WHAT'S NEXT | The interactive eXperience

Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.
— James Joyce, Ulysses

by Marco Accordi Rickards


Taking a look at that which is often called a videogame is a refined trap for the intellect, all the more effective the more we believe we are experts and masters of that strange, clumsy object, condemned to be eternally suspended between real and virtual. As if it still made sense, for that matter. The fact is that the interactive medium often proves to be a sort of parvenu, born as an electronic toy based on daring experiments from the 1950s and 1960s which were then dizzyingly enhanced by the globalising industrial explosion of the Atari era, in the United States in the late 1970s, when the businessman-designer-pirate Nolan Bushnell made electronic gaming one of the most popular, pervasive and viral forms of entertainment in the world. Though these games got their start in public spaces, they then came into our homes, sparking a digital revolution that was as chaotic as it was irreversible.
     From the start, that mysterious object labelled as a game was actually something protean, difficult to categorise and understand, at least when examined through the lens of our traditional interpretive tools. Necessarily bound by a double thread to computer technology, the body which interactivity needs to become incarnate and exist, it transforms and changes with a speed that no other cultural product knows. And, as Mary Shelley rightly notes in Frankenstein, ‘Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change’. Moreover, videogames use and assimilate all expressive forms (text, images, and sound) to carry out recombinant synthesis thanks to a formidable reactant, its hyper-personalised quid pluris. What, exactly? That’s clear: interactivity. There it is, the most recent and most fearsome deceit! Our necessary and obligatory participation is at times seen as presumed creative integration, and thus as a negation of artistic auteurship. At others, it’s a smoking gun, evidence of the superficially recreational (and only recreational) nature of something that’s too brazen to fit into the aristocratic salon of cultural forms. These statements are doubly absurd: the first because it doesn’t grasp that being an interactive experience is exactly the stylistic mark of a new kind of art that isn’t made from the crumbs of other art forms (a soundtrack, text, conceptual art, an actorial performance, etc.), but which instead fuses forms of expression that have been rethought and made the most of in an interactive role, in a simulated world that’s so virtual that it’s real.
     The other because the noisy flow of an infinite river of money cannot deafen us to the point that we fail to discern themes, provocations, sparks and emotions, present as much in the indie avant-garde as in the gilded hubs of activity of the mainstream.
     That’s right. The large, mass-entertainment videogame industry—that of Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Xbox, Sony PlayStation and Steam, of online and mobile games, of virtual and augmented reality, and of lots of small yet great big-bangs such as e-sports, gamification, applied games and, today more than ever, the (mysterious) metaverse, a platonic idea that fell into our world from the science fiction of Neal Stephenson, who coined the term in 1992 in his cyberpunk cornerstone Snow Crash—is a colossal one. In 2022, even if it fell by 4.3% year over year for the first time, the industry was worth $184.4 billion globally. That’s an undeniably impressive number, especially when coupled with the fact that there are 3.2 billion gamers around the world. So, we certainly shouldn’t be surprised if a child’s finger thus tries to interact with the cover of an old comic book as if it were the touch screen of a tablet, or if Pikachu, the most famous Pokémon character, has been more recognisable than Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse for a few years now. The point is that today, all things virtual are not placed in contradiction to reality, but rather form an integral part of it, in ever more harmonious synchronicity. In videogames or in other interactive spaces, we meet, we talk, we fight and we fall in love, and that isn’t any less real than when it happens (happened) in a town square or pub. 
     However, the numbers almost seem made to scare us. Especially when they refer to phenomena that we fail to grasp, entirely or in part, because they’re outside the comfort zone of our daily lives. Plus, numbers that immense seem to question the foundations of our cultural paradigms: how can such a green, unruly medium leave the giants that shaped us in the dust? ‘For us who understand life, figures are a matter of indifference’, wisely rebuked Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in The Little Prince. But, in point of fact, understanding videogames is essential! In Italy, at least, things are evolving. Over €2 billion in annual revenue and about 15.5 million gamers: the data coming from IIDEA, the Italian videogame trade association (included in the report from Fondazione Symbola on Cultural Industries) is a snapshot of a country in which gaming is a mainstream phenomenon and thus of great economic importance. An extraordinarily rich market where, however, production has struggled to gain a foothold, more so than in other geographic areas. In other words, lots of interactive products are sold in Italy, but, in proportion, very few are produced, which is a true shame considering how many incredibly talented Italians work in the gaming industry on an international level. It is a relief to note, however, that actions and measures have intensified, some governmental, aimed at facilitating growth in the Italian videogame industry. To state efforts (such as the availability of funds dedicated to interactive projects joined by those for cinema in the 2016 Cinema Law, or including videogames in the tax credit regulation) we must also add the launch of business accelerator programmes in the game development field, like the Cinecittà Game Hub in Rome, Game Farm in Bologna and Quickload in Turin, founded at least in part with the support of local public entities.
     Ultimately, the gaming scene is an extraordinary challenge, entirely oriented around the key words of plurality and embracing diversity: that which is a way to have fun for millions of young people is also an alternative to passive conformity and the static nature of traditional artistic expression. The game designer is the contemporary demiurge of new, infinite worlds, to be shaped with interactivity so that they can accommodate this restless, intergenerational multitude that we all represent, together.