It seemed to be Channel 4’s big event of the weekend since it was advertised in every commercial break last week – either that or I just watch too much Big Bang Theory. But I was very excited to see Charlie Brooker’s new documentary on how video games have become an intrinsic part of our lives over the past forty years and I wasn’t left disappointed.
Chaptered with a timeline of the 20 most influential games, beginning with 1972’s Pong, the list charted how these particular games rose above the rest – from the political backdrop of the time, the development of new technologies, or just sheer luck, to mark themselves out as games that changed the world of gaming and seeped ever more into the social subconscious.
Backed by known gaming-celebrities Dara O’Briain and Jonathan Ross, the programme explored the early years, with the rise of Pac-Man as the first commercial character, the Commodore Vs Spectrum war, the punk-like explosion of bedroom game designers, the violence-in-video-games political bashing and even the re-claiming of Lara Croft as a feminine icon from her mid-90s ‘lad-mag’ model existence; all were given time here.
There was also a segment documenting Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario and Zelda and his huge contribution to the gaming world. Each game and chapter dealt with its material with a huge amount of admiration, casting its inspiration from and to the world in which it was launched into.
The big leave-on-a-massively-controversial-note, came when number 1 (not in terms of best, just most recent) was declared not as a game, but as a social networking platform. Twitter took the last spot of the night as a game that has changed the world and despite it being the least likely item I thought I’d see, was argued well by Brooker.
It is no coincidence that the PS4 and the XBox One have fully integrated social networking capabilities into their systems. Games have now reached a point in the public domain in which their elements are used to make all kinds of things more fun, more engaging, and more immersive. Of course, we are talking about gamification, and Twitter can be seen as the most successful use of it. Tweets that’ll re-tweet, following popular profiles, gaining as many followers as you can share exactly the same qualities as core video game elements such as levelling up and gaining a greater amount of points; all with the purpose of bragging about it as social currency. And that’s always been the most fun part of gaming.
Before watching, I wondered if at two hours, this was going to be like so many Channel 4 pop-culture countdowns of the past, but Brooker’s gift for filmmaking, his clear love of the subject matter and his usual, dry, adolescent humour (which if you love as much as I do, probably says more about your mental age than most things) had me enthralled from start to finish, and then straight onto my xBox – hello dear friend!