The Science Channel has been airing this series over the next week. It’s about 6 episodes long and goes from the beginning, post-WWII and the movement of engineers vying to make interactive experiences along with the rise of powerful computing machines. It’s fairly thorough, and mentions some fairly obscure but technically relevant details such as the Uncanny Valley hypothesis and attempt to explain it to the common person. It also features many, many games industry legends and pioneers, such as Tripp Hawkins, founder of EA, and Ken and Roberta Williams, founders for Sierra and creators for games such as King’s Quest.

I’m absolutely enjoying this series and if you’re any fan of games at all, even at the most casual level, I urge you to check it out. It not only discusses games themselves but how they’ve been injected into our social consciousness and how our society has changed by the ways people have evolved in understanding and embracing the concepts of “play” and “fun.”

I myself am what you would call a hardcore, though lapsed, gamer. I’ve played many, many game titles, too numerous to count or even remember, and in every experience I always try to figure out in my mind what makes me keep coming back. The gamer experience has changed over the years, Miyamoto’s mario has gone from a tiny 8 bit sprite to a fully fleshed out 3D character in hugely interactive worlds.

My dream since college had always been to work in the industry, to be able to share my ideas and thoughts and to entertain people with my imagination. Somewhere along the way, those dreams were trampled a bit, and although I have a job I’m relatively stable at, I still can’t help but feel repeatedly like I’m not doing what I’d set out to achieve when I made the decision NOT to pursue a career in the industry I chose with my college degree.

My all-to-brief experience at EA Chicago really disappointed me and discouraged me from those dreams. I can’t help but wonder if there’s any room for someone with my ideas in that industry, or if it’s true and that the things I share, the things I imagine, can never come to be. I’d always been a fairly creative person, but for stability reasons have recently chosen to move into more stable career choices, but I just can’t help but wonder…is this it for me and my dream? Has the game industry gone from its golden era of imaginative technologists that had the sky as their limit when creating new experiences, to the same standard gameplay mechanics with yet another new coat of fresh paint on them?

I think that’s why I’ve recently found myself turning toward more “casual” gameplay fair….games that leave you with no real investment beyond the 10-20 mins at a time you’re able to spend away from real life, but still give you a sense of accomplishment. Games like Guitar Hero, Geometry Wars, Lumines…I enjoyed them all very much, and though they’re not the kinds of titles I and my college roommates engrossed ourselves with (like Doom and Hexen, Myst and others), they’re all just as satisfying.

So it’s going to be an interesting thing to see the games industry grow over the next 5-10 years. It’s changed…no longer do we have 5 guys in an office pounding out game designs…we have teams that can be as many as 100+, working long hours with no real job stability, trying to make a game that somehow rises above all the other noise in the market to become a multimillion dollar success that publishers need these days to survive. Somehow, I think the games industry, in trying to bottle “fun,” they forgot along the way that, in order to have a fun game, people need to HAVE FUN making it.