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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...
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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