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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 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.
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
Clearly, there is a reason of this polishing trend. I don't think this is good but it is what people want.
Look at GTA for example, it doesn't have anything new but still it is one of the most popular games.
On the other hand, maybe lack of new ideas is related with increasing cost of producing a new game (number of designers, programmers etc). Publishers don't want to risk their money with completely new ideas.
I just did that last night too, but for different reasons. What worries me is that the person I talked to on the phone said that my CD Key for the game would become invalid after 3 month, and that there was no way to get a new key other then buying the game again. This sucks if at some point I change me mind and want to play some more.
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
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.
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.
Ex-fucking-actly. Everyone who bitches about gaming not being as good as it used to be is either A. outgrowing it or B. just pissed off because they finished their favorite game and can never get the same excitement from any other game ever again.
Before people go flaming me, I fit into this category! I've both outgrown gaming (for the most part) and played through my favorite games more times than I probably should have.
But I still recognize that new games are enticing, complex, and most definitely innovative. Especially on the GameCube. Personally, I won't be playing the GC until I can emulate it (I emulate all my console games as a matter of principle), but just because I'm quirky like that doesn't make me respect modern games any less.
I don't agree with the grandparent and I don't agree with the article. Modern gaming is fine. If it doesn't interest you, find another game, or find another hobby.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
I'd have to disagree, while I think it's true that sequels really started taking off in the 80's, there were plenty of movie plots that were reused prior to that time period. If you look at a lot of the spaghetti westerns, or world war II movies, or noir films of prior years, there is plenty of reuse of plots and character types and locales. So I don't think that you can say that movies were incredibly original in the past, I think it's more that we tend to remember the standouts and 20 or 30 years from now, peoeple will be saying the same things about movies (and videogames) as they are today, but no on will remember "Police Academy in Outer Space".
Nintendo did two interesting things here. One, they declared that they were the only source for carts. You wanted a Nintendo cart, they had to be the ones manufacturing it.
Spin-off of this was also that carts are expensive to make, and they take a while; do you order a few, and risk it selling out, and lose the momentum while it takes three months to make a new batch? Or order a lot and risk having a bunch of unsold merch on your hands?
The second thing they did was limit companies to a few titles a year; five per company, I think, was the number. This forced the companies to make damn sure they released good product.
Compare this to the Playstation model; several hundred thousand CDs could be pressed in a weekend for pennies apieces, and any old pile of crap you can think of, you can shovel onto a PS disc.
Sony, however, picked the right time to move to a non cart based format, as the N64 vs PS1 slaughter showed.
Neat trivia fact: the PS1 was originally supposed to be a addon to the SNES.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.