At the FMX conference in Stuttgart this week, a conversation with a colleague turned to the differences between the culture of movie lovers and the culture of game lovers. My colleague told me that he thought movie people are far more likely to look back toward earlier work and genres, whereas the culture of gaming has a greater tendency to look forward, rather than back.
I can certainly think of counterexamples to this (eg: the game “Arcadia Remix” by GameLab), but as a general tendency I tihnk it’s valid. In fact, the moment he said it, I flashed back to a vivid memory. In 2001 the Baz Luhrmann film “Moulin Rouge” had just come out. If ever a work celebrated earlier genres – reveled in them, in fact – that would be it. I eagerly saw this film on its opening weekend, and loved it. Then I showed up at work on Monday in New York to find that just about everyone else – almost everybody I worked with – had also raced out to see it, and had also loved it. We hadn’t talked especially about it with each other beforehand – it was just something that we New York film lovers were bound to love.
It happened that the very same week I was flying out to visit a major game development company in Seattle, with whom I worked from time to time. I couldn’t wait to compare notes with my Gamer friends, since we’d had long conversations on all kinds of cool topics, and this was definitely the cool topic du jour. The day I got there I eagerly asked people what they had thought of the new Baz Luhrmann film. Most of them just looked at me quizzically. They all knew about it, but it hadn’t occurred to any of them to go see it.
Except for one guy. He told me that he and his wife had gone to see it, at his wife’s suggestion. But they had both hated it so much that they’d walked out of the theatre after only twenty minutes.
I changed the subject, but somewhere in the back of my mind I realized that I had stumbled upon some fundamental difference. In New York City we had revelled in this film, and all of its brazenly backward looking genre-mixing references. Apparently this aesthetic value does not translate to gamer culture. Perhaps it’s an oversimplification to say “game culture looks forward, film culture looks back”, but clearly there is something going on here.