I can still vividly remember the quiet hilarity brewing up within my seven-year old brain as I watched my father (then forty-two years old) attempt to play Super Mario Bros for the Super NES. While he had the basic, and admittedly simple, control scheme down, he kept violently tilting the controller to the right every time Mario jumped. I guess in his head the game would somehow take pity on his valiant efforts to get Mario over that last bob-omb, or maybe he presciently predicted the advent of the Wii. Whatever the reason, my young mind found his total lack of controller competence very amusing; and this was back when games only made use of six buttons.

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Art is expensive. Particularly electronic, interactive art that allows its audience to participate in everything from the slaying of Barrow-Wights, to break-neck police chases through crowded, virtual streets. As hardware and software developers continue to push the envelope of the video game experience – progressing from little more than colorful distractions (Frogger and Pong come to mind) to complex interactive narratives – the production of their art becomes more costly.

An unfathomably enormous amount of man-hours goes into the construction of games the likes of the recent smash hit Grand Theft Auto IV. Today, Pong and Frogger only satisfy if the player’s avatar can play them on a decrepit old arcade machine inside a virtual bar so luminescent with detail that one can practically smell the urine stain in the corner.
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