Got Game, Will Travel.(Brief Article)

I've come to the game developers conference in San Jose, California, as a media skeptic to play what designers here call a "quest game." Instead of seeking some magic sword, though, or the map to some ersatz treasure, I'm searching for a digital game that rocks: something beautiful and culturally significant yet profitable. Wish me luck?

The terrain isn't promising. Everywhere fussy, grubby graphics are seething on Xbox consoles, machine guns are gack-ack-acking and cars are skidding into patchily shaded walls. Tabloid wisdom pegs the game biz as a bunch of geeks and nerds feeding fantasies to agoraphobes, sociopaths and illiterates. While I meet plenty of friendly, delightful people, there's enough cruel truth in the stereotype to keep it slouching into my mind. Beauty, meaning and pleasure don't appear to be this crowd's ambrosia.

But it's also clear that the game-industry beast is preparing to morph. Digital games "will be to the 21st century what cinema was to the 20th," conference organizers promise me, quoting I forget whom. The market-research firm NPD reports that sales of videogames and related hardware reached $9.4 billion last year in the United States alone, outgrossing the movie business for the first time ever.

The troops are psyched. Reedy guys with stuffed animals on their backpacks go around repeating, "In Korea, you know, game designers are like rock stars!" (See you in Korea, honey.) But the point is, I am clearly not alone in hoping that the industry bringing us Wrestlemania X8 will deepen culturally as it expands. Workshops about dealmaking and audience manipulation are now supplemented with lectures on "Creating Characters With Dimension and Depth." Ongoing debates rage among attendees about whether an injection of "dramatic narrative" or a game's inherent "rule set" best generate "deeper meaning."

Fellow questers swarm the halls and bars. I run into pilgrims like Suzanne Seggerman from WebLab.org, who hopes to bring "social awareness into game design." Academic heavies like "Hamlet on the Holodeck" author Janet Murray are in the house, tracking the industry's progress toward something that might pass for passion. Game artist Eric Zimmerman, CEO of gmlb.com, and a crew of experiment-prone designers who instigated the first "Annual Indie Game Jam" this year in Oakland are playing games with games people play. I get to see some of their cross-referential, ...