The Evolution Of Games

Posted by simoniker on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @12:07AM from the if-i-could-game-like-the-animals dept.

Thanks to Reality Panic for pointing to a new IGDA-hosted article comparing evolutionary biology to the organic process of videogame creation. The author compares the Cambrian era, an "early period of developmental simplicity for organisms", to the '70s and early '80s for games, with both containing "...a number of... oddities with few or no modern descendants". He goes on to liken the possible wiping out of the dinosaurs with "the impact of a giant meteor" to "...the arrival of the Sony PlayStation... [marking] a mass extinction of 2D games", and concludes by suggesting that, like the evolution of fauna and flora, "...periodic outbreaks of originality, and the corresponding extinction of certain game genres, are useful to drive the form forward, but the conservative intervals between these events are what serve to sustain."

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