PLAYING WITH THE FUTURE: DEVELOPMENT AND DIRECTIONS IN COMPUTER GAMING

ABSTRACT

Consoles versus Content: The Battle at Sega

Alison McMahan

This paper looks at the development of the Sega gaming company from its inception but with a special focus on the history of the Dreamcast. The Dreamcast had the highest records for pre-sales before its release and was one of the first consoles to ship with a built-in modem for use with the world's first massive multiplayer internet console game. Clearly, the Sega Dreamcast was a step towards true interactive television, with its multiplayer game, both online and off, providing a degree of interactivity that traditional television lacks.

Now, just two years later, Sega has withdrawn from the console market and is focusing on its strength, providing new games for other consoles such as the Nintendo Gamecube, the Microsoft Xbox and the Playstation 2. Although over ten million Dreamcast owners - myself included - worldwide are disappointed in this development, the demise of the Dreamcast and the end of Sega consoles gives us an opportunity to step back and reflect on the role that consoles are playing in the development of interactive television. Although Sega's withdrawal from hardware production looks like a response to the current recession, it is also a sign of developments in interactive television. If we see console boxes as another kind of set-top box - a box that provides true interactivity, i.e., the ability to influence the direction and even add to televisual content, compared to the lesser interactivity of such interactive systems as WEBTV which simply add internet facilities and time-shift (record it now, watch it later) to the traditional television - then we can more clearly understand the role that console boxes are playing in the evolution of interactive television. As the boxes become more alike - by now, MPEG 2 image quality and internet access are standard, for example - what distinguishes each system is the content.

Sega, whose content development has always been its strength, has recognized this and has withdrawn from the console-box war in order to focus on the real battlefield: the evolution of real interactive television. This paper builds on an earlier paper I wrote for the Console-ing Passions conference (Bristol, UK 2001), where I looked at the various approaches and trends to interactive television today. In this paper I will look at some of the qualities that make Sega games, from Shenmue to fighting games to sports games, distinctive, and how these distinctive characteristics are altering the language of interactive television, a medium still struggling to be born.

Alison McMahan, Ph.D., has extensive experience as a new media producer and new media journalist. From 1997 to 2001 she taught early cinema and new media at the University of Amsterdam where she helped develop the Media Studies Major. She currently holds a Mellon Fellowship in New Media at Vassar College where she is building a sentient VR environment. This essay is from her forthcoming book, Branching Characters, Branching Plots: A Critical Approach to Interactive Media.

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