I’ve been following the pending release of Gamer, the new film by Spartastic actor
Gerard Butler. As an urban hermit who hasn’t actually been to a movie theater
in months, I’m interested in the flick for reasons other than sating my popcorn
dependency.
Gamer is the latest offering in an emergent genre of writing and film I call MMOReality – flicks that cover the merging cultures of online games and real life.
If Pixels and Policy can be accused of anything, it’s that we tend to take a rosy view on the merging of virtual and real worlds. That said, there’s something viciously fun about imagining all of the horrible ways the unity of web and world could go awry.
The genre has a proud history: Blade Runner. Minority Report. Ender’s Game. Tron. The slightly newer Tron with an overweight Jeff Bridges and a new graphics card. By all accounts Gamer is good people, but that’s only half of what makes the film so compelling. With a wide slated release and in-your-face marketing, Gamer could bring millions of new avatars to the welcoming shores of online gaming.
There’s nothing particularly special about Gamer. In many ways it’s a retread of The Running Man, but with Butler’s version we have average Americans logging on to a virtual combat world as avatars. The twist? The avatars are actually death row inmates engaged in a bloody battle royale. Any inmate who survives 30 rounds wins his freedom. You can figure out the rest from here.
Gamer is going to provide a boost to the online gaming industry by acquainting millions in the audience with a type of gaming experience that they may never have found otherwise. This follows closely on the heels of a point I made in my earlier post, Sleuths: Or How Interactive TV Makes You Smarter – the majority of consumers are introduced to new technology by means of old technology. In this case, the theater introduces massively multiplayer gaming.
Perhaps the spike in World of Warcraft or America’s Army subscriptions will only be temporary, but as with all booms, a good portion may well stick around past the initial phase of outsized expectation. Online games, as Edward Castronova has shown, are inherently social. Once a new player is connected, they will reach out to others in their real-world social group as a means of augmenting and strengthening both real and virtual social networks.
Another recent sci-fi movie, District 9, grossed around $83 million to date. Assuming $10 per ticket – the reason why I’m not included in any box office stats since maybe Titanic – that’s 8.3 million people. If we figure around the same for a big-ticket name like Gerard Butler, and then cut out a good half who may already play online games (a liberal sum to cut), that’s still 4 million new exposures.
If only 10% of those go on to play an online game because of their exposure to Gamer, that’s 400,000 new subscriptions. That’s only slightly fewer than the current number of active accounts in Second Life. With an optimistic prediction, we begin to see how Gamer could bring virtual worlds and online gaming into the mainstream.
So, why does it matter? One big reason: If online gaming goes mainstream, the number of innovative users and organizations with knowledge of and access to virtual worlds spikes. As the population of players grows, so does the potential for innovation in virtual worlds beyond entertainment.
Virtual worlds will benefit from the economy of scale: You’re much more likely to get a good idea for using virtual worlds in long-distance education when you have 400,000 teachers than when you only have 4,000.
And they said we’d never learn anything from movies.
