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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 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.
Is there anything that ISN'T dying these days???
Seriously, the media exaggerates EVERYthing because it makes for more entertaining reading.
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.
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
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.
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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....
Know what? There are plenty of innovative, well planned and well executed games out there. Games keep getting better and better. The problem is, audiences expect more and more.
Back in 1982 it was easy to impress people with a blue square shooting red dots at a green square.
Games aren't becoming "safer", and the medium isnt dying.
People have been saying the same shit about movies, every movie has been made, theres no more innovation to do! Well, sure, there are a lot of crappy movies being made, but a handful of standout ones.
Which is the way it is with media/artform. Music, books, TV, movies, and video games.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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."
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.
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.