Translator: TEDx Milano Translators Reviewer: Michele Gianella
You never forget the first videogame you play.
For me, born in the 70s, and I guess for many of my peers,
the first video game was Pong.
But I have to say that my first real start
was when, for my 10th birthday,
I got a Commodore 64.
I began writing my first programs,
my first games,
and realised what I wanted to do when I grew up.
So, I devoted myself to programming
and video game development.
Since then, I've been immersed in this fascinating world,
and all its developments.
I must admit, there have been
incredible, unimaginable changes.
In 40 years we have gone from extremely simple concepts,
like Pong - just a bar and a square ball -
to the extremely realistic and varied world of today
where the player is able to do practically anything.
I like to say
that 40 years in video game development
have been equivalent to 4,000 years of history
in the development of human civilization.
And video games today, in fact,
are no longer just simple entertainment
that we got used to in the beginning, in the 70s and early 80s.
Now they are something much more complex.
And we should try to understand
the impact they have in society today.
In this brief discussion we'll try to analyse them from various perspectives.
We'll start with the economic impact
then move on to the cultural and artistic impact
then on to the technological aspect
and finally the social aspects, which affect us all.
Let's start with the economic aspects
which are, perhaps, a little more striking.
To put the world of video games in context
let's investigate it in parallel
with other modern entertainment.
The record industry is worth around $15 billion a year.
Cinema is bigger, worth around $40 billion.
The video game industry, though,
is by far the biggest of all these,
and this year's estimates are almost $140 billion.
That's a really huge amount.
Obviously the North American market
and the Asian markets are the biggest.
In America, video games provide work for around 220,000 people
in Britain around 50,000.
But even in Italy there is a lot of activity,
and things are moving in some very interesting directions.
In Italy, the turnover is about 1.5 billion euros a year
but is still growing.
There are also 80 studios
developing some very interesting and innovative products.
So, even here, this market, this industry
is in a phase of very rapid development.
Turning to the cultural and artistic aspects,
I'd say that it is obvious
that to develop a video game today, you need some remarkable artistic skills.
This is a photo I took at an exhibition in Singapore.
It's a painting, an oil painting on canvas
created by the Ubisoft Singapore artists.
And it was created as pre-production, concept art
for one of the Assassin's Creed games.
So we can see that this is, really
artistic work of a very high standard, of excellent workmanship
for a video game.
But the interesting thing is that video games
can themselves become
an artistic vehicle for individual expression
for their creators.
And this is also something
that has not happened just recently.
In the early 80s a first attempt was made
to create a sort of interactive drama.
The game was called Deus Ex Machina
produced by Automata 284, an English company.
It was basically an interactive drama.
In the box the game came in
there were two drawers.
Obviously, at that time
you had to load video games on cassettes
and had to wait five - ten minutes before you could start playing.
Actually often longer.
Anyway, in this pack
in addition to the cassette containing the actual game
there was also an audio cassette
to be played during the game on your stereo system,
so one can follow the narrative
and understand exactly what the story's main character is going through.
Some of the leading British actors of the day
were involved in the project.
The game was also really simple, actually.
But it was based, very loosely,
on Shakespeare's "Seven ages of man".
In practice, we moved from DNA
through childhood, youth, maturity,
old age and, finally, the death of the player.
Very simple mini-games, which, of course, make us smile today
but Deus Ex Machina was the first
to push video games up to another level.
A higher level, let's say, of artistic expression.
Today this is one of the most interesting aspects
in the modern video games scene.
Maybe not so much for so-called AAA productions,
which obviously make billions;
but for the smaller productions from independent developers.
And I would like to show it to such a game, This War of Mine.
Maybe somebody here has played it.
It is a very interesting product because it basically shows
how today's developers try to present their stories
and also raise awareness on a range of issues.
The game "This War of Mine"
is inspired by the tragic Balkan war of the 1990s.
It's unusual as it doesn't tell the story from the soldiers' point of view,
and it definitely doesn't glorify military action;
but, rather, it reveals the cruelty of the war
and how it was experienced by the civilian population.
Let's watch a short trailer.
For soldiers, war is all about victory.
For us, it was about getting food.
I lived through hell with these people.
We were a group.
We would do anything to stay alive.
I will never forget those days.
The things you see in war
stay with you
forever.
So, it would be true to say
that today's video games are, in their own right,
one of the most interesting forms of individual artistic expression
that we can place almost at the same level as literature or cinema.
Now we come to the third level, technological impact.
This is a marriage, if you like, between video games and technology.
There are some interesting aspects
that have evolved, and in a sense been turned on their head
in a totally unexpected way.
Video games are created as a technological product
inspired by technological innovation.
The very first low-cost microprocessors
such as the Mos 6502, the Zilog Z80, were core products
that allowed the first video game systems
to be released for Atari 2600, Commodore 64, to the ZX Spectrum.
All the young people of my generation remember these machines
with great pleasure and a lot of affection.
But then something happened
which was really inspirational,
and video games became the driving force of technology.
A reversal of perspective took place.
This was very interesting, dare I say, even fascinating.
And this change happened with the Commodore Amiga's relaunch
in the mid-80s, in 1985.
The Commodore Amiga
had originally been conceived as a video game console.
But because of the recession in North America in 1983
the Amiga Corporation was forced to completely repurpose the project
and redesigned it as a home computer.
And it was light years ahead of any other machine at the time.
The first IBM, DOS-based PCs
were created just to run spreadsheets
and simple office utilities.
The Amiga, on the other hand, was an all-round, multimedia machine.
Something that had never been seen before.
And basically, from then on
the efforts put in making video games more appealing
started to influence, inspire technology in many other sectors.
This is something that today is even more obvious.
For example, let's think about driverless cars.
Much of the hardware now being used
in autonomous driving systems
to crunch the data and running the AI video systems
have actually evolved from the GPUs produced by Nvidia and AMD
that were originally designed
for the 3D graphics' real-time manipulation,
something that requires a large number of mathematical operations.
Also in other fields, such as virtual reality.
The virtual reality systems we see everywhere today
began to be used on a large scale thanks to video games.
But it is a field that allows us to have
many other perspectives and many other applications.
By the way, right now
I'm setting up a new research program
with my colleagues in Singapore
to try to alleviate some of the symptoms of Alzheimer's
based on the technology of virtual reality based video games.
So, there is a whole range of really incredible opportunities
that are opening up thanks to technology originally designed for games.
Finally, let's get to the social impact,
which is, perhaps, a little more controversial.
And there are some myths that must be debunked here.
First of all, that video games are something that isolate people.
The opposite is true: video games bring people together.
There are millions of adults and kids who play together, meet up
and follow each other online at all times of day or night.
So, really, video games are something that brings people together,
instead of dividing them.
Another misconception is that only teenagers play these games.
That is absolutely not the case.
Today, the average gamer has an average age of 35,
and almost half of them are adults.
They are no longer children or teenagers.
Another surprising fact
is that, in the total population of gamers
half of them are actually female, so we're not just talking about men.
Women with an average age of 44.
Obviously, this is an indication of the great flexibility
and great variety that we have in video games today.
The games that a 50 year old female enjoys
are clearly not the same games a child of 15 would look for.
When you look at the more playful games, like Candy Crush or Hidden Object
and games like these, which involve searching for hidden objects
these are very popular with a specific type of gamer.
In addition, video games are becoming popular
in many other areas of our lives
thanks to a phenomenon known as gamification.
Gamification can be defined
as taking some of the typical aspects of video games
such as points, rankings, levels, and so on
and applying them to completely different fields.
And we see this in some companies
that are using it to motivate their employees.
But if you have, for example
a fitness app on your mobile,
this works in exactly the same way.
It keeps you motivated, by constantly reminding you what you did yesterday
how much should you run today, how much your friend did
so you can run more than them, and so on.
And it goes on: it awards you with prizes, badges
trying to motivate you in ways that closely recall video games -
the field these ideas come from - one after the other.
This is a very interesting aspect,
that obviously affects us all.
But there is, of course, a downside.
I can't just mention the positive side.
Since the late 80s, video games
have always been thought of
as a violent hobby, not suitable for young children.
This is actually something that the industry took note of, of course
and set up a lot of rating authorities
in Europe, North America, Asia
that are responsible for indexing and rating video games
according to a whole series of criteria
to tell whether they're appropriate or not for a certain type of user.
So, just like in the cinema
there are games suitable for children and games that are not suitable.
The problem is that these ratings, in fact, are often ignored.
There was some recent research, in Britain
that showed that practically half of the families interviewed
allow their children to play games they theoretically weren't supposed to.
So the ratings are there, but you have to know about them
be aware of them and apply them.
I think, unfortunately
that here in Italy the situation is pretty much the same.
It's a situation we need to improve.
There is another problem that is often mentioned
and that can have serious consequences.
According to Build, even,
Germany was banned from the recent world championships
because the players were playing video games well into the night.
This may be true.
Obviously,
video game addiction is a serious matter.
It has also recently been classified as a recognised disorder
by the World Health Organization.
In fact, any type of hobby or activity can become an obsession.
We must be careful and do everything in moderation.
In my opinion, a more serious problem we must take into consideration
is linked to video game addiction.
There are now games, mainly the Free To Play games, but not just those
which try to entice players
to spend on the so-called loot box.
These are, let's say, surprise packages which contain rewards
actually we don't know exactly what we'll find in there
and the prizes are distributed in a pseudo-random way.
Some of them are very rare
and the player obviously tries to get hold of.
So they keep spending, waiting for that particular prize to appear -
and of course, they'll hardly ever appear.
This is a truly perverse mechanism
that can be addictive in the same way
in an way that is absolutely analogous to gambling.
There are countries where this type of game
has already been banned in Japan and in Belgium.
But this is an area where I really hope
that the industry itself will understand
they have to apply a degree of self-censorship and moderation
without waiting for legislation.
And certainly, such games
should never be played by minors.
So, in conclusion,
video games and games in general are not just games anymore.
As the historian Johan Huizinga said,
in his book "Homo Ludens" published in 1938,
in real life, there is always something primary in play
that transcends daily life's immediate needs
and gives the activity meaning.
All games have a meaning.
The aim of a game is to help us learn something new
to practice, to rehearse, even to distract us in certain cases.
But the idea is that the game, actually,
goes beyond just the game itself
and it is then that the videogame becomes a incredible tool.
Because it's extremely flexible
it can be used in any discipline for any purpose.
So games, actually, video games
do not end with Game Over, but keep going.
They become a steady influence in our lives.
Thank you.
(Applause)