In the List of Top-Selling Games, Clear Evidence of a Sea Change
February 1, 2008
By SETH SCHIESEL
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/01/arts/01game.html

Ever since video games decamped from arcades and set up shop in the nation's living rooms in the 1980s, they have been thought of as a pastime enjoyed mostly alone. The image of the antisocial, sunlight-deprived game geek is enshrined in the popular consciousness as deeply as any stereotype of recent decades.

That's changing. Online PC games in which thousands of players gab and explore together are attracting tens of millions of subscribers. Back in the living room, Nintendo's revolutionary Wii system has helped forge a new audience for gaming among families, women and older people, who had been turned off by the complex, violent and solitary adventures that once dominated the market. Paradoxically, at a moment when technology allows designers to create ever more complex and realistic single-player fantasies, the growth in the now $18 billion gaming market is in simple, user-friendly experiences that families and friends can enjoy together.

Those are the lessons that emerge from the list of the 10 top-selling console games of 2007. The list, released recently by the market research company NPD Group, highlights the soaring popularity of mass-market franchises like Guitar Hero and the Wii at the expense of critically acclaimed projects aimed at the same young-male audience the industry has relied on for years. (As recently as 2006, sales charts were covered with single-player diversions and sports games.)

Put another way, it may be a sign of the industry's nascent maturity that as video games become more popular than ever, hard-core gamers and the old-school critics who represent them are becoming an ever smaller part of the audience.

That is not so unusual in other media. In most forms of entertainment there is a divide between what is popular with the masses and what is popular with the critics. Plenty of films get rave reviews but never make it past the art houses. Plenty of blockbusters are panned.

The reasons for that seem fairly clear. Film, books and music (and food, for that matter) have been around long enough to have developed highly sophisticated cognoscenti whose tastes have little to do with the mass audiences that still drive those markets. Food critics have as much sway over Red Lobster as book critics do over Danielle Steel.

That has not been the case with video games. Game critics and players have been closely aligned in their tastes, perhaps because the writers and buyers came from more or less the same pool of tech-savvy young men.

But judging from the Top 10 list, that paradigm may be breaking down. And that's not necessarily a bad thing for either the financial or the creative health of video games. The importance of the mass audience in gaming's spectacular growth is seen most clearly in the success of Nintendo's Wii, which is far outselling its more technically advanced hardware competitors, the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and PlayStation 3 from Sony. The Wii is easy to use, while the 360 and PS3 are aimed at veteran players. Critics and game developers have been known to gripe about the Wii's selling so well even though there aren't many "great" games for that system.

The consumer doesn't care. Wii Play was the No. 2-selling game of last year even though it received an abysmal score of 58 out of 100 at Metacritic.com, which aggregates reviews. Mario Party 8 for the Wii made the list at No. 10 with a similarly bad Metacritic rating of 62. Both Wii Play and Mario Party 8 are basically collections of mini-games, like table tennis, portrayed through simple graphics. To someone steeped in game lore, that's pretty lame. To someone who just bought a Wii for the family, that's pretty cool.

Of course, if such games are making the Top 10, that means that some games adored by the gaming experts are now falling short of the best-seller list.

The showcase example is BioShock, the noir thriller set beneath the Atlantic Ocean. BioShock has already become one of the most acclaimed games of all time (Metacritic score of 96) and has taken most of the 2007 game-of-the-year laurels from various groups and publications (including the Game Critics Awards announced on Thursday). Yet it failed to crack the Top 10 in sales, perhaps because the very qualities that made it such a critical darling ? a complex story underpinned by a sophisticated interpretation of Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism ? made it less accessible to a mass audience than the running and gunning of Halo 3 or Call of Duty 4, which both made the top-sales list.

Similarly, the role-playing masterpiece Mass Effect, the fabulous mythology vehicle God of War II and Valve's excellent compilation the Orange Box all failed to crack the Top 10. There is hardly a question that two years ago all of those games would have made the list. Now they have simply been crowded out of the top echelon by less intimidating fare like Guitar Hero.

And perhaps it is not a coincidence that BioShock, Mass Effect and God of War II are all purely single-player games. You can't play any of them with friends, either over the Internet or on the couch. Nine of the 10 top-selling games of 2007 include a significant multiplayer component. The only exclusively single-player game that made the list was Assassin's Creed, an adventure set in the Crusades.

If new acceptance by the masses is one pillar of gaming's future, gaming's emergence as a social phenomenon is the other. Hard-core gamers are still willing to spend 30 hours playing alone through a single-player story line, but most people want more human contact in their entertainment.

That is why World of Warcraft, the king of online games, now has more than 10 million users. That is why Guitar Hero is now a fixture on campus. That is why Nintendo has become the dominant mass-market game company.

And even a gamer can admit that there's nothing wrong with a little human contact once in a while.