Games

Gaming Special: Welcome to the world of grown up gaming

This isn't just big business - and it's now bigger than Hollywood - games are fast becoming our dominant cultural medium, creating everything from iPhone mega-hits to all-powerful design moguls and the new adult gaming tribes. But can the future really be true?
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It used to be so simple. You had a games console - the Super Nintendo, say - and you had a game. Generally, this game was a cartridge, something in plastic, something you blew on to get the dust off, something you plonked in the console like an oversize shape-sorter toy. Cherchunk, and there it was - cartoon-bright, weird characters, and off you went to win a race, rescue a princess, or defeat the end-of-level boss.

Now, things are a bit different. Yes, the new console overlords Microsoft and Sony have finally released their next generation black-box monoliths - the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 - but the bigger story is how much the blockbuster games already sell.

At the time of writing, Iron Man 3 was the highest-grossing film of 2013, having made $1.2bn total worldwide. And why not? It's got Robert Downey Jr quipping while in a red metal suit that flies and fires rockets. Yet Grand Theft Auto V (pictured)- the violent, pulpy game where players must steal cars and rob banks, released in September 2013 - amassed that figure in little over three days. Three. Days. As your teenage son might mumble to you over dinner, "W'evs, Hollywood."

And the indie game scene has never been more alive. Requiring little more than a nerd and a laptop, inventive micro-budget games can make fortunes for the lone-wolf developers who sell via the online stores of Xbox and PlayStation. The 29-year-old Phil Fish became a millionaire on the back of his low-budget bedroom-gaming smash Fez, in which a 2-D character must navigate a 3-D world.

Console games are just the start. There's no escaping it - gaming, and the money it makes, is a serious, grown-up business.

Take mobile-phone games. In the UK alone, 20 million of us have played mobile games, with 6.2 million playing every day. Take a look down your Tube carriage - these aren't kids.

To me, gaming is about the moment of being there and deciding who you are. (Kevin Levine, creator of BioShock)

Now the Xbox One (pictured) promises that its motion-capture device, the updated Kinect, will be able to detect the movements of six people at once, including 25 individual joints, facial expressions, even heart rates.

The scope of games has never been more complex or ambitious. A game such as Bioshock Infinite deals with the real-life political and racial problems, and more closely resembles a Thomas Pynchon novel than a first-person shooter. Though, don't worry, you can kill people as well.

So here, in this brave new world, is GQ's indispensable, nerd-proof guide to gaming - from the new breed of tribes to our correspondent Danny Wallace's secret life as a video-game actor; from the Shoreditch start-up making millions and bagging a gaming Bafta, to our sex columnist Rebecca Newman attempting to make her iPad orgasm. Readers: power up! And remember: "Press X to not die".

Originally published in the February 2014 issue of British GQ.