What is Wrong With Game Development?

Warrior-GS writes "Seamus Blackley, who has done everything from work at Looking Glass Studios to evangelize for the Microsoft Xbox, sounds off on what's wrong with the relationship between developers, publishers and their audience. Also, as part of coverage of the D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas, GameSpy has chats with Miyamoto about The Wind Waker and Yu Suzuki about his gaming influences. Some interesting reading."

Comments

Re:+5 insightful

[$$$$$exyGal]

Which article was that in? I couldn't find it :(.

Here's another funny quote (not Miyamoto):

... gamer culture is new and frankly has a strongly negative social connotation.

Thanks for being frank ;-)

I'll tell you whats wrong with the game industry

[t0qer]

Lack of innovation, thats right, a serious lack of innovation, and too many "me too" games.

Waaaayy back in the day, the atari 2600 was the #1 console. It died a horrible death mainly because of all the crap "me too" clones of astroids, combat, and pac man clones (actually the 2600 pacman stunk like turds)

Later we got the nintendo 8-bit. OOh wow, easter eggs in mario, now every game has easter eggs and secret codes. Now everyone wants to program platform games because "If mario is such a popular platform game, mine should be too!"

Later we saw the puzzle game "me too" phase where everyone and their brother was doing some sort of "tetris" clone. Nintendo had Dr. Mario, Sega had columns, Atari came out with some shit game called "klax". For a while there it seemed everyone and their brother was trying to do some spin on tetris.

Now it's the same old crap, and game companies STILL haven't learned their lessons. Yay we have procedural textured mapped polygons on a box that can do 3gabillion vertices per second. Who cares about the game! Just look at those fill rates! Wow look it's tetris, but it's better because it's IN 3D WOW! Yeah i'm just lining up at best buy before they open so I CAN GET MY COPY TOO!

I suppose when they release the next generation of consoles, we're going to see the same old crap, but with more wizzbang graphics than you can shake a stick at.

In the words of Roddy Piper, "It's like putting perfume on a pig."

Seamus Blackly is a complete tosser...

[igomaniac]

and I don't know why anyone listens to him.

He thinks 300 page game designs stifles creativity, but how does he suggest you get 20+ people to work together to produce a coherent result without a detailed design? Idiot.

Furthermore he thinks that it stifles creativity to make a game on a budget and with a timeschedule... Well, of course it does but unless you have an operating system monopoly paying your bills this situation is not going to change anytime soon. Idiot.

And his suggestion to use focus groups in game development -- I've tried that, but the average joe is not a game designer and does not produce valuable feedback apart from "I like it" or "I don't like it". One example of why this fails is a game I worked on that had a bug in the collision response in one of the focus group builds -- it was slated by them, but _none_ of them mentioned the collision response being bad. Idiot.