Home Video

Perhaps no new medium has been adopted more rapidly around the world than video. Portable video cameras and especially the ubiquitous videocassette recorder (VCR) spread around the globe during the late 1980s and early 1990s, affecting everything from news coverage to international politics and family life.

The Home-Video Theater

The most significant uses of video occur in the home. Indeed, video transformed many homes into private movie theaters, where family members could view at their own discretion commercially produced videotapes of tens of thousands of feature films, educational products, exercise programs, pornographic materials, political propaganda made by special-interest groups, and their own family-made productions. Initially teenagers were the principal consumers of videocassettes, and viewing adult-oriented movies with friends became a rite of passage, especially for North American adolescents. By the mid-1990s, however, home viewing of movie videos was a massive industry that surpassed movie box-office revenues and encompassed practically all sectors of society.

In one sense, home video is merely an expansion of television. Many movies available on videotape are also available on broadcast or cable television. Also, VCRs are sometimes used to record cable or broadcast programming for repeated viewing or for viewing at a different time.

Technological improvements in home-video imaging and audio helped to make home video a medium distinct from television. Larger and less expensive television sets encourage families to establish video viewing areas or even entire video rooms in their homes. Moreover, hi-fi sound systems enable viewers at home to emulate the aural impact of the movie-theater screening room. As a result, home viewing of movies is more formal, collective and planned than regular television watching, although not necessarily any more reflective or discerning.

Most people prefer to rent or purchase newly released video movies. Even classic movies are now widely rented at video shops. In Third World countries there is an enormous market in illegal copies of recent films, especially action-oriented Hollywood films starring high-profile actors. The video industry caters to this appetite for new films, a strategy that does not always serve well the more discerning video user who seeks older, high-quality movies.

Video Gaming

Video games are part of a large high-tech industry designed primarily to fulfill one human want: the desire to overcome personal boredom in the home. A few games purport to be educational, or to enhance small-motor skills, but the vast majority of them is almost purely for personal entertainment. Not surprisingly, children with the greatest leisure time are the prime market for these games. These children have the most time to spend and the least inhibitions about computer technologies.

For all of their high-tech wizardry, video games are a poor substitute for more traditional board games and yard games. Most video games depend on a market of lone players, whereas other games depend on small groups searching for relational activities. Even when groups play video games, the play is directed at the monitor, not at players. While most other gaming fosters interpersonal communication among players, video gaming usually eclipses it.

Video games also have addictive qualities for players. Foremost among them is the sheer rush of adrenaline that players feel during the peak moments of action-oriented video games. Nearly as important is the competitive determination to beat the game, if not the other players. Rewards are immediate, even if the game has to be restarted for the player to try to advance to the next level. Finally, home-video games temporarily satisfy compulsive personalities, which need to be doing something as quickly and as frequently as possible.

Video games are not all bad, but they are clearly inferior and addictive substitutes for relational forms of recreation. The best video games are not time-bound, superenergy visual extravaganzas but multiplayer inducements to communicate about the subject matter of the game. Unfortunately, males do not feel the need for intimacy as strongly as females, so the video industry matches its male-oriented product development and marketing to these nonrelational players. Video games are largely the province of bored males who satisfy some of their cravings for power by blasting away the enemies, time and time again.

Home Video as Family History and Parable

Low-cost equipment is a boon to amateur video production, especially in the home. A growing number of families are using video photography to preserve memorable events. This kind of family video history alters both the way family life is conducted and how families relate to their pasts. In the best uses, video can help families enjoy and learn from their own personal stories of life.

Video, even more than film and still photography, leads families to emphasize the preservation of events rather than actual events themselves. In other words, family life is increasingly staged for the camera and thereby for the memorable record the video provides. Sometimes the change is not exceedingly important (for example, when the wedding party must stand during the service or when graduates march during commencement). In other cases, however, the sheer availability of the video camera redirects the action (for example, the videographer instructs children during a visit to the beach to build a sandcastle or to go swimming or directs a toddler on Christmas morning to frolic in the pile of discarded wrapping paper and bows—all the drama for “the camera”).

One positive aspect of this video-mindedness is the way it can instill a familial sense of the value of special occasions. Video encourages families to find more value in their time together, to see such family times as out of the ordinary (Eccles. 3:1). The medium can even foster greater preparation for family events in the hope of maximizing their video potential. This is true of vacation planning, which typically includes some options that are more “videogenic” than others.

However, video can easily rob family life of its spontaneous joy and irreproducible memories. When the video camera is present, families tend to swap their unplanned antics for staged behavior. Suddenly the normal spontaneity of life disappears, even the spontaneity left in ritualized ceremonies such as baptisms and graduations. In addition, video focuses a family’s collective memory only on the events that can be recorded. Unless a family consciously tries to keep alive the oral stories of nonrecorded events, the video memories will eclipse the recollection of them.

The Future of Video

Video technology complements the computer and has a bright future. Although videotape will eventually be replaced by CD-ROMs or other forms of digital storage, video movies and games will likely take up even more leisure time. Three important trends will shape the future of video and will influence the users of this technology.

First, video will become an increasingly interactive medium. A new genre of movies, for example, will become something like video games, with the viewer choosing plot directions. Meanwhile, the interactivity of video games will be enhanced by faster action and a greater array of play choices. In its own way home-video production will share this increased interactivity in the form of greater user control over the production process, including the home use of graphics, editors, sound enhancements and special effects. Interactivity will increase the creative options of users.

Second, video will emerge as an essential technology. Like radio and television before it, video will shift from a luxury item to a foundational home medium. In fact, video will subsume television, if not the computer, in many homes. Along the way video will take on all kinds of new uses based on the CD-ROM and other storage devices. These may include such things as home reference work, educational programs, video telephones and home shopping.

Third, video will shape domestic life, just as its predecessor, television, has for decades. Families will continue to dedicate more of their leisure time to video, seduced by the medium’s specialized fare for all ages, lifestyles and ideologies. Domestic architecture and furniture will be influenced by the desires of video viewers, perhaps even more than by the need for strong family life and interpersonal relations generally.

» See also: Computer Games

» See also: Entertainment

» See also: Games

» See also: Leisure

» See also: Photography

» See also: Television

—Quentin J. Schultze