Examining the Games People Play

The first Skee-Ball alleys--a kind of cross between bowling and darts--showed up in arcades in 1914. But at 36 feet long, the game required some significant strength to play properly. In 1928, however, the lane was shortened to 14 feet, and Skee-Ball became a roaring success.

Suddenly, everybody--men, women, children and the elderly--was playing Skee-Ball. In the 21st century, the game remains a fixture in arcades jammed with video games, despite the fact that even a couple of Skee-Ball lanes, many of which are now down to 10 feet, can take up as much space as half a dozen game machines.

It’s a little odd that something nearly a century old remains a hallowed fixture in arcades whose cli

entele is generally obsessed with playing the latest technology. But that says something about the video game industry and why video games haven’t become mainstream.

Although the industry says that most video game players are adults and perhaps half are female, those figures include people who play online card games and such. The demographics for what we traditionally think of as video games skew remarkably toward young men.

Part of this is clearly generational. As the young people who’ve grown up with video games grow up, they’ll be more likely to entertain themselves with video games as adults.

But there’s also clearly a problem with games. Plenty of people love board games but wouldn’t go near a video game--not even an electronic version of a board game.

Some of this, of course, is pretension and bigotry, the same kind of thought process that leads people to sniff that they never watch television because there’s too much junk on. You might as well declare the library off limits because Tom Clancy is on the shelf.

But this is more of a technology issue than anything else.

Computers are incredibly cranky. Quite frankly, operating a home computer in the 21st century isn’t so much like wielding a powerful tool as having a time-consuming hobby forced on you. And video games just complicate that equation.

The development of 3-D games has led to an explosion of special 3-D video cards. Some cards work well only with some games. Often, installation of a new game requires an upgrade for the card’s drivers, the software that makes everything go. And, of course, upgrading your card’s drivers can leave you with a crippled system.

Given those difficulties, it’s not surprising that much of the focus on gaming today revolves around consoles, the leading example of which is Sony’s PlayStation.

Although consoles don’t offer the cutting-edge capabilities of the desktop, they also can’t be broken with routine use. Letting the kids use the home computer to play games means you could very easily find yourself with a crippled system. It’s safer to let them play Nintendo.

At the same time, the adult audience for consoles has never been particularly vigorous. In some cases, this is by design. Nintendo’s software is aimed at children. Many more adults use a PlayStation, but most users remain young men.

In contrast, the adults who play what the industry loosely defines as video games are generally playing things such as blackjack via a network connection. It’s a very simple game, but the network connection makes it exciting for people. A more sophisticated game probably would be more interesting but also more troublesome, especially for the less technically adept.

Today’s consoles don’t offer the networking connection that gives such games their punch. Sega’s Dreamcast offered built-in networking, but the company waited too long to provide games to exploit the capability, and Sega officially stopped production of the Dreamcast in March. Sony’s latest entry, PlayStation 2, doesn’t offer network connectivity, but next-generation systems from companies such as Microsoft will.

Microsoft’s Xbox will come with built-in networking out of the box. So presumably, people now using the computer to play networked blackjack will begin migrating to a cheaper, more reliable platform to do the same thing.

In the process, the industry will have the opportunity to introduce these peripheral players to a universe of compelling, easily learned and challenging video games. Fueled by a stable and vigorous base, game developers will be able to offer console titles that present us new ways of playing.

People willing to take more risks will change the way we think about gaming in the same way revolutionary games such as “Wing Commander,” “Tomb Raider” and “Tribes” did in the past. And these fascinating new games will be played on stable, networked consoles, making them accessible to anybody.

And maybe then, video games will become a mass market. Who knows, we might even see the end of Skee-Ball.

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Dave Wilson is The Times’ personal technology columnist.