Last week I interviewed veteran videogame artist Bill Eaken - well-known for his work on classic LucasArts adventure titles such as Monkey Island and The Dig - about his latest project, The Exchange Student. It's a bawdy romp following a young Italian loser, Emilio Carboni, as he goes to study in Sweden. What interested me most was Eaken's suspicion that the plot was autobiographical, based around the experiences of project director Dimitris Manos.
An autobiographical videogame? That's a weird one. I could only think of one other example: the adventure title Shenmue, which draws details and settings from the boyhood of the game's producer, Yu Suzuki.
Are game designers missing a trick here? We live in a culture obsessed with gossip and personal revelation. Best selling magazines are filled with celebrity exposes combined with lurid real-life tales. Many new books are accounts of tragic childhoods, and television is a 24-hour confessional box.
But not videogames. Here, the characters are not only fictitious but usually fantastical, given the most perfunctory of backstories before being let loose on alien monsters or Nazi generals. It's interesting that one of the most successful videogame characters of all time, Lara Croft, has the richest biography. And the use of real-life models to represent Lara in photoshoots rendered her character into flesh and blood, an alchemy that prodded us one step further into identification and association.
Okay, so young men, the traditional target audience of videogames, are the least likely to be interested in reality entertainment, preferring Star Wars to star exposés, Tolkien to Trisha. But this is defeatism of the highest order. If the games industry is to extend its reach, it needs to be able to talk to new audiences. Perhaps videogames based on the fascinating turmoil of other peoples' lives are the answer.
Why merely read about Jordan's life as an aspiring model when you could live it? If real-life drama is all about getting as close as possible to the thrill of tragedy without the inconvenience of actually experiencing it - well, interactive real-life drama at our fingertips will get us closer still.
At least one game designer seems to have picked up on the potential of this unexplored genre. Peter Molyneux, creator of Populous and Black & White, claims to be working on a videogame that lets you relive your own adolescence. God knows how it'll work, but which one of us hasn't fantasised about taking a different route through our lives? To be presented with the chance to follow those routes? How terrifying. How aberrant. How do I get a copy?
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