David Braben ponders if the golden age of games is really here yet

Here’s a question: When did the games industry start? Is it, a) the Fifties, b) the Seventies, or c) it still hasn't started yet? Frontier Developments’ David Braben has been pondering the subject for some time, and he’s ready to present his genuinely surprising answer. You may have been following the medium for several decades, but Braben believes that, in a very important sense, the birth of the industry has yet to happen. We have seen only the building blocks, and everything we have played so far will eventually be viewed as the period in which gaming just got going.

Braben was a guest speaker at this year's Game City.

The claim might seem bizarre – and more than a little hyperbolic – when you look back to the release of Pong, Pac-Man and Jet Set Willy, follow their lineage through Mario, Sonic and Lara Croft, all the way to the richly textured worlds of Grand Theft Auto IV and Bioshock. Clearly, we’ve been interacting with something all these years, but how would you answer Braben’s question?

Did William Higinbotham's Tennis For Two crank the engine all the way back in 1958? Is 1961’s Spacewar where you’d place the pin? Did gaming shift into high gear with the first home computers and consoles, or was it the transition to 3D that made the difference? Braben effectively places them all under one banner; throwing Frogger in with Assassin's Creed 2 in the belief that, in many years to come, the world will see the industry’s progress until now in the same way as we regard cinema prior to the Thirties – valuable, but still preamble to the medium’s true coming-of-age. “Our industry hasn't yet begun,” he said. “Our descendants will look back in many, many years time and [ask], 'When was the industry started?’ And I don't think that time has happened yet.”

Braben explains that the games industry has tried to ape the film industry too closely, losing sight of what gaming is and should be. Even now, developers are still trying to come to terms with what can be achieved. “It was a while before [filmmakers] recognised that film was a narrative medium,” he says, “and I think it's been a while now to recognise that games are not necessarily a narrative medium. One of the films that I was influenced as a kid by was Star Wars, the first one, which was a wonderful film, but the narrative component of it was extremely simplistic and derivative and, to me, quite dull. It's a standard rescuing the princess story.

We have now reached a stage where players create their own experiences.

But that’s not why I liked watching it. I liked watching because you were immersing in a world that felt very different to our world, and it reminded me much more of the social storytelling around a fire where characters are not necessarily constant, and where people tell stories to each other partly as social experience and the narrative is not as important. It's talking about stories in a world. And that's what games are, or should form, or may well become.”

… continued