Slashdot Mirror
Life After the Video Game Crash
codecasting writes "There's an interesting, very satirical story over at David Wong's Pointless Waste of Time where he makes a good case for the upcoming death of the video game industry. His key points include gaming platforms largely reaching a technological plateau, the aging of the 'Original Gamers' audience, and the slew of games that are just copies of the same game from last year, but with a new title and different cars/guns/bikinis/etc. An interesting and humorous read."
I tend to agree. A good game has much more to it than highly realistic 3d videos. Historically the games which have been most successful were the ones with a simple, yet addictive concept. It didn't matter that they were designed for a 8 bit 2MHz proccessor with a black and white low-res display.
Recently there has been almost no inovation whatsoever. Every new game which comes out belongs to an already existing category (strategy, 3d fps, simulation, etc), with the only difference between them being slightly modified sprites.
The way I see it, the future probably will lie in Massive-multiplayer. As residential connections get faster, and protocols are improved to cope with lag better, it might be possible to design games where hundreds of thousands of players compete in real time in one virtual environment. That would be awesome.
I may be a little bit old school, but nothing has generated as much excitement as the release of a new Mario game or Final Fantasy 2 and 3 (US) used to when I was younger. Perhaps age has something to do with it, or it could be a lack of quality and fun. My money is on the latter.
I miss the old wacky Japanese titles that barely made it to the US. Games like Jumping Flash and Bust-a-Groove were qwirky and fun enough to hold my intrest.
"Hand me the bullet-shooty-thing and a box of little hurts" -Overheard on a USMC Rifle range
Is there anything that ISN'T dying these days???
Seriously, the media exaggerates EVERYthing because it makes for more entertaining reading.
The lack of innovation has come from the fact that video games have become a big business in the past 20 years. You can make the same argument that movies are the same way. Video games will continue to grow as the first "Video game generation" gets older. Think about it, most players now are 30-35 or younger...What will the market be like when these people are 80, and everyone plays games?
The Market is growing, not shrinking. Games are becoming more mainstream, which leads companies to produce "safer" tried and true games. Don't worry, there will still be innovation but there will also be more and more "safe" games as video games grow as a real business.
The author makes some really dead-on points, and it's plenty enough to make investors in Nintendo shares shake in their boots.
But I think he's badly underestimating the creativity of the companies that do survive -- whoever they happen to be.
Take board games as an example. How many ways can you move a playing piece from point A to point B? Isn't Life just the same as Monopoly, which is no different from Trivial Pursuit, which is an obvious ripoff of Chutes and Ladders?
You get the idea. Those four games hugely different variations on the same "platform" -- a flat piece of cardboard. What's more, they're still around after decades. Monopoly keeps coming out with special editions that are no more than "different cars" in GTA-LXXVI -- but they still sell.
And a stroll down Toys-R-Profit's game aisle shows a dizzying variety of board games. Many of them are lame variations on the theme (roll 1d6 to see if Barbie gets a good parking space at the mall) and won't last a year. But while they're around, someone will buy them, and next year we'll have another lame variant.
What's sad is that we're seeing the end of the beginning. We 30-somethings watched video games go from homebuilt to primitive to amazing... to commodity. I expect the children of the 1860s experienced the same thing with board games.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
His key points include gaming platforms largely reaching a technological plateau, the aging of the 'Original Gamers' audience, and the slew of games that are just copies of the same game from last year, but with a new title and different cars/guns/bikinis/etc.
The only difference could be that most people 30 and younger have grown up around video games, so they are more likely to continue playing/buying games. Other than that, the game scene sounds remarkably similar to the time just before the crash. Rehashes, remakes, same old, same old...
"Chances of RHIC-induced Armageddon are exceedingly rare, but... you never know." - MIT Physicist Bob Jaffe
Remember the first video game to gross $1 billion? NBA Jam, before it even made it into the home. This was after one of the prior 'crashes' in the home market. We all got burned out on Atari 2600/C64/Apple][ games and headed back to the arcade.
The video game industry may or may not be putting the player into the 'movie', but does it have to? My most feverish moments of gaming usually involved a text CLI interface. Some used a joy stick. The game is what you make it, IMHO.
The game industry will grow. It's just waiting for the next big thing, which may actually be some old thing redone to be fresh or just captures the imagination of players. The failings of the game industry isn't so much the tired old games redone, it's simply the lull between the peaks. There will be another peak, and another and another... as he said, Something truly new and different and novel, dammit. The market is ripe for it.
It always will be. In the meantime, I continue to play treasures from the past.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Even if I am forced to play nothing but pong, I still will!
In the last couple of days there have been news stories heralding the fact that video gaming is cutting noticeable chunks out of TV viewership in the US. It might just be a reaction to the fact that TV these days doesn't suck - if it sucked it would be good for something.
It might also be the case that video games have a fairly solid place in modern life that will endure even if we are on a technological plateau. Broadcast TV hasn't changed that much. Even though it's struggling it's still holding in there.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
I skimmed over the article. I have to disagree completely with his conclusion. Technology has not stagnated. People are still having original gameplay ideas. Sure, there are genres that are over done or frequently done, but that's fine. The games are becoming much higher production value. Look at the credits for a game like Vice City, it's simply amazing. In my opinion, games are becoming better than ever and I expect the game industry to keep growing for the near future.
Who remembers the big shakeout of the '83?
I'm not so sure comparing sports games to other types is a fair comparison. Sure, Madden 2004 has a limited amount of improvement....but that doesn't mean newer, fresher, more interesting games can't be developed. Saying "Creativity" is dead seems too simple to me, especially when your example is a sporting game. Think of games like Tetris or Snood: before they were created no one would've thought they'd be so addictive. While I agree that a limit to "realism" may occur soon, I certainly don't think that a lack of new games will occur.
At social events/family gatherings I see 20-30 somethings playing video games w/ teenagers all of the time.
This guy is way out there
...I wonder what Dave thinks of the Grand Theft Auto series? Does that count under his "cars/guns/bikinis" categorisation, or does he consider it capable of true innovation? To be frank, Vice City wasn't much of a leap up from GTA III - but it was certainly damn good.
Please, Not another BSD is dying troll... err oh.. n/m.
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
I disagree. The movie industry is still booming, and since the 1960's the only "improvements" in the technology have been special effects... sure the ratio of crappy games to fun games will contiue to change, but there are still innovative games that continue to captivate my imagination after 25 years of gaming. The article is funny, and interesting, but I disagree that we're seeing the end of an industry.
...a technological plateau, the aging of the 'Original Gamers' audience, and the slew of games that are just copies of the same game from last year, but with a new title and different cars/guns/bikinis/etc
One can say the same about music and movies. Trends repeat.
I'll IMHO take a lot to revive that, and as pointed out a couple of weeks ago, it'll take a development team run by people who love what they do, and not executives who love reading P&E statements based on the projected income of the "hottest new release!".
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
It's inevitable that things should slow down after the river runs dry on the 'easy' new gameplay concepts. But it's not like the industry is completely based around being new and cutting edge. Most of the best games still stand the test of time, not for their graphics, like youd want to think, but for the creativity and balance of the product. I wont cry when this happens, I hate the cookie-cutter game builds right now. THEY will go, but the good game producers will still survive, and maybe prosper.
Less garbage on the rack as far as im concerned.
Although I won't predict the death of the genre, I think one person can only play an MMORPG for so long before they're empowered to play real life.
Every time you read this, I am going against my principles.
Really now, if the same old idea just rehashed over and over (but most likely with slight variations) were a problem in the entertainment creation market, then books/music/art would have stopped being made sometime around, oh, 1000 years ago.
Everything worth expressing has already been expressed. That doesn't mean we can't enjoy the new incarnations. Society changes, things move out of favor, then back in again. At which point old ideas get rehashed and become popular once again. I don't think the gaming industry is in any danger of flopping, in fact I'll bet its only going to become a more and more pervasive part of world culture.
- I love animals. I try to eat at least one a day.
One day you have an article about how television is dying because of video games; now apparently video games are dying. Are they going to be replaced by people sitting around talking to each other? I don't buy it.
Personally, though, I think that console games will probably take over from PC games. It must be a lot easier for developers to not have to try making everything compatible with all of the various pc hardware components.
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
No kidding. I get the distinct impression, after reading this article, that the author likes to hear himself talk. I understand the points he raises, and even agree with a couple of them (online gaming is a niche market with respects to consoles), but I think the conclusions are way out in left field.
The XBOX and the Gamecube were failures? The graphical upgrades between consoles is getting narrower to the casual observer, so the game industry is going to take a nose dive? Instead of, say, the more reasonable outcome: they change to fit the new environment? We're not talking about the slow-to-move Recording Industry here, the videogame industry is in its infancy in comparison.
TFA looks more like an excuse to come up with some creative insults, and play with pictures in an attempt to be humorous. The arguments remind me of conversations I heard at lunch in junior high!
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
Yes, it is true that the people who try to keep pumping out the same games every year are soon going to have problems because they can't count on graphical improvements to make their game worth buying each year.
On the other hand (and in my opinion much more exciting) is we are rapidly getting to the point where games with very high quality graphics can be made without having to write a different highly-game specific engine each time you want to make a game. This means that we should hopefully have more and more interesting and original games appearing as the time to make them will get smaller, in the same way as cheap(er) digital video cameras has made low-budget film making much more possible than it was.
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
I believe you are on to something when you bring up the realm of MMO's. This is the realm where a basic amount of innovation is required by the developers, and then the rest of the innovation is brought about by the players themselves. With the advent of realistic physics, player-created objects, and detailed engines, a lot of new things can be brought about. This will help to jumpstart the stagnating game industry.
Skill is successfully walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. Intelligence is not trying. -- Anonymous
As soon as that puppy gets released cash out all video game stocks, because you know the end is nigh.
Hollywood hasn't come up with more than a handfull of new ideas in the last three decades and yet the studios are FAR from dead. The aging of the origional gamers is a GOOD thing for the game publishers because it means they have more disposable income, and the fact that they have less free time means that they will be less likely to notice the lack of origional content.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Massively multiplayer games are going to get very, veyr big. They've come a long way since Trade Wars. Since many of them can evolve into outright economies of their own, there are many social experiments waiting to happen in this arena yet - the Sims isn't the end by a long shot.
The revenues from games like GTA3 mean that this industry is going to be around for a long, long time. Gaming is HUGE. The entertainment value from good video games is much higher than movies or cable TV, or even books. You can play a video game for hundreds and thousands of hours. Combine this with the BS from Hollywood and the music industry.. although I think games nail the television providers worst overall. Most of the time you're using their primary distribution media for your video game.
Aging demographic? What? More kids play video games than ever these days.
We haven't even BEGUN to see the revolution that photorealistic 3d pr0n, er, rendered adult entertainment is going to bring. Up until now, the graphics weren't good enough to be convincing. I believe the current high end video games ARE good enough to be convincing. Unfortunately, this isn't an area that is actively pursued by people seeking advanced degrees in computer animation.
..don't panic
Speaking as an avid and famous video game player, the game industry is already dead, but can be revived.
A ton of games out now are repeats of old games.
Online games are the only ones that can have obscene profit margins.
No one has yet made an action paced game MMOG
Throw in "Saturday morning cartoons" ala cutscenes, and you'll have a hit that may score a billion dollars.
Everyone likes to be playin the same game, because it has to be badass.
Just because the badass bar keeps being raised, doesn't mean a company can't hit it.
God spoke to me
that only those games published for FreeBSD would be dying :-)
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
It's true that gaming is nearing some sort of revolution in the way the industry works. Games now are SO complex, and require such ridiculous development time that they have to be stupidly successful for any profit to be made. In order to find that success, even more money is poured into marketing.
I paid $75 for Sonic the Hedgehog, but I also paid $75 for Railroad Tyocoon 3. I am damn sure that RRT took an order of magnitude more money to develop, and this is only going to continue.
What's really interesting is what's happening in the handheld sector. Game Boy Advance is making a killing, and games on cellphones are everywhere. These games are much simpler to develop as far as I understand, and more and more people are playing them. Simpler is often better... When the industry moved full steam ahead into 3D, I don't think it was realized how much of a challenge it would be to continue to make games look bigger and better while selling them for the same price.
Ugh.
Come on. We've heard the "there's nothing new under the sun" "gamers are getting old" arguments before.
Hell, we've even heard the "limits of hardware" argument before.
Thousands of years of human history has shown that there's always something new under the sun, and human interests are constant.
Video games will go away when something else becomes more fun and not before.
I still think that some of the greatest games were produced by Infocom. Doesn't get much simpler technologically, but you could loose days in those worlds puzzling around. Since the Wolfenstein/DOOM days, so many games have shifted over to pure death and destruction with only video frame rates to separate one from the other. Even the better multiplayer games are either team destruction or just graphical MOOs. Technology can make a great game fascinating, but making an old idea pretty won't bring in the bucks.
aw man - first C is declared dead and now video games are dead. If the next slashdot story is that pr0n is dead, I've lost my three favorite hobbies.
Being an employee of a major Japanese video game corporation, as an avid gamer at heart, I have myself deplored the commercialization of games, and the tendency for games to be produced "cookie cutter" style in one of several well-explored genres, and to not sell unless it has a popular movie license behind it like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, guns, and/or scantiily clad women -- even though the production values and budgets of today's games far outweigh those of before.
Yet, I do think that the enormous gains in technology on the hardware side will result in a transformation of the video game industry -- specifically breaking out of its roots in "entertainment".
Games, especially when powered by today and tomorrow's graphics hardware and multimodal I/O technology, have already been discovered by organizations such as military, fire, and police to be valuable education and training simulations. In fact, this year's GDC will have a Serious Games Summit to promote the use of game hardware and software for uses other than entertainment, for education and other uses.
At Nintendo, my research group has been heavily looking into ways to dissociate games with pure "entertainment", and have been working with the Japanese military and other groups to incorporate our hardware and software into their training, and even in their actual weapons systems.
Besides training, we are working with an unnamed Japanese automaker to explore the use of game controllers -- the product of our years of HCI research -- as an alternate control mechanism for tomororow's "drive by wire" automobiles which will hopefully greatly reduce the accident rate, especially for a generation of drivers already trained and honed on video games.
We are also working with underdeveloped nations such as China, to produce customized games such as "Super Marx Brothers" and "The Legend of Deng Xiaoping" to use as educational materials in their school systems, making their textbooks come alive.
These are just a few examples of how we in the industry are seeking to diversity, and why I feel the game industry is by far, the most exciting industry to work in today.
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
Kinda like the music industry has. It seems that since gameing (the electronic type) has become mainstream, it's followed in the same path the music industry has. It's become crap because the corporate bean counters just want to sell a million units put together for the lowest possible price. So all we get now are recycles of what they think will sell.
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."-THG
Seriously I think its funny article, though I suspect that people will never get tired of games even if they are just the same old crap with increasingly pretty graphics.
Hikery.net - The best hiking site ever. Made by yours truly.
I think gaming has become a little like the car industry in that it has become standardized. Everyone knows what RPG and FPS stand for now, and the industry, for better or for worse, uses DirectX as the default base (I know this is widening). But one thing game makers need to deal with is that it is already harder to pry my money out of my wallet for a game than it was 5 years ago.
I still play horribly outdated games like Warcraft 2 because they are fun, and in the day of amazon.com I can actually find out what lots of other people think of the game in about 5 seconds. Then there are the game forums where you find out exactly how buggy the game is before they release the first patch.
Bottom-line - standards are going up, at least mine are. I expect something high-quality for my $50 and I can easily research past the marketing. Having said that, I plan on gaming for decades to come.
Articles like this are not written to make insightful points, that are written to waste your time by making stupid (but funny) ones. By posting it to slashdot you have made their goddamned month, wasting 10,000X the amount of time they can normally get people to waste.
Congratulations on being trolled by a troll that tells you it's trolling before it trolls you.
From the article:
Luke's X-Wing approaches the surface of the Death Star.
"Red Five, begin your attack run."
Luke swoops down into the trench. "It'll be just like Beggar's Canyon back ho-"
Turret laser bolts tear his X-Wing apart.
So true, how many times do you have to die a horrible death to finally get all the way through a game that was supposed to make you feel like a hero, but instead ensures that you never leave your cushy chair, your cold pizza, or your virginity.
I find that games only requiring a short period of time to throughly enjoy are my favorite. UT2004 is a blast in Onslaught mode (everyone should know this by now) and I can play with my brothers across the country. And a few good matches takes less than an hour of my life.
I like to play Simpsons Hit & Run with my wife when we want to just relax for an hour or so on a rainy day.
But I probably will not be willing to ever fork over the bucks that some of the upcoming all-in-one gaming/movie/theater systems are going to cost. I'll just get a cheapo PS2 and some decent games. I don't want gaming to be my life.
I'm on a chair.
The author says he did the 'research' but on what is what I want to know.
Take a look at my research. It says that the video game industry is growing at 11.7% compounding growth. Thats exponential.
So, he's just plain wrong.
Colleco vision was pretty cool in its day, but Cabbage Patch kids diverted Colleco's attention there.
But yeah I was morbidly depressed that I was playing all my same atari2600 games, but luckily Nintendo and C64 came out in 85.
Now we're all waiting for Massively multiplayer river city ransom, but just don't know it yet.
God spoke to me
He just doesn't get it. How many movies are made every year? Enough that there is nobody in the world who sees them all. A few blockbusters, and a lot that go nowhere. How many books in a year, or lets go down farther, how many science fiction books in a year, in English? Still enough that nobody will read them all. (And thats ignoring all the rejects publishers send out)
Video games will be around a long time to come. Look at the difference between the two 3d games he shows. Yet someone published both of them. Customers demand new, and publishers are happy to oblige. Some will make money, some will not.
Crash? Perhaps the next console generation will be the last, perhaps not. Either way though, video games will survive, because people want to be entertained.
Okay, there is one chance they won't survive. It involves the collapse of civilization as we know it though, so I don't worry about it too much.
Soon to be followed by the death of popular fiction.
Come on! People will continue to shell out the $$ to see the same hackneyed games with the serial numbers filed off, just like they continue to buy movie tickets and the latest "Star Wars" novel.
And, on a more hopeful note, there will probably always be inovators who push the envelope and expand horizons. Just because a medium is maturing doesn't mean it's dead!
Any generalization is a stupid one.
It's not all about graphics. Tetris had some of the most simple graphics every conceived of, "squares". Yet, I played the living crap out of that damn thing until I couldn't close my eyes without seeing blocky rotating shapes falling down.
The thing about tetris: It was a good game that was intellectually stimulating and it is still played in todays world, which is predominatly filled with fancy graphics and smoothed edges.
Every once in a while, Carmack will fix the problem. But that only sets up another 5+ years of similar games to follow.
I was born in 1983, so I never really encountered a lot of the older arcade games.
:)
However, when I encountered SolarWolf under Linux, I was instantly addicted.
I was especially shocked when I beat it after fifty levels..I'd hardly noticed the time go by.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
People that write articles like this often forget the "Clerks" factor. Aka, the independant artist factor.
If you poke around online, you can find TONS of independant groups creating entirely new games on their own, for little to no money.
This is similar to what kevin smith did in producing the movie "clerks." He, on his own, made some money, and produced his own film. It became a smashing success and lead to the creation of several new, highly innovative and creative films.
There is no reason this trend cannot continue in game producing. Yes, mainstream games will MOSTLY be a rehash of the same thing. But there will still be the occasional gem that falls in from outside. I doubt gaming is going to die.
no
The more games that end up on Apples and on FreeBSD (by way of Linux binary compatability), the closer they are to dying. Obviously the game companies should have thought about that before allowing games to be ported.
Ooh! And this should be modded to +5 funny first, *then* get the Flamebait mod, then an underrated, so it can be properly rated at +5 Flamebait.
That green slime had it coming.
On the other hand, my 8-year-old kid plays video games even more than I did.
The game industry is simply maturing, like any other 25 year old industry.
Doom was made by iD if I recall correectly. Infocom made the Zork text based adventures in the early eighties.
> There's a reason why people still go to operas while live gladiator contests and public witch burnings are both rare and poorly-attended.
Paging FOX executives... if our government's going to ban GTA4 before it hits the shelves and force us to watch TV to get our fix, can you guys at least buy some legislation to change the unfortunate situation described here?
Given that people still play basketball, baseball, football, soccer nearly a hundred years (or more) after their inception, something must be drawing people back to them year after year. Maybe people just like the elements of the sports (throwing a ball, tackling a person, etc...), but I bet more than anything, they come back for the competition.
I think the video game has already proven itself as a great forum for competition, and it will continue to be embraced until video games are as pervasive as every other sport. Obviously I'm not speaking for specific genres of video games (rpg's might have a tougher time surviving), but I say any game that lends itself to fun, fair competition will survive.
Every time you read this, I am going against my principles.
And his argument about the original game generation getting older? Man, that's just moronic, IMO. Someone may want to let this guy know that people are still having kids, these kids are still growing up, and --- guess what? playing video games. Not only that, but more are playing these days than ever before, especially as gaming is no longer seen as a lonely geek thing with all the associated stigma of that.
I do agree with certain aspects of his article, but we all have to remember that we were blessed to live through the birth stages of videogaming. Of *course* after that period of rapid change things are going to solidify and we're going to end up with less pure innovation -- this happens in every industry and even in every creative medium. But that doesn't mean new ideas and new technologies wont burst through every now and then to revitalize things... That's just the normal cycle of how these things work, get used to it....
Yes, there is a console that isn't dying: Dreamcast! Sega's console was the first to reach the plateau, and it'll be the longest survivor. For more information about the Dreamcast revival, check out such "signs of the second coming" as http://www.videogamedepot.com http://www.dreamcasthistory.com and http://www.dcemulation.com
"I am a fictional character."
The gaming industry has been at this same situation for the past decade or so and it hasn't died yet.
What's going to keep the industry strong include:
1. The neverending cycle of new video game machines being released every 2 - 3 years. They WILL be bought, and since they're not backwards compatible, the new owners of those brand spanking new machines will buy games
2. Sony PSP and other portable gaming machines including cellphones
3. Virtual reality gaming might some day become viable, and not in that ugly 3D fashion you see in Tron, but more like the combat simulators the US Army and police forces around the world are using
4. Multiplayer online gaming. The games so far have only scratched the surface of online gaming.
I still play Nethack, btw. GREAT game.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
There is no reason storytelling cannot be as powerful in video games as it is in movies. Every couple of months I fire up Halo just so I can play through the last level in "Legendary" mode and watch the easter egg cut scene. It's funny. It makes me laugh.
The only limitation faced by today's game companies is that they just don't have very good storytellers. Great programmers, brilliant artists, and fiendish level designers. But terrible writing. The fact that 16 year olds are the target audience doesn't help, either. But that is changing.
Neverwinter Nights has almost hit upon the right combination: a toolset for allowing others to tell stories. Besides a few technical limitations, their biggest mistake has been in their business model. By not allowing authors to sell content the are creating a disincentive to anyone pouring in tons of time. The best stuff I've seen, and in fact the only good stuff I've seen (and admittedly I haven't looked at a whole lot) was written by a guy who is basically using NWN to create a portfolio to find a job after he graduates from college. He's invested the time because he does plan to get 'paid', if indirectly, for his work.
Or take a look at Red vs. Blue. Done with the Halo engine, it's freakin' brilliant. Non-gamers I know, non-gaming GIRLS even (well, according to 3rd party reports; I don't actually know any girls like that) think Red vs. Blue is a masterpiece.
The point is that the story telling quality of most games is still terribly primitive, and it won't take technological innovation to make it better. We just need better story tellers to try their hand at it. When that happens the best of the best will be classics for a long, long time, regardless of how out-of-date the fog effects in them become.
Assuming our descendents can find the hardware to play them, of course.
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
You were some kind of bank robber that hid a bunch of money in this trippy mine. Basically you had to gather up all your loot and throw it in a wheelbarrow while two moronic cops chased you down.
What made the game so funny was the multitude of things you could do to (temporarily) take the cops out of action. Aside from dropping moneybags on them from a ladder, to knocking them out cold with a pickaxe (ouch!), it only got funnier when they threw themselves off a ledge or did unto themselves in some other humerous way.
That game kept me entertained for days on end. Sure it had no real plot and the graphics wer primative, but it was FUN TO PLAY! And that's the element overlooked by game companies trying to one-up (no pun intended) each other with gimmicks.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Then videogames have reached that same immortality plateau (marketing wise) that television and movies have been enjoying for the last 30 or more years!
END COMMUNICATION
because look what repetition's done to the movie and music industry. Man, they're hurtin'.
Seriously, one of the reasons for the last crash was poor management. Now that the industry's pulling in billions you're just not going to get that as much (at least not on the economic side of things).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Innovation may be considered "dead" right now, but that is only because consumers let it be. Game companies are going to rehash the same games over and over again as long as people buy them.
How many GTA games will we see? Well, how long will people keep buying them in droves? Sure, we may hit GTA 6, but if it fails miserably then we might see a GTA 7... if that fails, we probably won't see anymore. But if they keep selling, developers will keep making.
So what happens then when everyone grows tired of UT2007, GTA 6, Star Wars 123, and WarCraft 5? Well, the industry will take a hit. They have to - that's how they know they've hit the end of their rope. What happens next? Will the industry die completely? No. I beleive we will start to see more innovation again. I think their will always be a niche for video games... the developers that don't innovate will eventually die, but new original developers will come and take their place. But this likely won't happen as long as they make millions on the rehashes.
Consoles are inherently a technological plateau; that's why they're attractive to developers (the idea that the installed base will all have identical hardware for 5 years).
The "good old days" of gaming were also full of ripoffs, boring variations on a theme, and mindless clones of the latest and greatest. They all tanked and were lost to history, we just remember the classics more.
Please, let Seanbaby do Seanbaby. There's a reason why he's on TV now. He really IS that funny! Sadly, you are not.
Making up silly insults to yourself in some sort of mock "Oh, they're going to be so pissed!!!!" tirade is a waste of everyone's time. Where's that maturity you were harping on? Nowhere? "It's okay, bro. I'm mature. I have a website where pretend that people are so mad at me for predicting the end of video games that they call me a sentient ham statue. A SENTIENT HAM STATUE!"
Video game graphics aren't getting any better? We've reached a plateau in gaming? Well then...video games are doomed. Trust me, they're as dead the art of painting after they invented the camera.
Listen, Wong, if you have a point to make...and I am not convinced that you do...why not try to make using the time-tested combination of argument bolstered by example? Just a gentle hint from someone who is marginally literate...
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Life after the video game crash was hard at first, there where many times I felt like giving into the despair and reading a book. Then I found the reset switch, and all was well again.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
The industry can't crash or die because it is diversified among many players now instead of Atari and a few 3rd party makers. If the industry consolidated into 3-4 companies again and those comapnies fell on hard times, then yes you could have a crash or death or whatever makes the news glamorous.
This guy's talking out of his ass. What does he base all this on? His opinions
Humans have been playing games since they had leisure time. Once we didn't have to spend all day hunting and gathering we filled the rest of the day with story telling and drawing on cave walls. The gaming industry is not going to crash, or ever go away.
Now hopefully soon the dumb computers (consoles that only know how to play games) will go away soon, but PC gaming will never ever die.
*DrugCheese rants*
Companies with worthy technologies and otherwise sound business plans have committed suicide trying to keep up with Microsoft's desktop monopoly-subsidized overspending.
Sony can keep up, but their idea of gaming is the same as Microsoft's. More accurately, their idea of YOUR LIVING ROOM is the same as Microsoft's.
Now I'm not saying that Nintendo is in financial trouble (they aren't), but if Nintendo were ever to fold, I would drop buying new consoles/living room boxes and stick to older-generation games (which is very easy to do nowadays, and should be even easier in the future with at least a couple more Nintendo machines in the pipeline). At that point the games market will have changed to such a degree that I won't be missing anything.
And before all the pseudo-pundits shout the name "Sega," let me remind people that those of us who have been part of traditional console gaming for all these years at least had Nintendo's platforms as an option when Sega fell as a hardware manufacturer. Without Nintendo, the oldest player in the game becomes Sony - the same group that has had a deep-seated hatred of 2D gaming since the design stages of the first PlayStation. THAT is something that should weigh heavy on every gamer's minds when they think that gaming life as we know it could survive without Nintendo.
As usual, the Japanese are way ahead of us, but I reckon Russian Sex Roulette is bound to catch on soon. People are already worrying less about AIDS thanks to the new treatments. It'll be like the 70s all over again.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
were any of you guys chosen too?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
The PS2 doesn't use an ATI GPU.
...
The PS2 uses Cell processors not PPC processors.
The author is an asshat.
From the article:
Samus is a girl, dumbass.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
How can the Video Game market continue to thrive in the same way the film industry has? Lowered expectations by the consumer!
The only difference is that video games are still too new to have properly settled themselves into a couple of classics, and the market isn't particularly interested in pushing forward unless profit can be found. Production values seem like a sort of trade-off to me; for a few million bucks you can make a game that looks fantastically real, but at the same time has become devoid of any unified personal touch by dint of being produced by a huge team rather than a small group or a single person. I really haven't seen any big-budget games within the last ten-odd years that have managed to overcome this problem; they all seem to get mired in this sort of muddled, disunited world-view, where you get things like campy dialogue spoken by uber-realistic, vicious-looking thugs and secret agents, while moody BGM plays. Certainly, some fare better than others, but the old perfection of the experience is pretty much gone in big titles now. I think that smaller ones will continue to be the place for real innovation for the immediate future.
1. The technological plateau he speaks of is merely a graphical one, and it only seems like a plateau because new game consoles don't come out every month.
There's also the consideration that there are many places for the technology to expand. GTA3, despite what one may think about its gamesplay, hints at what is possible. Maybe the graphics won't improve much, but the world will get bigger and more detailed. The fascination of GTA3 for me was the ability to just wander around, down alleyways that had nothing to do with the missions and find stairways to rooftops, trash bins- all sorts of real world details. Lots of the world reacted to your actions. That's a neat thing. When your video game is an entertaining toy outside of the core gameplay, you've really accomplished something.
There's more to games than polygon count. Most of the game worlds, even the likes of Halo, are still fairly primitive compared to what could be done with ever more processing power. The end of graphical improvement might be a GOOD thing, and force developers to focus on gameplay, computer character AI, and other things that are a bit lacking these days.
2. He didn't really seem to have an argument in this section. ??? His view of the types of enjoyment derived from video games is a bit limited.
3. His horizon is limited. The video games may (or may not) be reaching upwards of 90% penetration into the current market, but the *market* is exapanding. Technological civilization is creeping into parts of the world not yet elevated to such.
He also seems to oddly forget that new generations are being born, and *everything* is new and novel to them.
4. Are the Gamecube and X-Box really complete failures? They've all sold millions of units. They didn't sell as well because [A] the PS2 got there first and [B] not as many good games. The X-Box especially only had maybe two decent titles for a long time.
As for age, he's entitled to his opinion, but I play games in my late 30's. I know people in their 40's and 50's who regularly play PS2 games and PC games. To use his belabored Hollywood comparison, most people seem to realize that, just as there are movies for children and adults, there are also video games for children and adults.
5. He might be right here. I already have home theater stuff. I want a game console to play games. I don't need a jack of all trades, master of none. That's why I expect a minicrash when these All In One systems fail to sell.
6. Agreed on the online play. I know Final Fantasy *fanatics* who have zero desire in FF11 Online. The reaction is usually, "Wait, I bought a game and I have to keep paying every month?"
7. was just a rehash.
--- Ban humanity.
Massive-multiplayer as realized today is B-O-R-I-N-G.
I have a friend who swears by them. He talked me into buying the Star Wars MMORPG.
I tried it for a week.
It was hideous. I'd never played such a game. I should say, I don't see one bit of attraction for games which are about collecting "bone" to make my character strong, which lets me collect more stuff to make my character stronger.
he keeps showing me these different games, and all of them at their core are the same. Its something, but its not gaming. Its social interaction in a stilted way without the benefit of actual humans.
I used to make fun of D&D guys, but at least they get together to play games in person. The MMORPG's combine the worst elements of gaming with no human interactivity. You couldn't pick a worse combination.
MMORPG's won't get better until they solve one fundamental problem...daily life is boring, and not everybody can be Luke Skywalker in an MMPORG.
and take me out of my misery.
I've been playing Subspace (www.subspacechaos.com) since 1995.
--
Will there be a rise of an "independent" games industry with more focus on artistry and less focus on profit in much the same way as there is an independent film industry? Will we ever have a widely-known gaming equivalent of the Sundance Film Festival?
Don't get me wrong -- I appreciate both blockbuster Hollywood movies and indie films in their own ways. I'd be interesting to see that kind of balance and contrast come to another entertainment industry.
I was all giddy and excited about HL2. I hadn't been that worked up about a game in 10 years. I was ready and willing to drop whatever it cost to run that game at a fantastic framerate, but it didn't show up, and now I'm even more jaded than I was before.
I had some mild excitement for the previously-upcoming Sam & Max sequel, but that got cancelled. (a new adventure game! MAN I miss that genre. Thank you, ScummVM.)
I think part of the lack of neverending salivation over upcoming games is that I can just go buy them now, unlike when I was 10 and a $50 game was a HUGE deal to save up for. That, or copying 25 pages of machine code out of the back of Compute's Gazette by hand.
Still, there are great games, and I play and buy them. Actually, I probably buy 3 or 4 times what I did when I was younger, even if I spend less time playing them. It's just easier now to justify picking up Viewtiful Joe while I'm grocery shopping than it was when my allowance was $1/week. I don't think the industry has anything to worry about. The dorks who played games as kids in 1982 all have jobs now, and will go right on buying them. Heck, the guys I know with kids play multiplayer gamecube games with them.
I believe the next major leap for gaming may be one of cooperation. Imagine multiple extremely different games, each speaking a common language or protocol ... each with its own objective and storyline ... but all interracting within a common environment. For example ... Somebody playing a futuristic version of "SimCity" may be laying down the roads that someone playing a driving game is racing on. Meanwhile, that driver gets carjacked from someone playing a version of GTA. The challenge to make it all work together is enormous ... but the possibilities are endless ... and the concept of a game will be closer to real-life than anything anyone's ever seen outside of the real thing.
... but as I see it, this would be the ultimate future of gaming.
We're nowhere near this concept today
very nice,
i see you've been holding back since december 7th.
haha super marx brothers.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Most this guy's arguments do not hold any weight.
For one thing he comparing an industry in its infancy to what it is now. The plateau in the eighties happened because of an over saturation combined with industry growing pains and maturation.
The video game industry has been far more innovative than the movie industry (yes there are plenty of copy-cats but the movies is full of those and remakes as well).
Actually the fact that he correlates movies to videos games it probably his weak point in rhetoric. People strive entertainment. As long as companies keep updating/remaking/re-inventing the same genre, people will keep buying. They have been doing it in the movies for years and now that video games can tell stories (something it does a lot better now that in the 80's) it will continue to thrive.
Settop box.
'nuff said...
idealord music
Sure snood is a waste of my PC's ability, just like Tetris Worlds was a waste of my PlayStation's, but I'm still willing to fork over cash to purchase new and interesting games to become hopelessly addicted to.
when I was growing up, all i had were sticks and stones to throw at the feral dogs. computer games, bah!
seriously, i grew up on the island of okinawa, and would collect bullets and old shrapnel as a kid. i was old enough to know that i needed to avoid playing with unexploded mortar shells. it's sorta like mario, only with real explosions.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Dude, the author is striving for humor.
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
We're still waiting for Duke Nukem Forever...
That entire article is onlt one man's opinion and not the absolute truth. Everyone is different hence you cannot predict what people want and/or will want in the future. Trust me many have tried on numerous topics and failed miserably.
Gaming has a long past and even brighter future regardless if gameplay isn't massively different in the future. A game is about passing time, escaping, a hobby, and plain ole fun.
There are millions of games out there for all types of preferences and all types of attention spans. There is something for everyone. Even though there seems to be a lack of original content in the last few years there has been an advancement in gameplay. More interactivity (HL2 environments), a move towards team based play and operating vehicles (CoD, BF 1942, UT2k4), and this is just in FPS's. MM's are also evolving into more of a FP view with much more depth not including SW Galaxies.
Things don't evolve overnight and some people just like to whine about the current state of affairs but I see it simply evolving at a slower pace because there's a lot more companies making games these days and orginality is harder to come by.
FYI- the author stated that people these days don't play the recent older games and I disagree. There's plenty of Q1, Q2, HL players out there. They are still creating new content (maps, models, etc.) so those scenes are still alive although not as large as they used to be.
The last thing I'll say is I totally disagree about once you're over 35 you can't game because you're a loser or manchild or somthing along those lines. I was on a blizzard board a while back and some guy stated that he thought most gamers are in the 15-20 year old range. Gamers came out of the woodwork to tell their age and why they game. The average gamer was over 40 and the oldest was 72!
Don't let people who do no research and simply speculate convince you of something that is completely untrue.
Gaming is here to stay even if games stopped evolving from this day on.
It's simply a part of our lives...
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
Tribes 2 is still the best game ever. I had to quit playing after I got married.
After reading this, I've made a stunning revelation. Pretend like you are reading this article and it's 1995. Somehow, his points all still make sense. He doesn't make any arguments that hold water. Technology is always advancing, we've hit several "plateaus." As older gamers age, not only do they continue playing games, but theirs kid's do too! And of COURSE there are carbon-copy games, it's been like that since the 80s! How many side-scrollers did you see in the late eighties/early 90s? But there's always room to innovate. Every year is marked by the games that came out that are different.
At least not yet. In the past 10ish years, there have been a lack of originality in new games. When did you last see a video game that did not look like another game, or was not based on a concept or gameplay allready used by another game? Video games wont die yet, unless nobody creates something new.
this is probably the most boring sig in the world
There's no two ways about it: Yamauchi has a point. Too many developers are relying on technology instead of creativity. But does that really mean that the videogame industry is going to crash again? Mr. Wong really doesn't show the connection. All he has managed to truly establish are the following points:
That's really not establishing much that we don't already know. In fact, those two problems have been a consistent problem for videogaming since the 16-bit days. All this article does tries to do is shut up (or incite) gamers that don't intelligently examine their own hobby.
What his article misses is that videogaming is maturing as an artistic medium. The only problem, as with any medium, is that you have to take the bad with the good. For every innovative, creative game like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, you'll have five NBA Jam titles. Not only that, but some of the best stuff (like Wind Waker) will get ignored by the general populace in favor of crap. Hence why the list of the top-grossing films of all time does not include gems like The Shawshank Redemption (but Titanic is near the top), and why Wind Waker was not as successful as Nintendo would have liked.
Videogaming is not going anywhere because, despite its faults, it offers a form of entertainment that no other medium can: interactivity. In other words, people love Mario because, when you're holding the controller, Mario is you. The Sims offers a better dollhouse experience than any "real" dollhouse ever could. Ridge Racer tops Hot Wheels any day. And few films can provide the same depth, the same experience as Wind Waker or Final Fantasy VII.
Recommended reading: Wolf, Mark J.P., ed. The Medium of the Video Game. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2001.
Spekkio Master of War
There is already a game that does exactly this. Second Life
http://secondlife.com/
I'm way older than David Wong, and part of the original gamers. We were the ones transitioning from pinball machines through Pong to the original video games like like Space Invaders and such.
Guess what, technology marched on, and allowed companies like Atari and Coleco to offer new, challenging games at home. At about the same time my kid brother grew up, and he started on the next wave of games like the original Nintendo. Now my kids play the new consoles, GBA, etc.
Gaming is a form of entertainment that will continue. At one time it was a little silver ball, aided by gravity, bouncing around. Now it's very tiny pixels on a screen. When 3D displays become real, games will probably take advantage of that and in the future, who knows? Maybe everyone will devote their basements to virtual gaming ala Star Trek holodeck instead of pool tables and Mame consoles.
Markets, video game or otherwise, always change, and the companies that can make it happen will replace the ones that can't. The death of those companies doesn't signal the death of the industry. Instead it's a sign of the transformation of the market.
It's not your age that's the problem. It's how long you've been playing video games. The first games you play tend to be the ones you remember as being the best because you were just starting out in computer games and everything is still new and novel.
Here's a few old-school examples:
When I started in games id Software's Wolfenstein 3D was in full stride and I enjoyed the hell out of it. Then came DOOM. For me DOOM was one of the best games ever made, with Wolf3D being among the other top ten contenders.
A year or so later ROTT came out. Technically it was somewhere between Wolf3D and DOOM and a LOT of people who were just getting into gaming thought it was the best thing around. I thought it was crap (and I still do). Was it crap? Objectively, no. Subjectively? For me it was.
Nothing in the FPS world interested me much until Quake 1 came out and we all got real 3D. Since Quake 1 it's mostly been refinements and prettier environs. Nothing has wow'd me like Quake 1 except for Half-Life and that wasn't because of the graphics.
Are these new FPS games (and I use these example because these are what I play) not well done? Are they bilge? Do they suck? Some do, but many are very well made games. They just don't dazzle me anymore because I've been there and seen that. Now there are just more colors and rounder asses on the women.
It's very hard to recapture the wonder you felt when you first started playing games.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
We're on a technological plateau
And he believes gaming has hit the wall as far as graphics go.
I have to call bullshit on this one. GPU's are becoming faster and more programmable (the rate at which GPU's are evolving makes moore's law seem very modest indeed).
Right now the trend seems to be advancements in the programmability of gpu's, allowing coders to write their own routines instead of being limited to hard coded ones. This means more realistic textures, shaders etc.
Compare the real time graphics of a video game to the pre-rendered images you see in a full length 3d film like Finding Nemo. It is obvious that the real time graphics of video games look like shit compared to the pre rendered ones.
Real time graphics will parallel what we are seeing in pre-rendered movies; its just a matter of time.
1.
...
1. Why does the industry have to crash at all? The movie industry is still around over a century later, dumbass.
Quick, go get your old 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System.
What? You donated it to a homeless shelter ten years ago? And even they don't play it, some guy using it as a little sandwich-holder? I mean, great games continued to come out for the NES right up until it went out of style. Developers could be making games for it today. So why is it extinct?
It's the same reason. The novelty wore off.
This is inaccurate. Nintendo's ARE still played. There are people who genuinely enjoy older, simpler games. Admittedly, these people probably compose a small percentage of the gaming market, that's really irrelevant because the problem was never that people bought new consoles only because the novelty wore off. The problem was that there was always something newer and better around the corner. For the last twenty years there has consistently been a newer and more advanced game console just over the horizon, and assuming equal quality of titles between the two, who would want to stick with the older, crappier looking games?
The driving force for upgrades was simply the availability of better hardware, not that people stopped liking games being made for older systems. It's all relative.
Interesting that he should pick Goldeneye and Red Faction as comparison to prove his point about game innovation plateauing, and it makes we wonder if he actually checked out these games first?
Red Faction has a very well-defined gimmick that few other franchises employ, which is the destructible environments. You can literally blast your way through walls, doors, and floors to get to new areas, and not just in the handful of scripted instances that most games give you.
To me, the ability to essentially carve the landscape in games is a very innovative technical step and brings us a bit closer to real-world VR emulation.
He also used tiny, low-quality shots that mimimize the huge disparity in visual quality between these two games.
3. Again, the novelty of getting to be Luke Skywalker attracted gamers in droves. We were never really able to do that before. The experience of being able to stride down a hallway blowing up monsters with a rail gun was also new to a lot of you. But it comes to the same, doesn't it? The first time you play a level, the monster around the first corner is a surprise. After that, it's homework. It's memorizing, via pure repetition, bad guy placement and ammunition deposits and card keys.
And what is watching a movie the second time around? Does it suddenly dynamically shift? No, just like once you've played a video game, the second time around it is familiar, the same can be said of a movie, but even moreso because you cannot change anything that will occur in that movie.
This is not true of video games, where a game creator can allow for any number of dynamic story elements. Take Deus Ex, where by taking the side of the corrupt government, or the rebel terrorists, the player can influence who survives to help him through unravelling the story, what events occur within the story, and maneuver toward an ending dictated by their own personal values and actions.
We will see infinitely more complexity on this level, stories that unfold with branches and branches depending on what you select. A movie where you can decide whether to work your way into power in an empire or assist the rebels in overthrowing an empire.
Movies, without actually incorporating elements of games, will never be able to fill this niche.
4.
That's both the good news and the bad news, though. Where is the industry going to expand to now? The middle-aged don't play games (more on that in a moment). Who's left? The elderly? The unborn? Microsoft and Nintendo both released new machines in 2001 and both failed. The new machines were not quite new (or novel) enough to catch anybody's attention.
I will now summarize for those of you who cannot be arsed to RTFA:
"I assert that technological novelty is the sole driver of the gaming market. I cannot seem to see, from where I am standing, any new technologies on the horizon that meet my exacting requirements for 'novelty.' Therefore, WE WILL LIVE IN A GAMELESS FUTURE AHAHAHAHAHAHA!"
He also seems to be using some stratospherically high standard for "success," in that he calls the Xbox and the Gamecube failures.
He also equates "bad," with "anything I don't like."
Indeed, gaming, much like BSD and Apple, is dying.
I think I'm gonna cut out of work early and go play me some Windwaker.
(P.S. "An interesting and humorous read." Yeah, if you're 13 and like heavy-handed bathroom humor.)
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
What a horrible piece of writing. Is he trying to mislead us into believing these are the only points to consider? Who is this rather profane interviewer that is asking questions?
Why consider anything technical except graphics you insert insult
On the contrary, the level of immersion has been steadily increasing. The movies of HL2 seem to indicate that you can interact with Everything inside the game.
Try that in Doom or Goldeneye. The older consoles do not have the horsepower to manage this.
The intelligence of NPCs has been improving constantly.
The interaction with other human characters has also been improving, as consoles are now able to connect across the internet.
There are plenty of technological improvements in new games that he ignores in his article.
The game industry has been around a long time. It can adapt and change all it wants.
The real reason the game industry is going to die, though, is going to be me, the original gamer parent. All of us with Ataris and NESs and SNESs are now having kids.
I plan on playing video games with my kids.
How many times is my 8 year-old going to have to get beat down by me in Street Fighter 6 EX Alpha Plus+ before he chucks the controller across the room in disgust for having lost the 537th game in a row? How many UT2k12 frags and gibings before he breaks down and cries? Will I have to score 300 points in Madden 2011 before he finally gives in to my superior hand/eye coordination?
My kids are going to *hate* playing video games because dad is either using the system already, or they're going to get their noob ass handed to them each and every time they play.
As long as the public continues to reward movies and games done "by the numbers" that is what will continue to be produced. And every time reviewers hype some piece-of-crap movie or game as the best thing ever to come along, they will drive another nail into the coffin of innovation in those industries.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
We've reached a plateau in pornographic image reproduction. There was a boom while we went from crappy low-res postage stamp sized pictures to full-screen high quality movies. But now, it's all the same. Always a naked woman and/or man, in a small variety of positions. There is no innovation! As this pioneering 30-something porn-viewing generation gets older, the porn industry will surely die.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Yeah this has been happening for sometime now. 3d games have become boring to even myself (a 3d artist/editor/director)
:) They dont care about those issues. They care about release dates, market research, and profits. The big fucking joke is that all of that stuff means shit in the real scheme of success. All of that market research is based on games that broke the mold and sold well. And of course all of the clones of that game. So if you figured out something new, they would be clawing at your balls with fist full of dollars begging you to sign with them.
The game mechanics of 3d games have remained mostly the same with very little inovation. Characters move and control the same through a map. They have very bad interaction issues due to technology limits but also the complexity in whats involved to create a fully interactive world. 3D camera movement and controls as everyone knows, is a HUGE problem. Its never in the right spot. Its always doing the wrong thing. How in the hell can you expect a PC to pick out artistic shots? It just knows to "constrain camera target to main hero character until camera target = plus or minus 180 degrees from the camera, then cut to next camera... constrain camera target to main hero" and repeat.
The fact that games like doom, unreal, etc are repeated each year over and over is proof that we've hit a wall in game play mechanics. Thats why we have franchise sequels instead of truely new games.
And the real reason why we see so many sequels is this.
Movies have even more technological limits than video games. Yet they have been around longer.
The trick is in presentation and story. Thats why DOOM 1 has been polished up into DOOM 2, then Quake, then quake 2, quake arena, and now DOOM 3.
At the heart of it... Its the same game with new window dressings each year.
Game play from Doom 2 to Quake was a bigger jump because you went from fake 3d to real 3d. But really the mechanics of the game play have stayed the same. Run, Jump, Shoot, Strafe.
Theres just so much you can do. But we havent hit that limit yet. In some respects we have but there are some areas of 3d games that havent been touched or explored yet.
Mainly because they require R&D in game play, fancy complex 3d trickery etc
3D is quite difficult. Making a characters hand scrape along the wall freddy kruger style as it runs... hmm yeah you could do it but how convincing would it be?
How about Jackie Chan style fights? We've been playing double dragon for years now in various forms because no one seems to care enough to come up with game play mechanics that solve that artistic vision.
And even that is possible. But the suits tell the developers to "SPEED IT UP"
Yet they have no fucking interest in paying developers to just R&D. Instead they want to pay developers to recreate the game that last sold well.
Oh just for fun... FUCK THE FCC.
Strangly, this same problem has not hurt Hollywood at all!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
What amazes me about this article is not the subject matter, or the ideas, but the depth at which they were presented. His whole argument was about games vs. the movie industry.
Games aren't going after the MOVIE industry, dipshit. They're going after the TELEVISION industry. Try the same article, but this time try to convince me why people are going to continue to watch TV over playing games in the long-term.
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
This is how it is! I've been playing www.kingsofchaos.com (stupid name) with a bunch of other people on slashdot. Its VERY stripped down- you buy weapons and armor, you attack other people. Thats it. There are no maps, no collaboration. Just attack, and wait to be attacked.
When we started, we got tagged constantly. Now that we have some skills and power, we tag others (and still get tagged by those more powerful than us).
Really, the only appeal is for those who are Obsessive compulsive and like slowly levelling up. But its Massive-multiplayer! Big deal- that just means slow-servers.
Broad-networking is hype. Smart-networking (i.e. a lan party with your friends) is a thousand times better. How many N64 owners can think back to times when they played Golden Eye 4 player, or WaveRace or MarioKart?
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Then again, everyone is entitled to their PoS opinions :)
:D
The problems with this article:
The guy seems to think real gamers toss their old systems out the moment they get the latest and greatest. This is incorrect, many of us still play our NES's and Genesis's regularly. Why do I continue to buy new systems? It's for the games that aren't possible on the older machines. Super Monkey Ball is a great title that comes to mind. The premise is simple, but mastery is difficult.
Next, the guy is assuming that all games are Adventure style games with cutscenes. He neglected to mention that most titles still have 100% interactivity. How about shmups like Ikaruga, or great multiplayer fighters like Super Smash Bros.?
Finally, I'll close with the comment that there's absolutely no economic basis for why the gaming market would go down the tubes after 2k5. Gaming is a billions upon billions of dollars industry, and its future cannot be predicted by some ass that relies on the poor initial sales of a couple of consoles due to the bad national economy to make his point. He is correct that there will be changes, some of them radical, but I can guarantee that gaming will always exist while I'm alive, because I plan on playing my NES for my enjoyment until I'm at least 80
Thanks.
We may have a graphical-niceties plateau, at some point. We're not there quite yet.
But, what can be done with improved processing power from now on?
1. BETTER AI. We can improve AI at range. Instead of monsters staying in one place in a game till they hear the player, they can ALL be moving around in the level, ALL the time. If you never know exactly where they are, the game gets more exciting. One time you go through, sure, they might be right around the corner - the next, they're NOT right there, and instead they're sitting back waiting to ambush you somewhere else.
This is not to say that better AI is killer AI, by the way. Better AI is the AI that CLOSEST APPROXIMATES WHAT THE CREATURE SHOULD DO. If I'm in a D&D adventure and killing Orcs, I expect them to ACT like Orcs. If they're some devious wizard, I expect run-and-snipe tactics. If they're a brawny brawler, I expect to be charged. The better processing power you have, the less you have to cut corners, and the deeper you can make the AI such that a creature not only looks and sounds as expected, but ACTS like one might expect it to.
2. EXPANDED LEVEL SIZE. This is one of those biggies. Doom, for all its technological prowess of the time, relied on sending players back and forth through levels a lot. Hexen, with its "hub" setup, even more so - reusing content to make things SEEM much bigger than they were.
The PS2 can't handle the size of areas we want these days. Best example is the PS2 port of Deus Ex, where every level got chopped up into 5-10 areas with load zones in order to fit them together, as compared to the original PC version (which still rocks, BTW).
3. Multilinear gameplay. THIS is where the "in the movies" feel comes from - where YOU, the GAMER, are picking what the story is. Choosing your side and defining what your character thinks/feels is a level of immersion that makes pencil-and-paper gaming still survive and even thrive today, and video games are finally going expand out from the "reading a book" format of the Final Fantasy 'roleplaying' idea, into the TRUE Roleplaying idea where you have a control over your character's destiny and placement.
4. Finally, he misses out on where video games are going. Look at Hollywood: how many pathetic, bad, annoying sequel movies or just bad premises with bad actors are put into theaters or straight to video each year? TONS. The Video Game industry is the same way, and the reviewers are important in both industry in getting people to buy in - but the number of games is a sign of long-term health, not a signal of impending doom.
...over the fact that you can't just whip together a little game and have fun. I made C64 programs that were pretty much "state of the art" at maybe 10. 320x256x16 colors with sprites, a stupid tune, some navigation and AI, there wasn't power to do anything advanced... and so could everyone else that had a great idea. Of course there were literally thousands of games, some you'll absolutely love.
It just doesn't work that way with games anymore. I can't write a 3D freeform alpha-blending shader-using multipass-filtering DX9 game photorealistic backgrounds, models and textures with 3D sound effects at CD+ quality, Internet multiplayer code, customization and expansion tools, UI design, AI design and whatnot. There'll only be a few games like that, and they'll be "mainstream".
That's the way every industry is. Look at any "major Hollywood production". It's basicly synonymous with "rehash of some similar story, or the same story (sequel)". Maybe you can find yourself some films you really love among the thousands of low-budget or no-budget movies out there, but they won't have the polish or special effects like the bigshots. That's no indication that big, professional and mainstream movies are dying though.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
People DIDN'T abandon the Atari 2600 et all in favour of "not playing video games".
They abandoned the old 8-bit consoles because of HOME COMPUTERS. The Arcade/Console industry crashed and burned, the home computer industry FLOURISHED. People realized that the C-64/Apple/whatever of the day was a lot more capable than that old 2600 in the corner.
If dying stories are dying, then is that statement dying as well? Argh - Cantor paradox!
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
There are parallels between the book people and the video game people who say the sky is falling for whatever reason. I don't think so, at least with books, which I'm more familiar with: the marketplace today is more robust and diverse than at any other point in history. Virtually any book in print is available within a few days from Amazon, and online projects seek to digitize anything done before 1923. Experimental sites online offer fiction; K5 now has a section for it, and it's not half-bad. In video games, I think there are more options out there now than at any other point in history, especially because one can try anything from a thousand iterations of tetris and pac-man to Unreal Tournament 2004 to a game so avant garde I've never heard of it.
If anything, the problem is not death of novels from the creative side, it's a dearth of people interested in reading and understanding. I'm paraphrasing, but I remember reading about someone asking Gore Vidal why there are so few good books published these days; on the contrary, he said, the problem is that there are so few good readers.
When I look at writers like Elmore Leonard, Chang Rae-Lee, Coatzee, Michael Chabon and others, I'm blown away by their sheer technical virtuosity. Yet people decry the state of books.
To bring this around to video games, I think there are differences no one will dispute (the difficulty of designing a graphics engine, changing technology, huge teams necessary for today's games, etc.), but the bigger probelm is finding people who want to play the most innovative games is probably harder than finding people who want to play games that let them frag someone with a rocket launcher and do it over, and over, and over again. Innovation will still exist; but the better question is how many people will appreciate it. The questions are interesting, and much too subtle for the the hack and slash technique of the original article.
Yes, it will crash and then rise again. Something new will come out. In the meantime, there are plenty of kids that are playing these games for the FIRST time. I can see where he is going and I agree mostly and it was a well written, funny piece, but I think after a downturn for a bit, it should come back again when a new idea is developed along with a new tech possibly. Who knows?
But that's not what really gets me excited. I'm seeing the first sign that video games (or at least a few of them) are maturing into a serious artform --- something I've long been saying they have the potential to be (since games are a superset of film) but which nobody's really attempted so far. Anyone who thinks gaming has been stagnating in the past few years absolutely needs to check out Ico. It's a radiant and strangely moving game. The virtual architecture has a kind of majestic, soothing emptiness. I think the relative lack of constraints on level design (e.g. useless wide open spaces are okay) means the creators of Ico could achieve an effect impossible for real-life architects. Ico showed that games can be aesthetically pleasing on a higher level than just "big guns, big boobs". Although it wasn't a huge commercial success, I think (or at least hope) that many future game designers will be influenced by it.
Sturgeon's law applies to gaming, just like it does to novels, film or any other type of entertainment. If instead of looking the amount of crap, you look at the number of gems, it's clear that gaming is alive and well.
So stop getting all of your collective panties in a wad. PWOT is kind of like theonion.com, but less about news, and more about satirical articles. I'm not quite sure why it was even posted to slashdot. You read PWOT to laugh at stupidity, not for video game news.
Now... Go Go Gadget cocaine shooter! Now... Go Go Gadget cocaine shooter! :)
If you read all the craption contests, you would understand
My favorite comments are from PS2 and XBox fanboys who say and I quote, "Nintendo sucks! GameCube sucks!"
These gamers obviously have no appreciation for the old days of video games with the sprite graphics and MIDI music - The days when Nintendo helped to innovate and revolutionize the video game industry, bringing it into mainstream.
Yeah, Sony definitely brought upon a new age of video games and a whole new generation of gamers, many of whom don't know the history we Original Gamers think back upon. But it was the classics like Atari, Commodore, Sega and Nintendo who helped start it all.
Duh.
That's why when you go to see a movie it's a Good Thing if it's a re-hash so you feel no major loss of missing parts.
Point by point:
1. His point is that technology has hit a plateau. But he only demonstrates that graphics have hit a plateau. We are seeing huge leaps in other areas of games still. Real time physics is a huge one. If you've played Max Payne 2 you know what I'm talking about. And if you haven't just wait for HL2 and then you'll know how awesome it can be. Also AI and realism are improving a ton. And I mean the good kind of realism like the acrobatics in Prince of Persia, not annoying things like having to eat every 27 minutes of game time.
And besides graphics are improving and innovating. Far Cry has pushed the far clip plane out to an absurd distance. You can see the enemies patrolling the fort at the top of the island from your boat at the start of the first demo level. That's impressive when most games have been using fog to keep your vision on the juicy graphics right in front of you.
2. He makes no point here. Basically only that games with story compete with Hollywood. Yup I agree, and games are winning...
3. He argues that games suck as interactive movies because of death and repetition. But he is narrow mindedly presuming that interactive movie type game must retain the challenging aspects of most games. Why? How challenging is sitting on your sofa watching a movie? It isn't. Movie games can back off the challenge to keep you immersed and still loving every minute of it. Take Knights of the Old Republic, I only died a few times through the whole thing. Mostly I was just loving running through it, slicing baddies up with my lightsaber and watching the plot twists unfold and reacting to them as I saw fit.
4. He says gamers are getting older and giving up on games, and xbox and gamecube were failures. The former is crap because tons of new people are getting into games every day. Games have always been most popular among the younger crowds. Sure some aging gamers give it up, but gaming is still on the rise: just look at sales.
And the latter point about failed consoles is irrelevant, even if you consider it true. There have been tons of failed consoles over the years and the industry chugs on. It signals nothing.
5. He says the next 3 consoles might be more similar than different. Ummm, who cares? I play games on the PC. And how does having 3 awesome, powerful consoles out at the same time each with their own games hurt anything?
6. He argues that the popularity of online gaming will not grow fast enough to curb the decline of gaming in general. No need to rebut, because I don't think there will be any permanent decline. He says: "Online gaming is not the same experience as video gaming". Sure and pacman wasn't the same experience as pong. That signaled the end of pong, not video gaming. We've also barely scratched to surface of online play.
7. He mumbles about consoles with net connections might cause publishers to push buggy games and fix them later. Who cares? It happens now and the savvy gamer delays his purchase till the patch is out. The rush gamer gets his fix early. It doesn't affect the market one bit.
One of his final sentences: "All it will take is some other fad, some toy, some other hobby to come along, and interest will fade." To which, I'll simply rebut: We'll see. We'll see.
... why similar games are a bad thing. Did Blizzard invent the RTS style game type? No, but they sure did perfect the concept at the time with StarCraft. Not everything is a rehash or a redo (albiet some are). Developers take the tried and true method and perfect it, or mix it up a bit.
Unreal Tournament 2004 is obviously a rehash of every FPS with vehicles, right? It may be similar, but the game is so simple, so addictive, that it doesn't matter.
This guy just likes to see himself type, his articles are nothing more than an attention whoring fool who thinks he has something intelligent to add to this world.
I have solved this block pushing puzzle before. I have spent hours looking for a stupid key before. (I have a cannon capable of shooting nuclear missles strapped to my back, but I still can't open a door without a key). I have jumped around a fancy 3d environment shooting other jumping people before. I have driven around many racetracks just so I could earn fake money so I could get a faster car to race around the same tracks against other people that have purchased a faster car before. I have died 40 times trying to jump from a big platform to a small one before. Yes. The gaming industry is stagnant.
While I agree witht he author, I think retro will make huge comeback.
See, we started out with only integer units in 2 dimentional space. As time progressed, we got into bigger 2D space (from 4 bits to 32, now 64) We also got floating points thanks to FPUs. (Games were why FPUs became standard issue). But we were still in 2d space. Some were side scrollers, some were top-down, some were persective. Then Wolfenstien 3D came out. Doom then Quake pushed 3d accelerators to the desktop. But then we could interact in a world that we relate to in very real ways.
Next up we'll find theres more challenge in moving in 2 dimensions than 3. That'll help preserve the novelty. But they must remain challenging.
That brings me to the non-retro gaming success story. Masting 3d space is easy, master 2d space a easier (as a subset of 3d space) but 4d and 5d space will be where the fun is.
Video games a are all about challenge. Once you get your physics model and coordination down, you are left with one thing: solving the intelectual challenges. This is why so amny people play RPS still. Generally it's kill, loot, goto kill, level, repeat. EQ has quests which are mildly intelectually challenging.
All of 3d gaming can be rendered easy via circle-strafing. Strafe side-to side while turning and you'll always face your target and circle them. I have not seen a 3d shooter that isn't rendered easy by this technique. Once it no longer works, I'll be intelegtualy challenged to find the bug in the AI or physics model (grenade jumping) that trivializes the game. (I used to be a sniper in Quake - TF - and a good one at that, but what I did became proceedural, nd I lost intrest. Grenade and rocket jumpers were all the same. I'd get them in mid-air 99% of the time.)
Indeed the industry has been relying on glitz and glamor to sell, much like a hot whore. But no one marries a whore, they marry people that are intelectually stimulating. ANd that's going to be the next games. The mind-puzzles. Tomb Raider, Tetris, etc. They all have sppeal for a long time, until the *DESIGNERS* turn it proceedural. It's not the fault of the tech, it's because the designers get lazy.
Escapr from reality, the use of imagination, is why people turn to video games. I predict in 10 years that no video game will ever do the same game twice (like they do today) I bet they won't keep staff around either. Every game is a new team, and no one is allowed to be on the same type of game project as they were on in the past 5 years. This will keep innovation and imagination high.
The other idea is working with other people. When C&C has IPX multiplayer, we played it non-stop weekends at a time. Quake was plaued for weekends at a time. I spent most of my nights on TF maps with my clan. Human interaction is unpredictible (well, a lot less than a computer) (Imagine basketball vs chess, what is more popular)
Killer app of today: The Sims Online. Features imagination, creativity and human interaction. Runner Up: EQ.
Killer app of tomorrow: solving puzzles with other humans online. But the puzzles can't repeat, not even the same type. Maybe a puzzle is to make a puzzle for others to solve - taking turns between puzzlemaking and solving. (An offshoot of this is OpenSource... )
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Personally I blame the greed/need for income that large companies often show as their main drive for game development (not that theres a better way). Many business models call for improvments upon past ideas, tried and true methods etc. The ideas for new games are, for the most part, blatantly tied to other sucessful ideas. Examples of this are pretty much everything released these days, seeing as how rarely is such a unique idea ever trusted enough to take a chance at becoming the next big hit. The not so old game Sacrifice was a great example, a very unique idea, and fun, however it just didnt sell. Naturally any company is going to want to generate revenue somehow, and so they stick to the god-awful recreations of past games that sold.
h e-ball-through-the-goal
These big compnaies using the models that only call for refinement of past ideas will of course make a bit more than companies trying new ideas (companies like this were more plentiful in the early days of 3d graphics and even before). With competition like that, its hard for anyone to invest any time and money into a new and novel idea afraid that it will just be snuffed out by (SuperDuper Sports Game 2000,2001,2002,2003 etc...).
I personally notice this in the fact that a couple years ago with the beginning of the Quake series, if you had put me in a store and told me to pick 5 computer games to take home, I would have done it on a whim. Now, I'd be lucky if there was more than one that really stood out or enticed me.
The same engine that drives the video game industry is apparently suffocating its creativity and will ultimately produce year upon year of ho-hum generic 3d this, or cutscene that, or new-little-feature-in-how-the-players-can-shoot-t
games.
Thats the problem IMHO
A game about stomping lawyers!? I WANT MY COPY NOW!
I am tired of people using the 8bit and 16bit era games as a comparison for today's industry.
The PS2 era is still on going, how do you know what games will come out. Maybe the best has yet to come.
Worse, there are entire sections of the library containing books without a *single* picture in them. No wonder there's no longterm market.
In all seriousness, what a garbage article. *Story* sells books. *Story* sells movies. (For the most part- bad movies with good special effects can still do ok) Story is going to sell huge classes of video games. Yes, sports games will be pretty much the same with updated graphics from year to year, but long term we'll see the growth of games with deep, involving storylines.
His criticism that interactivity ruins the experience is really misguided. Plenty of games aren't as dumb as Rogue Squadron- compare it to Planetscape Torment. You *can't* die in that game, and it's a wonderfully immersive experience.
Finally, I'm a married 38-year-old with a kid. Do I have a lot of time for games? No- it takes me months to play a typical one. Oh well, it saves money in the long run. But I still play.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Production values seem like a sort of trade-off to me; for a few million bucks you can make a game that looks fantastically real, but at the same time has become devoid of any unified personal touch by dint of being produced by a huge team rather than a small group or a single person.
I dunno. I'd say that MDK2 had a lot of character. I would also say that Dogfight (or whatever the heck that thing with 100 or so different two-player dogfighting and tank-battling games was) didn't have a lot of character, just because the resource limitations of the system restricted it too much.
There are still shareware games out there made by small teams, but I think it's easy to fall into nostalgia. In most cases, I think that modern games *are* more entertaining than older games. We just had much lower standards back in the day.
May we never see th
He calls himselfan 'original gamer" because he's 30 and old enough to remember the 2600. I think that title is reserved for people who were playing games in the arcades and bars before there were home consoles. Which means people who were already old enough to drink when PONG came out. That generation is in their 50's by now.
where there's fish, there's cats
While I agree with the author that the gaming industry appear to have reached a plateau, I do not agree with his prediction of the industry's death. A large part of his argument revolves around novelty. The novelty has worn off, nobody's going to buy something that doesn't seem bigger or better.
But just because I plateau has been reached doesn't mean the genre is dying. He is missing the fact that to each new generation, video games will be a novelty. When a newborn of today discovers video games, it will be a complete novelty. There is a first time for everything. This is why I hear 11 year olds laughing at jokes that I first found funny 25 years ago. Yeah, I don't find them funny anymore, but the kids of today do because they haven't heard them before.
So the video game "Blow Up Everybody 2015" will sell jsut fine. It might play just like Halflife, and *I* might find it boring. But the kids of 2015 will think it rocks.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
Granted, a lot of the OG's (Original Gamers) may be giving up their consoles. I'm in that age range, and have played on every system from Pong on up. I have a PS2 but almost never use it.
He's right, don't trust people over 30 to be playing consoles.
However, if I'm not mistaken, a whole crapload of kids have been born in the last 30 years. Said crapload of children will still play consoles for quite some time to come. I doubt the consol industry will diminish in the coming years, in fact I doubt it will be even flat. It will grow.
--
Young boys, the target market, are easily amused.
Great article! The questions nearly had me rolling on the floor. This guy sounds like he watches Dennis Miller.
I remember this time back in school, where they still used the overhead projectors. We had this old crappy beige unit that went out, so they replaced it with a nice new black unit. All the boys in the class were excited about the new projector.
Looking back on that experience is telling. Boys don't care about depth or experience. The new projector wasn't functionally better than the old, but it LOOKED different. To young boys its all about how things look. Granted, they don't care about things like armhair on their figures. They do, however, get enticed by new games that have new levels, new characters, new stories, etc.
I agree that adults don't have as much time to play games. I still enjoy it, even at 24. But with my first child born recently, I just don't have time. HOWEVER, the new generation with underdeveloped, irrational minds are up and coming. They have hours upon hours of free time. Video game makers benefit from the revolving door.
"Never tell me the odds"
You also have to remember that games often are modeled after real life... If video games were around in the 1800's (humor me), no one probably even considered a racing game with cars, or power boats etc etc. Just like now we probably cant really imagine racing using spaceships, perhaps using the gravitation forces of celestial bodies. What about a game where you travel through time to alter different events between periods to stop (or cause) certain other actions... There is no limit to the imagination, regardless of the media its applied to. Copycats and rehashes are just copouts for those whose imagination has run dry.
6. Agreed on the online play. I know Final Fantasy *fanatics* who have zero desire in FF11 Online. The reaction is usually, "Wait, I bought a game and I have to keep paying every month?"
As somewhat of a FF addict, I'd have to contradict this. I don't mind paying for game-service subscriptions, but it's a question of value VS return.
a) Replay value: Most of the FF series have it. There are some subplots, tricks, interesting items, and just the general fun of re-living a classic. When eventually the MMO server service goes down (usually as players taper off into other games, or die surrounded by empty pizza boxes), that game is more or less gone.
b) Storyline: A series of on-the-fly, partially-tied, etc etc stories don't really cut it for me. For me, playing FF has been like reading a good book, or more recently like watching a decent flick. Sure, some missions are interesting, but there's a general cohesiveness that's missing.
c) Full-timers, cheaters: Sorry, but I work for a living. I can't compete with the wonderboy who plays an MMO for 5h+ a day, or the script-kiddy with the latest exploit/hack.
It's like books Vs magazine subscriptions. Some of us like books, some of us like magazines. I just happen to be a book person, though sometimes a magazine article might catch my eye...
I read the first half of the article, and then as he kept calling himself dumb names I lost interest, but I have to refute this at least a little.
First he makes the sweeping assumption that no one plays their NES/SMS/SNES/Genesis, etc... I play all of the above, at least weekly. I just do it on my computer via emulators. I still OWN all those systems, but it's much nicer to have them all in one place, on one screen, rather than keeping a switchbox and dozens of cables all running around my livingroom. If a new game came out for one of my last-gen systems, I'd still buy it.
Next he tries to somehow define 'fun' for us. Nice of him to do that, but fun is one of the few things in the world that is (IMO) wholly subjective. To quote the Anime Lain (and while I don't like the movies, it's a good quote), 'No one knows what is fun, nor why.'
His discrition of Rogue Squadron was humorous, but very flawed. First of all, it's not a movie, which is completely scripted. No where in the movie was it *ever* possible for Luke to be destroyed in his X-Wing and the Empire win.
Neither is Rogue Squad a Toy, where one can pick it up and play with it in new and interesting ways, and maybe even make a new game out of the old one. (However, if you've ever ventured a glance at gamefaqs.com, and happened upon the section for GTA:VC you'd see that people really have made their own 'games' out of Vice City. So the potential exsists.)
It is a game. It has goals and objectives, it is challenging, and you can fail. Just like any other game. It may *feel* like a movie, but it's still a game.
(And I personally got the feeling from reading the article that the author really doesn't get off on challenge the way he might have 10 years ago.)
In fact, I'm more pleased than ever with the recent slew of video games. Previously, in bygone years, you *knew* that if it was a game based on a movie, it would be horrible. (Total recall on the NES anyone?) These days movie based games aren't just good, they are making sub-movies to put in them.
And finally, as for his 'married to cinema' bit goes. The only movie I saw in the theatre last year was LotR. I play video games every single day.
--Phlod
I have to say, the best part of that article was the bizarre collection of creative insults he wove in:
a d.jpg
a ph.gif
Captain Anus
dick holster
Turd Baron
and my favorite:
rancid sentient ham statue
And you gotta love the illustrations, too.
http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/games/cwarshe
http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/games/penisgr
Books are dying. They were popular when they were a novelty, but now everyone has read books and the novelty has worn off. I predict that in 2005 people will stop buying books.
All the stories have already been printed in books, and any new books just have minor variations of the same stories. Books are just a waste of time that could be spent doing other things. People will soon realize this, and the book fad will pass.
I cannot disagree with him on the end of the industry, and I am in the that original group of gamers, and I have three children from 5-15 (please no math). I think he is right, but for the wrong reason.
My 15 year old showed some interest in the PS2, but he would rather play games on the computer. My younger children are much more interested in the computer, and the console games are doing a terrible job making games for younger children. I will not let my 7 year old play Vice City anyway, and that is what the consoles are putting out.
That is the key problem now. All the games target teens, and college students, and most of those games can be played on the computer. The only thing that kept the N64 from being a disaster was Pokemon. The only chance they have is to make games that the younger kids can play, and are interested in playing. It can be done, but the focus is on making the games prettier, but not creating new, interesting content for the next generation, and that is why it will crash.
Actually, it sounds a lot like what happened to John Carmack and John Romero after DOOM came out. And it happened about the same time. Curious....
Lousy minor setbacks! This world sucks! -- Homer Simpson
shaders mean exactly zero when it comes to gameplay.
Clear, Dark Skies
"You see, there was a video game industry apocalypse once before, in the early 80's. The market was flushed down the toilet by a putrid swirl of bad Atari games, players realizing that Hot Dog Maze was just Pac-Man with different colors. They didn't abandon the Atari 2600 in favor of something better. They abandoned it in favor of not playing video games."
And yet the players still swamped the arcades - something the president of Nintendo realized before releasing his NES onto the American market. The problem with the Atari was not that all the games stagnated. There was still innovation, even in the 1983-1984. The problem was cartridge glut. No one could find those great games under the mounds of useless trash. Everyone could make games for the Atari and everyone did - even ppl who had no right making video games (Colgate anyone?). That is one of the reasons why the magazine Nintendo Power and the Nintendo License was so mind-boggingly important. It was an assurance of quality. Now we have the Internet. You are truely gutsy for buying games now without looking for reviews first. We have a similiar environment to 1983 now, but the difference is we can tell what is good/crap. As such, his analogy to the 80's fails. Just becuase we are mired knee deep in trash doesn't mean we will see a similiar crash.
On a greater note, there is just something about video games that keep pulling people back. I still go back and play Mario 3. I still spend hours on end sometimes playing Keystone Kapers and Laser Blast. It is more than just the novelty that draws people to games. It is more than just something to do. It is an experience that transcends your current reality. As the author said, it allows you to be Luke Skywalker - but just becuase you don't want to permantely be Luke Skywalker does not mean that no one will ever replay the game. The games keep bringing people back. While I agree with him that in fact the market for 'Buy this game cause we have modeled dust particles' is going to die, the whole market won't. Games that are good and inventive will still survive. A lot of companies will drop out, no doubt. But the ones like Nintendo that can still be inventive with gameplay and still bring about a great experience will still go on.
As for the movie analysis, there is a difference he hasn't taken into account. The Internet. Not only can we have games that involve ppl in stories but we have games that can involve people in stories with their friends. When you add the fact that not only you but your friend can play, the possibilities grow exponentially larger. Look at WoW and Everquest. They may not even be games anymore. Rather they are environments the user can interact in. You don't get the same with a movie. With a movie you are forcefed the producers/directors vision of what he wants you to see. With games you get a choice. You get to skip shit you don't like and focus on stuff you do like. And with the birth of the Internet, those choices will multiple with future games, not decline. And the 'online gmers' he talks about are by far a minority in my experience. I know a lot of people that play games online just for fun and not becuase they have a need to boost their self esteem by zerg rushing noobs. In addition, with improving AI's we also are losing the predicatble games. The Future? In one game, the opponent may be down a hall, in another he may have moved a different direction. We are quickly moving away from bound points and set patrol paths. In the future, you will be attacking units of enemies, not just pre defined defenses. Take a look at the plans for Thief 3 if you don't believe me.
In additon, if his analogy was true, we would have never watched movies as long as we have. Afterall, there are only so many romances you can watch, only so many war movies right. The novely of seeing them on the screen should have worn off and left us all back with our books. So why hasn't it? Hollywood and books gives us experiences that are different and hence they both can exist together. T
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
There's a section (Eclesiastes?) written about 3000 years ago that goes on for many pages claiming how "There's nothing new under the sun."
Great article.
Pong was a great game because it had consistant physics. Not necessarily real phisics, but consistant.
Doom, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3, all had consistant physics.
Sure these had increasingly beautiful graphics, but graphics didn't make the game. Real Gamers turned the graphics down, or off, so that they could get reliable physics.
It doesn't matter that grenades bounce like superballs, or rockets fly so slow that you can dodge them. It is the consistancy that counts.
Like a good science fiction novel, the game's break from reality starts at one point, but proceeds consistantly from that point.
The integrity of the game makes the game great.
Contrast this to, say, Unreal Tournament, where the graphics were primary. The physics are patched and scripted in a vain attempt to support the graphics. The result is a not too amusing cartoon. Bleh.
The game factors of "immersion" "escapism" "playability" are directly related to the integrity of the game.
This is why Quake 3 remains a serious game after four years, and other games are forgotten.
There should have been a better game than Quake 3 by now. I am amazed that there has not been. If a better game comes along, I will be playing that.
Good games are as rare as good books, or good movies.
Strangely enough, the procedure for makng these good things is well known. Do it with integrity, and do not release until it is finished.
Integrity is the enemy of ship dates. It takes a strong will and deep pockets to resist the forces of chaos.
Similar to good books and movies, the time spent playing a good game is not wasted. It is instead an uplifting experience. My grown up sense of time prevents me from watching tv, I do have the time to waste.
Quake 3 remains worthwhile time spent.
If the stories become compelling, instead of the hardware - what happens to hardware sales?
What happens to sales of the PS3 when every compelling game people want to play, plays just fine on PS2?
Clear, Dark Skies
Just like G'Kar said on the 5 season of B5 (My Fav) during the intro...
While the author makes a good point that point-and-shoot gameswill only go so far, I think he misses three key points:
1) We're starting to see more and more action games merge with elements of role-playing games. I thought that GTA: Vice City was really moving in this direction, where instead of physically growing stronger you get more influence and wealth to do whatever you want but you can take it in whatever order you want. Granted, there are several aspects of RPG that could be incorporated into that game if someone felt like it (control your own fate, have some kind of karma scale that causes people to react differently towards you, etc.), but expect to see many more games incorporating both these aspects in the coming years. Some of these will be retreads of VC or any number of already existant games (note similarities between Fallout: BOS and Dark Alliance 2 for Xbox) but others will forge new frontiers (Crimson Skies?).
2) Online gameplying is *burgeoning*. My brother plays Star Wars: Galaxies almost every other day and has two characters. He knows people from around the world just by playing with them and interacting digitally. Look at Final Fantasy XI and the huge number of Japanese and American players on it: the companies involved get $(X)/month without having to do much more than upgrade the system and its option every so often. I predict that this will turn into a mainstay of the video game market, especially for the true RPG fans.
3) Like it or not, the advanced military projects of VR and newer man-machine integration systems will eventually become incorporated into video game systems and maybe even the Internet. Imagine video games in a 3-D setting either by VR or "plug-and-play" a la Matrix from Shadowrun. Predicting where technology will go is tricky, but developments in holograph technology and other *exotic* computer applications are already being worked on. Maybe we've hit a temporary plateau, but that doesn't mean it is permanent by any means. How long is it before we could see a quantum processor running a fully interactive video game system with either Resident Evil 13 (where you can feel the zombies attack you and maybe play as one yourself?) or Grand Theft Auto: 7.0 in the city of your choice with fully accurate maps. The possibilities for technological advancement are endless and should not be automatically discounted just because things have "slowed down" in the last few years.
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
"You cannot play games at 35 or 40 and seem like anything but an intellectually-stunted manchild, there in your sweater vest, the control pad tangled in your long, gray, drool-soaked beard."
I resent that comment. I don't wear sweater vests and I shave regularly. So there!
I think this is more of a warning than a prediction. Granted, the article brings up several good points about gamers getting old and novelties getting stale. Other than that, the author says that the current trends will lead to a lack of technological innovation.
I'd like to propose a possible way to avoid the video game bust. Create a software platform that can be easily molded to efficiently churn out games. The most popular example of this model is the Half-Life engine. They liscenced out the engine, and out came Counter-Strike.
I think that if you create an engine that has the potential to provide great gameplay(such as GTA) and then create an entirely new story with the same engine, you can cut down on production and provide the short attention span games discussed in the article for a smaller price.
What made good games in the past is different then what makes a good game now.
Consider the programming restrictions that a C64 game had compared to any modern game. The programmers knew that they could only do so much with the graphics so they consentrated on plot/level design.
Most modern games only get harder because the AI is instructed to "shoot straighter". Take any FPS game and the only difference in levels is that the AI is a better shot.
RPG's suffer a similar fate (although a bit more understandably) where the bad guys have more health and more powerfull weapons/spells BUT (not understandably) heal quicker too.
Consoles by nature should always have more exciting game-play (same reason for quality on C64), while PC's should always have a wider range of games available (using more horsepower).
Maybe I am just getting too old for this anymore, but I miss the days of playing a game that kept me captivated. RPG's have just become boring, FPS are repetative twitch-fests (I only play T2 anymore), strategy games have been done to death. Moo2 & Civ are still excellent, but I can win on any setting because I have played them so much I know the games limitation and advantages in the tech-tree.
RTS are just Turn-based games for the twitch players. Whoever builds more units wins.
The original D&D C64 games were winners, so were most turn-based strategy. The only original quality FPS was Descent (everything else was an evolution of Wolf3d).
Here's an idea: let writers create game ideas, not programers. Too many big-biz software publishing houses only make "safe" games. This is the same reason that 90% of the Hollywood movies suck too.
There is no creativity left.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
You cannot play games at 35 or 40 and seem like anything but an intellectually-stunted manchild...
Bite me, punk!
That was my instant reaction, and I've made up my mind: this guy's an idiot, with little or no idea what he's talking about. He has a few good points, and it is possible that the heyday of the video game development boom is over, or will be over in the next 8 years. But sales of video games are going to decline like the sales of books and automobiles declined. As in, they won't, they'll mature to become cyclical buisiness markets like every other product category.
Whatever, he can't make me feel bad about playing video games in my mid-30s. My 2-year-old likes playing lots of PS2 and a couple of old Genesis games with me. I may be a bit *socially* stunted, but I don't play video games to the exclusion of all else- I watch movies, read books ( The DaVinci Code, most recently ) and even occasionally get out of the house. The notion that people who like playing video games today won't do so in another 5, 10, 15 or 20 years is just silly. Older family-focused dudes don't play as many video games because they don't have *time* to. These guys just have to learn to put off mowing the lawn and spend some quality time playing with their kids. There's a one-year period there where you might not get to play many video games while your child is still in the pure-parasite stage, but my kid's thought Simpson's Road Rage was a gas to watch since he could sit up.
Heck, the guy makes the point himself that lots of rather *old* games live on in handhelds. I guess his point is that the *growth* won't be there like it was in the past? Well, duh... look at the PC hardware market for an example of that; the product isn't new anymore, what are you going to do ? Dell and Apple aren't going out of business, though, are they? The demand for the product isn't really going away, though, it's just more easily satisfied. So at some point there fewer games in development- but there will always be games in development, and people looking forward to buying those ( new ) games. There will also be plenty of opportunity to market old games to new customers in different forms ( like handhelds ).
I haven't had the chance to read all the responses, but I think it bears pointing out that even the great video game crash of '84 wasn't all that terrible. A lof of games got deeply discounted, it was a bit of a lull in consoles and arcades, but a lot of people discoverd home computer gaming ("don't copy that floppy!" ;-) -- but people didn't go off and do something else.
The demographic shift *is* interesting, where we are kind of seeing the retirement of the first generation of gamers, but...I mean, aren't a lot of other industries worried about consumers moving TO videogames from whatever they're trying to sell, not the other way around?
Well, what the hell do I know...I'm getting ready to release my first atari 2600 game JoustPong at PhillyClassic next weekend!
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
'Star Wars, Knights of the Old Republic' was the best movie I have ever played...
Between the bad satire article and /. goons with their overly serious responses, I think I've lost my faith in humanity.
Regardless, the fact remains that video games are rarely anything more than pushing an avatar through virtual space. That virtual space and graphics for the avatar will typically remain at the current cutting-edge of graphics, so it will tend to look similar to other games of the same generation.
Before the 3D revolution, most 2D titles had the same basic appearance, colors, audible tones, etc. Grass was GREEN and water was BLUE. Most old gamers can tell you which console/arcade system a game was for after simply looking at a screen shot.
My advice: Quit complaining and taking gaming so seriously. Don't be a fanboy for one developer or hardware company (Nvidia, for instance) -- as these leaders today will be gone tomorrow.
Well, if C is dead then the code I wrote yesterday must be useless. Sometimes, what you need is a small command line tool built around some aspect of a C library. As shocking as it may seem to a lot of people these days, C is often a very productive way to built something like that.
I've done GUI work in C. So far, nothing has managed to dislodge that unpleasant memory, but I'm trying. I've done database work in C, which wasn't as bad, but there are still better tools. C is the greatest portable assembler ever designed. And some of us still have to get under the hood and work at that level from time to time.
This is from the same guy that claims there is no Saddam Hussein:)
Turn s60 photos into awesome videos with mScrapbook for all S60 3rd edition phones!
I have worked on a great many projects, and as of late it's all been in the freespace 2 community. We stretched that engine to it's limits well before we go ahold of the source code, and while the source code project (For which I am the network programmer) has brough us a long way - it would be nothing without that which we already had: Content Sure nice and shiny is cool, but that isn't what really gets you the money or the ratings. Nice graphics are just bonus points, gameplay is what get's you players. There are a great many games out there that I hate due to technical problems with them - and yet they have vast numbers of gamers (Counter Strike comes to mind). The game industry isn't going to die, stop acting like chicken little.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
The next video game market are women
Although there are a number of women that play video games, the proportion isn't nearly as many men that play video games... reason men design the the games.
but if u games targeted towards women, then that would be a whole new ball game
A point that people seem to miss so often, even if they are Original Gamers, is that graphics (and computing power in general) improved on game systems to allow new types of games. Zelda requires so much more than Pong. Today, that doesn't seem to be the case, and this guy more or less points that out (minus the motivation I mention above). There is little point in better graphics if it doesn't improve gameplay, and gameplay has been sucking over the last few years. Game companies today are so concerned about, as this guy mentions, "arm hair on football players" that they forget the that they are just recycling the same-old game experience.
I'm on Spring Break right now, and the funnest thing I've done with my time was to play through the first two Zelda games. They were easier than I remembered, but tons of fun. Oh, and just for nostalgia's sake, I played them on a 13" TV in the bedroom (just like when I was a kid).
Griefers get weapons lock (PlanetSide) or go to jail (Neverwinter).
I can see where he is coming from where games could get stale over time. But his comments on movies can be related to RPGs. Sure, most RPG systems work bsically the same as they have since the days of Final Fantasy I, but the stories make them plenty enjoyable to many fans. And as another post said earlier, a variety of games are beginning to take on more RPG elements then then used to. This would make it seem that games won't die quite so fast as he thinks they will.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Why did people stop buying SNES? Becaue Nintendo stopped making them, and developers stopped making games for them. The proof that good gameplay doesnt go out of style is in how much money Nintendo makes simply be rereleasing old games for the GBA. Also, many series have sucesfullybrought new games to the gba market. The castlevania series for instance. Certainly, the graphics are beutifly done... they're also something the snes would have been doing given another year I imagine. In fact, whats the big difference between castlevania on SNES, vs castlevania on GBA? Its not the graphics really. Its the style of play. Developers are constantly finding ways to make old ideas interesting again, despite limitations of technology. This idea that a plateu would cause us to stop buying games is just reduculous. He's looking at eyecandy as opposed to play value. If anything, a plateu in graphics would force developers to stop making games flashy and focus more on the gameplay.. and it might stop this recent trend of looking for the prettiest games instead of the ones with great gameplay. Really, how many of you bought Legend of Zelda because Link looked just like a real elf? How many people still play games based off of the ancient halflife engine? Good games aren't going anywhere.
I can't believe this crap gets posted on /.
This guy is obviously a washed up suburban Dad who blames the demise of his youth and his old favorite pastime of gaming on the withering of the industry as a whole and not on his own failure to keep his balls in his own pocket.
Talk about needlessly blaming external sources for his own internal struggle.
For the record, to all the bleeding heart againg gamers:
1) It's OK to become a sappy suburban dad who gives up computers, video games, internet etc. to spend time with your children and have your life dominated by your family.
2) It's NOT OK to blame this process on the death of video games, how the servers are all filled with "12 years olds who play these games 12 hours a day so how could I have a chance at winning, WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA", and how the net isn't "the way it used to be".
Live your life, grow, have kids, collect stamps, it's YOUR life! But don't lambast the rest of the gaming world and blame your life changes on larger, external reasons to make yourself feel better.
He also seems to oddly forget that new generations are being born
Then why are so many of the Xbox games rated T or M and therefore unavailable to new generations being born?
You do NOT need any GBAs to beat, or even play, FF:CC. It has a single-player mode, which is good by itself (it's not some tacked-on thing to an FPS or anything). It's just that a multiplayer GBA/GC mode is something not only new to FF, but to games in general, and so it tends to get the most attention.
I read this article prejudiced against it, but as I was reading, the case he made became more and more convincing. I started thinking: "Yeah, Madden 2004 is essentially Madden 2003, and eventually people will get tired of it". Also, as a frustrated Warcraft 3 newbie, I shared his feeling that online play is not a surefire solution to this problem. In my experience, online play for any game eventually becomes dominated by hardcore gamers, and if you can't keep up with them, you're out of luck. But I just couldn't shake the feeling that gaming is actually going to EXPLODE in the next few years.
The reason, as the other posters have pointed out, is MMOGs. In college, for about 1 year, I played a MUD. It was text based, geeky and it took a while to get acclimated to. Once I got rolling though, it was insanely fun. Some people treated the MUD like a video game to be "won", while others treated it as a social lounge and wouldn't do anything but chat. I fell somewhere in between. The point was, that even in this all-ASCII world, the game had something for every type of gamer. The ages ranged from roughly 15-40. I don't have time for it anymore, but I know that it's still up and running (it's 12 years now), and some of the players have probably started to push 50.
So what? It's a text game, accessible by telnet -- the average person will never see a MUD in their lifetime. They _will_ see some sort of MMOG though. Someday, as network speeds increase, you'll see a real merger of a FPS and a MUD. A graphically intensive, open-ended "game". They're in their nascent phase right now (Everquest, Sims Online -- neither of which I've played but which have decent followings). As people spend more and more time on the computer, and spend less time socializing in the real world, I guarantee you'll see them start to turn towards these games. There are obstacles, of course -- the aforementioned network speed issue, making gameplay easy, etc. But these will come with time -- my guesstimate would be no more than 10 years from now. And these type of games -- which won't necessarily require amazing hand-eye coordination, reflexes, or memorization, will suck in people of many ages (assuming that gameplay can be made simple enough). While the author's vision of a downward spike in demand for consoles might be true in the short-term, the long-term future of gaming is safe and sound.
I swear I saw this on TV the other day...
There was a commision at 2am on the local channel asking if your tired of that 'dead-end job?' It goes on to tell you how Billy-Bob's Vocational School can get you a degree in nursing, computer repair, graphics and computer game design!
We are, indeed, heading for a crash in the gaming industry if this proves to be true.
thelikesofwhich.com
Perhaps the technology will plateau, and the current generation will lose interest. There will however be an inifinite future supply of kids who will be gaming for the first time ever, and they should be able to sustain the game industry in much the same way that yo-yos and Monopoly are still popular.
Perhaps its a need to defend my love of gaming, but that article was mostly bullshit. Most of time I was reading it, I couldn't tell if it was a joke or not. I hope it was.
:).
I won't waste time arguing about how games are repeating their formulas, which you've all mentioned already that Hollywood does the same; that like Hollywood, games will simply refine and re-tell. I won't waste a good rant on how fucked up an argument could be that gaming, indeed technology, has reached a graphical plateau.
There is one good point, however: the aging First Generation and the New Generation.
Someone earlier mentioned that most of the First Generation, defined by me as anyone who *remembers* when the NES was rolled out (or any earlier console), are getting on with their lives, getting married, having children, and basically getting weighed down with other responsiblities. I'm 25, consider myself a First Gen Gamer (my first 'console' was a TI-99/4A, with speech synth!!), married, have a baby boy, a house, a career, and the other crap. Gaming these days isn't like it used to be. Along with that, I find myself drawn to only the best of the best of games. I don't have time or money to buy and sift through the crap games from the greats.
Personally, I think its the switch to the New Generation of gamers thats gonna be the problem, not the industry itself. Most of us First Gens gaming will slow to a crawl, and the New Gens will be the ones screaming to the developers as to what they want. Most of the New Gens aren't as wowed by ever-increasing technology as us First Gens are. For us, the novelty is still there while the New Gens mostly expect it.
The industry isn't going to know how to deal with the New Gens at first. They're a completely different breed. And us First Gens are only gonna slow in our gaming (tho we may not necessarily slow down in the purchasing of them
Then again, the switch could be seamless. Who knows.
Just watch Japan. If it happens in the game industry, it will happen there first.
On the PC side games are as good as it gets. Emulation has brought back classics from the past often making improvements (for example: did any of you every play secret of mana 2? No you say, it never came out in english. well now you can for free! Also the market is ripe for homebrew PC games. If something like Counterstrike would have been released 2 years before it did, few would have played it.
I think that this person has trouble telling the difference between the market as presented in a gaming magizine and reality.
Open Source Sushi
Apparently a significant percentage of slashdot readers take themselves as too too seriously as the LOTR fanatics who got all riled up over 50 Things Wrong With LOTR.
Folks:
0. It's a joke.
1. It's an old joke.
2. It's an old, tongue-in cheek joke.
3. It's a joke.
4. All of PWOT is a joke.
5. Trust me, I'm Anonymous Coward.
ALL the articles on PWOT are parodies.
erm . . . Hello?
Is this thing on?
Anyone?
Saxamaphone!
Because it comes off like it's trying to make a point, but never really backs it up - instead it just hides it's tongue deep in cheek to cover up a rather loose munging of facts.
Yeah, OK - Red Faction 2 wasn't much different than Goldeneye, especially if you aren't counting texture depth, level size, polygon count, vehicles AND geomod technology. Just because two games can produce screenshot of blockish rooms doesn't mean they're even remotely similar.
Which kinda pulls the rug out of the "tech plateau" which seems like, if there is a foundation for a logical argument, is the only one.
If technology has plateau'd so much, how come game requirements keep going up at nearly the same rate? I'm guessing his next article is "The Radeon 9800 is a capitalist conspiracy!!"
Never saw a holodeck that did MMO.
But being a 21 year old, far enough off from Mr. Wrong's age to matter, but close enough to have a bit of logic under my belt....along with the fact I'm been working at an established tech firm for over 2 years now being employed at multitude of jobs previously right after a spat of university college... I think he IS wrong.
Games nearly have the same quality as movies now. Imagine when they will...
It's obvious games are going to reach FF: Spirits Within proportions soon. If not PS3 gen, then "PS4" gen. Perhaps the next if we're caught up in another war -_-
I think you might need to buy a few new games. Even patched-but-buggy games like Spellforce are fun because it has the most "atmospheric" graphics of an RTS game that I've seen to date along with all the nifty features I like.
I don't like THINKING of playing the games -- DON'T GET CAUGHT UP IN IT. It's easy to feel guilty playing games as an adult, especially with relationships. Games are one of the few things that can force me to "uh-huh" my significant other of 3+ years, reacting to her, but not really listening. Just be aware of how much you play and limit, splurging every now and then when the games and your STRESS level require.
I appreciate your story's contribution, but taking in consideration all of these factors I'm happy to report it's just that you're near the adam of eden gen for video games (YOU SAID you started on Pong as a kid) so, yes, you feel a bit more guilt from your older peers. Doesn't change the fact you're an ass monkey and gaming has tiers of popularity within the generations -- each one pushing the envelope in their new way.
BTW, very funny article.
Americas Army is a complete FREE game made by the U.S. Army. Recently it was announced that over 3,000,000 players have accounts for this FREE game.
:)
There are hundreds, if not thousands of FREE servers to play this game on and the game works just fine on 56K dialup.
New patches and content (maps, etc) are being developed and offered for FREE download often.
As a long time gamer, this is the best game that I have ever played, very realistic.
Gaming may be in a tailspin, however games like AA prove that if you aren't building *crap*, folks ARE interested.
Americas Army will be around for a good long time.(thank you USA taxpayers!!!)
www.americasarmy.com
Gaming will never go away as long as there are QUALITY games being developed.
Hooah!
The greatest thing about being a child is getting to discover the world for the first time. You get to use your imagination to fill things in. That's why games were so fun: the more you used your imagination, the funner it gets. It doesn't matter if the characters are just a few blocks -- you really ARE a knight in shining armour in your mind's eye, and your quest *matters*. Nowadays, every little visual detail is all given to you, so there's no feeling of 'getting involved', of bringing the game to life. There's no magic there: the walls and shadows and ripples are already there, everything's defined. You're just consuming the predefined plots and graphics, rather than actively being part of the 'magic', which is where the REAL enjoyment is.
Believe me, I've wasted a childhood and a half playing games.
Especially in sports games. Most game developers rely on cheating to make the CPU "smarter" and tougher: they boost the CPU controlled players' attributes (e.g. speed, etc.) and lower yours. This is the LAZY workaround to a problem.
Unfortunately, I don't see this change anytime soon. Developers will probably never invest much in AI R&D, concentrating more on graphics and animation. Don't they realize AI R&D is a good investment?! I mean you could probably apply the AI engine into almost any games, just like you can use the Quake engine as a base to all FPS games.
This is a good thing!
As the old gaming paradigms age, we might see a period of gaming lameness (or gaming absence). But ultimately, creative efforts by designers and gamers will create new forms, new syntheses of old notions that go beyond 'rehashing' of old ideas, and will spark a new golden age.
So sayeth the sage.
No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!
Game of the Year. A very realistic game, at least in terms of social engineering. It's slowpaced, but steady. Very immersive. You can be a thief, a king of thieves, a mage, become a vampire, be a bounty hunter, join the underworld, etc. etc. etc. Everything's open. It's games like these that foreground the importance of social engineering (ya ya, vague term but I hope you know what I mean).
PC games are healthy as ever, with releases like Far Cry, Half Life 2, Doom III, and many others. (And the more enlightened PC gamers are surely knowledgable about the incredible PRGs and adventure games that are into production now - I won't go into boring details).
Consoles are limited machines, they can only play certain types of games, mostly action, due to the limited form of input. Average Joe will not cash out for the same concept as last year, only with better graphics.
Personally, I am down to playing all the good PC games I missed, especially adventures. Too much fun. Yesterday I finished 'day of the tentacle'...very good adventure. Next is 'lure of the temptress'.
I think that what you are going to see is that MMO games are going to evolve into an ongoing stable source of revenue for game companies. Ultimately the process of realeasing new games with the same rehashed premises every year is going to end soon. UT2004 is almost the same game as UT2003, the only major difference being in some graphics improvements and some new game play styles.
I look on the market and see Half Life 2, Doom 3, UT 2004, and a few other similar games on the horizon, and none of them really get me that excited. They are all essentially the same thing, and I can get the same joy out of playing counterstrike that I have now, over getting the latest greatest game for $50.
Having said that, I've been religiously playing PlanetSide since it's release. It's by no means a perfect game, but the element of large scale ongoing strategy does not exist in any other FPS game I've played. The closest contenders to this are games like Tribes, etc, but they are always confined to a small group of players fighting on random servers, for short periods of time.
Every night I log into PlanetSide I get a different experience. Some nights, I log in to find all our continents overrun, and some nights we are dominating. Ultimately it's somewhat repetitive in that you keep going through the same process of capturing bases, taking territory, losing territory, etc, but it has a much stronger sense of higher level strategy than any similar game.
Ultimately though I don't think MMO's are going to really boost the industry significantly. I mean, if I pay $12/month for a game, I'll probably not go and buy another game until I've lost interest in this one. If an average game cost $50, if before I bought anything more than 1 game every 4 months, it'd actually be a net loss in revenue for the game industry.
The benefit of the MMO is that, once established, it's a pretty reliable ongoing revenue stream as opposed to the massive swells in revenue from the single purchase games of old.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
...ProgressQuest!
Windows only, but the gameplay is riveting!
Trust not a man who's rich in flax / His morals may be sadly lax
Look man, I'm 37! THIRTY-SEVEN for Chrissakes! I do have a life outside of games, but games are definately still part of it. I'm in line for UT 2004 and if HL2 or Duke Nukem finally show up I'll be their bitch.
:)
But I admit, it is probably more unusual in my age bracket - but for a different reason. Way back when, the 2600 didn't arrive until I was 11 (1977). Perfect timing for someone like me, someone who understood basic electronics and KNEW what a computer game was and adored them. But it took a comparatively long time for it to catch on.
There was also a stigma attached to gaming then - something that Commodore would find out about later with the Amiga. Nowadays we call it 'multimedia', but back then anything with good graphics and sound was a TOY. After all, if adults used a computer it was usually a PC and anyone who remembers knows what THAT looked and sounded like back then!
Most games were designed for the new generation of *children* - regardless of fun factor for adults. SOCIALLY, most adults felt uncomfortable about the things. This has changed over time, but only because there is an older generation of gamers now to help ballast things. For instance, Nintendo still caters to younger kids while MS is catering to older gamers.
Think of it this way; it seems that if a game company nowadays doesn't sell a few million consoles in their first year they are a failure. But the Atari 2600 really didn't hit its stride until 1980! The 2600's peak run lasted until 1982 (the horrible conversions of Pac-Man and E.T. didn't help matters much) but continued to be built in different forms right through the 80's.
The author of this article picked a 7 year time period to compare screenshots, but innovation was only part of the problem. After all, there were surface differences between the Atari 2600, Intellivision, Bally Arcade, and Odyssey II but even the next generation of consoles didn't really improve things all that much, or in all areas.
Example: When Gen 3 arrived (Gen 1 being Pong, Gen 2 being the 2600/Odyssey II), the Colecovision led the way. Graphically, the games looked superior to the 2600, however there were still many things the 2600 could do that even the Coleco could not (mostly having to do with the amount of colors onscreen and true bitmap graphics).
People pushed the 2600 right to the edge - in fact, looking at the initial Pac-Man and comparing it to Ms. Pac-Man you would've thought someone upgraded your console! Good titles helped the machine survive for longer than it should have and perhaps this was part of the problem.
People came to expect innovation with the 2600. I remember buying Activision's 'BattleTank' and thinking, "Damn, this is great! I can't wait to see what they do next!" It wasn't a question of whether the next game would be better - it was assumed that it would be. In short, most people were satisfied with the 2600 as it was. It was considered an *appliance* then, like a T.V. or radio. The other machines of the day, namely the Colecovision and the Atari 5200 (really an Atari 400 without a keyboard) were better, but not enough to justify the expense. Not only that, at some point us teens had to DATE!
When the NES hit the scene it was noticably better and had NO competition, great titles (Mario, for instance), and excellent marketing. Old gamers even bought into it (or went into computers) because the 2600 titles eventually stopped coming.
I think the industry will always have its ups and downs, but as long as game companies continue to provide kids of all ages an outlet or escape from real life, they will be around.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I got a kick out of this quote. I and most of my friends are in our 40's (and really do remember Pong unlike this 29- year old). That makes me an intellectually stunted manchild (never mind that many of us hold Ph.D.s):
>>>
The original video game generation is growing up. I know, because I'm one of them...
But I'm almost 30 now, worried with mortgages and job stress and coffin shopping. My peers all have their own children, the household toy budget spent on the offspring, not the adults.
A few of us can still play games at 30, I suppose. You cannot play games at 35 or 40 and seem like anything but an intellectually-stunted manchild, there in your sweater vest, the control pad tangled in your long, gray, drool-soaked beard."
Obviously the dude is NOT a gamer, or he wouldn't make cracks like that. Gaming will always be big when the economy sucks as it gives you something to think about while you lose your mortgage. If i have to choose between playing a day and eating, I'll PLAY!(american's are overweight lazy ethnocentric bastards anyway).
No one knows what the future will bring. Give me a game with the same dynamics of games today and COMPLETELY REALISTIC GRAPHICS, and hell ya i'll buy it. Hell, find a way to port me completely into it, and i'll fund the company!(ie. tron).
tv/movies suck 99% of the time, yet those markets continue to stay strong. Why do we have different standards for games? I believe thy'll remain strong for years to come. People get bored with titles causing them not to sell, marketers will allow developers to actually experiment a bit. Who knows, maybe when intel puts out the 50ghz chip on a machine w/ 100gigs of ram and 1T of hdrive, maybe you'll be able to create your own games. (oh and tell me what the hell i have in the fridge, cause i'm hungry, oh and program the fukin wireless robot to get whatever it thinks i want from the fridge, cause im a fat lazy american who can't even get up to feed his fat face.)
oh, and GEORGE BUSH CAN SUCK MY BIG 9 INCH COCKERSPANIEL
Have you ever gone out paintball shooting with your friends / co-workers? It's far more realistic than the most advanced game on the market today. Why? There are more ways to interact with your environment. Right now, we just interact with the games via our two hands and eyes. Maybe some foot action for driving games and a headset for talking to your teammates. But that's it. In order to have a truly realistic gaming experience, we need to be able to interact more physically with the game.
And that would be Star Trek's Holodeck! Okay, we're not there yet, but what about a VR headset, a DDR footpad, and some handheld devices to simulate weapons? Instead of pressing ASDW to move, you need to shuffle your feet on the DDR pad. Instead of pressing or or you point your handheld device in the direction and either swing it (blunt weapon) or pull the trigger. And the rumble-pad technology could be implemented into a body suit so vibrate at the location you would get hit/shot/run over/etc.
Sure, the industry has creatively stagnated, but so have individual studios. A popular studio has released in the past few years: Motocross Madness, Motocross Madness 2, ATV Offroad fury, Splashdown, ATV Offroad fury 2, Splashdown 2, and MX unleashed. All nearly identical racing games with x-treme type stunts, with a few vehicle changes. Technologically these games are very good, but the poor guys at this studio have spent the past 5 years making the same damned game. That must get very boring...
word.
but im too drunk, so i will just limit myself to a vent on The Sims...
:)
It seems to me that the market for The Sims is the same market for the people who watch reality shows like Big Brother. i.e. people without lives of their own.
I've got a friend (female) who plays the sims and has virtual representations of everybody she knows. (which I find exceedingly creepy). But she is married to the most boring bloke in the world (0 friends, which is pretty exception for a guy who used to be a bar manager and plays in a weekend soccer team) and now hardly goes out (whereas she used to be a good laugh. usual story, hitting 30 picks first guy who doesnt jerk her about)
This is just the technological version of buying some small yappy dog then spoiling them like a child and dressing them up in stupid sailor outfits.
Whenever she starts talking about it (how amazingly x is getting friendly with y) I just want to shout 'what the **** has happened to you?'
oh well.. you might have guessed I have issues there
Pick any group of gamers. For every single one, they have a golden age of gaming. Talking to my young friends, they think the golden age of gaming was 5 years ago. My friends, 10 years ago. Older friends, 15 years. Talk to kids in a few years and they think the golden age of gaming is today. You could argue for hours reasons why games are going downhill, but it really just comes down to things are never as good as they used to be.
We're on a technological plateau. The next real leap, the next real difference in how we play games via sensory suits or neural inputs or whatever, is still too far away and too expensive.
Yes, a fair amount of time will likely pass before the next technological innovation that makes a significant change in computer based games, and even more time will pass before that technology is cheap enough that it's widely distributed.
That said, the computer game industry seems to me to be subset of the larger game industry more than of the technology industry. The reason that game designers are different from demo designers is that a game is not indended to display how a creative person can push the limits of technology in an appealing way; rather games are intended to be fun to play. There might be a "holy crap, how did they do that?" element to a computer game, but that's not really the point.
Take MMORPGs, for example. A technological advance was required for these games to be possible, but they're not popular because networking technology is cool...they're popular because they're a new, fun kind of game to a lot of people. (And yes, I know that they're basically not new in any sense, either from a game design or technology perspective, but you know what I mean.) In all the cases that I've seen, in fact, the gee-whiz graphics factor has been noticeably lacking...the cool technology is invisible from a gameplay perspective.
The SIMS became absurdly popular for a while. Pretty FPS games were big before that. "You Don't Know Jack" had its day in the sun. Myst and its knockoffs ruled the world ages ago, and we haven't even come close to far enough back to hit the Age of Atari discussed in the article. In all these cases, the popular game or games presented something new, or offered it in an intriguing new way...technology almost always played a role in that, but in my opinion the tech was rarely the primary factor. Gameplay, basically, rules.
Hmmm...I started this post about three hours ago and just now got back to it. Eh, you all get the idea of my ravings...no point in finishing it... :)
* * *
It is a dada story -- it has no moral.
I've been playing FFXI since october when it was released. Since then my computer has gone through several iterations, and consequently many formats.
After about 5 months my CD key still works fine.
Very cool.
e c. htm
http://66.216.122.95/_content/_reel/_movies/isp
Sorry but thats not exactly the whole 'Video Game" ladscape. Back in the mid and late 70's arcades arose, and blossomed at a ridiculous rate. This large growth in the "Arcade" market spawned home consoles. Atari 2600 being the first in the US to really penetrate a large percentage of US homes (sorry don't know about the rest of the world, simply relying on my memory as a kid). This set up the downfall of arcades, as well as parent groups wanting these arcades to be shut down for reasons that are still beyond me.
See I don't think the home console market crashed, I believe the entire Video game market crashed because of the growth in the home market cannibalized the arcade market. This sudden and abrupt shift was too much and poeple lost alot of money, Warner Communications (who bought Atari with greed in their hearts) started firing people left and right, and thats around the same period that retarded ET game came into being.
Anyway, Arcades imploded in the early and mid 80's, and dragged the home market along with them.
The current situation is no where like that today. There is no similiar, yet competing industry to destabilize the current dominance of video games as a whole. PC and consoles are the closest markets and they are so similiar that there really is no difference at all.
off to play some SOCOM II...
-a 34 yo gamer
--
I don't really play new games all that much, and I have enough legal games on my laptop to be able to not really care whether or not another new game ever comes out again. So I really could care less one way or the other. Certainly, new games are much harder to hack, and especially find hidden or unused/previously-used data. Did you know that both the NES ans SNES versions of SMB3 have remnants of a debug menu? The SNES one acts nearly identical to the NES one, including not allowing you to select Battle Mode after jumping to the routine, since there was no separate Battle Mode selection on NES, which makes me think that the SNES version was ported from the NES version. This would make sense, because since the 65816 is binary compatible with the 6502 when concerned with legal opcodes, most of the logic would work with, in most cases, simple RAM address modifications, I would think.
Hacking is where it's REALLY at. Merely playing the games, to me, is only gravy.
FC Closer
"Hear someone complaining about something that someone else likes, and you will hear someone not understanding something that someone else does."
--My grandpa.
Go ahead MOD my day!
More opinions here
I tend to agree with the author, I find I'm spending less money on games than earlier in my life.
Best Community for Gaming and Gadgets!
I don't know if the pointless article's point was that video games will die entirely, just that the industry is heading for trouble. Last I checked, there was no multi-billion dollar "chess industry". Plus, unlike video games, chess doesn't rely on novelty. What, besides novelty, prompts someone with a working copy of Madden NFL 2003 to pay $30 for Madden NFL 2004? Is the experience really $30 worth of better?
In my opinion, the reasons video games have become more stagnant is that develors use graphics and technology as the centerpiece of the game rather than the affability of the gameplay itself. The reason that games like Mario and Tetris still hold some value today (I actually play Mike Tyson's Punch-Out all the time on my friends NES) is that they were gameplay centric and fun no matter what Mario's head looked like.
Today it seems that game companies are content to have it really look like Luke Skywalker but be truly boring to play after the first time through it drolling at the graphics and the cut scenes. That is why the classics, are the classics and todays games don't have the same staying power as they do. It is always so disappointing when you have games based on immersion, a la Star Wars, that has no value from the gameplay.
This is why games like GTA and the Sims are successfuly because they focus on the gameplay, with graphics only as the medium, and not what the gamer is paying for
Interested in Sports with a brain? --> http://dispatchesofj.blogspot.com/
Remember Space Invaders? And how many "aliens in rows shooting downward at rocket" games were there afterwards because people couldn't think outside of that?
After Manic Miner came out on the ZX Spectrum, you couldn't move for platform games.
3d shooters like Doom and Quake were great, but that's all we seem to get sold in the arcade game market now.
Is there someone out there making anything as revolutionary as Lemmings or Elite any more?
The next E.T. game gets released early next month.
I'm guessing it'll flop just as bad (if not worse) than the Atari 2600 version.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Perhaps there just bored with the fact that there the same thing?
I think there is a market for that level of player.Pun intended.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Talk to people younger than you about movies and you'll realize that they're clueless about movies before their time. I'm 23 and I've talked to several people my own age that never saw Star Wars, ET, Mad Max, and other classics. This is in a country where LOTS of video stores carry a good amount of the older titles in addition to the current ones. Why? Because you can get them all on VHS and a good amount of them on DVD, especially if they're classics. Everyone has at least one of those players in their home so they only have to carry the titles in two formats. Still, only a minority of us are going to seek out the older classic movies. Blame our capitalistic society for breeding people that focus on the latest shiny object. With video games, it's even worse! There's a few dozen different consoles and less gamers than there are movie watchers. Halo was a launch title on the Xbox and you can still rent or buy it anywhere because the Xbox is the current console. Within months after the next generation console coming out, Halo will start to disappear from the shelves. Gamers buy the new systems because the new games come out for the new systems. If it were as cheap to port a GameCube game to the N64 as it is to release a movie on DVD and VHS, it would be done! The point I'm trying to make is that it's unrealistic from a capitalistic standpoint to have a readily available supply of old games and to create new games for old platforms.
The Current Console Race
While throwing down my thoughts, I'd like to give the definitive reasons why the Playstation and the Playstation 2 have done so well and where video games are going. I have yet to be wrong in my predictions on the video game industry. The fight started between Sega and Nintendo. After the 16-bit war, Sega placed their bets on releasing systems with revolutionary changes ahead of the competition. Unfortunately, they executed their ideas poorly and the gamers didn't go for it. System after system flopped including the Dreamcast which I would say is only half a generation ahead of the N64. Despite the half-generation leap, I believe the Dreamcast would have actually made it if they didn't have a poor reputation due to the several failed systems they quickly abandoned in favor of new ventures. Who would want to buy a Sega console when their prior Sega purchases died within a year of launch? Nintendo learned their lesson after the first mistake, the Virtual Boy and didn't follow Sega to the hardware grave. My guess is that these flops scared Nintendo into backing out of the joint venture with Sony on the CD attachment for the SNES. They decided to let Sony run with it and make the Playstation, betting that their tried and true methods would prevail. What they didn't count on was the "AOL CD Effect" that Sony would employ. Playstation came out and swamped the aisles with titles by basically giving developers free range. A one year head start with a solid system and TONS of games gave the appearance that they were the only system in existence. Then the N64 came out and was superior to the playstation. The games didn't just look 3Dish, they were actually rendered in 3D and you could feel the depth. Unfortunately, by the time the N64 came out, everyone and their best friend had gotten sick of waiting and bought a Playstation. With its strong support and not too far behind graphics, it kept the lead. Only those that decided to keep waiting for the N64 or those that could afford multiple gaming systems got the N64. People who were just getting their first system at this point went with what their friends had or were more interested in mature content than the immersive 3D environment that the N64 offered. Nintendo made just enough money to keep moving while Sony took the throne. When the PS2 came out, it was the same story all over again, only this time Microsoft joined Nintendo. You'd think one of them would have learned! Hell, Microsoft didn't even learn from the N64 controller complaint
S. John Ross made a list of plots at http://www.io.com/~sjohn/plots.htm
The RPG references pencil and paper RPG's, but it's still pretty insightful when applied to computer games.
First Person shooters haven't really done anything new since oh...around the time of Goldeneye or Half-Life (so a good six years). Frankly I haven't bought one in ages (unless you count Metroid Prime, but frankly the gameplay mechanics for that were mostly lifted from N64 Zeldas, with jumping adding a new dimension. The first person perspective doesn't really change that).
Try another genre.
Fighting games have finally broken away from the street-fighter combo-driven gameplay (as seen in Soul Calibur and Super Smash Bros).
Console-style RPGs are still tossing out new gameplay from time to time. FFX had the sphere grid system which came out of left field; Mario and Luigi had a brilliant dodging system and an interesting way of navigating dungeons.
And if those aren't interesting enough for you, go for one of the games pioneering a new genre like Wario Ware or Animal Crossing.
or thought about what he was saying, you'd realize that my point is *his* point - graphics have been good enough for several years now. No one wants or needs slightly more realistic fleshtones or ever more realistic explosions - how the hell would your average gamer know if an explosion was realistic or not?
And that is the plateau he was talking about - we don't need better graphics and the next step, virtual reality, is still too clunky and expensive.
Clear, Dark Skies
When all the games are copies of older games - as they have been for the past few years - and it costs so much to develop a game that independents are shut out - where will the new compelling game come from?
When I was a lad and schmuck with a C64 could get into the game authoring business. I did it myself. But how much does it cost to get a PS2 development kit.
Clear, Dark Skies
In Baliwood (the Indian version of Hollywood), ALL movies have the SAME plot, so much so that the characters are simply introduced as "The Hero", "The Villian", etc in every movie.
I wouldn't call that very innovative, but their business is doing fine.
Games are the same way. They've become so un-original that they can be lumped into "fps, sim, puzzle", etc. It doesn't mean their business is going anywhere.
Eventually we'll have the uber game that's so real it's like plugging into the matrix.
Do you think people WON'T plug in? Do you think people won't PAY to plug in?
... but it was more interesting, and he wrote it over a year ago.
You can see it here
Lots of interesting insight.
I simply wasn't as competent when I started playing games (age 5) as I am now. It didn't take nearly as complex a game to amuse me. I still remember when I was like 13 my friends and I would gather around to play Final Fantasy 2. It seemed HARD to us, and we spent like 30-40 hours to beat it. So I tried it again receantly, blew through it in 13 hours. Not only because I remembered mostly what to do, but because the systems that seemed complex seem simple now. I can see the regularity of enemy actions and the combat system, and optimize characters and their actions to respond.
Experience plays a part as well but not like you are talking about. As you play more games, you just get better. I got the shareware Quake not too long after it came out and played it a bit. Wasn't a huge fan, mainly because I sucked ass. I think I beat it on easy but I might have even cheated to do that. So when I went of to university I got a new system, complete with Voodoo2s, and a friend introduced my to Quake TeamFortress. I started using the mouse to aim, learned how to strafe, etc. Then I really got serious, joind a clan, got good, joined a GOOD clan who was champion in a couple league.
Six months later, it's Christmas break and I'm home and without the nice highspeed dorm network. I don't really want to play much TF since I don't want to get my timing off. So I piddled around with other games. I then decided to try Quake single player. Hadn't touched normal Quake, much less single player since I'd left home. Rocked it on hard. It just seemed so easy. Same game, I had just gotten so much better skills. Didn't seem entertaining since there was nothing to it.
As with anything, as you grow both in your actual mental capacties and in your skill at what you are doing, your appetites will grow likewise.
May as well be predicting the imminent demise of Apple or something.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
In my old SWG guild (quite small), about half of the people were married. Of those, about half had kids. They didn't tend to play as much as us single guys, but they still played quite a bit. Occasionally, they'd have to take a break to see to the needs of their family, but they still usually found an hour or two a night to play games.
In my new guild there is a wide range of people. Young single people still dominate, but a large portion are married. Also we see some father-son teams for the older parents.
Just because you can't play games like you used to doesn't mean you can't play them. I mean when I came to university, I used to play Quake TEam Fortress 20-30 hours each week. I literally went to class, ate, and played TF. No way I could do that now, even if I wanted to. I have too many other things to do. Doesn't mean I don't play games, and quite a bit.
- Storyline. How did the Final Fantasy series get successful? Probably not because of its graphics (FF6 and earlier)
- Online Multiplayer gaming: why it should be dying? And whats that stat about 96 millions consoles sold anyway (RTFA)? We don't care, I know consoles makers aint making a dime when selling a console. The real deal (profit) is in games. I dont play consoles (except if PC is considered as a console?), but I only play online multiplayer games on my PC, and anything offline is really boring IMO. What the author missed here is about human competition. You can't code that. There is too much possibilities out there, too much way of playing a game, you can't copy a human's thought into some code.
"...a generation of kids has grown up thinking Trance is the shittiest music since country and western." - Paul van Dyk
Fuck this guy. I hope he seriously does not think that it will go down...
Even with games like GTA3 being released and made better with more features, people are going to buy that shit. The video game industry is only growing larger, and with the release of all the next-generation consoles, it can only grow larger. Nothing is going to slow it down.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
The future of video games won't be a death (or even slow decay), it'll be a change in direction. PC/Console games are starting to reach an asymptote in terms of quality of gameplay, graphics, etc. and we're going to be playing the same types of games in the future as we are now. No, the future of game development is to stretch where they go: we'll be playing doom on cell phones in a year or two, and GTA:VC type games five years after that. It won't be about playing better games, it'll be about playing good games in better places.
Pikmin was produced by Shigeru Miyamoto! You know, the father of the best games in console history? Just because it didn't SELL in the billions to the droves that just want to play another sequel to GTA, does not mean it is not mainstream. Are you suggesting it had low distribution or an independent publisher? Go check, its right there on the shelves with the pretty graphics everyone is buying up.
Wow... /. no longer allows me to view my full comment history, so I can't link to the extremely relevant essay I wrote on this ages ago. :(
...that, and I'd play a lot more console games if the systems didn't cost as much as a PC these days. I mean, back in the day, you could get a new system for $120-200 or a PC for $1000-5000. Now it's more like a console OR a PC for $500. Hmm... crappy PC, but still not a hard choice.
To cut it short though, innovation still happens in gaming. Whole new genres have been spawned in the last 5-10 years, and there's so much innovation in Japan that the companies just don't believe will sell over here.
When I was 12 years old, I was able to buy about 2 games per year. One I usually got for Christmas, and maybe I picked up one or two more saving my allowance and birthday money. You also had to make damn sure you got a good game when you were able to get one. And often times we only had Nintendo Power Propaganda and word of mouth to go on, so there were inevitable disappointments.
But I had a dream. I dreamt that one day I would be able to walk into Toy's R Us, and gaze upon that long aisle of games and gaming systems, and buy any damn thing I wanted. I would pull a hundred tickets if need be, walk them to the "game cage" and buy a whole damned system, even if there was only one game I wanted for it. I am sure many of the other gamers who cut their teeth on Pitfall Harry had a similar dream.
Then guess what happened. Time passed, we got jobs. Many of us went into Computers because of our experience with computer games. Many of us were employed during the boom, making good money, and not yet caring enough to be ultra-conservative with it. So what did we do? We lived the dream. We bought Voodoo 2 cards so we couldn't see pixels in the walls in Quake, we bought N64s becasue Waverace had cool water, we bought PS1's because Twisted Metal was evil as hell. We got used to gaming on the couch and upgraded to Xboxs and Ps2's. I completed my dream when I walked into Traget and bought a cute little gamecube just because I wanted to play Zelda on it. I know many of you did too.
After "living the dream" for a while my inner 12 year old self has caught up to my calender age. I am starting to consider "Will I be interested in this game long enough to finish it? Will I have time? Maybe I will rent it. Maybe reading a review is enough". I am sensing that the "living the dream" is coming to an end, in myself and in others.
I wonder what effect "the dream" had on gaming sales in the 97-02 era. I wonder what effect no longer living "the dream" will have in the 04-08 era. Are there children today dreaming about walking into a gamestop and saying "gimme one of everything"?
Don't worry too much about it. I was playing (and attempting to write) Wumpus on a Bendix G15 back in 1963, and Star War on a PDP-15 clone in 1972... ;-{)
I'd like to know why this guy is so angry about the game industry?
Personally, I still enjoy playing games. I played games as a kid, and I'm still playing games now. The types of games have changed, but I still enjoy them. It's just like reading books. When I was a child, I read easier, less-involved books with pretty pictures. Now I like deeper, more meaningful literature, with a great plot and deep characters.
Why should games be any different? I think this guys next editorial should be about the death of the book industry, followed by the film industry, followed by the television industry. Everything changes, but I doubt that "interactive fiction" like computer and video games are going away anytime soon.
IMHO you seem to miss the point of the article.
Novelty sells games. Currently, that's graphics novelty. Ooh, looky, now with more bump maps. So, yes, currently that's what gets people to dump their old games and fork over 40 bucks for a new game.
I'll tend to aggree with the article that, indeed, it's becoming less and less of a difference. Maybe the young ones won't go back to playing Prince of Persia in 320x200, but a lot of them _are_ perfectly willing to go back to 2, 3 or even 4 year old games. Heck, the most played online game is still HalfLife. It's a _lot_ older than that.
So indeed it's becoming less and less easy to keep people in the habbit of throwing away their old games and buying new ones on graphics alone.
In fact, I'll go further and say that even if the ability to produce better graphics continued indefinitely (which it won't), it still creates the effect that the novelty wears off. You start noticing that you've played the exact same game last year, only in lower resolution. Is the minor facelift really worth another 40 bucks for the same game?
But I'll disaggree with the article in that he seems to assume that graphics are the _only_ novelty factor possible. You see, the thing about those old games wasn't _only_ new graphics. What kept people buying new ones wasn't _only_ the transition from stick figures to blocky 2D to decent 2D to piss-poor 3D to semi-decent 3D to...
What kept a lot of us buying them was that they differed in more than the graphics department. Centipede involved shooting all right, but it was _not_ a clone of Galaga. Contra was a scrolling shooter, but was _not_ a clone of Penetrator. Tetris and Sokoban were both essentially puzzle games, but neither was just a remake of the other. _That_ is what the real magic of those days was.
And heck, if you even look around nowadays, there's still plenty of room for innovation. The Sims is the best selling game of all times. Not only did a lot of people buy the original game, they bought 7 (SEVEN!) add-ons to it. Because being really original actually pays.
Dune 2 spawned a new genre. So did Wolfenstein 3D. So did SimCity and Civilization. Diablo might not have been 100% original, but it was new and original enough for most people. It also was a very stable and polished game. It paid off big time.
So I'll say that graphics are _not_ the only thing that sells. In fact, I'd say not even the main one. With the debatable exception of Wolfenstein 3D, none of the games I've named above was that special in the graphics department. (The Sims is largely a 2D isometric game in an age of 3D bump-mapped pixel-shaded games.) But they vastly outsold games which were graphically superior.
Or heck, let's go back to my first example. More people are playing Counter-Strike, with its outdated low polygon count models and low res textures, than the latest and greatest Medal Of Honour incarnation.
So _if_ publishers keep focusing soleley on shiny graphics, yeah, we may well be headed for the crash predicted in the article. But maybe they're smart enough to see the way out. Maybe. I wouldn't bet on it, but I can still hope.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I feel that far too much time in game development is spent on graphics and not on content. The reason why most people love Metroid Prime is because of the gamplay and level design. People hardly ever speak about how good the game looks; Prime does look really, really good (which is merely the icing)
However, I don't think you understand the point I am trying to make.The quotes I took from the article, the author claims that we have hit a plateau in graphics. He says we are on a technological plateau (in terms of graphics, not gameplay). I was disagreeing with him on those claims, not that the graphics were "good enough".
Both instances I quoted from the article, the author (and the person he was quoting) were clearly trying to say that graphics have not improved much in the last 7 years. He made a comparison with James bond of 97 and 2004. If you compare those games side by side in real time, the one from 97 would look and play horribly with its crappy frame rate (not to mention the cheesey popcorn looking explosions.) Maybe the average gamer would not know if an explosion was realistic, but they would know if it looked asthetically pleasing.
There are a few things that will never die.
Anything that revolves around bringing food to people.
Anything that revolves around sex (dating, etc...)
Anything that revolves around entertainment (movies, games, etc...)
There are more of course, but these are some of the basics we need, so games are not going anywhere.
AC
The situation in the Atari crash and the situation now are so completely different that I can't tell what the author is thinking in trying to compare the two of them. The author reminds me of those people who keep claiming the End of the World is nigh and the Sky is Falling and all of that stuff. He wants to rain on everyone's parade.
First off, graphics hasn't hit a plateau. It is on an S curve. We've just reached the point where it is tapering off. But we've nowhere near hit the limit there. Remember the Lord of the Rings movies? Remember the final battle? Can Warcraft match those sorts of graphics with those sorts of numbers of troops? The moment that personal computers can generate those sorts of graphics real time, I'll be willing to conceed we're maxxing out.
And there are still things that are hellish to model on computers. The flooding of Isengard was done with models because the computers weren't up to the task. Eventually, we'll have software that can model water flowing like that for movies and then years down the road it will appear in games. But it will take some time for it to cross over.
Photorealistic dynamic human avatars are still the cutting edge of CGI (and we haven't even gotten there yet). Admittedly, the developments are more incremental now than they used to be, but they're still there. I want my game to look like it was being performed by live actors on a real set. The graphics ain't there yet.
Physics, as others have noted, is an issue. Related is the idea that every object in a world can be interacted with or affected by the player. We've a long way to go in the physics area, but this is more in the region of gameplay.
AI on the other hand, still has a ways to go on the S curve. The major limitation of games these days is that social interactions still for the most part have to be pre-scripted. There are a few games that are slowly making the first few steps past that, but we've got a long way to go.
Of course physics and AI and gameplay issues aren't obvious. The writer of this article is taking a very superficial view of games (and of the gaming industry) by noting that just because two games look similar, they are the same. Just comparing the looks of the Madden games isn't enough. If he had done a comparison of game feature by game feature and shown that there was little incremental improvement, then he might make a point. As it stands, he sounds incredibly shallow and superficial.
GTA3 was a breakthrough in gameplay more than anything else. An open world where there were multiple issues for solving problems. There are other games out there that instead of having one solution to a problem or one style of ultimate gameplay are allowing a range of approaches. These games look a lot like other games of less depth and complexity, but only someone who looked at the surface of things would say there was no difference.
Games are going to be changing a lot under the hood going forward. The one good point of the article was that graphics improvements are no longer a primary selling point any more. All games are starting to look good. Now issues involving AI and physics and gameplay are coming to the fore.
"you can't just go downloading 700mb psx images all day much less 4.7gb ps2 images" You've never heard of bittorent have you? Downloading psx images is quite easy on a good broadband line.