Slashdot Mirror
The Future of Game Dev (Except in St. Louis)
ksquire writes "Ben Sawyer, of Digitalmill, has published an interesting article at Avault.com about
the past, present, and future of game development.
Sawyer argues that the game industry is going more and more toward 3rd party development tools and '4th party' publishing -- meaning that game developers are essentially tool developers for game enthusiasts to create mods (also using tools like Alienbrain or Discreet's
GMAX).
I'm really curious as to whether the Slashdot community thinks we'll see a future era of standardized game tools and developers courting modders, or if we'll continue to see more specialized game engines. Maybe a greater PC / Console split?"
Meanwhile, over in St. Louis, the Free Expression Policy Project has filed an
amici curiae brief
by 33 media scholars saying that "Most studies and experiments on video games containing violent content have not found adverse effects."
They're trying to stop the county from banning violent games --
Wired has the story.
ksquire points out that "Sawyer also wrote an article, Serious Games: Improving Public Policy through Game-Based
Learning and Simulation, which was
discussed on slashdot."
netphilter and TCPALaw get credit for the Wired link. Previous Slashdot stories on violent gaming include this one and this one.
TCPALaw's full comment was (minus a dangling modifier): "Wired has a nice story on the St. Louis ban on violent video games. If the ban sticks (it was upheld by Judge Limbaugh against a constitutional challenge... Rush Limbaugh's uncle ... the same judge who struck down the federal ban on junk faxes as an abridgment of free speech - go figure) it could be extended to MP games available to play over the Internet."
Look at Half-Life. I can still, after how long now, fire up Half-Life and join a decent game.
;)
Hell, I can still find Quake 2 servers around, and there's still a few Quake 1 holdouts.
Gamers love mods. For the developer, it gives them a chance to experience how games are made first-hand and also gives them an arena to show off their skills to existing gaming houses.
For players? Depending on the mod community, it's like buying one game and getting ten in return. And everyone likes to save money, eh?
What would be cool to standardize would be the 3D modeling language and behavior scripting representations. After that it is a matter of compiling the world models and behaviorisms into the games custom binary representation.
We aren't that far from this now. There are a number of *common* engines. Various generations of Quake and Unreal seem to be used in all sorts of games. If both of these could compile levels and models designed in a standard 3D editor, others would surely follow.
This perspective only holds in the PC game enthusiast market. The PC market is only a fraction of the total videogaming market and the enthusiasts are only a fraction of that.
The really big market for games is not on PC but on consoles, where customization is pretty much unheard-of. If you think that the industry is getting large enough that 3rd parties can create a market selling tools or libs or whatever, then that's absolutely correct and has been so for over a decade. If you think the market is going to 'decentralize', think again.
I'm not sure how it works in the US but movies here have ratings on them. If you want to rent a movie or see a movie that is rated R you have to show ID that you are over 18 or accompanied by an adult and so on for PG 13 and AA14 and so forth, and there are parental guides on content. Why not simply apply those ratings to video games, since movies and games are from a content standpoint comming together the existing rating system would apply. A parent who lets their 17 year old buy a R rated movie or game is less inclined to care about it's content than a 8 year old kid, but then the person legally responsible for the child is aware of what their child is doing (insofar as they chose to be).
Banning video games of any sort will be as effective as banning pornography or alcohol. Except al capone will be some guy with a webserver on a former british AA base in the middle of the atlantic.
Seems to me that arcades have closed because there's less of a need / desire for them. Ten years ago, you could play games at home on your Nintendo, but it didn't even come close to the stuff they had in the arcades. Since then, though, consoles have gotten better, and arcades haven't -- the games you have on an XBox / Gamecube / PS2 rival what you're going to see in an arcade.
The decline of arcades is not because of "the man" keeping the violent game-playing kids out of trouble in the malls, it's because arcade games just aren't the profitable business they were 15 years ago. (Arcades are SO 1980's!) I remember when I was a kid, arcades were a big deal because I never had a console. Even the friends who did have Ataris and Nintendos liked the arcades because they had higher quality games. So, it was worth a special trip to the mall to play "Altered Beast" or "Mortal Kombat".
Arcade games now are played more for the novelty than the experience. With the exception of maybe multiplayer racing games with cockpits, racing wheels, and gas pedals, games on todays home consoles are much higher quality, don't require rolls and rolls of quarters, and don't require a trip to the mall or the local pizza joint. The only reason I have to play a coin-op today is because there just happens to be one in the place I'm grabbing a burger, not because I'm going out of my way to play them. And if I see Galaxian sitting next to the latest version of Virtua Fighter, chances are I'm playing Galaxian, because I want a fun, simple game I don't have to pump 20 quarters in to master.
Again, I don't think the majority of readers here are worried about what this means for arcades. It's just an unfortunate nail in the coffin. What people *should* be worried about is how far the advocates of banning violent games will take this - internet cafes, online content, what is sold in the local Best Buy?
-the walrus
I'll bet most parents today would advocate a game like D&D that promotes actual problem-solving and creativity over trigger-finger-reaction games. Just another sign of the times.
"Timmy, why don't you play a nice wholesome game like Dungeons and Dragons with the kid next door instead of making his head explode like a blood sausage with a sniper rifle? There's a good boy."
-the walrus
The future of gaming is what every NES/atari/old school gamer has dreamed of. They always complain that games today are just copies of what is popular (how many quake/fps copycats can you name?).
Well, modding is changing all of that. When a game comes out, modders push the limits of the engines to do anything they want... the clincher is... they do it for free.
Now, for game designers to still make money, they have to come out with new and unique ideas. Doing your standard FPS ain't gonna do it anymore. Even single-player FPS with great plots are being done with mods. The games of tomorrow will have to be bigger and better than mod writers (or have a bigger and better engine), which means the days of the FPS copy-cat will soon be over.
Also, to note, some publishers are encouraging the modding community to step forward into the gaming industry. Just look at Garage Games. They are selling their Torque Engine (the engine behind tribes 2) for $100 for a non-commercial license (and if you make a commercial product with it, no problem, as long as garage games is your publisher).
Let the mod revolution continue!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Today's gamers are tomorrow's game developers, and I think this is something that wasn't as true ten years ago.
With the recent increased popularity in both video games and software development, making mod-able games isn't so much a new innovation, but really just a logical step forward. Game developers can safely assume that at least a couple hundred of their players will be talented programmers, and from those a collection will be willing to work on things like mods. The benefits of this possibility are fairly obvious (look at other posts), and really the only cost is the need to organize your code into an SDK, which is probably benefits your codebase considerably if you are thinking about this from the start.
Someone else mentioned this, but not only will you possible generate new games that will add to the value of your game, but the programmers who worked on these project are probably just the type you want working in your company, allowing you to basically hand-pick a few new programmers for your company from the vast pool of modders working on your game. I'm almost certain that Valve Software (Half-Life) hired a few guys from some mods, and I think they even keep the Counter-Strike developers on payroll just so they will continue their work.
All this of course applies to artists and such as well.
Your signatures belong to me.
This is exacly why I had such short attention for games which came with editors which allowed me to build my own levels. It became work. Creating games should be creative fun. Alas, 1980 was a long time ago, back in the day when a guy could sit in his basement and write up something like Sneakers and submit it to a place like Sirius Software to see if they'd be interested. Now it's all producers and specialists and my nephew actually wants to get into it as a line of work. Take a second major, I say, keep your options open. Games should be a labor of love, first, a way to make a living, second.
My 2 centimes anyway...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What you are saying is that Sony/MS/Nintendo/Sega/etc. are going to allow users to totally open up the engines to their games so that they can get that much more value out of the system?
You think they'll purposefully rob themselves of their OWN revenue? You'll only see this if they can figure out a way to make it profitable. Such as:
- Buy shoot-em-up for $50
- Download additional user-authored mods for $5-10 a piece from the central server (all of which are cryptographically signed, of course.. wouldn't want you running unauthorized code)
You'll NEVER, EVER, EVER see a console game that has the infinite maleability without additional cost that you see in the PC realm.
Repeat until you understand: Game consoles are barely open systems that will snap shut at the first threat to revenue.
I have to go one further here. I agree that the death of the pinball machine was the beginning of the end, but I believe the arcade's final nail in the coffin is the advent of the higher-power home consoles. Before the Super Nintendo and such, you had to visit your local arcade because the best games were only available on the robust hardware, but now... Every kid has a equally powerful system parked under their television at home. Man, I remember putting about $10 a day through my local street fighter machine but nowadays I could buy my own copy instead for the price of a couple of days' play. (i'm not ignoring the rapid adoption of PC's, its just that PC's have only become common for the average Joe over the last 10 years or so. Before that, it was enthusiasts only!) Consoles brought gaming to the masses, and will continue to do so.
Never fight naked, unless you're in prison...
I find it odd you decide to attack me personally? You don't even know me... oh well. Here is my reply to some of this... Yes you are right - I didn't create tons of new thought. However, I never claimed to be inventing all of this. What I did was try to pull together a bunch of disparate thoughts a lot of people have and put some organization to it, which is a key part of any piece of writing. It allows people like you to see it all together so you can then attack me. As for the standardization comments. You're point was the same as mine in the article at some point standardization will increase. I think we're disagreeing on how fast but arguments of degree are never winnable on either side without until time passes. Also the point about speed and edge are hogwash now. GTA3 was never state of the art and it outsold lots of other SOA games. Yes SOA games will do well - we all like the latest and greatest but I think GTA represents the fact that if a huge hit game both with hardcore and casual gamers can be built using products like Renderware then it's going to get increasingly harder for every team at every publisher to justify building an engine from scratch. Yes technology does force changes but the thought that game developers after 20 years can't start to create standardized files with some level of backwards compatibility is crazy. The performance vs. function curve is rapidly dwindling and as it does standardization will grow. If you spent some time talking to Mike King at Criterion as I did at last years GDC you'd see that a lot of people are talking about this stuff and some are doing it even now. Talk to the guys at RAD Game Tools as well. Bink Video is becoming a defacto standard for game video. Talk to Jack Moffit the creator of vorbis and see how quickly that's become a standardize file format (royalty free to boot and open source) for a lot of game audio. Over the last 20 years mostly propreitary processes, tools and engines where the rule. Over the next 20 years they will increasingly become the exception. The macro-economics of the game industry and moores law will nearly dictate it. As I said in the article there will always be room for innovators and the Carmacks of the world but it will be far more standardized.