When video games went mainstream, the Pentagon realized their potential as a promotional tool, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on war-based games. Now the wheel has come full circle as they use game-style interfaces for real-life tools of war.
by Marijam Did
Part 1
By the 1990s, video games were mainstream, both as a creative product delivering new and profound moments of joy and as a space for political actors to create political realities. As profits soared, this creative industry succumbed to the claws of financialization and corporatization.
It was a decade of bursting creativity and the calcification of business practices. Games like Cosmology of Kyoto (1993) or Vib-Ribbon (1999) were revered by art critics, and even acquired by institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art for their profound aesthetic and conceptual aspects.
On the flip side, studio sizes grew, leading to a bloated managerial class, with their lingo and auditing of certain creative ambitions. The orientation of games as products, or artifacts of popular entertainment, along with the mechanization of production and marketing processes, rendered the games industry homogeneous in terms of both output and cast of creators.
At the same time, game distributors clamped down on pirating, tightened their grip and increased their share of the pie for offering their shop fronts to game developers. Thrown to the margins, many smaller game developers could not keep up. Any potential ambition for a mass movement of artistic game development guilds or cooperatives, fair trade hardware solutions, and diverse themes and mechanics in video games was buried here . . . for a while.
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