I was sitting in the reception area of the Guardian's old building in Farringdon. It was 2005. I'd been called there by the newspaper's technology editors Bobbie Johnson and Neil McIntosh; they had this idea of running a games blog, something to tie in with the new generation of consoles, the arrival of mobile games, a new interest in interactive entertainment. Here too was Aleks Krotoski, who I'd be working with, who I'd watched on TV shows like Bits and Thumb Bandits. We all went out for lunch. We talked about the future. I thought "I'm a Guardian writer now".
At home I had a baby son, and I was finally coming to terms with my dad's death, at the age of 62, from cancer. Suddenly the world seemed all about possibilities again. And I really, really loved games. This is how the current generation began for me.
When I look back over the past eight years, what immediately floods in is the sense of scale and opportunity that the new era promised. The era of open-world adventures. Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption, GTA IV and V, Far Cry 2 and 3, these games matched vast sandbox systems with beautiful, rich environments that swallowed you up and allowed you to truly play a role in a functioning universe. Away from the shoot-outs and car chases, they also brought us moments of calm and reflection – the gentle trot of John Marston's horse along the shriveled desert tracks; the view from Tamriel's Throat of the World mountain range; the birdsong and gusts of wind that rattle through the radio towers on Far Cry 3's isle of horror. While these experiences had their foundations in the PS2 and Xbox era, they flourished on the more powerful hardware.
And the designers themselves matured – in some ways. It has become something of a joke, the way games were once about rescuing princesses and beautiful girlfriends, and then became about saving daughters. The current generation didn't solve the central maddening problem about gender representation, but it brought us Joel and Ellie, and Lee and Clem; it said that human relationships are possible in games. The love affair between Ethan and Madison in Heavy Rain was weird and unsettling, but it suited the darkness of the world – a world steeped in parental anxiety and psychological breakdown. I played Heavy Rain as a parent and found myself shockingly immersed in its horrifying parable of loss and insanity. The pain was palpable, even if the interface was shoddy as hell.
Heavy Rain also hinted more subtly at another important development: the idea of gamer as performer. Rhythm action titles had been around for a while, but Rock Band, Just Dance, Sing Star and Guitar Hero perfected the recipe on current machines, bringing self-expression and rich analogue intricacies into the central model of repetition and simulation. The YouTube generation awoke to the potential and videos of expert Guitar Hero performances proliferated. And on the Wii, a machine critically castigated before its launch, performance was the wonderful raison d'être, the unifying princple. The Wii remote freed non-gamers from the shackles on the multi-button controller and allowed them to express themselves. Family gatherings drew in around the machine, like the piano in the Victorian parlour. Wii Sport is the ultimate utilitarian game – designed for all, maximising happiness, utterly non-elitist.
But yet, the rise of digital distribution brought in a new era of experimentation and esoteric creativity. Jonathan Blow explored the notions of time, memory and love through Braid; we had the mournful monochrome platformer Limbo, we had the ridiculous but brilliant post-apocalyptic pet sim, Tokyo Jungle. The idiosyncracies of the 8-bit age could emerge again after the mainstream rush of the PlayStation 2 era. Games could be weird and awkward and openly aggressive. Super Meat Boy! How that challenged me as I sat awake at night with a crying baby, tiredness fogging my brain, reflexes shot. And later, I sat with my two sons and showed them Fez and, oh man, Minecraft. Minecraft. Yes, a PC game first of course, but on Xbox 360 it was discoverable to a new audience, and it has changed gaming forever. Minecraft says, the world is about you and it does so without ego and without much in the way of borders. The greatest battle of this generation has been the one in which designers cede control to players. They won't let go. They will have to let go.
And all the while, all through this generation, we were told that Japan was over. Japan was through. This struck me hard as a veteran games journalist, as a veteran gamer – as a kid who pumped pocket money into Space Harrier and Outrun cabinets... When I interviewed to be a writer on Edge magazine, much of my discussion with editor Jason Brookes was about Pal conversions of Daytona and Ridge Racer. Oh, our collective disappointment! That these magnificent fluid games were to be corralled into a mere 25-frames-a-second! But it was Japanese games like these that just totally dominated the games industry in the 32bit era.
And then decline, and the arrival of open-world western games, and suddenly, Japan was over.
But it wasn't. Beneath the diminishing returns of the great JRPGs and racing games, there was a punk ethic there too, just like the Western inde scene. Sleeping. And then – boom! – Vanquish, Bayonetta, Yakuza, No More Heroes, Deadly Premonition, Catherine. Games of madness and vibrancy, with systems torn from the country's development past and shot into space. Games where stories merged with mechanics in strange, unfathomable ways, where concepts of sex and heroism twisted and writhed. Japanese developers were still working within familiar genres, as they always had done, but they were exploding them from within. And the ultimate example? Dark Souls of course, a game that turns every player into a scholar of arcane rules and mythologies, a game of clockwork death machines, where every step is a fumbled key in a deadly lock. A game that doesn't just tell us about the current generation, but with its implementation of multiplayer elements into the campaign, hints at the next generation, too.
This was the era of grand art design, of conceptual bravado. From the vaults of Rapture to the hyper-masculinised armour of Gears, designers explored the parameters of visual representation in kinectic worlds. A perfectionism and confidence came in, so that we could have Ken Levine discussing Ayn Rand; we could have Cliff Bleszinski obsessing over the exact amount of dust scuffing up when Marcus Fenix skidded into cover. Confidence. The confidence to kill a playable character in Modern Warfare, having him crawl out of a downed helicopter and die in the heat of a nuclear blast. The confidence to end the Last of Us with a massive question mark hanging over everything.
This generation of consoles brought in true multiplayer online gaming, after the haphazard experiments of PlayStation 2's netlink and Dreamcast's 56k modem. I remember early bouts of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter with friends, hours and hours of them – the joy of co-operation. And the rise of the deathmatch and the horde mode, and the absolute genius of Left4Dead, with its understanding of the theatrics of game design, its AI director – its jumps, its desperate moments of doomed camaraderie.
Valve. Portal 2. For me, the finest game of the generation, better even than the majestic Super Mario Galaxy with its typically near-faultless combination of imagination, accessibility and challenge. Portal 2 inhabits a world so perfectly realised, so artistically complete, Stanley Kubrick himself would have nodded in quiet deference. Valve, through this generation, became the expert in exploring the idea of playable space. There is always the legitimate world of the lab, and the illegitimate world explorable beyond it; the ducts and dark service corridors behind the pristine white panels. In Valve games, the architecture tears open to reveal the machinery we shouldn't see and welcomes us in. And Glados is the greatest mad scientist character since Dr Strangelove.
I sometimes ask myself, what modern games do I wish my dad – a keen gamer – had seen? He'd have loved Fifa and its irresistible trajectory into photorealism. He would have enjoyed many of the indie platformers, Fez, Spelunky … maybe not Super Meat Boy. Portal 2 though, definitely. Portal 2, I think.
The Guardian Gamesblog has changed a lot in this generation. My original colleagues Aleks and Greg Howson have moved on and the newspaper is taking much more interest in this curious and feared arm of the screened arts. I am still here, reporting on my fourth generational shift. My children have grown up with the Lego games, and Minecraft, of course, and they have grown up glimpsing through a crack in the door as I've blasted my way through countless military shooters and third-person hack-'em-ups and survival horror romps. Genres have risen and fallen into dust, game journalism itself has evolved, from little magazines to gigantic global websites; soon perhaps it will all be about YouTube superstars. The rise of the community manager to a role of real prominence hints at how power-relations are shifting in the industry. I feel the dark shadow of obsolescence at my shoulder.
But the games, oh the games. It's always been about them. Every generation I've seen has begun as a fan fight over technical specifications that dissolves into the thrill of playing. And here we are again, on the verge of something new, and we have no idea really, where it's all going. My children will remember this coming generation better than the last. This will be the defining one for them. What baseline will it provide? What expectations will they take into their future? What games will they chose to play, away from the ones I've shared with them on PS3 and Wii and Xbox 360, away from me?
