.

00:17:10Many were almost like playable sitcoms or comedy sketches.

00:17:13There were hundreds of colourful, quirky Spectrum games,

00:17:16but only one came to truly symbolise the era.

00:17:22I mean, the first thing that you're struck with with Manic Miner

00:17:27is the hideous tune at the beginning.

00:17:34It's a sort of aural assault. It's disgusting.

00:17:38And the colours as well, it's so garish.

00:17:41But there was something really kind of charming and mysterious about it.

00:17:46What's fascinating to me now about Manic Miner

00:17:49is just the excitement of the rooms and how many rooms there were.

00:17:54And, you know, all you were doing was looking at something that,

00:17:57I don't know, had a few different blocks flying around.

00:18:00But there was something really thrilling about it.

00:18:03What made this landmark game all the more unusual

00:18:06was that it was written in just six weeks

00:18:08by a 17-year-old called Matthew Smith.

00:18:10Every single Spectrum owner in Britain had that game,

00:18:13and that's how good it was.

00:18:15It's absolutely chock full of humour.

00:18:17I mean, the game is very much Matthew Smith.

00:18:20I mean, the guy's a legend, and rightly so,

00:18:23and Manic Miner is his signature.

00:18:27Manic Miner makes it onto our list for being the quintessential Spectrum game,

00:18:31an idiosyncratic, peculiarly British homebrew classic

00:18:34still celebrated today in clever fan-created homages on the internet.

00:18:40The Spectrum's chief rival was the all-American Commodore 64,

00:18:44a more powerful and altogether more confident system

00:18:47marketed with the emphasis on fun in impossibly wonderful advertisements.

00:18:56Commodore games had slicker graphics and far superior sound,

00:18:59and as well as its slew of American imports,

00:19:01it still had room for oddball British titles.

00:19:04One of the games that I remember most fondly

00:19:06and that I'm most pleased to have been involved with

00:19:09was my old game Hover Bother,

00:19:11primarily because that was a collaboration in design with me and my dad.

00:19:15It's another one of these silly British comedy games

00:19:18that just arose one morning when we were sitting in a place

00:19:21where there was somebody mowing a lawn outside

00:19:24and we just started tossing back and forth this idea

00:19:27of a comedic game where somebody could be mowing a lawn

00:19:30and there could be a dog which gets in the way.

00:19:33And it was all very Terry and June, you know.

00:19:37But it ended up being a really fun little game.

00:19:41But it wasn't all rosy in the British gaming garden.

00:19:44It wasn't like a club, no.

00:19:46Commodore and Spectrum owners didn't like each other at all.

00:19:49Long before Blur vs Oasis or any of these other hideous media inventions

00:19:53of fake clashes,

00:19:55the Commodore vs Spectrum debate was a civil war,

00:19:58a geek civil war,

00:20:00whose repercussions can still be felt to this day.

00:20:03Because Spectrum was British, you know,

00:20:05it was kind of the local favourite and all that.

00:20:07But you always knew, tell me, you always knew, didn't you?

00:20:10You always knew that you had the lesser machine.

00:20:13Essentially, you'd be driving your Triumph, and that's great,

00:20:16and then we'd pull up in a Cadillac,

00:20:18which is essentially what the Commodore 64 was,

00:20:21with its big, clacky keys.

00:20:23Shift, run, stop, loads and plays.

00:20:26Still, despite their rivalries,

00:20:28Spectrum and Commodore owners could unite on one key issue,

00:20:31and that was that the owners of the third system,

00:20:34the BBC Micro,

00:20:36very much the Liberal Democrats of the computer world,

00:20:38they were dicks.

00:20:40The BBC Micro was a chunky middle-class computer

00:20:43created for the BBC's computer literacy project,

00:20:46a jolly well-meaning attempt to get Britain coding,

00:20:49courtesy of jolly well-meaning but not notably sexy edutainment shows

00:20:53like Making the Most of the Micro.

00:20:56I've got here a listing of the programme

00:20:59that I've taken off the printer,

00:21:01and it's a reasonably sized programme for a microcomputer.

00:21:06Little wonder the computer itself had a bit of an image problem.

00:21:10The BBC was for people who were a bit posh,

00:21:13cos that was quite an expensive machine,

00:21:15so if you were BBC, you were a bit posh.

00:21:17I was a BBC Micro guy.

00:21:19The squidgy keyboard Spectrum, I mean, I just laughed at it.

00:21:22Square it may well have been,

00:21:24but the BBC was soon blessed with a killer app of its own,

00:21:27a game that didn't just promise you the world,

00:21:29but handed you an entire universe,

00:21:31then let you do what you wanted in it, a game called Elite.

00:21:43These Spartan monochrome wireframe graphics,

00:21:46primitive by today's standards, were stunning at the time,

00:21:49but that was only the start of it.

00:21:51Elite came out in 1984,

00:21:53and it was really a groundbreaking game on so many levels.

00:21:57It was impossibly big.

00:21:59You know, what Elite did was it simulated the entire universe.

00:22:04It wasn't, you know, it didn't do anything by halves.

00:22:07Elite was made by two incredibly intelligent university students

00:22:11called Ian Bell and David Braben,

00:22:13and technologically it was a massive, massive achievement

00:22:17because you got these enormous galaxies into 32K,

00:22:21which you couldn't even open a Word document with that now.

00:22:24That game almost felt like it fell through a time hole

00:22:26from 20 years in the future, like it shouldn't have existed back then,

00:22:29both technologically and also in terms of what they were trying to achieve

00:22:33in creating a living 3D world.

00:22:36Elite wasn't just a technical marvel, but a conceptual one.

00:22:39Until then, almost every game told you, the player, what to do.

00:22:42There were rules, and you had to follow them,

00:22:44punching buttons like a lab rat.

00:22:46Elite jettisoned the rulebook into space

00:22:49and let you get on with absolutely anything.

00:22:52It was the first what we would call a sandbox game

00:22:55or an open-world game.

00:22:57You can play the game in any way you want.

00:22:59It's not linear anymore.

00:23:01Suddenly you are given a playing environment

00:23:04and you can choose to do Mission A first or Mission D first.

00:23:08You can also choose not to do any missions.

00:23:10You can just go out there and explore if you want to.

00:23:13Suddenly you could really control your entertainment experience

00:23:16in ways that were never possible before.

00:23:22The fantasy of exploring a limitless galaxy is a seductive one,

00:23:26hence the success of memorable exercises in wish fulfilment

00:23:29such as the camp but lovable Star Trek

00:23:31or the rambling, picaresque shenanigans of space-hopping hobo Doctor Who.

00:23:38Those interstellar bum bags had all the fun.

00:23:41Now, thanks to Elite, you could explore the universe like Kirk or the Doctor.

00:23:45But unlike them, you didn't have a deep-space travel card, no.

00:23:48You had to pay your way by trading goods.

00:23:50And the quickest way to earn big money was to trade illegal stuff,

00:23:54like slaves or narcotics, just like Doctor Who doesn't.

00:23:58Massive bastards could even turn to piracy,

00:24:01blowing up other ships and stealing their cargo.

00:24:04I'd always seen Elite as...

00:24:06Imagine the 17th, 18th, 19th century of sailing ships

00:24:10going across the Atlantic, trading all sorts of goods.

00:24:13You know, should you just cover the normal things

00:24:16or should you cover the things that were deeply illegal?

00:24:19We wanted the player to have the freedom to do good and to do bad.

00:24:23It was like kind of Thatcher in space.

00:24:26It was, make money in this universe however you want to do it.

00:24:29If you want to sell slaves, if you want to sell narcotics,

00:24:32if that's the way to do it, even though there was risk involved,

00:24:35that's what you did.

00:24:37If you can imagine, in the mid-1980s,

00:24:39we were at the height of capitalism

00:24:42and the economics of life and the politics of life as well

00:24:46were reflected inside the game.

00:24:49It wasn't overtly meant to be political at all,

00:24:52but I think it sort of...

00:24:54As a sort of child of its time, it sort of became that way

00:24:57because of the money focus of the game.

00:24:59You know, you found yourself playing the game

00:25:01because you wanted that docking computer,

00:25:03you wanted that large cargo bay or whatever,

00:25:05and you sort of aspired to the next bit of money

00:25:07and you would do anything in the game

00:25:09to just try and get that little extra bit

00:25:11because you wanted it so much.

00:25:14There were so many new concepts in that game,

00:25:16it was such a leap forward that I think for publishers

00:25:19and for the audience at the time,

00:25:21it took a little while to get their head around it,

00:25:23but once they understood what was possible,

00:25:25that you could create worlds inside a computer,

00:25:28that was just absolutely amazing.

00:25:30Elite gave birth to an entire genre of open-world sandbox games

00:25:34in which the player is largely free to create their own narrative,

00:25:37the most famous example being the gleefully anarchic

00:25:40and morally wonky Grand Theft Auto,

00:25:42which we'll return to later.

00:25:44So, Britain had enjoyed a mini-renaissance of early gaming,

00:25:47but the rest of the world wasn't just sitting around,

00:25:49giving up and going...

00:25:51Thousands of miles away, somewhere terrifyingly foreign,

00:25:54a boffin was working on a game so nightmarishly addictive

00:25:57it would soon enslave all of mankind

00:25:59and destroy the world as we knew it.

00:26:01Kind of. You'll have to watch the next part

00:26:03to see if I've oversold that.

00:26:13MUSIC CONTINUES

00:26:18The year is 1985, and as an audience of millions

00:26:21pretends to live in harmony while withstanding

00:26:23this fucking excruciating Duran Duran performance at Live Aid,

00:26:26the world is in flux.

00:26:28Riots are tearing across the United Kingdom,

00:26:30and not even the glittering royal premiere of Back To The Future

00:26:33can stem that chaos,

00:26:35chiefly because the two events are entirely unrelated.

00:26:38Meanwhile, something was about to happen in the world of gaming

00:26:41that was on a par with the Beatles releasing their first single,

00:26:44but with catchier music.

00:26:53When Mario first appeared as the protagonist

00:26:55in the challenging Donkey Kong, he was known only as Jumpman.

00:26:58A few years later, he popped up

00:27:00in the somewhat bare-boned platformer Mario Bros,

00:27:03but it wasn't until 1985 and the release of Super Mario Bros

00:27:06that he became an instantly recognisable icon.

00:27:11Super Mario Bros is a side-scrolling platform game

00:27:14where basically you have to run from left to right,

00:27:16going up ladders, down pipes,

00:27:18jumping on monsters, collecting gold coins.

00:27:23He's just a masterpiece of minimalist design,

00:27:28cos you get his personality

00:27:31from just this tiny, tiny bit of information.

00:27:34His design actually came from the limitations of the console at the time.

00:27:37You know, the blue overalls, the red cap, the moustache,

00:27:40all of which came about because, you know,

00:27:42they couldn't really render anything more complex than that.

00:27:44So it was red, white, blue and black for a moustache.

00:27:46It was as simple as that.

00:27:48You know, it was born of necessity.

00:27:50That's why it's curious that he's become

00:27:52the kind of iconic brand character that he is now.

00:27:54Mario just means games to me, if I'm being honest.

00:27:57Always friendly.

00:27:59Always beautiful to play.

00:28:01Like, always beautiful to play.

00:28:03Has never really failed.

00:28:05And I think that Mario just represents all the right stuff in gaming,

00:28:08all that pure kind of fun stuff, the essence.

00:28:11The essence is all there in Mario.

00:28:13Again, it's this idea of complexity hidden behind simplicity.

00:28:17So Super Mario games look simple, they look beautiful,

00:28:20they look like they're for everybody, and they are.

00:28:22But they're also really, really difficult games, you know.

00:28:30Oh, you idiot!

00:28:32Here's the hallmark of just how well-judged

00:28:35Mario's level of difficulty is.

00:28:37In the process of playing it, you'll die hundreds, if not thousands of times.

00:28:40But each time, you'll blame yourself, not the game.

00:28:43And it's that constant sense that next time you can do better

00:28:46that spurs you on and keeps you playing.

00:28:51In fact, the Mario platforming format is so compelling,

00:28:54it appeals to absolutely everyone,

00:28:56from the under fives to the under fatwas.

00:28:59I've become a master of the Nintendo machine.

00:29:03I think I've become very good at defeating

00:29:07all sorts of tiny little two-dimensional enemies.

00:29:10Yes, Salman Rushdie became a Mario addict

00:29:12during his virtual house arrest.

00:29:14He even put his addiction to good use

00:29:16with his children's novel Luca and the Fire of Life,

00:29:18seemingly directly inspired by the game.

00:29:20In this, the hero traverses levels, saves his progress

00:29:23and has multiple lives, which probably seems like

00:29:25a particularly brilliant concept when you're living under a death sentence.

00:29:34You can't really talk about Super Mario's success

00:29:36without mentioning Koji Kondo's music design.

00:29:43Mario's music was brilliant

00:29:45because every melody is, like, memorable.

00:29:53There's so many of them.

00:29:54Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba.

00:29:56Da-da-da-da-da-da.

00:29:59Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

00:30:02That's the sickest one, I think.

00:30:04I swear, any rapper would just be like,

00:30:06that's the best rap beat ever.

00:30:10Labyrinth, come in.

00:30:16I think video games have influenced

00:30:18my whole, like, reason for wanting to make the music I make.

00:30:21You know, that kind of 8-bit energy, 16-bit energy.

00:30:24It's kind of inspired a lot of, especially a lot of the earlier stuff

00:30:27that I made with, like, Tiny massively.

00:30:30It just had a very important effect

00:30:32on the way I think about music and see music

00:30:35and get inspired with music as well.

00:30:37Mario was created by Shigeru Miyamoto,

00:30:40seen here winning a BAFTA in celebratory scenes.

00:30:43No other game designer has ever been able to replicate

00:30:47the sheer joy of exploration and childhood wonder

00:30:51like Shigeru Miyamoto.

00:30:52People talk about Miyamoto as the Spielberg of game design,

00:30:55and he very much is.

00:30:57He's a man who creates wonder on the screen like no-one else.

00:31:00In fact, Miyamoto isn't just the Spielberg,

00:31:02but the Walt Disney of games,

00:31:04responsible for an unprecedented number of treats,

00:31:06including the beautifully designed and widely beloved Zelda series.

00:31:10Unlike many video game mascots,

00:31:12which tend to be a crash bandicoot in the pan,

00:31:14Miyamoto's creations have endured,

00:31:16largely because the games they appear in tend to be very well made.

00:31:20Mario, in particular, has become almost a kite mark of quality.

00:31:23If you've grown up with Mario, then he's part of your life

00:31:26and so there are now parents who want their children

00:31:29to experience Super Mario

00:31:31and have the excitement and joy of problem-solving

00:31:34and winning games that they did with the Mario characters.

00:31:37It's a joy to watch my children sort of enjoying it.

00:31:40Back on Earth in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell,

00:31:43marking the end of the Cold War and the Eastern Bloc.

00:31:46These weren't the only tumbling blocks and falling bricks

00:31:49the Soviets had to contend with.

00:31:57Well, I think there's been puzzles throughout the ages

00:32:00and I think Tetris is like the perfect incarnation

00:32:03of a traditional puzzle game in video game form.

00:32:07Everybody is familiar with putting puzzle pieces together

00:32:10and it just combined that with reflexes

00:32:13and that was kind of like the perfect melding of two worlds,

00:32:16like sports and puzzles.

00:32:18When video games started out, there were things that anyone could play,

00:32:21stuff like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong,

00:32:23there were things that literally anybody could understand.

00:32:26Tetris is just like that.

00:32:28Games had gotten more complicated, but Tetris was fit shapes together.

00:32:31The minute you learn how to play Tetris, you've already succeeded at it.

00:32:35And there's not many games you can say that about.

00:32:37The minute you learn, oh, this block goes here, oh, this fits in here,

00:32:40oh, then that fits in here, that goes, boom,

00:32:42and you've already succeeded.

00:32:44Right away, the minute you learn that, you're winning at it.

00:32:47And I think that's the magic of Tetris,

00:32:49that's what makes it completely compelling right from the start.

00:32:53It's just a design that's so perfect

00:32:56that every single game designer who looks at that thinks,

00:33:00I really wish I could have made that.

00:33:02It's so simple, but so beautiful.

00:33:06Tetris' straightforward design was largely a result of the way it was created.

00:33:10Computer engineer Alexey Pajitinov wrote it on the defiantly

00:33:14and non-gamesy Soviet and utilitarian Electronica 60 terminal.

00:33:19It was pretty much at the dying embers of the Cold War.

00:33:22It was one of the first products that moved from east to west.

00:33:25And interestingly, he never actually made any money out of it

00:33:28until very, very recently,

00:33:30because it was effectively owned by the Russian government.

00:33:33Tetris was perhaps the first game that was compelling

00:33:36to the point of being addictive.

00:33:38While playing, you were dimly aware that some kind of irrational appeal

00:33:42had completely gripped your mind.

00:33:44It was like a sickness, absolutely like a sickness,

00:33:48because it was a constant, can I do this, I can do it, I've won,

00:33:51can I do this, I've won, I've won, I've won, I've won,

00:33:54panic, panic, panic, and then eventually you would lose.

00:33:57But success was always just a couple of button presses away,

00:34:00it was always a couple of button presses away,

00:34:02so it was just a constant reward.

00:34:04There's a concept called flow in video game playing,

00:34:07and in fact it happens outside of video game play as well.

00:34:11And it's where a person will be completely immersed

00:34:15and engaged in the task at hand,

00:34:17and everything else just disappears and falls to the wayside.

00:34:21Years ago, the repetitive nature of knitting

00:34:25was quite often used to help people

00:34:27with low-level mental health issues, low-level depression,

00:34:31and Tetris is a similar kind of environment to that.

00:34:34If you handed me Tetris right now, I would play it for an hour, happily.

00:34:40Tetris, for me, was a hugely significant game

00:34:44because it was the first game I ever got on my Game Boy,

00:34:47which was basically your conduit to life and entertainment as a child.

00:34:51Bundling Tetris with every Game Boy was a masterstroke.

00:34:54Here was an addiction you could carry around with you

00:34:57for a cheeky hit now and then, just like cigarettes, but a bit less deathy.

00:35:01I dread to think how many bus stops and train stops were missed because of it,

00:35:05but it was that sort of thing, you could just take it out in your pocket

00:35:08and play it whenever you had any moment of downtime,

00:35:11and that's something we're still seeing today with mobile phones.

00:35:14Its lineage leads to things like Angry Birds,

00:35:17the whole kind of casual mobile scene

00:35:19pretty much had its ancestry in the likes of Tetris.

00:35:22Even as the Russians were chalking up their first big hit with Tetris,

00:35:26meanwhile, on our side of the Iron Curtain,

00:35:28Hollywood was starting to get seriously involved in the games industry.

00:35:32Games were being created by the people who brought you Star Wars.

00:35:36You know, Star Wars.

00:35:40What was interesting straightaway about the LucasArts studio

00:35:44was that obviously it was under the umbrella of Lucasfilm,

00:35:47George Lucas's company, so it was the first connection between film and games.

00:35:51LucasArts started and it had a mandate to stay small

00:35:55and not lose any money and to be the best,

00:35:58I think were the three slogans they had.

00:36:01And also, don't use Star Wars.

00:36:04George wanted this new company to stand on its own legs.

00:36:07Early LucasArts efforts were action games,

00:36:09which, while technically cutting-edge, didn't have much of an impact.

00:36:12What these games were missing was a coherent story,

00:36:14something you'd think Hollywood would excel at.

00:36:16The first attempts at computerised interactive fiction, such as Zork here,

00:36:21consisted of nothing but text on a screen,

00:36:24a kind of playable novella you'd navigated through

00:36:26by typing in instructions like,

00:36:28go north and get lamp.

00:36:30This Spectrum adaptation of The Hobbit added crude graphics to the sea of text,

00:36:34not quite Peter Jackson.

00:36:36It wasn't until LucasArts turned the genre into a point-and-click cartoon

00:36:39that interactive storytelling came of age.

00:36:41When anyone asks me what my favourite video game is,

00:36:44it's not your Grand Theft Autos, it's not your Call of Duty,

00:36:47it's Monkey Island.

00:36:55The secret of Monkey Island was a brilliantly realised comic adventure

00:36:59overflowing with character and charm.

00:37:02What I loved about the Monkey Island series

00:37:04was the fact that they were a little bit romantic at times.

00:37:06The main character, the protagonist, was a guy by the name of Guybrush Threepwood,

00:37:10this wannabe pirate who just really didn't have it in him.

00:37:13He didn't have the guts, he didn't have the nous

00:37:15to become this famous pirate that he'd always wanted to be.

00:37:18We had Elaine Marley, the love interest in the piece,

00:37:20she was funny, the script was excellent.

00:37:22The main antagonist, the main baddie,

00:37:24was a ghost pirate by the name of LeChuck,

00:37:26and I love that character so much.

00:37:28I have a tattoo on my leg of the man himself.

00:37:32Not only is it a beautifully programmed game and a wonderful looking game,

00:37:35really very lovely visuals to it and really distinctive,

00:37:37but also at the same time it also had a very strong character,

00:37:40a sense of humour about it, kind of a tone basically,

00:37:44in the way that a good movie has a tone.

00:37:50Like so few games are genuinely funny,

00:37:52and this game was not only funny in its writing,

00:37:54it used its mechanics to set up a lot of the comedy.

00:37:57I don't know if you remember there's a sword fight in Monkey Island

00:37:59that you have to win, but the way that you win it

00:38:01is not by being better with the sword, but by having the funnier comebacks.

00:38:04It's basically an insult sword fight.

00:38:06The character that you're fighting against will insult you in some way,

00:38:09and then you've got various choices of what's the funniest retort,

00:38:12what's the funniest comeback, and as you would win the argument,

00:38:15as you'd win the fight of witty rejoinders,

00:38:18the fight would go in the same direction.

00:38:22I mean, we were so influenced on Monkey Island by The Simpsons,

00:38:25but also I think Monty Python, in a way,

00:38:28like the Holy Grail was doing to the Arthurian legend

00:38:31we were hoping to do to pirates.

00:38:33Fittingly, for a game forged from many different influences,

00:38:35some believe Monkey Island turned out to be quite influential itself,

00:38:38pointing out similarities between the game

00:38:41and the vastly entertaining Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

00:38:44Both the game and the film feature a reluctant swashbuckler

00:38:47who attempts to rescue his wisecracking love interest

00:38:50from a motley crew of zombie pirates with a scary undead leader.

00:38:53There are even individual moments that seem vaguely familiar.

00:38:56For instance, here, Guy Brush Threepwood solves a problem

00:38:59by using a coffin as a boat,

00:39:01a bit like Jack Sparrow did in Dead Man's Chest.

00:39:04Sorry, mate.

00:39:08Mind if we make a little side trip?

00:39:12I didn't think so.

00:39:15All of which, I'm sure, is a total coincidence.

00:39:18It's hard for me to watch those movies

00:39:20and not see little glimpses of Monkey Island in them.

00:39:23But, I mean, Monkey Island was really based on

00:39:26the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

00:39:28I mean, that was my whole influence for that game.

00:39:30So it's kind of a full circle thing.

00:39:32Monkey Island earns a place on our list

00:39:34for bringing cinematic storytelling techniques to interactive fiction,

00:39:37and its spirit lives on in advanced contemporary games

00:39:40like the grim murder mystery L.A. Noire

00:39:42and this year's flawed but interesting Beyond Two Souls.

00:39:46For the mission's sake,

00:39:48I'll try to keep Iden from killing you.

00:39:52But no promises.

00:39:54They're impressive, but a bit po-faced.

00:39:56Nothing since has had the humour of Monkey Island.

00:39:59All this stuff about spinning yarns was all well and good,

00:40:02but when would games learn to focus on the really important things,

00:40:05like teaching children how to maim and kill?

00:40:08The answer, fortunately, was soon.

00:40:12Bang!

00:40:16Bang!

00:40:21The early 90s were brimming with firsts.

00:40:24The first President Bush was gleefully waging the first Gulf War,

00:40:27the first McDonald's opened in Russia,

00:40:29and something called the World Wide Web

00:40:31became publicly accessible for the first time.

00:40:33Popular youth culture, meanwhile,

00:40:35was entranced by slackerdom and the grunge scene,

00:40:37as detailed on gaudy entertainment shows like The Word.

00:40:40But there was also a new wave of cultural icons

00:40:43hailing from Japan, whose specialist subject on Mastermind

00:40:46would have been kicking the shit out of each other.

00:40:59Street Fighter II looks incredible.

00:41:01It's the game that made gaming cool.

00:41:03Arcades had to draft in more machines

00:41:05just to accommodate for the demand for it.

00:41:07It was just such a huge, huge phenomenon.

00:41:10Street Fighter II is a prime example of why games are good,

00:41:13cos you've got a friend and you say,

00:41:15let's just have a reasonable game of Street Fighter.

00:41:17Yeah, sure, let's have a game of Street Fighter.

00:41:19And you end up screaming at them,

00:41:21I'm going to kill you, I'm going to kill you.

00:41:23But it was great, cos it was competitive

00:41:25and it was so unlike anything that I'd ever played before,

00:41:28to be honest, cos it's just two characters

00:41:30punching each other in the face.

00:41:33It was definitely competitive,

00:41:35especially when you play with bad winners.

00:41:37I call them bad winners,

00:41:39because while they're knocking you the hell out,

00:41:41they're just like, yeah, bam, take that,

00:41:43and you're just getting totally trashed up.

00:41:49There have always been head-to-head games,

00:41:51Pong was a head-to-head game,

00:41:53but they tended to be simple tests of reflexes

00:41:55until Street Fighter II came along.

00:41:57This, too, was a test of reflexes,

00:41:59but also, crucially, a test of memory, agility and strategy.

00:42:02Now, unless you know what's going on,

00:42:04it looks fairly mindless,

00:42:06but it's actually far more complex than it appears.

00:42:08I think the key thing about Street Fighter II

00:42:10was that it popularised the idea

00:42:12of complexity in the control systems.

00:42:14It was one of the first games to introduce the idea of special moves,

00:42:17so each one of the very colourful characters

00:42:19had their own way of fighting.

00:42:21To perform, say, Ryu's rising dragon attack,

00:42:23you'd have to be able to hit the enemy

00:42:25To perform, say, Ryu's rising dragon fist,

00:42:27your fingers have to perform quite a complex dance on the controller.

00:42:30You have to memorise and then perform this move at lightning speed,

00:42:33which makes it a bit like mastering a musical instrument.

00:42:36Someone playing Street Fighter II

00:42:38is making hundreds of strategic decisions at lightning speed.

00:42:41It's basically scissors, paper, stone,

00:42:43but on a bewilderingly complex scale.

00:42:45People who are playing Street Fighter II now,

00:42:47it's still really competitive,

00:42:49and they're doing frame-by-frame analysis

00:42:51of where the vulnerable windows are

00:42:53and when you can use which attack

00:42:55and what blocks what and what doesn't block what,

00:42:58and it's just crazy.

00:43:00That's why it's so satisfying when you win.

00:43:02You aren't simply thumping someone in the face,

00:43:05you're outwitting and outperforming them

00:43:07while thumping them in the face.

00:43:11Street Fighter II influenced a whole raft of other beat-'em-ups

00:43:14of growing complexity, such as the phenomenal Tekken series,

00:43:17which, as you can see, became increasingly more violent.

00:43:20Still, at least no-one's ever inspired

00:43:22to actually do that kind of thing in real life

00:43:24as a consequence of playing the game.

00:43:26I remember when I was a kid,

00:43:28my brothers made me fight with another kid,

00:43:31and it was just like a little kind of spa

00:43:34with another young kid that was my age.

00:43:36Everybody thought I was going to lose,

00:43:38and I actually used Tekken moves to win.

00:43:42It was so dumb,

00:43:44but I actually won

00:43:46with my dodgy little Eddie Gordo and Paul moves.

00:43:50My missus still laughs at me about that.

00:43:52I remember my brother saying it around the table,

00:43:54and I was like, oh, shit, I actually did it.

00:43:57That's how much I was into Tekken. It's so wrong.

00:43:59At least they're just kicking and punching each other.

00:44:01It's not like games are full of people running around shooting guns.

00:44:07By 1993, there had been a few games

00:44:10in which you shoot people with guns from a first-person perspective,

00:44:13like the fun Nazi-culling excursion Wolfenstein 3D,

00:44:16but it was the release of our next game

00:44:18that truly cemented their place in history.

00:44:26Doom was a flabbergasting, ultra-violent descent into bloody hell.

00:44:30The first time I saw Doom, my jaw was on the floor.

00:44:33It was absolutely stunning.

00:44:35Doom was one of the big holy shit moments in games history.

00:44:39I remember I'd been working at PC Gamer for about a year

00:44:42when that had come out,

00:44:44and, you know, we were experienced video game people.

00:44:47We all did that for a living.

00:44:49And Doom was one of those moments where the first time we saw it,

00:44:52we were like, what is this?

00:44:54The modern-day shooter is Doom, essentially.

00:44:57Id's design effectively created the first-person shooter

00:45:00with the Wolfenstein 3D.

00:45:02Doom popularised it because it was the perfect implementation,

00:45:05I think, at that time, of the idea of seeing a view

00:45:09inhabiting the character

00:45:11and the camera view being your view of the world.

00:45:14In fact, this ground-breaking first-person viewpoint

00:45:17was actually a happy accident.

00:45:19The reason why we made the games first-person when we started

00:45:22was because it took less processor time

00:45:24to actually not draw a character in front of you,

00:45:27so the game could go faster and faster.

00:45:29There was something very, um...

00:45:32How can I describe it?

00:45:34Lonely.

00:45:36About Doom.

00:45:38I know it's not a shock for some people

00:45:41to imagine computer game players as being lonely,

00:45:44but Doom was one of those games I used to dream about, you know?

00:45:48There was a feeling of real isolation to it, you know?

00:45:51And I found that quite powerful at times.

00:45:54Isolation is something that you can't avoid.

00:45:58Isolation is scary. Doom was scary.

00:46:01Very scary. Honestly.

00:46:03Young people hearing older people talk about how Doom was scary

00:46:08must be like, you know, when you read those stories

00:46:11when people saw the first cinema and they would see a train coming

00:46:14and they would run out of the cinema, you know what I mean?

00:46:16You hear those stories and you kind of laugh, you think,

00:46:18these idiots, they thought it was a real train coming.

00:46:20But, you know, things can have an incredible effect on you

00:46:23when you're first experiencing them.

00:46:25The reason why Doom was terrifying for me

00:46:27was because there were doors in it that could open and shut.

00:46:30And that seems like caveman stuff, like being scared of that.

00:46:34It's like, ugh, being scared of a shadow or something.

00:46:37But the fact that there were doors

00:46:39and you could hear things behind the doors,

00:46:41that was an incredible kind of leap forward.

00:46:43That was an incredible...an incredible thing.

00:46:48One of the things that makes Doom scary

00:46:50is just obviously the darkness in the game.

00:46:54And it's also scary in that enemies,

00:46:57you can hear them wandering around

00:46:59and so you know they're there somewhere

00:47:01and just hearing that and not seeing it is a scary thing.

00:47:04And also you know that you could go through a hallway

00:47:07and accidentally step on the wrong thing

00:47:09and all of a sudden a wall opens up next to you

00:47:11and stuff is coming out at you.

00:47:13Doom was packed with so many innovations it was almost embarrassing,

00:47:16but its biggest innovation of all

00:47:18was the immersive and compelling multiplayer mode.

00:47:22I can remember I was actually working at a game development studio

00:47:25and one day we all went in, one Saturday,

00:47:27we all went in and set up the computers,

00:47:29set up the local area network so that we could all play Doom together

00:47:32and it was my first experience of being in a game world

00:47:35with a whole bunch of friends playing together, beating enemies

00:47:39and being aware of each other, that whole idea of telepresence,

00:47:42the idea of being aware of each other in a game world.

00:47:44It was fascinating and it was so, so compelling.

00:47:46We just played for 12 hours straight.

00:47:48The beauty of video games is that it adds a dimension to friendship

00:47:54that nothing else does.

00:47:56Going to see a film with your friends is nothing

00:47:58compared to being in a shoot-em-up or a game with your friends

00:48:01and Doom was the first game that really allowed us to experience that.

00:48:04Yeah, although it's hard not to notice that experience is kind of violent

00:48:08and in this regard Doom was a child of its time.

00:48:12By 1993 technology had improved to the point

00:48:15where in-game characters could be represented, albeit crudely,

00:48:18by real people, as in the notorious Mortal Kombat here.

00:48:22And the sight of these real people maiming and mutilating each other

00:48:25was a step too far for some.

00:48:28When a player wins, the so-called death sequence begins.

00:48:31The game narrator instructs the player to finish,

00:48:34and I quote, finish his opponent.

00:48:36The player may then choose a method of murder

00:48:39ranging from ripping a heart out

00:48:42to pulling off the head of the opponent with spinal cord attached.

00:48:46Every generation seems to have some sort of cultural moral panic,

00:48:50whether it's Elvis Presley's hips or video nasties or whatever,

00:48:53and in the 90s it was video games.

00:48:55It was games like Doom, you know, and Mortal Kombat

00:48:58that had what were perceived to be super gory, terrible graphics,

00:49:02which when you look at them now is ludicrous

00:49:04because, of course, it's just basically like people made out of C-fax

00:49:07getting blown up.

00:49:08Just as controversial was the frankly crappy Night Trap,

00:49:11which came on the exciting new CD-ROM format,

00:49:14threatening to turn games into full-motion video nasties.

00:49:24Five teenage girls have disappeared

00:49:26after spending the night at the old Lakeshore Winery house

00:49:29of Mr and Mrs Victor Martin.

00:49:31It's like a television programme in a lot of ways,

00:49:33and the purpose is you're part of a crack team

00:49:36that's protecting some girls on a slumber party.

00:49:39So the gameplay is basically clicking on CCTV cameras

00:49:42and setting traps for these kind of vampire things that are coming in.

00:49:46And because it's video and not graphics,

00:49:49and especially at the time, I think, it was lifelike

00:49:51because it wasn't the clunky graphics of the 80s,

00:49:54this was film you were watching.

00:49:56And it is quite disturbing to watch it, actually,

00:50:00because it does feel very voyeuristic.

00:50:02I understand why it was controversial,

00:50:05because even today, if you made a game today

00:50:07where the concept was spying on college girls in their lingerie

00:50:12via various security cameras

00:50:14and kind of stalking them around this house,

00:50:16that would be very controversial now.

00:50:18Back then, I can understand why people had the reaction that they did.

00:50:22It has been quite a leap from Pac-Man to Night Trap.

00:50:28Night Trap, which, just to be clear, was a deeply shit game,

00:50:31was such a hot potato it featured heavily

00:50:34in a US Senate hearing on video game violence,

00:50:36which led to Toys R Us taking it off the shelves.

00:50:39Mortal Kombat and Night Trap

00:50:41are not the kind of gifts that responsible parents give.

00:50:45Night Trap, which adds a new dimension of violence

00:50:48specifically targeted against women, is especially repugnant.

00:50:52Significantly, it led to the creation of the US Video Game Rating System,

00:50:55a voluntary code designed to alert parents to content

00:50:58that might be unsuitable for their disgusting children.

00:51:01This had a twofold effect.

00:51:02On the one hand, the games industry was aware it was being watched,

00:51:05but on the other hand, the introduction of ratings

00:51:08meant games could now be conceived and marketed

00:51:11explicitly as not for children.

00:51:13Suddenly, developers had a green light

00:51:15to pursue nasty games for nasty adults,

00:51:17leading to further controversy,

00:51:19with the death-packed pedestrian-splattering Carmageddon

00:51:21being briefly banned in the UK in 1997,

00:51:24and the MP-alarming Grand Theft Auto making its debut that same year.

00:51:28Lots of people at that time, moral campaigners,

00:51:30were trying to link video game violence with real-life violence,

00:51:33and we saw this later on with the Columbine tragedy,

00:51:37which lots of people tried to suggest

00:51:39that the two kids that were involved in this were heavy games players.

00:51:43Every time there is any sort of violent act in the news,

00:51:46it's always reported, like,

00:51:47and the shooter was a big fan of, you know, Grand Theft Auto or Call Of Duty.

00:51:52It's like, well, that's because he's an 18-35-year-old man,

00:51:55that's probably why he's a fan of that game,

00:51:57not because he's a psychopath.

00:51:58Recently in the USA, the National Rifle Association

00:52:01has tried to shift blame for a spate of mass shootings

00:52:04away from the availability of firearms

00:52:06and onto the shoulders of video games.

00:52:08Through vicious, violent video games,

00:52:12with names like Bulletstorm,

00:52:15Grand Theft Auto,

00:52:17Mortal Kombat

00:52:19and Splatterhouse.

00:52:21Ironically, the NRA makes some crude target-shooting

00:52:24and varmint-hunting games of their own.

00:52:26Furthermore, not everyone is convinced of a link

00:52:29between violent games and violent behaviour.

00:52:31I think there might be violent people that play these video games,

00:52:34but I don't think these video games turn you into violent people.

00:52:37We should move on.

00:52:38We should talk about some of the positive aspects of video games

00:52:41or some of the genuine challenges we can make to the industry,

00:52:44like, where are the positive female role models in games?

00:52:47But, you know, if we carry on with this debate,

00:52:49it amazes me that it's lasted for so long.

00:52:52Dedicated gamers tend to reflexively scoff

00:52:54at any suggestion games might be too violent,

00:52:56but it's clear that even the most hardcore Splatter movies

00:52:59don't dwell on biological destruction

00:53:01to quite the same gleeful degree as many games do.

00:53:04Increasing graphical fidelity means the debate will intensify

00:53:07as the portrayal of violence does.

00:53:09It's easy to laugh at the low-tech depiction of death

00:53:12in the early Mortal Kombat games,

00:53:14but the recent Mortal Kombat 9 features extreme and upsetting imagery

00:53:18that would be almost entirely unthinkable in most other mediums.

00:53:27Kung Lao wins. Flawless victory.

00:53:30Despite scenes that shocking,

00:53:32Mortal Kombat 9 failed to generate any real controversy,

00:53:35but then many games still fly somehow under the cultural radar

00:53:39and consequently aren't called upon to justify themselves.

00:53:42I'm traditionally quite nonchalant about violence in video games.

00:53:45I played the shit out of things like Doom and Sniper Elite,

00:53:48but even I find that basically unacceptable,

00:53:51which either means I've become a terrible wuss in my old age

00:53:54or games are becoming so forensically graphic

00:53:57they're reaching a tipping point.

00:53:59Some games have a more mature and responsible attitude

00:54:02to depicting violence than others.

00:54:04Some are outright irresponsible.

00:54:06Others, I think, do it in a much more mature and responsible way.

00:54:09And so I don't think there's anything inherently bad

00:54:12about expressing or exploring the subject of violence in video games

00:54:15just as there is in any medium,

00:54:17but certainly there is violence in the real world,

00:54:19there's going to be violence in any artistic reflection of the real world,

00:54:22and video games are no different.

00:54:24Wow!

00:54:25And when women in games aren't being gruesomely sawed in half,

00:54:28they're often being simplified, patronised and objectified.

00:54:32You'll never be a match for me.

00:54:34But the games industry's treatment of what I tactfully won't refer to

00:54:38as the titted gender was about to be challenged,

00:54:41as we'll see after this break.

00:54:44Picture the scene.

00:54:46It's the mid-1990s,

00:54:48and no-one knows what to make of humankind's poxy existence anymore

00:54:51because O.J. Simpson has just left caught an entirely innocent man.

00:54:55Baring's bank has collapsed, thanks to rogue trader Nick Leeson,

00:54:58and in the world of pop, middle-class kinks Franz Blur

00:55:01are going head-to-head with dirge-spewing musical chimps' tea party oasis

00:55:05in a battle literally no-one gave a shit about ever.

00:55:08Meanwhile, bruised by the beating it took over flogging violent games to kids,

00:55:12the games industry suddenly hit on a new target market.

00:55:15People off their faces on ecstasy.

00:55:17Or clubbers, as they're technically known.

00:55:20Have you seen any drug tickets?

00:55:22What?

00:55:26Did you take any yourself?

00:55:29Here we have a normal.

00:55:31It's a normal.

00:55:33It's a normal.

00:55:35It's a normal.

00:55:37Here we have a normal, healthy young man.

00:55:40And here we have a fellow who's been experimenting with PlayStation for only a few minutes.

00:55:45Enter the slickly marketed PlayStation,

00:55:47positioned as the post-club, post-spliff entertainment medium of choice,

00:55:51bristling with trippy visuals and credible soundtracks.

00:55:57PlayStation had moved gaming on,

00:55:59and that gaming was now something that young adults did, and not just men.

00:56:03Lots of women played Wipeout, lots of women played the early PlayStation games.

00:56:07They understood that there was something powerful about putting a woman on screen.

00:56:17Tomb Raider was the first game that I became obsessed with.

00:56:20It was the only game, really, at the time, where there was a woman involved,

00:56:24and a woman with a couple of guns shooting some stuff and being pretty kick-ass.

00:56:29Partly inspired by the gutsy female image of singer Naina Cherry

00:56:33and post-punk-tune feminist tank girl,

00:56:35Tomb Raider's Lara Croft earns a place on our list for being gaming's first true female icon.

00:56:41This was the era of Loaded and FHM,

00:56:44and Lara Croft somehow was kind of a virtual representation of that whole idea.

00:56:49She was kind of sexy Mario, the sexy Sonic.

00:56:53I mean, there's been so much discussion about,

00:56:55was she, you know, an object of female empowerment,

00:56:57or was she an object of male titillation?

00:57:00When I was, you know, what, ten years old playing that game,

00:57:03that didn't matter to me.

00:57:04All I saw was a woman where previously I'd only seen a man,

00:57:09and that was huge for me.

00:57:11Having ruled the late 90s, brightening up trendy magazine covers

00:57:14and appearing in irreverent soft-drinks ads,

00:57:16the 2000s would be less kind to Lara,

00:57:18despite, or perhaps because, of being portrayed by the equally unrealistic Angelina Jolie

00:57:23in a pair of noisy but not very good Hollywood action flicks.

00:57:26Stop!

00:57:27But then in 2013, Tomb Raider was rebooted and reimagined,

00:57:30with an increased emphasis on story and Lara's character.

00:57:34I finally set out to make my mark, to find adventure.

00:57:40Another key difference, this time the lead writer was female.

00:57:44I didn't really like the way that she'd been adopted by the wider media

00:57:48and somewhat over-sexualised,

00:57:50and I felt that, as a younger female gamer,

00:57:52I was sort of being pushed away from the franchise.

00:57:55And so when I took on the role of helping develop this new, younger Lara,

00:57:59I really thought about what myself, as a gamer,

00:58:02when I first started out would have liked

00:58:04and what the younger me would have responded well to.

00:58:10You can look at the journey of video games

00:58:12and mirror it with the journey of Lara Croft as a character.

00:58:14At the beginning, she was a look, because video games were mostly about looks.

00:58:18And then, as time's gone on, Lara's creators

00:58:21have tried to make her more of a character, more of a relatable person.

00:58:24And similarly, all video games have been trying to tell stories

00:58:26that are more human and more relatable.

00:58:28The new Tomb Raider reboot feeds into that.

00:58:30What you've got there is a character who was once an avatar

00:58:33and is now becoming a person.

00:58:36This shift reflected a debate about gaming's depiction of women

00:58:39that was already well underway.

00:58:41In many ways, games still seem psychologically lodged somewhere around 1978,

00:58:45full of eye-candy dolly birds without much to say for themselves.

00:58:48And the voices questioning this have been growing ever louder.

00:58:51In 2012, when cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian

00:58:54launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a series of short films

00:58:57about female stereotypes in games,

00:58:59some male gamers reacted by bombarding her with rape and death threats.

00:59:04I don't believe video gamers are sexist.

00:59:06And I don't believe most games are sexist.

00:59:09But also, you look at video games and you can't deny

00:59:12that there are things in them that are not flattering to women

00:59:15and that make you roll your eyes and sigh or sometimes make you really angry.

00:59:18And I think that it's not so much gaming culture that's unfriendly to women,

00:59:22it's internet culture.

00:59:24Even today, a huge number of games still place you, the player,

00:59:27in the shoes of a boring, cookie-cutter, Caucasian, hetero dude

00:59:31with a dick and a gun and fuck all else of interest.

00:59:34But there are some exceptions.

00:59:37Mass Effect's a good example of a mainstream video game,

00:59:40like one that a lot of people buy,

00:59:42that does include something other than straight, white men.

00:59:45And for that reason, it has a very devoted following

00:59:47among people who aren't necessarily straight, white men.

00:59:49In Mass Effect, your character is basically bisexual by default.

00:59:52You can flirt with whoever you want and pursue a relationship with whoever you want.

00:59:55And it's sad that that's progressive,

00:59:57but, you know, in a video game of that kind of size, it is progressive.

01:00:00I didn't know you were such an optimist.

01:00:04You have that effect on people.

01:00:06Meanwhile, back in the late 1990s,

01:00:08those cool adult gamers weren't content

01:00:10to simply experiment with things like female protagonists,

01:00:13such as Lara Croft. No.

01:00:15They wanted whole new kinds of experience.

01:00:17Games had become set in their ways.

01:00:19There were too many predictable platformers

01:00:21or metronomic fighting games

01:00:23or by-the-book shoot-'em-ups.

01:00:25What was required was an entirely new kind of experience,

01:00:28an entirely new kind of game.

01:00:30And that's precisely what turned up,

01:00:33wearing a bobblehead.

01:00:39Parappa the Rapper is a game about a musical dog

01:00:42who learns the value of self-belief

01:00:44by rapping with a kung-fu onion,

01:00:47while you just press buttons along with the beat.

01:00:54Parappa the Rapper was incredible.

01:00:56It was such a simple, really clever use of the controller.

01:00:59You had to hit the things in sequence.

01:01:01It's the first time I became aware of the boom-boom-ba, boom-boom-ba-boom,

01:01:04you know, that kind of very simple sign language.

01:01:07Simon Says style rhythm action games

01:01:10began with the endearingly advertised computer smart-ass Simon.

01:01:13Simon has a brain.

01:01:15You either do what Simon says or else go down the drain.

01:01:20Parappa turned this basic concept

01:01:22into a playable, psychedelic musical pop-up book.

01:01:25The songs are...

01:01:29..they're so catchy.

01:01:31I mean, they're so catchy.

01:01:34They're so catchy and insane.

01:01:37I never dreamed it would be like this

01:01:40I am the number one ruler of the seven seas

01:01:43The skunk over here will bring you luck

01:01:46The skunk over here will bring you luck

01:01:49I often listen to the Onion Man song.

01:01:52Go now, kick, punch, block

01:01:54Kick, punch, block

01:01:56Or the Driving School one.

01:01:58Check and turn the signals to the left

01:02:00Check and turn the signals to the left

01:02:02There's the one where they're all waiting to go to the toilet.

01:02:05The darling over there will bring you luck

01:02:08Don't give up, I got no time to spare

01:02:10There's the Driving School one. Did I say that already? Yeah.

01:02:13Parappa the Rapper was appealing

01:02:15because it made people like me,

01:02:17who have absolutely no musical ability whatsoever,

01:02:20feel like they did.

01:02:22That was a big part of its appeal,

01:02:24the fact that you were pressing buttons in time.

01:02:27There's no musical talent in that whatsoever,

01:02:29but you felt like there was.

01:02:31Parappa the Rapper led to games like Guitar Hero,

01:02:34in which you use a simplified push-button guitar

01:02:37to play along to recognisable hits from big-name acts.

01:02:40Later games added far more realistic instruments,

01:02:42meaning players were genuinely improving their skills,

01:02:45however old they were or weren't,

01:02:47as you can see from this charming footage.

01:02:53The very latest rhythm games have taken this to its logical conclusion.

01:02:57You now connect a real guitar directly to your console.

01:03:00In fact, they're not marketed as games anymore,

01:03:02but bona fide musical education tools.

01:03:05Not a bad legacy for a cartoon dog in a hat,

01:03:07although Parappa himself has been largely forgotten,

01:03:09relegated to appearing alongside 50 Cent

01:03:11as a pop culture reference in subversive comedy shows.

01:03:24Parappa, you never return my phone calls,

01:03:26so now eat bullets and lick my balls!

01:03:30It's a rarity talking about games on TV.

01:03:32TV doesn't often do games, and one of the key reasons for that

01:03:35is that TV commissioners believe

01:03:37no-one wants to watch other people playing them,

01:03:39which is a valid point.

01:03:40I mean, picture two dweebs playing some baffling point-and-click strategy game.

01:03:44It's not like anyone's going to, I don't know,

01:03:46pack out a stadium to see that.

01:03:51This illuminating documentary footage

01:03:53depicts emotional South Korean fans watching their idols in action.

01:03:57And who are their idols?

01:04:00These guys.

01:04:01Shit-hot Starcraft players.

01:04:03The Koreans are quite into Starcraft.

01:04:11A densely complex war sim,

01:04:13Starcraft is basically fast-paced space chess.

01:04:17Starcraft is a real-time strategy game

01:04:19of building up a base and sending off soldiers to kill people,

01:04:22but at a pace that will take whole years off your life.

01:04:27Starcraft is really interesting in that

01:04:29it has emerged as the first sort of competitive sport of gaming.

01:04:34If you look at a country like Korea, for example,

01:04:37Starcraft is effectively the national sport.

01:04:40I mean, there are cable television channels dedicated to Starcraft.

01:04:43The key Starcraft players in Korea are superstars.

01:04:46They have fans, they have a screaming adulation.

01:04:49As you can see, it invokes unparalleled excitement amongst commentators.

01:04:54I think for a lot of people,

01:04:56they just enjoy watching people that are good at things.

01:04:59You know what I mean?

01:05:00I mean, it's almost like watching a virtuoso piano playing.

01:05:03When you watch some of these guys playing Starcraft,

01:05:05their fingers are a blur when they're playing it,

01:05:07and it's kind of fascinating.

01:05:09Never mind fascinating,

01:05:10the Korean audience finds the game shout-out-loud shit-ifying.

01:05:15SHOUTING

01:05:21Shortly afterwards, the year 2000 arrived

01:05:23in a flurry of optimistic fireworks,

01:05:25and humankind wondered what majesty the new century would hold,

01:05:28and it turned out the answer was a voyeuristic reality show

01:05:31in which egotists entertained the nation by sharing a bog for six weeks.

01:05:35But they weren't the only housemates that were entrancing millions.

01:05:45The Sims, in some sense, is kind of a life simulator

01:05:48where you create little people, personalities,

01:05:51they then live their lives in the game.

01:05:53You can create houses for them, they can get jobs,

01:05:55they can fall in love, they can have kids.

01:05:57Following in the footsteps of the voyeuristic satire The Truman Show,

01:06:00in which the world tuned in to watch the mundanity of a suburban life,

01:06:03The Sims tapped into our desire for a perfect domestic existence.

01:06:07It certainly appeals to that part of you

01:06:10that wants to escape into another world

01:06:12and create another version of yourself,

01:06:14almost too similar to what your real life is.

01:06:17I was living on my own when I first played The Sims,

01:06:20and I thought I'd try it out.

01:06:22I didn't really go for it, I didn't enjoy it.

01:06:24I just couldn't see the point of it, to be honest.

01:06:27But I was playing it, and it was in the very early stages of the game

01:06:30when you just buy a flat,

01:06:32and I noticed there were all these little green patches on the floor

01:06:35and the sound of flies near the green patches.

01:06:38I was like, what the hell are these?

01:06:40And I realised that as the game progressed, more of these would build up.

01:06:44I thought, well, how do I get rid of them? This is annoying.

01:06:47And then I figured it out, that it was waste paper bins.

01:06:50You put waste paper bins in each room,

01:06:53and then those little green things stopped appearing.

01:06:55And I was playing the game, and I thought,

01:06:58maybe I should put waste paper bins in my flat!

01:07:01The Sims wasn't just idle play, it was stressful.

01:07:04You had to micromanage every aspect of your Sims' existence,

01:07:07from how many bins they had to how often they went to the toilet.

01:07:10You had to eat healthily, exercise loads,

01:07:13and generally behave if you wanted a good life,

01:07:16and that good life was rigidly defined as a well-paid job,

01:07:19a smiling partner, and a tidy house full of possessions.

01:07:22Maintaining all of that became increasingly difficult.

01:07:25It took the American suburban dream

01:07:28and turned it into an endless point-and-click pain in the arse.

01:07:31It was actually meant to be a satire of US culture,

01:07:34and I think most people didn't get that.

01:07:36And the promise of the game, really, in The Sims,

01:07:38is that you have all these objects, and each one has little ratings.

01:07:41You know, the couch will improve your comfort this much.

01:07:43But each one of these objects becomes kind of a ticking time bomb.

01:07:46They can break, they can, you know, catch on fire,

01:07:48they can become dysfunctional.

01:07:50And you find that these objects that you're buying

01:07:52to basically make your Sim happy are now making your Sim miserable.

01:07:57But even though The Sims' roots lay in satirising consumerism,

01:08:00it soon became a capitalist cash cow itself,

01:08:03with a barrage of distinctly unironic branded spin-off packs you had to pay for.

01:08:07I don't think The Sims will ever be as popular again

01:08:10as it was when it first released,

01:08:12and I think the reason why is because we are The Sims now, really.

01:08:15Each other are The Sims.

01:08:17When you look at social networks and you look at Facebook and stuff like that,

01:08:20you now have that top-down view into people's lives.

01:08:23The Sims created a realistic world but then just made you conform in it.

01:08:27Luckily, a game was about to come along

01:08:29that would let you indulge your darker side.

01:08:34MUSIC PLAYS

01:08:38On September 11th, 2001,

01:08:40millions feared the world was about to slide into chaos.

01:08:43Weeks later, a video game consisting almost entirely of nihilistic urban anarchy

01:08:48ushered in a new age of morally blank freedom for gamers.

01:08:52I love the feeling of dropping into

01:08:56what is a pretty realistic simulation of a working city

01:09:01and then just causing havoc.

01:09:04It's just sort of like perfect escapism for me.

01:09:08Early incarnations of Grand Theft Auto were somewhat primitive

01:09:11and looked vaguely reminiscent of the rebellious, bedroom-coded ZX Spectrum

01:09:15that was released in the early 2000s.

01:09:18It looked vaguely reminiscent of the rebellious, bedroom-coded ZX Spectrum games

01:09:22that were part of its genetic code.

01:09:24Despite being set in an exaggerated version of the USA,

01:09:27it was a defiantly British game made in Scotland from mudders.

01:09:33Grand Theft Auto arrived at DMA Design,

01:09:35a small Scottish development team in Dundee,

01:09:38and it was something they'd worked on,

01:09:40a very small team had worked on it for, like, four years,

01:09:42and it was thought of in their studio at that time

01:09:44as kind of like the runt of the litter.

01:09:49Then in came Sam and Dan Hauser,

01:09:51who took on a publishing deal with DMA Design.

01:09:54They became the kind of producers of the game, and it changed.

01:09:57When Grand Theft Auto III came out, they used 3D visuals,

01:10:01which made the game feel more mature,

01:10:03but it was also much more aware of wider cultural issues.

01:10:06They had lots of cool music in it,

01:10:08and again, there was a sense of anarchy to it,

01:10:10but it was more out of control this time.

01:10:14I'm only pretending to play that.

01:10:16Grand Theft Auto III was an immense blockbuster,

01:10:18revolutionising a franchise that's become

01:10:20one of the most lucrative entertainment properties in history,

01:10:22with an influence that stretches beyond the world of games.

01:10:25If you watch the film Drive with Ryan Gosling,

01:10:28that film, I do not believe that film would look the way it does

01:10:31if it wasn't for Grand Theft Auto.

01:10:33Lots of people say that the director

01:10:35essentially made a non-interactive version of Grand Theft Auto.

01:10:39The world of Drive, as it's depicted in that film,

01:10:43is very much influenced and inspired by Grand Theft Auto, I think.

01:10:46But unlike cinema, most of the stories told within the world of GTA

01:10:50are ones the player effectively writes themselves,

01:10:53using the freedom of their own actions.

01:10:57The other day, I stole a car,

01:11:00I was shooting someone in the head,

01:11:02and my wife was shouting, shoot him again, shoot him again.

01:11:05Now, we're two very peaceable, cat-loving ladies from Glasgow.

01:11:10I think I can rationalise it because it's not real, it's not real.

01:11:14Yes, and if rib-tickling viral videos are anything to go by,

01:11:17GTA's world of fantasy indulgence even seems to appeal to older players,

01:11:20especially those with an axe to grind against energy companies.

01:11:24Hello, what do you do for a living?

01:11:26Work for British Gas, do you?

01:11:28You wanker. I'll give you your football bills up.

01:11:31Bastard. You take that.

01:11:33You won't put them up no more.

01:11:35One for you, and one for you.

01:11:37For some reason, this level of anarchic freedom seems to upset people.

01:11:41Parents, listen up, because here's what you need to know tonight.

01:11:47In Grand Theft Auto, your son, or your husband, or your boyfriend,

01:11:51or whoever, can hire a prostitute, have sex with her,

01:11:56and then beat her to death with a baseball bat.

01:12:03Well, GTA is the gift that keeps on giving for tabloids.

01:12:06I mean, Parliament debates it,

01:12:08there are motions tabled in the House of Commons on it,

01:12:11there are endless commentators who judge it

01:12:13to sort of be something linked to the devil.

01:12:16If you're a parent and you allow your son or daughter to watch this,

01:12:20even if they're beyond 18 years old,

01:12:23you're a lousy parent, in my opinion.

01:12:25It is the definitive moral panic game.

01:12:28Ladies and gentlemen, this is your moment.

01:12:30Please don't make me ruin all the great work

01:12:32your plastic surgeons have been doing.

01:12:34Grand Theft Auto is pretty much the Frankie Boyle of the gaming world, really.

01:12:38It's controversial, Scottish, nihilistic,

01:12:40hard to defend in The Guardian, and to what end?

01:12:43Well, because it just wants to make you laugh, of course.

01:12:46Yeah, Frankie!

01:12:47Yeah, shut it, pal.

01:12:49You leave here with an asshole like a yawning hippo's mouth.

01:12:52It is interesting, being a Brit living in the United States,

01:12:55I think people outside of America tend to look at the American world

01:12:58from the outside a little bit more cynically.

01:13:00We look at American culture and American values

01:13:03with a little bit more cynicism than people inside American society do.

01:13:06You have to be on the outside to hold up a mirror,

01:13:09and that may be the reason why GTA has been fairly successful

01:13:13as a piece of satire.

01:13:14Again, I think the satire, the commentary in GTA is often very crass.

01:13:18I think they miss the target as often as they hit it.

01:13:20But again, the fact that they're trying

01:13:22goes beyond a lot of what a lot of triple-A, big-budget video games

01:13:25ever try to do.

01:13:26It's a giant cartoon Grand Theft Auto,

01:13:30and it's not exactly a subtle representation of anything,

01:13:33but then it's not meant to be.

01:13:35If you want a subtle representation of something else,

01:13:38read a lovely book by Jane Austen.

01:13:41Grand Theft Auto is all about causing mayhem

01:13:43and not giving a fig about the consequences,

01:13:46but increasingly some games are prompting players

01:13:48to consider the repercussions of their actions,

01:13:51and they do it with surprising grace.

01:13:54Shadow of the Colossus was a really fascinating game in a lot of ways.

01:13:58It was a really meditative game.

01:14:00You played a character who lived in a fantasy world

01:14:03whose mission was to rescue a princess,

01:14:06which is a very basic video game set-up.

01:14:08Your job in the game is to bring down these huge creatures.

01:14:12It's like seven huge boss battles

01:14:14where the bosses are not only monsters,

01:14:17but so big that they're almost a landscape in some way.

01:14:20And gradually, as the game goes on,

01:14:22your feelings as you bring down these monsters

01:14:25become more and more complicated.

01:14:27Because every time you killed one of these creatures,

01:14:30you realize you just killed something magnificent,

01:14:32something larger than life, this beautiful, majestic animal,

01:14:37and you just slaughtered it for some unknown reason.

01:14:40And every time you did one of those things,

01:14:42your character design slowly morphed and became darker and darker.

01:14:47And you realize you are the villain of this world.

01:14:53Shadow of the Colossus was significant

01:14:55because it helped forge a new way of looking at games,

01:14:57one in which the player could no longer be entirely certain they were the hero.

01:15:01It also influenced recent indie titles like Papers, Please,

01:15:05which, despite its basic appearance, is a complex game

01:15:08that causes the player increasing discomfort.

01:15:11Papers, Please is a game where you're a customs officer

01:15:14working on a fictional border of a made-up country,

01:15:17and you have to check everyone's paperwork

01:15:19to see whether or not they can come into the country.

01:15:21All the mechanics is like someone approaches the checkpoint

01:15:24and hands you their papers.

01:15:26And they might ask you to let them in.

01:15:28They have family. There's someone that's starving inside

01:15:30or they're trying to bring somebody to them.

01:15:32But your job is just to check, are their papers forged?

01:15:34Do they have all their papers?

01:15:36And then whether to allow them to get in or reject them.

01:15:38You quickly realize you've got to be a bit evil.

01:15:41You quickly realize you've got to be a bit evil.

01:15:44If you don't make the quota every day for stamping enough people through,

01:15:47you don't get enough money to feed your wife and kids.

01:15:50And it's the sort of game that you play,

01:15:52and you realize why people do bad things.

01:15:54It puts you into a position where you slide,

01:15:56and you go, all right, well, just one person.

01:15:58Then before you know it, you're completely corrupt,

01:16:01and you never really noticed it happening.

01:16:03Through those mechanics, you feel a feeling that's so unique to gaming,

01:16:07you feel guilt.

01:16:09And a movie can't make you feel guilty, a book can't make you feel guilty,

01:16:12but here's, like, I'm making an action,

01:16:14and someone can curse me because of it, and I feel guilty.

01:16:17And it's kind of brilliant in that way.

01:16:20Games excel at making you stand in other people's shoes,

01:16:22not just the shoes of corrupt Eastern European officials,

01:16:25but creatures so phantasmagorical, so beyond our imaginations,

01:16:29they don't even need shoes.

01:16:31Imagine that. You can't!

01:16:39Something happened in the mid-2000s

01:16:41with the rise of what's called the massively multiplayer game.

01:16:44And this, for me, was the point at which the line between games and reality

01:16:47started to get quite blurred.

01:16:49My wife got super into it, so did my son.

01:16:51And what was nice was, in actual fact,

01:16:53it became quite a nice mother and son thing to do together.

01:16:55You know, it was very interesting. They would go on raids together.

01:16:58You know, where else can a woman, a grown woman,

01:17:01who's mothered several children and written several hit movies,

01:17:04go out with their son, skin some animals,

01:17:07kill a troll, OK, win some gold,

01:17:09and still see a lovely bit of scenery in a lovely new mythical city?

01:17:12Nowhere.

01:17:13The problem with a game this seductive is it can also be quite addictive.

01:17:16Regularly I would play for 14 hours straight when I would be raiding.

01:17:22I'd do a couple raids a day,

01:17:24and then I'd have to do upkeep in between the raids.

01:17:26You hear of people who will sit there, especially men, I have to say,

01:17:30who will sit there with buckets or bottles

01:17:34attached to their nether regions

01:17:36so they don't have to move, they can play constantly and just pee in a bottle.

01:17:39The clichéd image of World of Warcraft players

01:17:42as addicted shut-in husks neglecting their own lives

01:17:45was memorably satirised in this South Park episode.

01:17:48Man! Mushroom!

01:17:50What, hun? Mushroom! Mushroom!

01:17:55Oh, that's a big boy, isn't he?

01:17:58Yeah, and never mind World of Warcraft, that is the tragedy of all games, isn't it?

01:18:03The way they steal you away from the real world

01:18:05where all the normal people live and encourage you to stay indoors.

01:18:08Gaming's just such a sad, sedentary pursuit, isn't it?

01:18:11It's totally unlike, say, the way you're sitting there in a darkened room

01:18:14passively watching me say this.

01:18:16Box sets are the silver bullet in this.

01:18:18Everyone who complains to you about playing Far Cry 3 for 30 hours

01:18:22has sat through far more of that in terms of games of Throne or Breaking Bad,

01:18:27all of which was a pretty sedentary activity, right?

01:18:30And no-one down on box sets, no-one's going,

01:18:32oh, these are appalling, these are... Box sets are making our children fat.

01:18:35So that's always been the one I've gone slam.

01:18:37Have you watched a box set recently?

01:18:39Well, of course I have, because I have watched Der Klirgenfurgen,

01:18:42the new Scandinavian murder thing.

01:18:45How is that different to playing Grand Theft Auto V?

01:18:48Yes, you may learn the word or two of Danish as it goes along,

01:18:51but it's exactly the same experience.

01:18:53In fact, it's more passive.

01:18:55At least my thumbs are getting a workout.

01:18:57Never mind a workout for your thumbs, what about your other fingers?

01:19:00Early video games were simple,

01:19:03and so therefore anybody could sort of pick them up

01:19:06and figure out what to do.

01:19:08Then there were overlays upon overlays upon overlays of complexity

01:19:12to where if you picked up a PS3 controller,

01:19:16it looked a little bit like the cockpit of a 747.

01:19:20The minute you went to a one-button gestured thing,

01:19:24it empowered a whole bunch of new gamers,

01:19:27and that was really the power of it.

01:19:30It sounds too good to be true.

01:19:32Being able to play a game of tennis in your lunch hour,

01:19:35and you don't even have to take your suit off.

01:19:37It was the first time you could actually play games with your family

01:19:40and have a level playing field.

01:19:42You know, you could hand the controller to your grandma or your mum

01:19:45and say, let's play tennis, and they might well beat you at it.

01:19:48And for a long-time gamer, that was a great experience.

01:19:51Wii Sports is on our list,

01:19:53not because it's one of the best-selling games of all time,

01:19:56but because it's one of the best-selling games of all time.

01:19:59Not because it's one of the best-selling games of all time,

01:20:01shifting over 80 million copies,

01:20:03but because it's one of the most accessible,

01:20:05turning gaming into an even more mainstream pursuit

01:20:07that can be easily marketed at anyone

01:20:09who can do this, or this, or this.

01:20:14All right, this one's my favourite, Chop Chop.

01:20:16I'll cook for you, Marv, if you want.

01:20:26After the spectacular coming of the Wii

01:20:28came the Microsoft Xbox Kinect,

01:20:30which did away with the controller

01:20:32and instead watched you with its beady camera eye

01:20:34and judged your every action like Orwell's big brother, but fun.

01:20:37The new incarnation of the Xbox comes bundled

01:20:40with this more advanced, bulkier version of the Kinect,

01:20:43which can now analyse your heartbeat and facial expression.

01:20:47Gesture technology has now dribbled out of gaming

01:20:50and into other everyday gizmos like smartphones and even televisions,

01:20:54which now routinely require you to wave at them

01:20:56like some kind of peasant, as we can see from this unsettling advert.

01:21:00And the gaming world hasn't finished invading your life

01:21:02just because it's taught you to perform a few gestures

01:21:05like some kind of gibbon.

01:21:07No, as we'll see, it's after nothing less than your soul.

01:21:182007 was grim.

01:21:20Even the launch of the spangly new iPhone

01:21:22couldn't distract anyone from the unrelenting misery

01:21:25of the economic crisis.

01:21:27What could you do for cheap escapism?

01:21:29The cinema was full of crappy threequels

01:21:31and a new Transformers movie, so that was out,

01:21:34and thanks to the smoking ban, pubs now stank of sweat and arse gas.

01:21:38Fortunately, there was one form of entertainment that still delivered

01:21:41and it chiefly delivered by letting you shoot people in the face.

01:21:49This action-packed epic is very much the Citizen Kane

01:21:52of remorseless gunfire.

01:21:54Putting you into the shoes of a soldier,

01:21:56putting you in the middle of a battle,

01:21:58and not just as, you know, the lone superhero,

01:22:01but as part of this giant machine.

01:22:03You know, it's a world going on around you.

01:22:06The Call of Duty franchise is impeccably produced and fun to play,

01:22:10but also so brutal, many find it hard to stomach.

01:22:13For my money, the most disturbing mission in modern warfare

01:22:15is Death From Above, a mission which puts you in an AC-130 gunship

01:22:19and puts a kind of grainy film over the cameras.

01:22:22You're looking down and shooting at targets you can't even recognise.

01:22:25It's the only mission in modern warfare that could be photorealistic

01:22:28because the real-life footage we see on the news from AC-130s is grainy,

01:22:33and it's tremendously disturbing

01:22:35because you can't make out what these figures are.

01:22:38It could be... It could almost be a statement, but it's not.

01:22:41It's just there so you can have fun, and that's very dark.

01:22:44Every Call of Duty game seems to have its banner moment,

01:22:47which is almost deliberately conceived.

01:22:49Oh, this will be the level that will get us all the headlines in the Daily Mail

01:22:52and, you know, The Sun, and these are the things that people will complain about.

01:22:55I think that's a little bit cynical.

01:22:57The game's success also lends the debate about violence an interesting new kink.

01:23:01Many of the guns it features are real-world weapons

01:23:04licensed with the manufacturer's full consent.

01:23:07It's a kind of grim product placement,

01:23:09which means the game doubles as a shop window for future gun owners,

01:23:13albeit inadvertently.

01:23:15Trouble is, some of its more fanatical fans

01:23:17are the very last people you'd want owning guns,

01:23:19or even rocks, to be honest.

01:23:21Fucking come out of there, bitch!

01:23:23Oh, my God!

01:23:25Fucking lightweight marathon, you think you're fucking good?

01:23:28Get the fuck out!

01:23:30Call of Duty is the prime example of a game

01:23:33with a horrible player base in terms of behaviour online.

01:23:38Oh, my God! Shut the fuck up, you stupid fucking darkness!

01:23:44There's a joke that comedians tell called the aristocrats,

01:23:47which is just basically the most offensive joke you can possibly tell.

01:23:50And playing Call of Duty with a headset on is like listening to a children's choir

01:23:55sing the longest, most vile aristocrats joke in your ear for hours.

01:24:01It's intolerable.

01:24:03Darkness, I swear to God, I'm going to come over there,

01:24:05I'm going to fuck your mum like the pig she is!

01:24:09All of that could lead you to believe that present-day gaming is horrible.

01:24:13Not necessarily.

01:24:15Video games are in an amazing place right now,

01:24:17because you've got these giant blockbuster games

01:24:19that are like giant Hollywood movies,

01:24:21and then you've also got the equivalent of the independent film scene.

01:24:24You've got games that are made by one person, two people, little teams,

01:24:27who are saying something that they want to say.

01:24:29Just like indie films came about

01:24:31when the cost of making films was drastically reduced,

01:24:33now tools and publishing options are available

01:24:36that essentially the little guys who just want to put their game out there,

01:24:39games that don't have as much appeal, but cost so much less,

01:24:42they can recoup their investment with just a few thousand sales.

01:24:46Suddenly it seemed the idiosyncratic bedroom coder of the 1980s

01:24:50was back with a vengeance, like someone had turned back the clock.

01:24:54And an unusual time-twisting indie platform game called Braid led the charge.

01:25:07Braid is a puzzle platformer.

01:25:11It was created by Jonathan Blue.

01:25:14On the surface, it's all about a guy, Tim,

01:25:16trying to rescue a princess from a horrible monster.

01:25:19You first pick it up, yeah, I'm just playing a platform game.

01:25:21But then going into the fourth dimension,

01:25:23playing with concepts of time and reversing and speeding up

01:25:26and manipulating time in a way that took something that looked familiar

01:25:30and completely reinventing it.

01:25:32One aesthetic thing I didn't like about it was the main character

01:25:37just didn't care for the little guy.

01:25:40He looked like a sort of squashed Hugh Grant.

01:25:43You know, that's just my taste, you know.

01:25:47I'm not a fan of miniaturised Hugh Grants.

01:25:50Braid is almost a game that's kind of too smart for its own good.

01:25:53Almost I feel, though, I kind of feel like it's a game you admire.

01:25:56But I definitely remember reaching a point where I was like,

01:26:00I'm not really having fun anymore.

01:26:02And that's fine, that's absolutely fine,

01:26:04because I think for indie games they have to explore what a game is.

01:26:07Braid earns a place on our list for proving indie games could sell,

01:26:10paving the way for other individual and experimental titles.

01:26:14Braid was swiftly followed then by Limbo,

01:26:16which again was a beautifully stylised,

01:26:20very emotionally wrenching story

01:26:22of a small boy walking through a kind of ethereal landscape.

01:26:26Journey is probably the most famous example of that.

01:26:29Fabulously beautiful, incredibly emotionally involving.

01:26:32There's a point where the little fella

01:26:34just can't quite make it up a snowy mountain,

01:26:36and, Jesus, it'll get you.

01:26:38Many of the new wave of indie titles hark back to the retro past,

01:26:42offering subversive or surprising reimaginings of gaming's heritage.

01:26:46And indie games aren't something you have to seek out

01:26:48in some obscure hobby shop.

01:26:50Today you can buy them without leaving the comfort of your own hand.

01:26:54There's this whole line of video game genealogy

01:26:56that starts off with the arcades and moves through the Game Boy

01:26:59and stuff like Tetris and Mario

01:27:01and ends up with modern arcade-like mobile games

01:27:04like Candy Crush and Angry Birds.

01:27:06Games started off as something that everybody played

01:27:08and now they're, again, something that everybody plays.

01:27:16Lots of people that didn't really think of themselves as gamers

01:27:19will play something like Angry Birds because it's like a time killer,

01:27:22because wherever you are, whatever you're doing,

01:27:24if you're in a doctor's waiting room, if you're on the bus,

01:27:26if you're bored on the tube, you can play Angry Birds

01:27:28and it kills that dead time.

01:27:30With its intuitive, visually appealing gameplay,

01:27:32Angry Birds has brought intense hand-held pleasure to millions,

01:27:35just like your mum has.

01:27:37Angry Birds is a nice enough game.

01:27:39I don't think it's the best game in the world,

01:27:41but, I mean, certainly it deserves to be a success.

01:27:44Whether it deserves to absolutely rule the entire universe,

01:27:47with the exception of anything else, I really don't know.

01:27:50Even yesterday, when I was going to buy my train tickets to come down here,

01:27:53I looked over at the ticket clerk's phone

01:27:55that was lying next to the ticket window.

01:27:57Angry Birds. It's just everywhere.

01:28:00Like Pac-Man way back yonder,

01:28:02Angry Birds has become an unstoppable kiddy-wink merchandising phenomenon,

01:28:05with branded goods, cartoon shows, theme park rides and all.

01:28:09But Angry Birds isn't the only indie game to have built an empire.

01:28:12Our next game is, if anything, an even more impressive achievement.

01:28:21Minecraft was just one of those bits of gaming genius.

01:28:24I think you can sum up the appeal of Minecraft

01:28:26effectively by just saying it's Lego video games.

01:28:30Minecraft is an open-world game which lets players shape their environment

01:28:34by placing or destroying blocks.

01:28:36It's easy, it's creative and it's social.

01:28:38The beautiful thing with Minecraft is that you see people

01:28:41playing together to create something, to build some massive project.

01:28:45People coming together to build replicas of the Starship Enterprise

01:28:49and stuff like that within Minecraft.

01:28:51And that's a lovely thing because most of the time in games

01:28:54people come together to destroy stuff and each other.

01:28:57Minecraft became a hit, selling over 33 million copies,

01:29:00and its most enthusiastic fans are children.

01:29:03Children can interact with Minecraft

01:29:05and it allows them to be creative in a way that nothing else does.

01:29:09Like reading a book, it's great, it's wonderful,

01:29:11but it doesn't allow them to be part of that fantasy.

01:29:13Minecraft does.

01:29:15And they create these huge worlds for themselves,

01:29:17these huge structures, not because someone is telling them to,

01:29:21but because they want to.

01:29:23And they're probably learning so much about teamwork

01:29:27and design and architecture and the environment

01:29:31just through playing this game.

01:29:33You get lots of teachers now, geography teachers use Minecraft

01:29:36to get children to design villages.

01:29:38You get physics teachers now using Minecraft

01:29:40to teach kids about simple mechanisms.

01:29:43And finally, I made it work.

01:29:46The Minecraft Escalator.

01:29:48It really communicates to kids.

01:29:50My children, my sons, play Minecraft a lot.

01:29:52My older son is on the autism spectrum.

01:29:56To him, Minecraft is so valuable

01:29:59because it's a world of logic and creativity

01:30:01which he immediately understands.

01:30:03And this is the same for all children.

01:30:05It's really helped my son in a lot of ways express himself,

01:30:09which is really profoundly important.

01:30:11I'd love to shake the maker of that game by the hand

01:30:14because I think he's kind of changed my son's life.

01:30:17So the world of games has become like the world of cinema

01:30:20with multi-million dollar blockbusters to one side

01:30:23and low-budget cerebral indie titles on the other.

01:30:26But now there are signs of a third way emerging.

01:30:28We're seeing the beginnings of the gaming equivalent

01:30:31of the critically acclaimed HBO box set.

01:30:34Where did you get the money for this?

01:30:36Drugs. I sell hardcore drugs.

01:30:38Oh, good. You can start helping out with the mortgage then.

01:30:41Yeah, you wish.

01:30:43Dad?

01:30:44Come here, come here.

01:30:46Timmy!

01:30:47Timmy, stay back!

01:30:49Timmy, I am warning you!

01:30:51Don't!

01:30:53The Last of Us is the story of these two survivors

01:30:57in the world that has been ravaged by this pandemic.

01:31:00And we follow Joel, this middle-aged survivor

01:31:03who's willing to do anything it takes to survive

01:31:06across kind of any moral line.

01:31:08And through circumstances, he ends up teaming up

01:31:11with this 14-year-old teenager girl, Ellie.

01:31:14I need a gun.

01:31:15No, you don't.

01:31:16Joel, I can handle myself.

01:31:20No.

01:31:21I think Ellie in The Last of Us was a great female character.

01:31:25She's young, but she's very capable.

01:31:28But she's also got this interesting vulnerability

01:31:31and she's not grown up in our world.

01:31:33I've never been on a plane.

01:31:35Isn't that weird?

01:31:37And she can't really kind of understand it

01:31:40and she sort of brings a unique perspective because of that.

01:31:43She can't envisage a time when young teenage girls

01:31:46were just sort of obsessed with kind of boys and looking good.

01:31:50That's completely alien to her.

01:31:52Is this really all they had to worry about?

01:31:55Boys? Movies?

01:31:58Deciding which shirt goes with which skirt?

01:32:02It's bizarre.

01:32:04Like any self-respecting box-set drama,

01:32:06the game gradually and inexorably moves towards a fulfilling,

01:32:09some might say devastating, climax.

01:32:11For the first time in my life, I was crying

01:32:14as I held a controller and moved a character around.

01:32:17I must have... I'm really glad my wife didn't come in,

01:32:20but I was just kind of moving around going, oh, God.

01:32:23Game designers are getting older.

01:32:25Lots of the big game designers are in their 30s and 40s

01:32:28and they have children,

01:32:29and they suddenly are thinking about games in a different way,

01:32:33not as systems, not as scoring mechanics,

01:32:36but as an emotional experience.

01:32:39Oh, baby girl. It's OK. It's OK, girl.

01:32:43It's OK.

01:32:45In the next five to ten years, we're going to see more games

01:32:48about emotions and about social situations,

01:32:51about politics and about society,

01:32:54because we are now living in an age where we understand

01:32:58what happens around us in a very interactive and a very digital way.

01:33:02So here we are now in 2013

01:33:04with games at a bit of a crossroads.

01:33:06From the monochrome simplicity of Pong,

01:33:08they've transformed via this series of technological and conceptual shockwaves

01:33:12to become the most varied form of entertainment since the written word.

01:33:16But one thing we've seen throughout this show

01:33:18is that gaming never stands still.

01:33:20And sure enough, a new generation of hardware has just arrived,

01:33:23bringing with it a fresh set of capabilities

01:33:25which is going to overturn everything that went before.

01:33:28As their slick promo material makes clear,

01:33:31the new PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are both more powerful than their predecessors,

01:33:35but perhaps the biggest clue to gaming's future

01:33:37is their marked new emphasis on integrated social networking features.

01:33:42Now, why would game systems want to include social networking?

01:33:46Unless maybe social networking already functions like a game.

01:33:56Twitter is a massively multiplayer online game

01:33:59in which you choose an interesting avatar

01:34:01and then roleplay a persona loosely based on your own,

01:34:03attempting to accrue followers by repeatedly pressing lettered buttons

01:34:06to form interesting sentences.

01:34:08The biggest way in which video games have affected our world for me

01:34:12is the increasing gamification of real life.

01:34:15Stuff like Twitter is a game.

01:34:17It's about, you know, small achievements adding up to bigger ones.

01:34:20And it's about playing the rules of whatever you're in.

01:34:24Gamification means applying the mechanics of video games to real life.

01:34:28Now, often this boils down to incentivising people

01:34:31to perform the same action over and over again.

01:34:33Each time Mario headbutts a block, he gets a coin.

01:34:36When he gets 100 coins, he gets an extra life.

01:34:38And these perpetual little pats on the head

01:34:40compel you to bash those blocks for hours.

01:34:43By supplying a constant stream of fun-sized rewards,

01:34:46social networking has, by accident, gamified whole aspects of our lives.

01:34:51Every second, another little gold coin for you to collect.

01:34:54More followers, more retweets,

01:34:57compelling you to interact over and over again.

01:35:00These are games we don't even realise we're playing.

01:35:03Every day you have a drama,

01:35:05and you have everyone sort of piling in to be the one to talk about it,

01:35:10to be the one who gets retweeted.

01:35:12It has become kind of a game that I find myself gauging when I do a tweet

01:35:18how popular the tweet's going to be, and I try to guess ahead of time,

01:35:21like how many retweets is that going to get,

01:35:23and how many favourites is that going to get.

01:35:25In terms of the competition,

01:35:28especially between celebrities or people with the verification tick,

01:35:33every time I see someone, or every time someone's talking about someone,

01:35:37they're talking about how many,

01:35:38oh, I've got 50,000, I've got a million followers, I've got this.

01:35:43And it kind of very much reminded me of a lot of games like that.

01:35:46It was always about how many points you got,

01:35:48and it ups your profile,

01:35:49it makes you feel like you're doing something in your life.

01:35:52What I do on Twitter a lot is just project a false persona,

01:35:56and it's like that Avatar thing, you know what I mean?

01:35:58It's like World of Warcraft or anything like that.

01:36:00The way I am on Twitter is nothing like the way I am in real life.

01:36:03That feels like a game sometimes, you know what I mean?

01:36:05If you're a sociopath, it feels like a game.

01:36:09So, how have video games changed the world?

01:36:12Well, they've entertained us,

01:36:13they've put us in the shoes of cartoon characters in fantastic settings,

01:36:16they've made spatial reasoning fun,

01:36:18they've allowed people to connect and explore non-existent worlds,

01:36:21they've helped bridge the gap between Eastern and Western culture,

01:36:24they've provided a safe space to run riot,

01:36:26to fantasize out loud without anyone actually getting killed,

01:36:28they've handed a generation of creative thinkers

01:36:31a whole new set of tools to express themselves with,

01:36:33and they've inspired and instructed millions of children,

01:36:36not that anyone cares about them.

01:36:37But perhaps most significantly, possibly sinisterly,

01:36:40games have now burrowed by stealth into aspects of our social lives online,

01:36:44and we, in response, have cheerfully invited them in,

01:36:47and that trend's just going to continue

01:36:48until whole areas of our existence have become games.

01:36:52In fact, you'll scarcely be known as you anymore,

01:36:54you'll just be known as Player One.

01:36:56You might as well change your name by d-poll now and have done with it.

01:36:59That's the end of the program now.

01:37:01I mean, I'd say game over, but only a prick would say that.

01:37:04Get out of my show.

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