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Creativity, a Problem for the Gaming Industry?
Steeda95GT writes "A Reuters story reprinted at Forbes.com is an interesting read, saying that 'The gaming industry will shrink unless we start to see new games'. It talks about how the ratio of original titles to sequels is dropping dramatically, but it also goes on to say that upcoming sequels (Doom 3, Halo 2, Half-Life 2, GTA: San Andreas) will be successful only because their predecessors were."
No, its guts. Guts to try new things to break away from what is known in games, to produce the kind of games that new customers really want. The market is what you make it.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
originality and creativity when repackaging the same game and slapping a subtitle on it will rake in millions? The Sims comes to my mind...GTA is in a similar boat in my mind...
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
But it is not just EA chasing after proven material. Upcoming titles such as "Halo 2," "Half-Life 2," "Doom III" and "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" are all expected to top sales charts this year, in large part because the games that preceded them were so successful.
Sure this will get them noticed more, but if the games don't have innovative graphics and gameplay, the popularity of the previous titles is not going to mean shit.
Successful only because their predecessors were? Thats certainly a backwards way of looking at it. They're successful because they kept doing (and by expanding upon) what made their predecessors good games.
They may not be original, but that certainly doesn't mean they won't be fun, which is what gaming's supposed to be about. Why reinvent the wheel when you know what people like?
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Analysts have been saying the same thing about Hollywood for 20 years, but every year the box office is consistently bigger than the last (and rising faster than inflation) -- and much of that is powered by sequels. In 2003, 6 of the top 10 grossing movies were sequels. And when Hollywood is short on sequels, they recycle old ideas -- Spider-Man was the #1 film of 2002, and it's free to spawn more sequels anew.
Bottom line: Creativity has been floundering for a long time, but people keep buying games, keep watching TV, keep going to the movies. Businesspeople would be fools to abandon a known quantity (the revenues of any sequel are easily predictable) in favor of new stories and fresh faces, not matter how much some of us would love to see them. To think that people will suddenly stop buying games because they're all sequels is silly; gamers really have no choice except not to play... and only in WarGames/I. is that a real option.
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I think that Doom 3 doesn't really fall into the catagory of the other games.
1) Doom 3 is retro. The last Doom game came out while I was still in high school.
2) Doom 3 is a significant advance over the last sequel. It's not just new levels.
Saying Doom 3 is just a sequel is like saying Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was just a sequel. There's no comparison.
Still, I think that companies will start coming out with more creative games soon. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised of LARPing became the next big thing, and games that are offshoots of RPGs became bigger, such as the White-Wolf titles, only with more roleplay.
You know, video games are going the same way as radio -- more and more of the same crap, over and over and over again. No one wants to give anything new a chance, even though there's plenty of new stuff out there. The only difference is, I don't know that there's been much of a change in the corporate ownership structure in the video game industry like there has been in radio (i.e. the ClearChannel takeover). But then again, I suppose there wasn't much in the way of diversity in video game companies to start with, was there?
::Sigh::...if only companies weren't so damn risk-averse, maybe society could progress a bit.
The saddest thing about it is, if there were ever a new game that did what, say, Legend of Zelda did back in the 80's, the company that put it out could make zillions. It's not like they'd lose much putting out crappy stuff meanwhile, either.
How To Get Humans To Mars
Its more stuff like ThinkTanks, that feature kinda psuedo-unique gameplay that's a bit hard to master but very fun. Reminds me of the good old days of shareware games on DOS.
You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.
As someone that just left the game industry for the second time - this time 'cause I got tired of looking for a job that didn't require a minimum of 80 hour weeks working on either a n-th generation sequel or a game that tried to differentiate itself through pushing the gore / splatter level:
The problem is with the people FUNDING the game industry. The independent shops are being swallowed by companies that have made loads of cash getting away with pumping out sequels that have only minor engine improvements. This sucks, but worked for a while in a few profitable genres. Many companies that tried to push it died after too many generations (I used to work at Accolade, that's part of what killed them...)
Unfortunately, people that funds games look at this seeming no-risk model, and refuse to fund anything that doesn't look like the same. They all want you to license an existing engine, and make a game that can be described in a single sentence as {profitable game A } crossed with {profitable game B.}
If you don't follow this model, you don't get funds.
As a related point, there are WAY too many companies in the industry for the amount of shelf space available, and the big players BUY shelf space, so its nearly impossible to compete anyway without cutting a deal with an existing major distributor. Want to do that? Guess what, you have to change your game to follow the same model as everyone else.
In the mean time, the EA's and Sony's of the world are pushing their developers harder and harder - they've currently got a surplus of available headcounts to replace all the burnt out ones with...
The industry needs more "angel" funders. But in this economy...
Consider that men have been going to bars, drinking too much and going home with ugly women for thousands of years. (The oldest known human recipe is a Mesopotamian recipe for beer) Obviously humans can do what they like indefinately, even if they regret it the next morning.
The way I see it the video game industry is analgous to the movie industry or music industry in general. In fact, we can group all of these under the heading "Entertainment Industry".
I will use the movie industry as an example and I believe the analogy will become fairly self evident. In the early phases of film making the director had to struggle with many technical issues as the art form was in it's infancy. Low light shots, grey balance, film processing, sound editing and duplication were enormous technical and logistical hurdles. As the technology of this artform became more complex, people involved became specialized in their particular niche of the process. The technical resources are now available to the director without the complete, in depth knowlege of each process. The director is free to focus on his particular job: making the best movie possible. (Please note, I'm not in the entertainment industry, I'm just hoping to make a point here)
A video game, without question, is a form of art and entertainment. I believe that the industry is still in a developing phase. In the beginning, the person programming the game WAS the director. Typically they concieved the game, developed, programmed and had the challenge of overcoming all technical and creative issues. (Relatively few creative issues, I might add [think: pong]).
Now the indusrty is seeing it's split of fields. People are now only responsible for texture mapping 3-d models. Other people work on physics engines. We have been seeing the specialization of technical fields within this industry. My arguement is that this specialization allows for greater creative freedom by those whose job it is to just "make great games".
Lastly, I think there have been a lot of crap games recently, but let's look at why that is. Well, why is it such a high percentage of early movies made are now considered classics? Well, they were good movies, but why? Because the people who made them were professionals and it was expensive to make a movie back then, so they took it seriously. Today, anybody with a DV Camcorder and iMovie can make a film, but how much of the stuff thats churned out is actually worth watching? It's the same with video games, the development and distribution costs of game making has dropped dramatically and the technology to produce games is now as easy as getting a developers kit and a PC.
Any discussion of the current state (or future) of the gaming industry without at least a footnote to the entertainment industries history, I think, is somewhat lacking perspective. I believe the industry is in an acceptable place, given its relatively short history.
Sequels are chosen because they're safer and more prone to make money. PC game publishers are worried because piracy is eating into sales so badly. Consoles are a little safer, particularly the Gamecube.
It's the great unspoken truth that Slashdot won't admit. Rampant game piracy is a problem. Look at all the stupid copy protection we have to go through. It is still insane to expect people to have to put in a game CD every time they play, but publishers make the development teams put them in.
He claimed that the RIAA is claiming that piracy is hurting sales, and then pointed out that their hand-wringing was contradicted by their continued success.
Be that as it may, I believe the grandparent's skepticism is well-founded. "Piracy" (what a terrible term) has -- according to pretty much every study that wasn't commissioned by payments from the major labels (and even a few that were) -- either a negligible or positive affect on sales.
I've never understood Slashdot's reasoning for this.
Well, first of all, -2 points for assuming that all of Slashdot has a single opinion on anything.
If you've never understood the reasoning behind people arguing that sharing a product also being sold doesn't automatically hurt sales, you are apparently unfamiliar with the concept of "advertising". You've also never read any of Janis Ian's or Cory Doctorow's essays on the matter -- two people in a position to actually be able to compare their sales figures before and after.
If you choose to remain ignorant of arguments being presented by either side, that's really not "Slashdot"'s problem.
It was from 199? (before 1998) and it had no heroes and only small diversity in the teams. But the building and the order system were revolutionary, I'd say.
There were 2 switches for unit behaviour, that could be set per unit, directly, via a group selection or as a default for new units from a specific factory.
The first was aggression: always shoot, only shoot back, do never shoot and the second was allowed path deviance: break orders whenever aggression triggered, stray only lightly from the path, stay on orders no matter what.
That was perfect in my opinion, since you could easily create guards, patrols, offensive patrols and suicide missions without the need for any "pre-fab"-stances.
These stances also applied to non-combat units, since you had a multitude of construction vehicles, that were all able to interact with one another, automatically.
Set a constructor to shoot-all, and it will repair anything damaged and harvest any resource it sees along its patrol. Set path straying to light and it would only repair standing units and buildings, set it to liberal and it would follow damaged units until they are fully repaired, then returning to the next path vertex. And all would aid in construction buildings automatically.
Now imagine you do this with 20 construction aircrafts, that patrol your base, repair all buildings, repair all defense units, aid in all construction projects and harvesting minor resource thingies along the way.
Imagine another thing: you could set the aircraft factory with a predefined guard route and the stance behaviour, then assign some construction units to "guard" that factory. They will then aid in all construction projects this factory starts and will heal the factory if it gets damaged. Since there are 20 units helping, it churns out aircrafts extremely quick. All these go on an offensive patrol directly or meandering into enemy territory, sweeping anything away they see en-route. All this, while you concentrate on the main tank/battleship attack, resource expansion or a stealth operation behind the enemy.
This is automation and that's what I expect from todays games. Westwoods "Dune2 Battle for Arrakis" had essentially created the genre, but you had to click and command each and every unit on its own. Wasted mouse and brain of the avid gamer in less than 3 hours, but it was still a great game. Command & Conquer added a central build interface, unit grouping, hotkeys. Starcraft made this more RPG-like with clear values for each aspect of the units and allowed the first automations. "Attack ground" for a rapidly growing hydralisk army bred from 10 or more hatches was devastating against all but the most skillful micromanagers, since it used the most valuable resource in a realtime-strategy game - human attention.
Warcraft3 went leaps and bounds backwards. This game needs such a minute attention to details, micromanagement on all occasions, even special units to care and feed for and even an inventory to fill properly. Come on, I wouldn't consider this "strategic" anymore. Strategy is a concentration on overall goals, resource management, unit mix and attack plans. Warcraft is more like a tactical element on a smaller scale. If you like it that way, no problem. But it wasn't revolutionary on any aspects. It just consumed too much attention with no chance of recovery.
Strategic games shouldn't give the player the feeling of a trained hamster in a wheel. Recurring and trivial clicky-tasks should be assigned to some of the units in the game. "Repair all buildings damaged in the last whatever-storm" shouldn't involve more than 3 clicks. Let the player decide how much micromanagement he'd like to use. And through that, you not only make the game fun to play with, you also create possibilities for more discoveries and "real" skill & experience increase for the player as they find new ways to let the units interact. That way, you can win the game with less-than-perfect hand-eye-coordination since you don't compare click speed but some kind of "leadership"-qualities. At least it does not become a boring clickfest...