Abstract Trouble in River City: The Social Life of video games by
Download 6.01 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- An Industry Timeline
A Note on MethodsThis work attempts something of a methodological breaking of the mold. Whereas most communication studies works fall exclusively to one side of the qualitative/quantitative dichotomy, this project proceeds by ignoring it altogether. Instead, it embraces the “Michigan School” approach, which chooses methods because of their suitability for a given problem rather than their place in a research tradition. The original data collected represent numerical data gathered via traditional survey, experiment and content analysis, plus observations from participant observation, and notes gathered from scores of interviews with industry players. The former add to the statistical analysis, while the latter help fill in the qualitative texture of the work, informing many of the hypotheses. Interviews and talks were conducted as part of a course taught in the Spring of 2002, via email, and over the phone, and over two years of attendance at the game industry’s annual mammoth trade show known as E3. The interviewees were developers, publishers, code writers, sound engineers, art directors, marketers, consultants, industry reps, game journalists, first-time and hard-core players. Some of the interviews were gathered as part of a separate, previously published project surveying the economic structure of the industry (Williams, 2002). Altogether, this wide array of people allowed for input and information from every angle of the game industry from the creators, through the financial middlemen, and down to the actual players and game community members. Chapter 2. An Industry History The U.S. video game industry is one of the most profitable and dynamic industries in entertainment. Consider the following: The industry is larger than motion pictures. Some of its products rank among the most memorable and profitable pieces of popular culture in the last quarter-century: games featuring the humble plumber Mario have made twice as much money as all five Star Wars films combined (Borrow, 2003). It is also an industry that nearly wasn’t—one that survived technological upheaval, a rapidly changing consumer base, and a host of leaders marked as much for their personal excesses and luck as for their insight and technical brilliance. Understanding the industry’s history accomplishes two goals in this dissertation. First, it establishes a backdrop and a basic timeline for the social analysis that follows. Secondly, it introduces the concept of the active audience, a concept sometimes surprising to business elites. The fortunes and failures of the major game firms can be explained as much by their management and innovations as by their recognition of a dynamic consumer base making the transition to digital technologies. The economist Joseph Schumpeter has written of “gales of creative destruction” in business—changes that shift paradigms and transform the market (Schumpeter, 1943). A savvy consumer base thriving on interactive technologies turns out to be a gale of creative destruction just as powerful as any new technology (Cowan, 1999). An Industry TimelineIn the early 1960s, game development took place in university basements, with young and enthusiastic programmers working long hours for their own gratification. In 2003, the scene looks startlingly different. The developers are still young, enthusiastic and hardworking (and still mostly male), but are now part of vast corporate empires acting more like Hollywood teams than hobbyhorses (Pham, 2003a). Large hardware and software empires such as Electronic Arts, Microsoft and Sony now dominate video games, and their billion-dollar revenues point to the giant scale of an increasingly stable, mainstream, thriving industry. The industry’s modern structure is marked by vertical integration, professional management, and a fiercely competitive marketplace driven by the non-interoperability1 of the major game systems. Games are actually four overlapping markets: console systems, handheld games, arcades units and PC games. An emerging fifth market could be said to be the networked game business, driven as much by cell phone use as by Internet-based games. The full details of corporate structure and competition can be found elsewhere (Williams, 2002). But for historical purposes, the question is How did we get from university basements to such modernistic corporate hegemony? The story involves individual companies and colorful managers as well as a changing population. G
1951-1970 Birth of Industry 1970-1977 Rise & Fall of Atari Empire 1977-1985 Nintendo Era 1985-1995 Next Generation & Network Era 1995-2003 First Game Boom, Crash } } Modern Era an be considered the end of the first game era, and a time when the industry was essentially given up for dead. The second, and we might say modern, era that we are in now began when the Nintendo corporation picked up the pieces and began rebuilding the industry. From its efforts, the game industry as a whole has rebounded to surpass the first game era. The broad strokes of the story can be understood by looking at the sales figures, which show a classic boom-and-bust pattern. Figure B gives the combined revenues for the home and arcade business in constant 1983 dollars.2 The basic rise-fall-rise pattern is visually apparent (with arcade data removed, this boom and bust would appear even more dramatic). 
Figure B. The rise, fall and rise of the industry. Data Source: Amusement & Music Operators Association, Nintendo, PC Data, NPD, Veronis Suhler, Vending Times (1978-2001). The initial large spike from 1977 to 1983 was driven almost entirely by the success of Atari in both arcades and home units. The subsequent collapse was driven by Atari’s demise; Home game sales bottomed out at $100 million by 1986 (see Figure H in Chapter 4). After the Nintendo revival in the late 1980s, a host of newer, more advanced and capable home machines flooded the marketplace. Over the ensuing ten years new entrants propelled the home console industry to large sales growths, and by the mid-1990s the industry had stabilized into an integrated and competitive field whose ebbs and flows related more to product lifecycles than overall health; the dip in 1995 was a transitional period between systems for the major manufacturers, not a period of poor health. The First Game Era, 1951-1985 Download 6.01 Mb. Share with your friends:
|
