IMMORTAL COMBAT
JC Herz interview for 24:7

The first thing that strikes you about 26 year old New Yorker J.C. Herz is just how much she loves to be thought of as "one of the kids". In Herz's universe, adults are just plain dumb, they suck big time and they're as patronising as hell. But the kids are alright, they're united in full on, thumb-numbing video game play - the day-glo word of competitive electronica is the thread that bonds them all together. It doesn't really matter how she sees herself - J.C. has a wealth of knowledge rammed in her cranium that would have most of Mensa bowing out in deference to her God-like genius.

In the U.K. to promote her latest volume of contemporary cultural theory, Joystick Nation, J.C. has a genuine love of all things British and is quick to point out the debt the world owes to our home grown game boys. "There's a generation of unbelievably talented game designers here because this is where cheap computers never died. In the States, computers were cheap in the Seventies and then suddenly became fast, expensive monster machines - whereas in the UK there were cheap computers everywhere, so a kid could get his hands on one and start tinkering around and, fifteen years later, you have a generation of great games designers."

The flavour of Joystick Nation is one of positivity - its mission is to reclaim game culture back from the abyss of neurotic parents and spaced-out psychologists. There's nothing brain-fryingly detrimental about video games - in fact J.C. asserts that the reality is quite the opposite. "Adults have this misconception that even fast paced games are purely twitch-response scenarios, but there is actually a large amount of strategy involved in these games. There's more strategy in a game like Tomb Raider than there is in Monopoly or Chequers. Adults freak out and perceive video games as brainless, but the mental energy being generated by these children would blow the circuits of most adults."

As the Atari Generation grows older and wiser, the white dot aesthetic of 'Ping-Pong' has been replaced with the more sophisticated 3D virtual landscapes. The graphics may be blinding, but that's not to say that game play is much improved on its skeletal ancestors. "With the old vector games like Battlezone or Asteroids, they have the beauty of great minimalist art," claims J.C., "It's just the sheer, pure idea of something that you're dealing with and it's pretty gorgeous. The better the tools get, the greater the temptation is for writers to get lazy and create something which plays in an unoriginal fashion but is visually dazzling."

Now blessed with a canon of personalities from tubby Mario to space-babe Lara Croft, the games industry has always been quick to cash in on the cult of the celebrity - something that J.C. finds simultaneously predictable and bewildering.

"Essentially we are back to the 1930s studio system where stars were entirely controlled by studios. However, game characters are not going to demand $20million for their next project and they're not going to tear up hotel rooms or develop a serious drug habit - they are going to do exactly what they are told to do. We're back to Max Headroom - a virtual guy based on a real human being, but within the control of the network. It was all foretold on British television fifteen years ago. One of these days you're going to be playing Tomb Raider Seven and Lara is going to turn around and peel off her face and there will be Max..."

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