world of blocky wireframe 3D skyscrapers gradually morphs, over the game’s five levels, into a lushly solid representation of a green Earth, in a parable of human and machine evolution.
The arrival of true artifical intelligence predictably failed to happen, although large steps were made by Peter Molyneux’s Black & White (2001), a game in which the player’s teachable pet monster took on certain physical characteristics according to moral decisions made by the player acting as the gameworld’s god, and then by Halo (2002). A brilliantly engineered sci-fi first-person shooter, Halo placed you in a war movie, and through the illusion that both your enemies and your comrades were intelligent, created an extraordinary sense of involvement. In contrast to most previous games of the genre, no battle in Halo ever went the same way twice. You blinked in disbelief at the cunning of your enemies. You laughed when one of your men kicked a prone alien and said: “How does it feel to be dead?”. You shouted at them to get out of the way of enemy grenades. And when you let them die, you felt bad.
You also felt bad if you failed to help your friend in the exquisite fairytale of a game, ICO (2002). Playing a small horned boy who meets a luminous, ghostly girl in a vast castle, you try to help her escape, holding hands and conversing in nonsense language. Through its jaw-droppingly gorgeous environment — beams of light penetrating cavernous, gloomy stone interiors; bleached grass in sunny, verdant courtyards; distant battlements of the enormous castle appearing on the horizon in a bluish haze — the game constituted the best example yet for the emotional impact of architecture, the invocation of aesthetic wonder.
And then, on a wave of controversy, came Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002), a gleefully amoral gangster game that was widely criticised for its violence — you could, if you so chose, beat up passers-by in a baseball bat. But punishment did exist in this universe: kill innocent people and the police, shortly followed by the FBI and the army, would hunt you down, and the player also had the option to drive ambulances and save citizens, or merely to race cars against local hoodlums. In its fictionalisation of Miami in the 1980s, with characters in pastel suits and a contemporary pop soundtrack on the game’s numerous in-car radio stations, Vice City evoked tremendous period style and an unmatched freedom to play as you pleased.
Meanwhile, a peek into a more cybernetically fluid future was offered by the eventual release of Sony’s EyeToy in 2003. A simple web-cam device that sat on top of the TV, it put the player’s image on the screen and allowed her to control a number of amusing mini-games — punching tiny kung-fu fighters, washing windows, disco-dancing 1970s- style — by waving her arms and head about. The games were rudimentary, but the device represented a wealth of future opportunities for games to escape their dependence on a rebarbative plastic controller festooned with buttons. More than the modest successes of online console gaming enjoyed by the Xbox and PlayStation2, or the announcement in May 2004 of new handheld consoles by Sony and Nintendo, the EyeToy held out promise of a real revolution in gameplay. The ways we interact with machines are becoming ever more intimate.
