Games are in the Kavalier Age

Against the din of assembled videogames industry folks and an aerial acrobatics show starring a prince with painted-on clothes I asked Ben Mattes what Age it was. While historians like to assign Ages and Eras to periods of time long passed, I wanted Mattes to predict how we’d look back on this stage of game design. Was it the Golden Age? The Renaissance?

Mattes, who was slumped in a chair and nursing a bottle of Fiji water, cautiously leaned forward. He bit his lip. “I don’t know he murmured.” Prince of Persia producer gave it some thought. “Have you read Kavalier & Clay?”

I hadn’t. He launched into an abbreviated telling of the tale. The comic book creators Kavalier and Clay have an epiphany while watching Citizen Kane. That film opened their eyes to a range of thoughts and themes—they realized that comic books could be about more than the rock ‘em sock ‘em battles so typically found in their pages. They could be innovative and meaningful.

That, says Mattes, is where the games industry is now. “We’ve just seen our Citizen Kane and realized that games can have meaning,” he says. “Right now, we’re Kavalier and Clay”