Applied Semiotics

or how everything (and I do mean everything) is falling further and further

behind the accelerating hyperreality of video games.

I went to E3 last week and felt old. E3 is the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the biggest video game trade show in the industry. For the last several years its been held at the Los Angeles Convention Center. I'm going to get back to E3 in the specific and video games in general, but before we move on, I want to unpack "feeling old" a little, because it's important to the larger point I'd like this essay to make.

I've felt uncool before. Old is a similar feeling to uncool, because both involve feeling out-of-the-loop. There is a party going on that you weren't invited to, because.... why? Because you don't get it, your clothes are no longer of the mode, you don't understand what people mean when they say "I totally crushed it." You're just a little too slow.

This is ultimately an essay about speed - movement over time. Speed is always a function of time, and speed is of massive importance in a capitalist economy, especially a post-industrial information economy. We talk about computers in terms of processor speed. We talk about the collapsing speed of the news cycle. Much of the information we deal in our day-to-day lives is with is issued with an expiration date, its ability to confer value or competitive advantage is a function of its time criticality - its relationship to time is a goad to speed.

This was the first year at E3 where the product I saw exhibited was a radical departure from my mental model for "video game." What I saw was so cinematic, so photorealistic, so massively multiplayer that it bore as much relation to my old Atari 2600 as a cheetah bears to a trilobite. Sure, there's a line of relatedness, but the distance is so great that comparison is largely an academic exercise.

This has been a long time coming. Anyone that understands Moore's law could have guessed that these consumer-grade consoles were eventually going to get to this level of capability. But we need to put this capability into context. This was the year that I felt like we arrived at the watershed. Sure, video games are in the ascendant. That's not news. What is news is that video games still looked like video games last year. This year they looked like... nothing I'd ever seen before. If the past is another country, the future is a land filled with objects, means, systems and ways that nobody has ever seen before. It is the landscape of the unprecidented. Yes, video games are in the ascendent, but it is a question of scale. It is a question of speed. This is a media on an ascending trendline like an F-18 going into a balls-to-the-wall climb - two pounds of thrust for every pound of airplane, the sky turning outer-space black outside the canopy.

Context. It is not just that video games are amazing. It is that this was the first time that I saw them replacing... everything. Television is still our dominant media form, but in the developed world we already exist in a hybridized space where television is the one-way mass-market high-def delivery pipe that plugs people into the conversation-driven high-findability medium of the Internet. We are a post-literate society, that's not news. But I could feel the money at E3 this year. Bigger than publishing. Bigger than film. The thin edge of the wedge, to be sure, but it was there. The gap is getting bigger. And the rate of growth is accellerating at computer speeds. Think about that, cultural change at computer growth speeds. When Toffler spoke of "Future Shock", he predicted that our post-industrial society would eventually hit a change curve where we would inadvertently alter our own culture so quickly that we would wind up giving ourselves collective culture shock - just by walking out the door for a quart of milk. What he didn't guess was the mechanism, or that the biggest change would be at home, on our living room screens. What he didn't guess was the rate of change, the speed.

Context - video games are the new context of comparison. In my day job we build websites for the automotive industry. The experience gap that we have had to deal with to date is the space between television and a networked personal computer. That gap is effectively gone - we are pumping video to people, creating product-focused reality tv shows, offering things that could never be possible on conventional tv. Our star was on the rise.

But our best offering looks like shit compared to the games I saw. Yes, the game industry has billions of dollars more than we do. But guess what? Nobody cares. The consumers we are targeting will increasingly hold these massively immersive and interactive game environments as their gold standard, their default frame-of-reference. So what that our website has a $300k budget and your game has a $100m budget? Do you think that Joe and Judy America at home give a shit what my budget is? I still have to compete with your game if I want to sell a car. How am I going to do that? I'm not sure, but the result sure isn't going to look like the way we do it now, I can tell you that much. The answer may be not competing at all. Or that the game producers are the new television networks. Or that advertising and the whole of the culture industry as we know it is over.

In his book "The Curve of Binding Energy" John McPhee describes how the calculation of the CBE made nuclear weapons a theoretical possibility. By plotting the curve, physicists could know how much energy would be liberated in the detonation of a nuclear weapon. Once the trend of that curve was known, the arrival of a weapon orders-of-magnitude more powerful than anything in human history was only a matter of time.

The new curve is there for everyone to see. And as the aperture of the gap between video games and everything else widens, the light it will liberate will be blinding. Everything else will seem shabby and dull by comparison. The culture industry is in for a turbulent ride.

This isn't the end of the world. As Bruce Sterling likes to point out, the past is always with us, and the present is composted to make the future. When the bomb was born in July 1945, we had to learn to live with it.

Adjustments will need to be made. Fast, as in "with speed."