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Game Industry goes from Geek to Chic
Raiford writes "A Reuters feature story describes how the computer gaming industry is shedding its geek persona in an attempt to attract Hollywood's best visual effects, sound, lighting and animation experts into the gaming fold. The story quotes the executive vice president of Electronic Arts on how rapidly advancing processor technology is demanding an expanded skill set and that Hollywood provides the ready source to meet the demand."
I've noticed at least on my campus that the jocks are seeming to take over the gaming area. While the geeks remain a constant force. I think it's the competitive appeal of modern games, and how they are getting closer to real life.
Come now, EA has been on this path for over a decade. They used to publish tons of games, from the great to the crappy, all of which were at least great fun for someone. Now they just publish the super mainstream "Safe" games like Madden and Sim* while taking VERY VERY few risks.
* The FPS and RTS genre's games are MUCH easier to play with mice. The dreamcast could accept a mouse -- can any others, and do the games work with it?
* 640x480 just isn't good enough anymore (and your TV set can't even do that well.) Consoles will have to be able to display to SVGA monitors just like the computers do. HDTV is another option, but how many people have HDTV now? Not very many.
* And last, but not least, you can't justify an Xbox to do your taxes. People are going to buy PCs for `productive' things, and when that's done, they'll want to play a game.
(Now, if a console can run Turbo Tax, that might be what's needed to drive the final nail into the PC game coffin. Of course, if that happens, then that console you're using ... is basically just a PC!)
Like it or not, but certain genres of games are still dominated by PC games -- in particular, I'm thinking of FPS and RTS games. Maybe this will change in the future ... we shall see.
Why are Slashdot reprinting it? (Oh right, it's supposedly a games story, so up to
Thought provoking? Hardly. Perhaps a mention of the growing number of classic developers EA have bought and sucked dry (Bullfrog, Origin, Maxis, next stop Westwood) that have paid for these fancy offices would be in order?
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A single piece of a computer gaming rig - the accelerator card - costs more than an Xbox, and doesn't look nearly as cool, come with a DVD player as a basic feature, or display on a huge TV.
What does it matter the size if the tv if you're playing at NTSC resolutions? I suppose you could spend the thousands of dollars needed on an HDTV for it, but then the cost argument falls flat on it's face.
You're probably right about PC gaming dying, except in the area of online games, and especially any kind of sim game, and it is largely about cost, but more out of ease. Most people can't figure out how to upgrade a computer, nor do they need to. They simply don't care about high resolutions, they're used to the blurriness of TV's and aren't bothered by it.
PC games will never completly die, the PC has a far wider range of uses than consoles, making thier cost justified already. Most people will end up owning PC's, and throwing in a $90 video card, and being able to play any game is prettymuch a nobrainer. It doesnt take a $300 videocard to make a computer a usefull gaming rig. You buy a PC for many things, including games, but the only real use for a console is the games.
From "Pac-man" to "The Legend of Zelda"? "The Legend of Zelda" was for the 8-bit NES -- not all that much of an improvement compared to more recent systems. While I agree with the article's author that it's at least equal to GTA3, I question whether it's worthy of the term "quantum leap"...
:)
Seriously, this guy knows as much about games and programming as EA does about, well, games and programming... All game companies out there right now, and EA in particular, need to stop hiring special effects people and get some real game designers -- i.e. on a level with Miyamoto.
They're out there, I don't doubt; without some real improvements, PC gaming will die entirely and be replaced with consoles, which can do the junk sports games and FPSes currently popular much better than a PC.
Let's see all this new technology actually improve the gaming experience... I say we go back to 80286's and DOS, or maybe the Apple II; they at least had innovative, entertaining games.
"Games still lack one element of the Hollywood lure: glamour. Unlike famous actors, video games stars like Lara Croft and Tony Hawk do not get $10 million signing fees. And because they don't drink and date, they never make the gossip columns of Hello magazine." You _know_ they're working on this...
I find it interesting that the entire gaming community seems to pretty much agree that EA is practically a plague on the industry. And for good reason-- it seems like all they've done for the past few years is suck in fantastic companies, suck the life out of them, and ruin or cancel any interesting products they may have had.
I am thinking here of Ultima Online 2 and Tribes 2, the latter of which was the one game i've looked forward to more than any other in literally years. Tribes 2 will now never reach my platform of choice, and this is as far as i can tell due to administrative mishandling and subsequent shutdown by EA. And from what i hear, the game isn't terribly playable on the PC either, due to EA's policy of "OK, dynamix, we want you to get it to a shippable state NOW. No, don't bother with bugfixing, you can patch that. You're not getting it done quick enough. It doesn't matter if it's in a finished state, just ship it, you can patch it later. Ah, it's ready to ship? Good. You're all fired."
(That WAS EA who bought sierra, right? My roommate seems to think it was too. Either way, there have been a lot of other cases of similar behavior with EA-subsidairy products that intruiged me but came out unplayable due to mismanagement.)
Meanwhile, their killing of UO2 has, in my opinion, led the MMORPG industry into a stagnant, imaginative slump, boring everyone away from the genre. There's been too little movement in that area for too long. This may change when Star Wars Galaxies comes out, but for the moment no one i know still plays mmorpgs.
In my opinion, the gaming industry is dying because EA has sucked all the imagination, life, and momentum out of it. Their aquisitions and subsequent shutdowns have neatly destroyed almost all the innovative guiding lights of the industry, leaving everone else directionless and ill-funded. What can we do about this?
I would dearly like to be able to enjoy PC games again. What can we, as gamers, do to stop all this? Is there some way we can as a community encourage either the destruction of EA (and the spinoff of worthwhile groups like Maxis), or a massive, massive change in upper management?
All i can think of is a boycott, but in my case that wouldn't make much difference because i haven't found any of EA's games interesting enough to buy in a long time. But a *number* of their cancelled games *were* things i would have bought, so maybe it would be better if we just started a petition of people who say they would buy more games if the games were more innovative, interesting, and more intent on polished gameplay than polished graphics?
But that might not help either, since i don't think EA is particularly grounded in reality or receptive to its customers. Is there anything the little guy can do to hurt this monster?
Maybe i should just give up, assume it's hopeless, and buy a gamecube.
Geek image and stereotypes are far from done in high school, let alone college. The only difference is that now the in-crowd has just become indifferent to those they find "nerdy" or "geeky". Ask your average college student if they actually enjoy so much as one aspect of the subject matter in any given class, and they'll tell you that they don't care beyond making a sufficient grade. To them, if you enjoy thinking about deep philosophical or political issues or, gasp, you read for pleasure and you're in school for reasons above and beyond punching your ticket, then you are a geek.
People have collectively always behaved like reactive herd animals, but more and more so I think the trend towards intellectual indifference, apathy, and even hostility, are growing. (I hate reading. I don't need to know all that to live my life the way I want to. I don't care. Ignorance is strength etc...) That's why us Americans have a raging dry-alcoholic reactionary kook for president, and why parasites like Jack Valenti, Hilary Rosen, and Michael Eisner can lobby away our constitutional rights almost at will.
Judging by the results, as shown in current trends in our society, I'd say ignoring the "geeks" and corralling them when necessary is proving to be a very savvy and effective tactic to undermine their influence. When geeks were directly attacked they gained publicity and they had influence well beyond their numbers, such as the political upheaval of the 1960's or for much of the Internet boom of the 90's. However, what I'm seeing now is a trend towards using the fruits of "geek" intellectual labor as a time machine to turn back the clock on social and scientific progress e.g. the current p2p debacle, and the current efforts of religious reactionaries to stifle stem cell research and other scientific inquiries into using medicine to enhance as well as heal human health and function.
(I'm referring to the use of hard technological measures to enforce antiquated business models, religions, philosophies, and laws that are anything but progressive or the fruit of enlightened minds.)
My hope is that unenlightened self interest on the part of the ignorant leads them to allow science to make an end run around the blocks to it's progress, if for no other reason than that MR. and MRS John and Jane Q InvesterClass wants their baby to be born with more than just economic priviledge. Not to mention that although the rich don't trust the poor to have unmonitored communications, they definitely don't feel this sort of government intrusion should apply to people like them. So I at least have faith there will be loopholes to exploit, and that maybe at some point in the distant future they will become big enough to push a truly advanced society through. All this could happen, thanks to "geeks".
Video games have been made mostly to satisfy gamers of a certain demographic, middle class teenaged boys. We agree that the Sims is a great game. It seems to me that the continued success of Sims games and expansions is that there is a significant number of people out there that just don't care for the incremental innovations in gameplay we call 'FPS' or 'RTS.' Probably the last game before sims to see an even gender balance was Tetris, and that was 10 years ago. The sims was a game style long overdue. Not that EA should focus all its efforts on beating all the money out of the game.
I'd also argue that good game design appeals to a larger audience than the boys who like seeing gibbed corpses. It should scale nicely in difficulty so that casual players can pick it up and have fun, but not bore the obsessed. If by "more thought provoking games" you mean Sim City, Sim City has said all its going to say. Just like every successful game out there, the sequals are incrementally working their way towards a different game. Evolutionary, not revoltionary. If you're gonna bitch, bitch that they're diverting too much money to a single source rather than branching into gameplay concepts I haven't thougt of before, not the same damn game with an extra layer of civil architeture to worry about, please.
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