The word “digital” is a triumph of marketing. Videogames have always been digital artefacts; but now, so are music, television and cinema, and soon books will be too. We have digital lifestyles: Edge readers perhaps more than anyone else. But the term used to represent something brighter and harder: the apotheosis of hi-tech futurism. And its rise and subsequent reinvention within another industry points some some interesting parallels with the current state of videogaming.

The digital music revolution of the 1980s at first sight seemed simple: throw away the clutter and fuzziness of analogue systems and embrace a shiny, clean new future. True, there were some diehard pedants who insisted that vinyl sounded better than compact disc. But in truth, they were aurally deceived by the fact that, since certain bass frequencies simply cannot be encoded onto vinyl, analogue playback equipment has always included circuitry that boosts the bottom end in order to restore what was lost in the pressing process. The much-vaunted “warmth” of vinyl is artificial.

Initially, electronic musicians welcomed the introduction of digital synthesizers since they furnished a cleanliness and purity of sound that simply had not been possible before. Analogue synthesizers went out of tune and broke down a lot. Digital synths didn’t, and their new connection protocol (MIDI) offered a level of precise machinic control that made entirely new sorts of music possible. Everyone seemed happy. For a while.

But gradually an upswell of dissatisfaction grew. The second-hand market in old analogue synths boomed. People gradually came to agree that digital filters simply didn’t sound as good as analogue filters, and they missed the variety of hands-on control that the old instruments, festooned with knobs and sliders, offered. Programming a digital synth such as the Yamaha DX7 by pressing buttons and observing the readout of a minuscule LCD screen just wasn’t the same.

So in the mid-1990s, instrument manufacturers invented “analogue modelling”. This was a kind of digital instrument that emulated the circuitry of an analogue synth entirely in software. You got the precise control and reliability of digital, with the sound of analogue. Snugly racked up next to my desk right now is one of the most recent iterations of this technology: a Novation SuperNova II, a gorgeous 36-oscillator beast that emulates the sound of a whole shedful of old analogue synths as well as constructing noises that none of those machines could ever have made.

Many of the most exciting developments of videogaming recently can be seen in a similar light: as a kind of analogue modelling. Games are becoming fuzzed up and metaphorically fattened. The most obvious example of this is in the field of control systems, where the overriding standard for decades was one of simple switches. Of course our modern “analogue” joypads are still digital: the sticks and triggers have resolutions of so many bits; the buttons return set numerical values. But they are effectively emulating the feel of a continuous, analogue control system.

This has enabled an emancipation of gameplay structures, of which the prime example right now is the superbly engineered Super Monkey Ball. Imagine playing it with buttons instead of a stick. You would effectively be issuing commands at discrete intervals, at one remove from the gameworld. But with the analogue stick, you caress the world itself, directly, and because you are so organically melded with the system, you feel more for the dumb little simian than you would otherwise.

Or think of the old arcade games that had a simple digital attitude to existence. There were the quick and the dead, and nothing in between. One pixel in the wrong place and that’s it: you lose a life. The brilliantly conceived shield system in Halo offers an analogue-style alternative that not only lessens useless frustration but actually adds to the game’s tactical content, as you scramble for cover to buy vital seconds so that your shield can recharge. Devil May Cry, meanwhile, applies this to the death of your own enemies: no longer are they just killed or not killed, they are killed in more or less stylish and kinetically pleasing ways.

The idea of analogue modelling can also be applied to visual aesthetics. For those whose eyes are tired of the pointy perfection of many PC efforts, where everything is indiscriminately sharp and shiny, along comes a game such as Ico, deliberately emulating the graininess of film’s analogue celluloid, and the depth of field of living eyes. With puzzles, too, the old digital paradigm - find a switch to open that door - is slowly dying out, even though it continues shamelessly to appear in substandard tat such as Jedi Outcast. Even the Tomb Raider franchise, once shorthand for banal switch-hunting, is promising with Angel of Darkness to introduce a level of analogue fuzziness, with subtle variations in Lara’s physical abilities throughout the game. Meanwhile, blended dynamic animation systems, such as that promised for the dragons in Reign of Fire, are attempting to replace with an analogue-style responsiveness the irritatingly digital feel of animations that, once invoked, continue as they damn well please until the routine is finished.

There are still numerous areas in which increasingly analogue-style systems for videogames can be imagined. Exploration games might toy with the idea of environments that are more analogue. Rather than, for instance, having holes in walls that you either can or cannot get through, there might be holes that you could just about squeeze through if you left some equipment behind. Enemies in combat games, meanwhile, should behave according to their injuries. It’s absurd if I can kill a guard by shooting him six times in the ankle; it’s equally absurd if it doesn’t affect him at all. But if he limped away, trailing blood, for backup, the gameworld would instantly feel darker, more responsive and challenging.

The fact is that the human brain is not a digital computer. Our experience in the world is richly continuous and complex: it is analogue. And videogames are becoming ever more interesting as they attempt to mimic this complexity of content and response. The old binary-state classics were good, but it’s time to move on.

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