The Evolution Of Games

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."

Comments

2D games

[sofakingl]

2D games are not extinct; games such as Guilty Gear X and SNK vs Capcom continue to be made, and have a solid fan following.

Re:2D games

[TRACK-YOUR-POSITION]

Though there are few examples of 2d games being made on the home consoles (some of which are absolutely incredible) even more significant are the vast sums of money being made by 2d games in the portable (game boy, cell phone, pda) markets. 2d isn't just still alive, it's the next big thing.

Re:2D games

[PainKilleR-CE]

It's becoming much more common to use 3D engines to make 2D-style games. Off-hand most of the ones I can think of are console games, but Ikaruga is a great example of a very old style of game built on a 3D engine without becoming '3D'. I believe there was at least one version of Asteroids that did this, as well, though it wasn't very successful, iirc. Diablo 2's use of 3D effects is the same way, and over time more and more people will do it, in part simply because the support for building a strictly 2D engine is very limiting (and if you're using DirectX it's gone unless you want to use the old versions).

Re:2D games

[TRACK-YOUR-POSITION]

The very beautiful Klonoa 2 for PS2 did this. (I'm told Klonoa 1 for PS1 also did, but I've never played it). The mediocre Duke Nukem: Manhatten Project on the PC did this as well. Lots of people talk about using Direct3D for 2D stuff--getting free hardware transparency and linear transformations as a bonus.

It's an approach that has a lot of aesthetic appeal, because art designer knows exactly what camera angle their art will be viewed at, and can do a better job optimizing for that angle/distance.

On the other hand, there's more changed in the transition from pixels to polygons than just an added dimension. Pixels are discrete, blocky, integer-based objects, while polygon meshes exist in approximately continuous space. When playing a pixel-based plaform game, if the game is designed properly, you can tell exactly when the character is standing on the platform and when they've walked one pixel too far. I don't think any polygon-based platform game yet created has had that level of exact precision. A friend of mine even suggested voxels would be a good idea in platform games for this very reason.

Re:2D games

[PainKilleR-CE]

Lots of people talk about using Direct3D for 2D stuff--getting free hardware transparency and linear transformations as a bonus.

Not to mention most of the other features of current 3D cards, such as lighting, shaders, etc, although the impact of that sort of thing isn't explored much in 2D.

It's an approach that has a lot of aesthetic appeal, because art designer knows exactly what camera angle their art will be viewed at, and can do a better job optimizing for that angle/distance.

It also offers the developer better control of what's displayed on screen at any one time (in other words, there's a definite limit to how much is visible at once in a 2D game, whereas once the user has control of the camera or the camera adjusts to the user's viewpoint, you lose some or all control of how much may be drawn on screen at once). In 3D space you spend a lot of time designing to keep the user from being able to get to a point at which they may see too far, so that the polygon count is within a reasonable range. Of course, with newer engines and more powerful computers this has become less and less an issue, but it still is kept in mind by good level designers.

On the other hand, there's more changed in the transition from pixels to polygons than just an added dimension. Pixels are discrete, blocky, integer-based objects, while polygon meshes exist in approximately continuous space. When playing a pixel-based plaform game, if the game is designed properly, you can tell exactly when the character is standing on the platform and when they've walked one pixel too far. I don't think any polygon-based platform game yet created has had that level of exact precision. A friend of mine even suggested voxels would be a good idea in platform games for this very reason.

Good collision detection and a fixed camera view can fix a lot of the issues with platforms, though. Many of those issues come from camera angles that may distort the viewpoint or may leave the character in the way (in 3rd person views). Maybe it would be too costly to get pixel-level collision detection from polygon-based graphics, but it could be a good excuse to get designers to shy away from their need to force players to utilize pixel-level accuracy in their jumps.

Voxels are good when you have time to do the render, have a lot of space (and more importantly volume) to render, and so on, but with all current 3D cards being optimized for polygon rendering, I don't think you're going to see voxel engines taking off in gaming (though there are a handful of them out there).

Atari Crash

[DrWho520]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. The meteor was the market crash in the '80s. Atari, being the fat, lazy, unadaptable dinosaur that it was, could not stand the ensuing cold. The NES and SEGA were the small mammals of the time, and that's why they survived. PS1 was an offshoot of SNES, a direct decendant of the NES. I am not sure even nature is as fickle as the videogame market, though.

You are right, this article is a big, steaming pile.

Gaming is at a Nexus.

[pecosdave]

Games are starting to look simular even though vastly different. The reason for this? 3D

Think about it, back in the day you had single screen games. Everything took place on a single screen, and you had to move your sprites around to make a game happen in different and unique ways. Nobody would accuse PacMan being anything like Space Invaders but they each left you in control of a single sprite on a single screen. Eventually clones of nearly every good game happened, but it was new so it was overlooked.

Then came systems that could actually SCROLL their screens. You had Mario hopping around, you had 9,000 games that required moving right and beating up the bad guys (i.e. Double Dragon, Batman) and you had some zooming space ships. Zelda came along and was different, but before long that was coppied. So now we have scrolling games.

Eventually came true 3D. We are on a convergence. A big convergence. No longer is coding an engine from the ground up for each game a substainable buisness model, or even necessary. Compare Alice to Quake III. I would say they were remarkably different. Alice is a platformer, Quake III is a first person shooter. They both run on the same core engine.

Right now there are different 3D engines for different types of games, but there's becoming less of a reason to seperate engines between game types. It wont be long until one engine can be a first person shooter, a platformer, and a racing or flying game. I would venture to say it's already possible, Conkers Bad Fur day for example embraces all of these elements at one part of the game or another.

The reason this is percieved is the better 3D engines get, the more games are going to look alike reguardless of what core type it is.

As computers/consoles become more powerfull, have more RAM, and the engines become more refined the blurrier the line between game types becomes. I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing. Sure, not every game has to be 3D, but we've crossed the threshold of the 3D age and theirs no going back.

The main difference I see between a racing game and a platformer? The racing game uses less detailed polygons because at high speeds it doesn't matter which leaves more memory for bigger worlds. A platformer moves slower and doesn't need as big of a world so more power is put into fine details.

How long will it be until a game comes out were the main character is able to interact with the environment on a platformer level, jump in a vehicle (or on a mount) and drive through the same world at high speeds with great detail? I can't put my finger on a particular example at the moment, but I'm sure it's already happened. Halo seems like a good example for now, UT2K4 is supposed to be simular.

Innovations not dead, reinventing the wheel on a regular basis is. Personally I'm hoping for incremental engine upgrades. Wouldn't it be nice if the UT2K3 engine would work with the game code from the orginal UT? I wouldn't mind the better rendering on the old game. Wouldn't it also be nice, if for some reason you haven't upgraded your game library for a year or so, then someone gives you a nice shiney new flight simulator for Christmas. You put the game in, decide it sucks, but all of the sudden since you got a game with an updated engine all your old games suddenly look better?

The day is coming. This convergence is a GOOD thing. Don't bitch about an empty gas tank when somebody GIVES you a car.

Re:Gaming is at a Nexus.

[twifkak]

Notice how your entire post is centered around the *technology* behind the games? (You put the game in, decide it sucks, but all of the sudden since you got a game with an updated engine all your old games suddenly look better? No. It requires artists to create more detailed models/animation for that to be. Besides, there's more to a game than looks.)

Yes, convergence of technology is good. When engines and tools become flexible enough that each developer need not spend time in pre-game phase (read: GK3 postmortem), game development costs can cut drastically, and can especially improve the situation for smaller game-dev studios.

However, this doesn't mean the fact that for every leader there are 100 followers is a good thing. *Artistic* convergence is bad. One simply need look at the hyper-genrefication of games to see the harms of a convergent collective mindset. I say I like games, and people respond "What kinda games you like? FPS? RPG?" AHH! I like many games -- adventure, shmup, platformer, the "casual" FPS (Halo, e.g.) -- but whatever preconcieved notions I have about genres of games I like have been derived mostly from precedent. My older brother gave me a copy of Samba de Amigo for the DC. I played it, and liked it, so I searched for a few others like it. Does that make me a music game fan?

Now, I'm aware that I just pointed out a potential counterpoint. I exhibited the "copycat" tendency of consumers by searching for other music games. However, if genres weren't so restrictive (look at all the music games -- mimic visual cues through button press, hear the result -- but there are plenty of other ways to handle music [I've got some ideas... shh!]), I might have picked up a musical RPG, and then through that found an interest in RPGs. Of course, there's more to innovation than clever hybridization -- 10 years ago, did music games even exist?

(Another example of bad convergence is perhaps the continuing emphasis on realism, but I can't think of any good examples right now -- anybody wanna tag team?)

Re:Gaming is at a Nexus.

[PainKilleR-CE]

I'm not going over the whole thing, but I will give you an idea of where my mind is at. I see polygons going away for the most part. Future, I know, but I'm picturing 3D models being sculpted with curves that are expressed mathmaticaly.

That's really just a matter of getting the tools in the hands of model designers. As it is, the game will treat the model as a series of mathematic expressions, and curves are just another level of math to deal with on the software and hardware fronts (and every curve is usually just broken up into approximations in polygons anyway, even in math).

Instead of coloring 10,000 2D tiles why not have 1 object expressed as a formula that renders the entire object?

This is the way it's already handled by most 3D engines. If you have a 3000 polygon character model, the model was designed as a whole by the artist, and is stored as a whole, and one texture (skin) is applied to the whole model. The formula that renders it, on the other hand, has to break it up into polygons (or it's broken up during compilation and stored as a series of polygons) because the graphics cards handle triangles and polygons (because they're easier to work with).

This would allow it to scale tremendously, and if the output does require polygons (variable by the capabilities of the hardware) a driver or engine update could increase the end result rendered polygons.

This sounds similar to the MRM technology from Intel licensed by Valve and others (the only released game I know uses it is Dark Reign 2). The idea is that you design a model with as many polygons as you want, and then the mesh (the exterior of the model if you will) is reduced in the number of polygons by a mathematical model according to how many polygons are on screen. It only works in one direction (and only ever could), which is to reduce the number of polygons. Increasing the number of polygons requires a human eye. However, if there were unlimited budgets and infinitely patient designers out there, developers could have models that are well beyond the polygon count that any current system could produce, even if it was the only thing on the screen. Of course, this works (once it's implemented) without any changes to the engine or drivers, because it's based on what the machine can handle under that engine. In theory, the perfect model could look like just another Half-Life model today, and almost exactly the same as what the designer put together in 2 years, on the same version of the game with new hardware.

As long as old games are created with something vectorish they should be able to scale upwards quite well. Maybe there will be new features in the engine the old games wont use, but as long as the engine contains improved pieces that are compatible with the objects of the older engine it should work better.

Vectors, unfortunately, don't improve the quality of 3D objects when they're scaled. You could use vectors to resize models and (hopefully, depending on the angles used) preserve the model's quality at different sizes, but it wouldn't change the number of polygons.

For example take a MIDI file. I've played MIDI files on cheap hardware that sounds better than an ATARI 2600, but it still beeps, boops, and sounds electronic. I've played the same MIDI files through really good high end sound cards and pro-audio equipment and it sounds like a real instrument. Maybe thats a bad example, but the input source was the same.

This is the same example that you would find with polygon-based models and any technology that scales them well for the hardware. That MIDI file is only going to sound as good as the source, regardless of how much better your hardware gets. If it was designed on an Atari, the individual instruments may sound better, but it will still be limited by the Atari's capabilities (ie you won't get massive 128-voice sound from the MIDI file if the source had a maximum of 8 simultaneous voices). Or, just like you can play most ster

Creationist Gaming

[person46]

I think game development was spawned out of a void in six days by a supreme being. During those six days all gaming genres were created and have remained static since that time. I'm writing an article on it, I expect it to be linked to on Slashdot sometime tomorrow afternoon. I'm also writing articles on how gaming is like Judeaism Voodo checkers and Ritz crackers, stay tuned.

Dinosaur

[Robmonster]

So tjhe arrival of the Playstation is akin to a meteor wiping out the dinosaurs....

Seems fair, seeing as the dinosaur was most likely the Sega Saturn.

Summary and critique (long)

[RobotWisdom]

Summary: Bateman points out that in biological evolution, most innovation occurs when new niches open up, usually via a catastrophic extinction-event. Between these crises, innovation is mostly incremental, following paths-of-least-resistance that Waddington (a 1950s embryologist) called 'chreodes'.

In computer gaming, it's usually hardware breakthrus that open up new niches, with sequels and genre-copycats filling the between-times. Bateman argues that even the incremental improvements of sequels and copycats have the potential to open up new niches. Examples cited: Wolfenstein 3D, Sims, Gauntlet.

Critiques:

Food to an animal is much like money to a game

Most niches are based on a particular food-source, so a better analogy might be that food-sources are like player-motivations: The Sims appeals to different motives than Doom. Both are effective in extracting money/calories, but via different food-sources/motives.

[In the early days] Games were unconstrained by preconceptions, and so explored all manner of directions, only learning the hard way what would prove profitable, and what wouldn't.

The creativity in games in the early 80s was due to low entry-barriers and huge consumer demand for novelty. Most were crap, but the few that weren't made millions, and inspired imitators.

...hallucigenia which apparently supports a trunk and globular head on seven pairs of rigid spines

This reconstruction turned out to be bogus-- the spines were on its back.

Compare the success of the genre exemplified by Taito's 1978 Space Invaders (albiet not the first shooter) which by the 1990's had evolved into the first person shooter and had codified the genre into a streamlined, simplistic game structure making it the fish of the games world.

I think this analogy is valid.

...the mudskipper [1st fish to walk on land] of first person shooters could appear at any moment, opening up a new chreode and new possibilities. The question is, what is the equivalent energy barrier to the fishes' life in water problem in respect of first person shooters?

In retrospect, it's easy to see that land was begging to be exploited, but fish were shackled to water for breathing. By analogy, FPSes are shackled to point-and-shoot, and the land begging to be exploited is the whole realm of human interactions seen in movies and books. But where the first breakthru will occur isn't obvious yet.

Games are designed - why should they show the same slow rate of change (albeit on the faster scale of decades)?

Bateman misses a useful perspective-- the conservatism of sexual selection in evolution. Most creatures are constrained by hardwired sexual stereotypes to avoid mates that don't fit the stereotype, so innovators are effectively punished for their daring. This is less true for consumers, who are hungry for novelty, but applies to game-companies, who hope to minimise risk.

(It could also be applied to consumers' demand for state-of-the-art graphics, I guess.)

By working within the existing chreodes, we have a mechanism for introducing elements of originality with some confidence that they will still appeal to a significant proportion of the market.

A big difference between games and species is that game designers can experiment cheaply on a small scale and then, when they find something promising, seek funding for a more expensive commercial release. So promoting innovation requires promoting those cheap, small-scale experiments.

Namco/Bally Midway's Pac-Man (1980) typified the arrangement, with a series of ever-more challenging mazes facing the player

(The maze didn't change!)

The lesson here, perhaps, is that publishers looking to be at the forefront of change in the industry should occasionally step outside of their existing brand chreodes and gamble on new design or technology, becau

Re:Summary and critique (long)

[PainKilleR-CE]

because the potential rewards for founding a whole new chreode branch has the capacity to exceed the value of mining out existing chreodes.

This can only succeed if a publisher has unusually good instincts.

I think there's also another example in the games industry that shows there really doesn't have to be a lot of risk involved (and it really points to a larger trend). Valve has shown that they can make use of the risks others have taken and make money off of that. TF was the biggest mod for Quake, so they hired TFS (the group that made TF), CS proved the most popular mod for Half-life (after TFC's initial success as the first mod for HL, since it was built to test the capabilities of the SDK by Valve/TFS themselves), so they bought the rights to that mod and worked on it, then packaged and sold it. Even Half-Life itself is an example of this, built on id's engine with people hired from all over the industry that proved themselves on other projects (and they've been hiring people ever since for work on HL2, TF2, and the tools to build their games).

Other developers have done much the same thing, and it's really no different from any other industry. A great deal of the innovation in the FPS world has come from small groups of people that work with the tools FPS developers release for their games to build something innovative with that game's engine. They may not have the art talent, or even the programming talent to build the engine from the ground up, but they had an idea and got it working on an existing platform, and then the smarter developers picked them up, ideas, personnel, and all, and brought in the talent and marketing to make some real money off of it. People would be hard pressed to say that the idea of TF was pushed by the material they started with. CS, on the other hand, was a different take on an existing model, that, for one reason or another, caught a bigger market than it's predecessors.

Seemless transition

[DrWho520]

A buddy and I are playing through GTA3 right now, switching off for different missions and such. I have never played through the game before. I was amazed by the open endedness of the game. And how it seemlessly transistions from one mode to another while you explore the city. Walking around and exploring is not as polished as Zelda, the fighting interface is nothing compared to SoulCalibur and the driving is not on par with GT #, but all three gaming types are incorporated into the game. I came to the conclusion that the next truly innovative game would combine all those elements with the high quality that stand alones of those types of games can provide. Nice to see someone else agrees with this idea. Here is a nice big ME TOO for you and another example (maybe a better one) for your idea.

So what I want now is a game with the spirt of Dragon Quest built in the GTA game engine. I want that gameplay with dragons, wizards and slimes.

PS1 did not kill off the dinosaurs

[TRACK-YOUR-POSITION]

Sony Playstation is the system that allowed the dinosaurs to exist. The number of video game players greatly expanded, but the games were fantastically more expensive to produce, approaching the costs of the most expensive hollywood movies. Because they were so vastly expensive, video game companies insisted on conservatism--stick only with what has worked before. Make sequels to our hit games. Make ripoffs of the other guy's hit games. After all, we can't waste tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars on untested content. The Playstation era was the Age of Expensive, Slow, Dinosaurs.

But what Dinosaur lovers like Mr. Bateman have missed is that while marketing and financial planners love conservatism, video game players DESPISE it. That's why a gaming magazine has to apologize for recommending a game that is more of the same--because there is no market on earth that values change and novelty as much as video game players! Which is why, ironically, the risk averse nature of video game production has caused the vast majority of new commercial video game projects to lose money! Every developer tries to remake last year's best selling game, and act surprised when no one wants to buy their almost-but-not-quite-as-good-as-Doom-3 video game.

So very many games spend so much money on gorgeous graphics and production value that they have no hope of getting that money back without being on the top 10 list of video game sales. To cite the lack of originality as proof that originality is not needed is ignoring the fact that so many video game companies have been really bad at making money lately.

Yet the age of dinosaurs is ending. Cell phone games, PDA games, Game Boy Advance, and even web-based games are the new mass extinction event. It can be cheap to make video games again. Despite the Game Cube not doing so hot, Nintendo is still one of the most profitable video game companies because its so damn easy to make money selling 2D game boy advance games that cost many orders of magnitude less to write than home console/PC games.