Grand Theft Auto IV players don’t visit the Libertonian for the art.

RECENT ADDITIONS TO THE $46.5-BILLION-A-YEAR VIDEO-GAME INDUSTRY

ow of Mordor, the combinatorial game- play system means that player and random chance create distinct story lines; if you fail to kill an Orc, he’s promoted; if you win, you are given new powers—the game responds dynamically to the play. Underneath all the Tolkien nonsense—wraiths and mag- GRAND THEFT FAR CRY 4 MONUMENT VALLEY ical bows and all that shit—is a complete- AUTO V Platforms: Xbox, Platforms: Mobile ly different response to dying then start- Platforms: PlayStation, PlayStation. devices. ing over: Life in Shadow of Mordor doesn’t Xbox. Copies sold: 7 million. Number of downloads: begin again. Earnings: $1.98 billion. Genre: First-person 2.4 million. Estimated cost to shooter. Genre: Puzzle-solving, No Man’s Sky’s “infinite procedurally develop: $137 million. Plot: A man returns to headache-inducing. generated galaxy,” expected for release this Setting: Fictional south- his Himalayan homeland Puzzle: A series of mazes summer and probably the most anticipated ern-California proxy Los and becomes a rebel through which players game of 2015, is more extreme than Shad- Santos. leader in a civil war. lead the protagonist, Chappelle’s Show syn- Uncontroversial Princess Ida. ow of Mordor or Minecraft, meaning arti- drome: The satirical sociopolitical stance: Headache: A Japanese ficial intelligence will generate the world treatment of violence, Anti-oppressive govern- print- and minimalist- as it is explored. No Man’s Sky will have materialism, and easy sex ment regime. sculpture-inspired land- 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets. Visit- in GTA V attracts players Add-on adventure: scape that has been who enjoy violence, ma- Valley of the Yetis. compared to the optical ing all of them would require 580 billion terialism, and easy sex. Yeti presence: Nominal. illusions of M. C. Escher. years, or roughly 42 times the age of the Searching for Infinity universe. This is not technically infinity, but it is close enough. The world of No Man’s Sky is not just uncharted but also, to a cer- tain extent, unchartable. Artificial intelli- at GameStop gence rather than human beings creates The new generation of video games attempts to give us what real life can’t: endless possibility it without the involvement of the design- By STEPHEN MARCHE ers. Einstein and Bohr famously debated whether God played dice with the universe. SHADOW OF MINECRAFT NO MAN’S SKY Many, many millions more peo- bucks as it charges through a fence. In Grand Theft Auto, the wa- The creators of No Man’s Sky do. MORDOR Platforms: All of ’em. Platforms: PlayStation, ple have visited the Libertonian, Grand ter hazards on the golf course have lost balls at the bottom. In As- But even these newly invented worlds Platforms: Windows, Creator: Overweight eventually Windows. PlayStation, Xbox. Swedish billionaire Genre: Single- or multi- Theft Auto IV’s fake museum, than have sassin’s Creed, you can pet street dogs—a gesture more pleasant lose their newness, no matter how infinite Genre: Third-person Markus “Notch” Persson. player adventure. visited the real Metropolitan Museum in and much weirder than the traditional conversations with hook- they manage to be. Games always leave the fantasy. Objective: Players Release date: 2015. New York. The Met, with its collection of the fin- ers. Even in an iPhone puzzle game like Monument Valley, with its same inevitable deflation after the initial Setting: J. R. R. Tolkien’s choose “creative” or Protagonist: Interplan- est achievements of human civilization, receives 6.24 rich M. C. Escheresque designs, the environment and the pecu- rush of joy—that’s why you always need to legendarium. “survival” mode, both etary explorer/bota- million visitors a year. GTA IV, in which you can shoot liar sensation of moving through impossible architecture as you buy more. In SimCity, you were supposed to Legendarium? The fic- of which involve world- nist/zoologist/space tional universe in which building—resource gath- combatant. digital avatars of those artifacts with a machine gun, sold navigate its labyrinths provide the excitement. Pretending to kill be able to do anything, except it turned out Lord of the Rings is set. ering, domicile con- Setting: Virtually limit- 25 million copies. Video games account for the bulk of Amer- people is fun, but the sense of a world, much more than the kill- you could do only a limited number of things. Plot: A ranger seeks re- structing—in an archaic less, procedurally gener- ican culture today: Minecraft is Web-searched more often than ing, is why you sit down and then stand up after five hours and In Second Life, you could do whatever you venge against the evils agrarian setting. ated open universe. the Bible or Harry Potter, and GTA IV’s successor, GTA V, earned have no idea what happened. could do in the real world, but who really of Sauron for murdering So it’s sort of like a me- Not for: Completists. his family. dieval fantasy version $1 billion in its first three days, making it the fastest-selling cul- Unfortunately, the world always wears off. Even the most gor- wants that? Video games are inherently Bummer! Totally. of SimCity? Sure. tural product of all time. No other art form has the same scale geously detailed of the open worlds, like the Himalayas of Far Cry ephemeral even though they are great and no other art form is in such a constant state of reinvention. 4, reach the inevitable moment when you arrive at their edge, the works of art, because the sense of a world Every few years has brought a revolution in gaming, bringing the little sadness of illusion’s limits. The sense of infinite potential in emerging dissolves on contact. Perhaps all discovery is ephemer- your marriage into a game. Tinder turns sex into a game. Swipe form to now stand at the threshold of what traditionally has con- Minecraft is so attractive—100 million subscribers, sold to Micro- al, and all infinities turn out to be merely human. left. Swipe right. For a few extra dollars, you can take back your stituted the mark of the highest expression of art: the freedom soft for $2.5 billion—that everyone is willing to forget the crudity That is the existential despair at the heart of Grand Theft last move. What happens when Facebook manages to combine of the viewer and the illusion of transcendence. Video games, of every other aspect of the game. But Minecraft only seems in- Auto and Far Cry and Minecraft and no doubt No Man’s Sky as the virtual reality of Oculus with the social network? How will which everybody, including their biggest fans, treats as dispos- finite. In the “Far Lands,” the algorithms underlying the game’s well: They throw themselves hard against the limits of the real- that game—working title: Status—be different from what we able and shallow, are among the most profound works of art be- graphics start to disintegrate. Of course, given human nature, a ity they make with all the cleverness and computational pow- used to call society? ing made today. They reveal the depth of the collective craving man named Kurt J. Mac has quit his job to voyage in search of the er they can muster. Then there’s just another end, just another The revolutions in gaming are the perfect product of a postrev- for contact with the infinite. land where digital illusion dissolves. The journey will take him 25 edge beyond which they cannot pass. There is another way to olutionary age: They generate worlds of vast choice in which you Almost all great video games, and even the not-great ones, op- years. He currently has 370,000 subscribers to the YouTube chan- imagine an infinite game, of course: as actual life. The gamifica- can’t really change anything. Exactly like the Internet or the mall. erate under the same premise: Come for the violence. Stay for the nel on which he is documenting his journey. Only 22 years left to go. tion of the everyday is already encroaching on the sum total of No matter how much variety you can blow up, the structures of world. It’s the stuff you barely notice that makes a game great— It is at the edges that the questions these games start to pose be- human experience. There are already apps to turn your fitness life remain standing. Welcome to the fundamental condition of the sound you make as you land on sandy soil, the way an elephant come far more profound than they have any right to be. In Shad- regime into a game, to turn your shopping into a game, to turn our time. It’s available on Xbox or PS4. ≥

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