JOHNNY L. WILSON / Editor, Computer Gaming World
Johnny L. Wilson, 43, has a doctorate in Old Testament studies. But a hobby as a personal computer game whiz led him to his career as co-founder of Computer Gaming World, a 12-year-old magazine based in Anaheim Hills that was purchased in August by the New York magazine giant Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. The monthly magazine reviews personal computer games--as opposed to video games--and is designed for adults. He spoke recently with Times staff writer Dean Takahashi about the future of interactive games.
Q: How did you get started with computer game reviews?
A: I got into this because the publisher, Russell Sipe, was a longtime friend of mine and got me into this. We were members of the same war game club when we were graduate students in theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., from about 1978 to 1980. Computers were just coming into their own. He saw a need for a magazine to thoroughly cover computer games, and we switched careers. At that time, general computer magazines gave very little space to computer games. He founded it in November, 1981.
*
Q: What kind of growth has the magazine seen?
A: It was 48 pages when it started with black-and-white text. It was sold in computer stores and had a base of 5,000 targeted customers. Today, we have 85,000 paid subscribers and more than 200 pages per issue. At the end of August, Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. bought us. They are preserving our editorial side and are expanding our marketing efforts. We’re excited about that.
*
Q: What is the hottest issue in the game industry?
A: The issue on everybody’s mind is convergence of the high-tech industries that will lead to the so-called information superhighway. Is it real? If you combine Silicon Valley and Hollywood to create interactive entertainment for an information highway, the question is whether that marriage leads to something we’d call Sillywood or something interesting. I think we have to make sure Hollywood doesn’t spend years relearning the lessons of the past. We need interactive games with depth, human interest and sensitivity. Not just hack and slash, beat ‘em up games.
*
Q: Do you think games will continue to be made by small companies that feed games to large publishers, or will the giants begin to dominate as the research and development becomes more sophisticated and expensive?
A: It’s ironic. Even as consolidation is occurring and game companies are all finding strategic partners for an interactive future, the advance of multimedia has empowered the little cottage publisher to pop up out of nowhere. I don’t think I’ve seen so many new start-ups since the early 1980s. The energy at the top and this talk about an information highway seems to have created more entrepreneurs on the bottom who are willing to take the risk to build their idea of a multimedia experience.
*
Q: As computer games become more popular, is there something changing about the attitude that people who play such games are weird?
A: That’s an attitude we run into a lot. Most people say it must be nice to play games for a living. It’s real hard to take games seriously because we play them when we are children. It’s real tough to admit that there is a value to playing when you’re an adult. There very much is. Play is a valuable part of human experience. It enables us to try out new options with no risk, except maybe losing face in the game. It allows us to try out different strategies or approaches. In role-playing games, play even allows us to be an entirely different person than we are character-wise. The point is we learn by playing.
*
Q: Video games are getting a lot of heat now for violence. What is your reaction?
A: I think part of the reason they’re getting so much heat is that they are perceived as being for children. Since I don’t believe games are just for children, I take a different perspective. My concern is that violence not be the only solution in a game. It’s easier to program violent games than it is to program social games. With social games, you have to be able to program a lot of different responses and reactions. For example, if you program a conversation in an old Western saloon: You come into the saloon, you talk to the bartender character. You have a choice of things to say, and the bartender has to be programmed to react to each one of those. If the conversation goes on for a while, you build up a lot of different reactions that that conversation could follow. Whereas, if you just walked into the saloon and started firing, that’s much easier to program. In the social game, you have to learn to act socially. It’s a technological problem that has to be overcome if there ever is such a thing as an interactive movie. Video games don’t have that much memory. You just shoot. If you keep the body there, bleeding or crying and asking for medical attention, it takes up memory. You want to get to the next bad guy. So the game takes the ultimate cop-out by making the body disappear. It sanitizes the results of the violence and (lets you) shoot the next guy and the next guy. What I am programming for the player is that the violent solution is the easy, clean, sanitized solution. You don’t even run out of bullets. Computer games at their best give you more than one way to solve a problem. In video games, violence is the easy solution. In life, it shouldn’t be the easy solution.
*
Q: Will pornographic computer games become wildly popular?
A: The anecdotal evidence is that X-rated films drove the video recorder player industry. People think adult material will drive the mass market for computer software games. I think what will really drive the market are interesting games that have a semblance of reality enough to feed a suspension of disbelief and follow the cardinal rule that in stories, movies and games, it helps if we care about the people we read about or watch.
*
Q: Is that the game player or the former theological student speaking?
A: A little of both.
*
Q: On personal computer versus video games . . .
A: I don’t think Nintendo or Sega will woo the hard-core gamer from the personal computer. Both kinds of systems have their advantages, but PCs are more powerful and can also be used for business.”
*
Q: On controlling violence . . .
A: “I don’t believe in censorship, but I do believe in informed consumers. As early as 1990, I advocated a ratings system to get game makers to voluntarily put codes on labels for bad language, nudity, sex or excessive violence.”
*
Q: On minimum requirements for computer game hardware . . .
A: “It’s constantly going up. Each time there is a groundbreaking game, it forces people to upgrade to new, more powerful computers.”
*
Q: On playing the games . . .
A “Outside of work, I play eight to 10 hours a week.”
