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Dvorak Trashes Modern Gaming Industry
oskard writes "John C. Dvorak recently posted a PCMag.com rant trashing the gaming industry, predicting a complete market-meltdown in the near future. Titled 'Doom 4: End of the Game Industry?', it was interesting to see how the 3D Realms Forums reacted to the article. He claims that 'games have hardly changed since the invention of the first-person shooter.' His kids have obviously showed him too much Halo 2, and not enough Half-Life 2." From the article: "The business is going to attempt to sustain growth and creativity by making game players buy newer and newer machines. Computer gaming has always been sustained by never-ending improvements in resolution and realism. But once we get to photorealism, what is going to sustain growth?"
Guru meditition Error: "An instance of professor could not be loaded due to a missing a critical library: empathy.lib."
Seriously, I could have applied that analysis to the the media of any century. People could have said that about art in the 16th century, literature in the 19th century and television in the 20th century. Now it's the turn of the new fangled 21st century media, the video game, to be label as "boring and non-progressive".
Wake up and smell the roses. In this world you don't have to be original to make money. If anything, you are penalised for creating something original; daring to be different is often suicidal. This problem is even more accute in the software industry where it can cost a lot more to produce a game that it does a crappy sit-com.
People like their media a lot like they like their sex: Non-adventurous but guarenteed to satisfy. (As a side note, slashdotters might disagree that people want "boring" sex I think the reality is that most people grandstand on this issue; I'd wager that the majority of people feel comfortable having relativity boring sex).
Don't be fooled by Dvorak, the gaming industry is unlikely to implode. It just means that we'll appreciate the ground-breaking games more when they arrive.
Simon.
Now that Dvorak said its dying, sales will sky rocket and Duke Nukem Forever will be released ahead of schedule.
"For Great Justice."
Wait until he sees Duke Nukem FOREVER!
http://www.sandstorming.com
If I had a dollar for every dire prediction this blow hard made, I'd be a millionaire.
I agree with him. The other day I went to Future Shop to buy a game or just browse and I walked by every title thinking how uncreative the games industry has become. I don't pay for copycat games.
Make something original.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
back in the early 1990s in an article in, i think, pc computing? or maybe pc magazine. he had some kind of top ten list of things that would happen enxt year.
people would stop paying 40 bucks for games like racing, he said.
he is either a tool or a troll?
Unless the Ctrl-K key is particularly vicious.....
I've have more sympathy for his views if he didn't start off the article by demonstrating that he didn't even understand 'Starship Troopers' :). Geez, how could anyone have thought it was a serious movie, rather than a comedy taking the piss out of American militarism?
Dvorak does this all the time to increase page impressions. Don't even bother reading the article.
It's obvious to me that the opposite is occurring. It appears that people are becoming more and more addicted (or "drawn to" if you prefer a less inflamatory term) to video games as they become more interactive and realistic.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Games suck these days, with few exceptions every game is just a variant of one of a few formulas- FPS's, RPG's, RTS's, Sports games, Racing games, and a couple of basic puzzle formulas. I don't think the game market's about to implode or anything, but it's been a long time since a wholly original game has come out. Need more Katamari Damacy, less run-around-and-shoot-crap games...
Can we get a Dvorak topic that we can ignore, please?
/.ers., really.
John Dvorak writes for the average WinTel user who isn't following tech trends more than what makes the evening news. I can't understand how anything he writes is of any interest to
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
For example: Unreal Tournament series has peaked in my opinion, the systematic annual release of UT 200x titles is starting to wear very thin, and the quality of the work and time going into the games seems to be declining.
I don't think the communities which build around playing these game titles are able to stay up to date with the releases. By the time you have bought the game, created a clan and joined a league or ladder, the next version of the game is out and you are simply supposed to discard it and move onto this years title.
Sure other areas such as the console market have done this, but the sucess of a single title now spawns a complete series of games
FPSes have the best visual 'eye candy', but I could have said the same in the 1980s about Flight Sims. Innovative fun games continue to be invented and create their own niches.
In the past few years, there's been some great advancements... Europa Univeralis 2 is probably the most intricate historically based strategy game ever invented (and yet doesn't become a micromanagement nightmare).... how would you qualify "The Sims" as a game based on 1980s or 1990s definitions? Sounds like a dumb premise but its been hugely popular (and inventive). I'm not a big fan of MMORPG but it is definitely an advancement in the realm of CRPGs. And Doom3 is just an eye-candy FPS, as the article poster pointed out he should be trying Half Life 2 or KOTOR.
He's probably indirectly commenting on the slowing pace of 'genre' creation...most of the new games fit into a specific model/theme. This is where consumers have spoken. Tetris is probably one of the most addictive and popular games of all time, but if it was invented today no one would pay $50.00 for it.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
PC gaming is dying. I haven't seen anything original in a good while. Doom3 tried but it just wasn't clever. Halflife 2 is excellent, but just an evolution, not an innovation. I haven't seen anything interesting and new in the RTS scene since Homeworld.
Console gaming is going strong with innovative new styles and methods like the gyro in the PSP, the mic and touch screen of the DS.
Katamari Damashi.
The Eye Toy, though it's not really all that popular in the US.
I think of first person shooters as sort of the "silent movies" of video games. We are at the stage of developing the technology to create truely deep games. The FPS is an excellent platform for testing out new technology (see the newest Unreal engine for reference). Once the FPS proves a technology feasible it can be adopted into games of larger scale; and once we reach a plateau in the realism that can be delivered by games, developers will have to innovate gameplay around that realism.
This is my sig, there are many like it, but this one is mine...
The game that Ender Wiggin played in the famous sci-fi book Ender's Game is where I see the future of gaming going. Continuous, puzzle-based, 'smart' games that develop and change on the fly. There is no end in sight to gaming; it is a removal from reality, as drugs are. There has always been, and will always be (the holodeck, anyone?) a desire to escape from the common-day.
But once we get to photorealism, what is going to sustain growth?
I don't play games because of the graphics. I play games because they are fun. Agreed a fun game that looks great is better than one that looks like crap, however photorealism is not the end state of gaming progression. Look at all the fun people have with games like Bejeweled. That has nothing to do with visuals. Its just a fun game to play. All these first person shooters are featuring graphics because that is what will set them apart. It is tought to build an engaging story that has to involve thousands of monsters to be slaughtered. FPS games are going to decline to a niche, but games are going to persist.
This guy is just being inflammatory for the sake of it.
If you want to see exactly how inane this is, go out and rent the brain-dead Paul Verhoeven film, Starship Troopers.
Poor use of an example there, being that Starship Troopers is a oft-misunderstood anti-war satire.
Mod article +5 Ironic
Kings Quest Fun plot, lots of actions, and the graphics sucked. But that didn't stop it from being a blast to play (remember if you didn't have the sugar cube to get thru the poison brambles...)
Anyways, theres always decent story lines, multiple realms, etc. Thats why I always enjoyed Muds (MortalRealms) because of the varied areas and the fact that new ones were always being brought online. I realize that most games can not afford to be updated to this extent (text vs complex 3d models) but still... if I wanted a photo realistic game with pain feed-back, I'd join paintball.
see, what he's really saying is that *he's* bored with the stuff the gaming industry is putting out there; therefore, the industry just *must* be on the verge of imploding, right?
what he's forgetting is that the gaming industry's target audience isn't self-important middle-aged white men. a demographic that's closer to the mark is kids and teens. *they're* the ones who are providing the main revenue stream for the industry, and, not too coincidentally, *they're* the ones impressed by the fancy flashing lights.
all of the "it's all the same thing" rant is lost on this audience: they haven't been around long enough to know that it's all the same thing, wrapped up in new, shiny paper, and using faster processors and cards. to them, old *is* new again, and it's pretty freaking impressive!
I don't mean this in a disparaging way; I'm just saying that you don't get that kind of perspective about the gaming industry until, very likely, you're no longer part of their target demographic...
Um, I think halo is a bad example of "just another shooter". It really isn't just another action game. It has a number of inovations that give a lot of depth to gameplay.
Health/shields - recharging shields after a few seconds, so you never have to limp around almost dead, team mates can cover you while you recharge for team strategy, etc
Vehicles - the way you can just get in and get out at will
Carrying only two weapons at a time, forces you to choose, not just load up
Melee attacks - always available and make close combat much more interesting
Grenades - always available at a button press (not a weapon you switch to) and add lots of strategy, such as bouncing htem around corners, laying them in front of doors enemies are following you through, etc
Plasma / particle weapons - plasma hurts shields more, particle hurts health more, makes weapon combos more interesting
Motion tracker - Not a radar, you can only see people who are moving, so not moving is a strategic option, crouch walking is slow but you don't show up on motion trackers, so it adds a level of stealth to an action game
Granted, these are all halo 1 inovations, but the balance of all these things in halo 2 is superb. They all come up constantly. I think a better example of a boring by the numbers game is Doom 3.
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice
When you claim to be 'working' on Duke Nukem: Forever, you tend to become dilusional.
Anyone interested on modern FPS engines sould check this Quake Family Tree.
/me...Looking forward for Quake 4.
This pict how actually most people its on modding already existing engines. Valve its even forward, modding his how mods ( Counter Strike: Source ).
-Woof woof woof!
Huge opportunities will abound in the gaming industry as tools are released that lets the global community mod their favorite games. Storytelling will come to dominate games at every turn, as graphics, physics engines, and audio approach reality. The stories will also need to approach reality. http://autumnrangersgame.com/ is an example, based on the novel http://autumnrangersnovel.com/ and movie http://autumnrangersmovie.com./
how do people like this get to be taken seriosuly? Some jackass writes articles and becomes the authority on computers?
I play gams to get a break from reality. I don't want any sort of photorealism in my gaming experience. I want to be immersed in a CARTOON world of aliens, orcs, elves or whatever.
Unless they can get me some photo-realistic looking aliens from HL2 or some Orcs from WOW to come in and record video for them to digitize I will keep playing the games I find visually appealing.
Games are supposed to immerse you to a new world, not be a substitution for the one you live in.
What the hell? Why do people think this guy is an "authority" that we get submissions as NEWS. Not like every Nick Petreley article gets posted or whatever. Since Dvorak's a PC "Journalist" Dinosaur (I think Pournelle of Sci-Fi/Byte fame beats him hands down, or maybe even Bob Metcalfe ) he gets the automatic respect of the slashdot editors?
Sounds like the same old Game Play vs Bells & Whistles debate again .. and again ..
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
This is the same guy that figured Microsoft could kill Linux by merely writing "drivers" for it.
Once again, he ponders out loud as if he had some clue. But I have never seen any dire predictions he has made ever come to fruition. Can you find one (challenge!)?
What keeps the game industry going is not novelty, but keeping the current generation of gamers wowed until they get replaced by younger, newer gamers coming in. Will it change over time? Yes, almost certainly. But I don't think it will ever die.
Repeat after me, "Dvorak is stooooopid. Never listen to him."
"Dvorak is stooooopid. Never listen to him."
--dv
Insert witty saying or aphorism here.
Dance Dance Revolution. Has a built in work out program, and its addictive gameplay encourages people to wear themselves out.
face the world with eyes of fire.
Darwinia!
It's even got full Linux and MacOS X support! Seriously thought, it's a game that is addictive and original (no, simply using references to older games does not count as a ripoff). Go buy!
Who cares about first person shooters, they're probably the most uncreative genre of computer games anyway.
The gaming industry being uncreative is old news, it was already uncreative as hell when 486 hit the shelf for god's sake, and 95% of the "gamerz" populations ain't asking for creativity anyway, they care for l33t FPS, l33t v3rt3x & sh4d3rz, they don't ask for gameplay they care for graphics, they don't want scenario they want T&L. In a word, they care for useless shit.
Try giving them Colonization or the good ol' Lucas Arts age adventure games (Day of the Tentacle, Sam&Max Hit the Road) and see them shiver in pain and wither as they see screens without any vertex tesselation and 3D real time light rendering...
Have you seen which game is arguably the most popular ATM? the fucking sims for god's sake, who cares about creativeness when you can make millions out of "Reality Shows" on computers?
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
What he doesn't explore is why. A distribution channel that favors "safe bets" over radical new concepts. Kinda like the movie industry, cranking out sequel after sequel of the same cliche'd genres.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Call me crazy, but I suspect the driving force behind sustaining the gaming industry will be quality products with entertaining game play. Photorealism will be nice. So will realistic force feedback effects. Sure, we all are looking forward to the neural interfaces of the future (and we welcome our machine masters). But, without a compelling storyline and entertaining game play, all the shiny new features aren't going to mean a great deal. Which is, I believe the point of what Dvorak is saying.
whatever Dvorak says is usually 100% spot-on, so I guess we should all start playing...sports?
His kids have obviously showed him too much Halo 2, and not enough Half-Life 2.
So how is Half-Life 2 extremely different from Halo 2? They're both just FPS with good graphics. There's a guy standing, holding a weapon, geometrically everything seems like any other game and he shoot other things/people. Maybe he gets on some vehicle. That's exactly Dvorak's point. All we see each year are the same games (or same type of games) with improved graphics. In the past each game used to be wildly different from the other, were innovative and had good gameplay and not shiny graphics. Really. Super mario or even some more recent games are much better according to me. Although I'm not sure if Dvorak's right about whether this will be bad for game sellers. People (game buyers) these days are pretty stupid.
(-1 troll, here I come)
Oh sure, now that the game industry is bigger than hollywood, it's going to *implode*. Hahah.
I've been playing videogames multiple hours a day for > 24 years. If anything, games are bigger than ever now.
Who would invest so heavily in a market that's about to implode? Microsoft maybe? Do you really think Microsoft would be making the xbox if the market was going to implode? I guess Microsoft is a bunch of idiots too.
I trust Netcraft more for the matter like this.
I have but one word for you....p0rn.
New forms of p0rn.
New forms of photrealistic realtime streaming MMO p0rn. Hmm, of course we'll have to redefine the MMO acronym!
Ph34r teh l33t h3nt4i pr0n!
Well, yeah they are, but that doesn't really have anything to do with the topic.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Sounds like novels and movies to me. There's what, adventures, documentary, sci-fi, romance, a few others. Books haven't had any real new ideas except a tacked on story line to keep the reader from being bored stiff.
I hate to break it to Dvorak, but gaming isn't always about something new and creative. In fact, new and creative can be very hard to enjoy for a gamer who's used to certain types of games (go read all the "why isn't it more like
A good story will get me through a really stupid game any day of the week, like a page turner with a great plot and terrible spelling because the writer didn't get a good editor.
I actually am one of those people who quite enjoyed Doom 3, not for the incredible graphics or sound effects, but because it had an intriguing plot line. I'm not saying it was as well fleshed-out as it could have been. I'm not going to refer anyone to the hundreds of people who didn't bother watching any of the video discs in the game or reading the E-mails, they're easy to find too.
There are many types of gamer -- some like newspapers, some like comic books, some like 2000 page novels, some like to reread their favorite magazine fifteen times. The gaming industry isn't dying.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
"Computer gaming has always been sustained by never-ending improvements in resolution and realism. But once we get to photorealism, what is going to sustain growth?"
We have a working counter-argument: Hollywood. Once we get CG that looks real, we won't be able to many movies anymore.
People who buy games just for the cool graphics are like the people who only watch movies for the SFX. Yes, they exist, but that's not what drives the industry. We've all seen moves and games with killer graphics, but didn't sell because it stunk.
-MrLogic
Excellent ideas, torpor.
... maybe each time you press the button, move the joystick, the energy you put into the game is recycled? Or maybe a keyboard that recycles energy used to press keys?
I would love to see a console designed for this purpose. Imagine running a kind of SETI@HOME that searched in quadrants using random algorhythms generated by your button combinations!
Or
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
But honest, anyone heard of a productive video game concept?
America's Army is a recruitment tool for the United States Army.
"The business is going to attempt to sustain growth and creativity by making game players buy newer and newer machines. Computer gaming has always been sustained by never-ending improvements in resolution and realism. But once we get to photorealism, what is going to sustain growth?"
Uh...the same way that all other areas of of media - music, books, literature in general and movies sustain.... by focusing on even little creativeness/inovations within the bounds of the medium and focusing on quality elements that make up the medium?
Every game presents a new world to explore and to learn and to challenge. Yes, the basic motifs may be the same -- puzzles, mazes, monsters, and weapons -- but the combinations are always unique and that provides the challenge.
A "new" game provides a "new" challenge even if it uses the same building blocks as the old game.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I have received a instant message about the topic.
GAMES ARE NOT DEAD. repeat. GAMES ARE NOT DEAD.
Here the proff:
http://www.darwinia.co.uk/
-Woof woof woof!
and why should i care what he says ? or is he just another American wannabe "expert" saying the usual annoying crap like
"you dont wanner do it like this , this is what you wanner do..you wanner do it like this, thats what you wanner do..."
I always thought that the porn industry lead technological innovation. From Internet security and encryption, to finding vulnerabilities in Windows. Porn is always at the forefront. Gaming doesn't push technology, getting closer to those pixellated hoo hahs does.
Scuzzlebut: Ha ha ha!
n00b: stop camping you a$$hole
SCUZZLEBUT IS UNSTOPPABLE
HEADSHOT
SCUZZLEBOT PUTS AN EXPLODING BULLET IN Dvorakian's head
Scuzzlebot: Ha ha ha!
Scuzzlebot: You like that?
n00b: Loser!
With that said, the cut-scene engine is excellent, the production is good, there's a semi-coherent plot and the gravity gun is a lot of fun. It's certainly a hell of a lot better than the invisible rail shitfest that is Doom 3, that's for sure.
He's wrong more often than the weatherman.
"Am I the only one who expects a collapse of the gaming business soon?"
Yeah, John, I think you are.
"There are four or five simple game categories and nothing really new or different."
And there are only a handful of movie and musical genres so I guess they're doomed too? (or is it doomed 4? hah!)
When fully immersed virtual reality gaming becomes old hat, I'll start to worry.
Games for the past years have, for the most part, *not* been about furthering the art of computer/video games.
They have been about furthering hardware, platforms, 3D chips, etc.
The frequent question the console companies is not, is this an innovative game, but more, does it push enough pixels to 'show off the hardware'
Maybe when we reach a point where the 'eye candy' just looks like plain old reality, we can get back to thinking about and creating all of the possibilies of what a game can really be.
Until then, I'll be shooting shiny monsters, driving shiny cars, playing with shiny football players - all never really changing, but getting shinier and shinier every year...
I really get tired of people like Dvorak who make statements equating "no new ideas" with "soon to pass". All of the cars that we drive are based on a single design that was made over 100 years ago, yet all of the cars on the road are still different from each other. They're all cars, but they all have a different feel and different enjoyment factor to different people.
Look at series like the "Splinter Cell" and "Thief". They're all variations on the same theme - first person stealth - but they all have a different feel with different challenges. So, they're all the same kind of game, but I've purchased every one of them because they're still different enough that they don't feel like I'm playing the same game.
Just look at how many games are STILL being played frequently because of fan mods! A lot of games have GIGS of mods available for them to keep the experience fresh. As long as the core engine and functionality are enjoyable, all that gamers need is something to break the repetition of "the same old levels". The success of so many game series that are just mild improvements over prequels or competitors (like the "Thief", "Rainbow Six"/"Ghost Recon", and "Splinter Cell" series) should be proof of that.
Just my two one-hundreths of an American dollar. Convert to your currency as necessary.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Video games, total waste of time, you say.
But of course, the time you took to post this slashdot comment was entirely productive? Saving the world, are we, one comment at a time? Fixing the Energy Crisis (TM) by whining and trolling?
Move along, please, nothing to see here.
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
new games will sustain the gaming industry
I don't see a lot of difference between various games as of late. While there have been good attempts at creating unique concepts, where has the innovation gone?
All it is in the game industry now is:
1. Hire dev team
2. Come up with rehash of existing game concept
3. Push them to release some buggy piece of s**t which will require 2 patches to fix after release
4. ???
5. Profit!
Sad thing is the above is actually true.
Dave C. Didiot recently posted a junkie.com rant trashing the recreational drugs industry, predicting a complete market-meltdown in the near future. Titled 'Herbal Viagra: End of Drugs?', he claims that 'recreational drugs have hardly changed since I smoked my first spliff in the 60s.' From the article: "The business is going to attempt to sustain growth and creativity by making junkies buy hard and harder hits. Junkies have always been sustained by never-ending reductions in sensory perceptaion and increase highs. But once we get totally out of our minds, what is going to sustain growth?"
"But once we get to photorealism, what is going to sustain growth?"
Porn
Showing him Half-Life 2 wouldn't help. Dvorak's problem is that he openly admits he does NOT game. Thus he's like the old guy who thinks all rock and roll sounds the same. Or the young guy who thinks all jazz sounds the same.
It's hard to understand the nuisances of a subculture unless you particulate in it yourself.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
I don't think the industry will die, but I think it's about to run into the wall PC's have run into which is diminishing annual sales of hardware. The new video cards haven't sold anywhere near as well as ATI and nVidia would like, nor have the PC's themselves. Somewhere along the line, the machines became powerful enough to do what people want without taxing the hardware. The new upcoming consoles, despite the hype, will be an incremental increase over the last consoles despite the hype. Hardware sales used to be driven by the software, but consumer software (games or apps) is so far behind the power curve that it's going to take some time to catch up. It's different on the professional end, but the numbers don't compare to the consumer end.
The companies have got used to people buying their systems without question, but I think that is going to change. After the initial rush of early adopters, I suspect sales will slip downwards. Are the games the same to a large extent? Sure they are. They say there are only about five or six stories told by people, and it's just the details and presentation that make people want to hear them. The same is true for games. We'll buy then for the same reason people watch banal TV over and over. You gotta have a hobby. We will rave over few though and we won't be buying hardware as often.
Call it the maturation and saturation of an industry.
Whose to blame for a lack of new ideas? And isn't the market providing consumers with what they want? While I won't go so far as to say that there aren't very many "completely new untouched ideas that people will love" out there to be tapped, I will admit that perhaps some new/better stories need to be written and gameplay can always be improved. And frankly, the whole dog you can talk to and pet thing sounds like the typical Japanese popcorn game that will sell really well there, but not here. Just give me a game with a decent story and lots of challenge and I will buy it.
He obviously doesn't understand the nuances of the FPS, and I doubt very much that he plays online. The rise of the team-based FPS has added a COMPLETELY new dimension to the FPS genre that I think has yet to be fully explored. Enemy Territory took the team-based FPS a level farther by creating specific objectives that have to be accomplished in a certain order as a team. This is, to my knowledge, the only game with this type of setup. Yes, Couter Strike is somewhat similar, but it's not nearly as involved in terms of the types of objectives you have to accomplish. The addition of classes of people is also pretty new and adds a completely new dimension to the game.
,etc) add a level of improvement in skills and strategy for individual players, but it's the team tactics which make it really interesting.
Playing online really is the future. If people are playing single player games and expecting something new, then obviously they're going to be disappointed. I really don't buy FPSes for the single player anymore, although the gravity gun in Half Life is pretty damn fun. Playing online means that every single game is different every single time. Sports like basketball or baseball have been around forever, why have they not died out? The reason is that they are played by different teams and combinations of skill sets which make for a different game every single time. This is true with online FPSes as well. Each team has a different dynamic and way of getting things done. The team based aspect adds a HUGE amount of strategy to what is a relatively simple formula. Things like "bugs" in the engines (circle jumping, strafe jumping, bunny hopping
What this means is that there will always be a market for FPSes. People love them...this has been proven. If the improvements to the games are incremental, people will still play them just as they continue to play basketball or baseball. Just because the parameters of the game don't change much doesn't mean that people are going to stop playing.
I wish someone would work out how to make a slashdot post actually productive.
I mean, yeah, its entertainment. But its also a total and utter waste of time.
There's an Energy Crisis going on, kiddies. All those torpor (458) posts are comin' from someones homeland, costing someones blood. Wouldn't it be great if actually there were some result from all these torpor (458) posts, that actually fed someone?
Okay, I'm cynical. But honest, anyone heard of a productive torpor (458) post? This is new territory. Please explore.
Gaming will always be popular because it is a means of escape for people, just as books, movies, and T.V. is.
World events and changes in technology will always provide ideas and fuel the imaginations of developers for new and interesting games.
Hell, I know I'll never be a super duper secret spy, but I can play one in a game and get my kicks!
Half-Life 2 doesn't suck. Ziiiiiing!
Yeah, games for many years have only really been there to sell hardware.
Maybe when the 'eye candy' get to the point where it is just 'plain old reality' will then game creators be allowed to start figuring out all the possibilities of what a game could be.
But until then, it is all about 'showing off the hardware' as far as innovations.
So I will remain shooting shiny monster, driving shiny cars and playing with shiny football players - all getting shinier and shinier with each passing years - happy, but looking forward to something different.
The movie industry has been releasing lemons again and again and is still going strong. Besides, story never really was the selling point of a shooter, right? Here, I totally agree with John Carmack, who once said "Story in a game is like story in a porn movie; it's expected to be there, but it's not that important."
On the other hand, I agree that Dvorak does have a point. Someday the incentive to buy newer machines will have to be fuelled by different needs, and that few developers will be left at that time. Making game has become majorly expensive, which is why you see companies like EA buying everything that moves while the small ones go under. So no, the gaming industry is not going to die because of lack of imagination, it's just going to consolidate, and the quality of games will get even lower, if such a thing is still possible.
how can you say the industry is dying, final fantasy 67 was brilliant and Mario 124 was genius !!!
iam looking forward to Doom 34 and GTA7
The only I do not agree with in your post is the shameless plug for autumnrangers, that does seem to be the only reason for you post, are you developing it or publishing it?
Let's see. He slams Linux. He slams Open Source. Now he slams the modern gaming industry. He is the Paris Hilton of IT. Even crappy publicity is still publicity. Now we just have to wait for the sex tape to leak out and he'll have gone full-circle.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
Everyone here seems to be anti-Dvorak. But I bet most of you would agree with his comments about Bill Gates's immigration comments. For Dvorak's blog:
I seriously do not understand what they are thinking at Microsoft to make these sorts of public comments. Ballmer said something like this some months back and I emailed him about it and he was baffled by my email. They apparently do not see any of this as a "hot potato" issue that can have negative implications on sales. This is total isolation from reality. In this case Gates has physically gone to Washington to go door-to-door on this issue.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
But once we get to photorealism, what is going to sustain growth?
The content! the story! how has hollywood sustained after achiving photorealistic CGI? Using it in interesting ways! Creating stories that people love.
Photorealism will just be polishing a tool. It will be up to creative people to sustain the growth of the games industry. Games are now a (highly technical) art form. Did people stop doing interesting things with painting after the Mona Lisa? No. This is just the begining of the game industry, not the end.
The problem, has the "burn the house" schandal spred its that concept, genre. A sucesfull game become a genre. What its RTS? RTS its dune2. The Game. I have played that game for years and years with slighty different names for the spice. Often as tiberium, metal, mana, wood or gold, but the same mechanic.
Its the concept of RTS that stop people.
Anyway I see a solution: Indy guys. You can make AAA titles with a few guys on a creative idea. A simple one. If you can achive a wonderfull world, you can beat the big fat guys.
-Woof woof woof!
Half of the games out there intentionally avoid realistic graphics. Instead, they have cartoony, silly graphics. They make graphics that actually work for the game. And, guess what, they're quite successful.
But once we get to photorealism,
Without ray-tracing hardware I find it very unlikely that games will have photorealism any time soon (next 5 years at least). Movies can't even do photorealistic rendering perfectly and they use ray-tracing.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
How about better game-physics, for one thing?
Yeah, and look at how no-one EVER plays chess any more. Its so old, no inovation, no new peices or moves.
Yet somehow, people still buy chess-sets. And packs of cards. And footballs.
OK, there are some genres (or combination of) that you can crowbar just about any idea into. The massively popular The Sims is just a person simulator, and we've had simulators for years. I mea, its merely a progression from Sim City. Where's the innovation in that? Combat Flight Sim iss just a flight sim with guns. Nothing to see here. Civilisation? Ah, that looks like Strategy. Move Along. Sid Meirs' Pirates? Sim. No, adventure. No, strategy. DanceDanceRevolution, we can put that in Sport. Or Sim. If you're going to pre-define your Labels, we can crowbar any new idea into them.
Point: There are some popular genres. And it takes more than a glance over the Top Ten Sellers to find Real Innovation. But it is still there. Come back to me in 10 years and see if we lok back on the 200x's as "The Decade That Computer Games Died". £10 says we'll still be playing. And probably playing a lot of FPS, RTS, sim and sports games. and also some new stuff.
b3 4phr41d 0f my 4bov3-4v3r4g3 c0mpu73r kn0wI3dg3!
MadDwarf
If the gaming industry does implode in the near future, at least they'll have a built-in excuse:
"P2P file sharing drained our sales and killed profits for the programmers and developers! Now, those poor level designers are practically starving in the streets because viscious P2P networks pulled food right off their table!"
Sound familiar?
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
This guy obviously hasn't heard of Will Wright's new game, Spore.
In fact, they don't need graphics at all!
Here I talk about 1st-person "story-oriented" games, not 3rd-person strategy games. How about games taking on more interesting stories? How about NPCs that can actually learn from one-another and generate some semblance of human language on the fly, characters who are not just dumb entities that you click on so they tell you everything they know as some predetermined monologue in some predetermined tone, despite your shooting your gun 5 feet from them. How about games which can generate their own subplots, so the game designers themselves can play their games?
Most games have certainly been quite bland in these arenas, and I don't think it will improve until the games industry starts hiring NLP (and other) specialists to design moderately intelligent systems which allow for more interesting character interaction. Right now the assumption is that putting games online makes them more "interactable," but that mostly makes games open to excessive PKing, cheating, and a distinct lack of role-playing. I'm sure there are some arenas where this isn't so true (personally I've played some on great NWN servers, where the story/role-playing take precedence over the obnoxious "I wanna level every night so I can show my friends I'm better" mentality of so many online gamers.
Anyhoo, perhaps one day NPC character interaction will improve and NPCs will rise up from their servitude and take over! And then we'll be sorry we mercilessly slaughtered them for their key to the crypts (when their relatives come and hunt us down).
Consequences for character actions which the game designers themselves do not even know -- that's a fascinating game feature.
----
What's going on here? Everytime Dvorak opens his yap it's getting attention on slashdot.
This is hard to understand seeings as where about 80% of all comments about Dorkvorak on slashdot are "This guys an idiot".
DOWN WITH DVORAK!
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
why does a game have to be original to be good? can't it just excel at whatever it does? remember, video games are just copycats of playing outside. so if we're itching for the original thing, grab a chaingun and meet me out back.
1. It's now a big business, which means that PHB's are in charge. They tend to want something 'safe', not something radical.
2. Electronic Arts. If you look at the scores of uncreative games out there, the vast majority of the really bad ones will have an EA label.
3. Game programmers and designers are older. That makes them less likely to take risks and expand their horizons. The people who design FPSs and RPGs today are experts at designing FPSs or RPGs, not experts at designing games.
Also note that it's not completely stagnated market. Every once in a while, you'll get a really new concept, or a really interesting revision of an older concept. But I agree it is something that only happens every few years.
Dance Dance Revolution started the video game workout concept, but http://www.yourselffitness.com/default.aspx
really steps it up.
I would count military flight simulators and ground combat simulators to be pretty productive video games.
these are destructive video games, not productive. know the difference?
why you gotta always be about war, huh? think thats the only way to live your life?
I guess I could have modded you Flamebait or Troll but you're just too fucking stupid to be worth it.
people like you make the war machine go 'round. you make killing worth it, yo!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Judging by Dvorak's track record, this essentially guarantees years of more innovation in the game industry.
"This is not exactly news. (Cf. Kurt Vonnegut's description of the basic story, which he calls ``Man in a Hole'': ``Somebody gets into trouble and gets out of it. People never get tired of this.'')"
K. Vonnegut's "Man in Hole" quasi ideogram well describes storylines as we like them. The idea is older than Aristotle, whose definition of catharsis has propelled everything Hollywood has done and probably all of pulp fiction. Dvorak is just showing his dismal lack of even a basic knowledge of The Western Canon and showing his age.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
OBEY OBEY OBEY
...he'll just go away.
Seriously. Can anyone here think of anything even the slightest bit controversial that Dvorak has said in the past ten years that has made any sense?
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Dvorak is an idiot. Really, all he does now is speculate about the doom of something. Linux, games, his marriage, etc. How can a guy like that sleep at night without the fear of being killed by a mob of Elvis impersonators in his sleep?
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
With the possible exception of Battlefield 1942, I haven't seen a FPS game since that has held my attention for more than 2 weeks (and I tend to spend upwards of 100$ a month on video games). Everything has been a disappointment to me, and most other people I've spoken to, lately.
There's going to come a point where photorealism is going to be common place, and eventually easy to develop. After that, the developers will be able to get back to the old Arcade style roots - good, solid games with good, solid ideas. They'll worry about story, look and feel, and some new, compelling quirks that grab the players attention. The video game industry isn't going to die. It isn't going to be crippled. Once photorealism is common place, the developers will come back from the jackass side of the game development force and focus on gameplay. Then everyone will be happy, and I'll stop feeling bad about shelling out mass quantities of money for new games.
Having been a long time member of the gaming media, I can honestly say he is right. The industry is set to implode. It is big business and lots of money to be made right now, and that will continue on a bit longer I'm afraid but in the near future this is going to see a sharp drop off. Once it does gaming will fall back to a smaller market, and rely more on the substance over flash. You can see it already with the surge of "Retro" games, retro gaming has always been around but is in greater demand now than ever because people naturally are returning to where the fun is.
I do disagree with the photorealistic part of his argument though, photorealism will never sell as a game. A game is a form of role-play and suspension of reality, game characters that are non-descript and not based on real life counterparts do better because the player can project themselves into the role easier. No one wants photorealistic games, they may think they do now, but it will not last. Myst is probably the closest to a successful photorealistic game ever and it was the deviance from real-life and total freedom that made it work. Think of a great FMV game you've played... oh, yeah, there aren't any. They do not pull you in. People keep claiming their system will bring us into photorealistic games, I just keep waiting for it to come to fruition so it can fail, companies can go under, and true innovators will re-emerge.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
From the Need-to-make-headlines-and-haphazard-predictions Dept, in sponsorship with the Tiger-Sues-Apple Dept.
I have copied and pasted the article here, don't bring the ad revenue...
"Am I the only one who expects a collapse of the Apple business soon? Does anyone else think that it is overdue? It has happened before, and I can't see how people will keep shelling out $2500 or so for a Mac when the macs have hardly changed since the invention of the Ford Model T.
I complain to my kids about this, and they insist that things have changed markedly. They show me examples, and all I see are tweaks and weirder, mostly stupid designs.
I'm not the only one who thinks there's a problem. When Microsoft president Steve Ballmer spoke at this year's WinHEC Conference in Seattle, he discussed the lack of new keyboard ideas. He saw the same things that I see: There are four or five simple keyboard categories and nothing really new or different.
The categories are natural, natural multimedia, unnatural glow-in-the-dark, optical, and utopian http://store1.yimg.com/I/lovemacs_1841_247848. That's it. Most of today's hottest keyboards are combinations of two or three of these categories, with a logo added to keep the users from being bored stiff. When my kids show me a keyboard, I usually say that it's nothing but the same old clickety-click-click with a new background. They leave in a huff."
Interesting
Please say more.
Wow. You are very insightful. I never thought of it that way before.
Firstly, games are entertainment, and entertainment (music, books, movies, TV) has rarely, if ever, been productive.
:P
If anything games, like TV, probably reduce the number of children produced in this world. So I guess you can say they keep the population down.
East Coast Brewers
But of course, the time you took to post this slashdot comment was entirely productive?
we shall see. i find your act of pre-judice disturbing.
Move along, please, nothing to see here.
famous last words of yet another police-state puppet^H^H^H^H^H^Hvictim.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Interactive robots on mars being controled by the high school AI club. They will compete with the surrounding schools, and it will all be on a television show called, "American Recital". Eventually, children will be able to take over third-world countries with these robots.
We all dance, we all sing.
-The Streets
Lets see, almost all movie/book themes fall into a few dozen styles. How many have you seen that are rehashes or twists to a Romeo/Juliet plot?
I guess following his advice, and we have to remember his proven track record, the whole media industry should just stop. I mean, why make new movies? They'll just be like last decade's, but with different people, better CGI, and fitting the current culture. I guess we were all fooling ourselves, thinking that anything new may still be enjoyable if it builds on old themes. Surprised the movie industry didn't crash years ago, or maybe people weren't smart enough to realize what this genious noticed.
Heck, on his logic we should go back to writing on stone tablets. I mean, paper and word processors are the same idea, just nicer. To think any of us actually enjoy using pen and paper to write in 5 minutes what would take 5 hours. We must all be wrong, Dvorak is just *so* much smarter than we are.
God, why am I sitting in a nice, warm house? I should be in a cave. I mean a *house*! Come on, what idiot thought of those. Its just a fancy cave, what moron ever thought people would want to live in one. Man, what a fool I was. If only I was as smart as Dvorak, god of a man realizes that new products are remarkably similar to old ones, just slightly better. Who'd have thought???
The gaming industry is getting stale. The FPS was a revolution in gaming with the original Wolfenstein, but even that was only an offshoot of the Contra/Commander Keen style side scrolling shooter. It only changed the perspective and gave the gameplay some added depth, but thats it. OpenGL was another technology that revolutionized games, but it only made them look better and allowed for added depth and realism. The type of profound advancements that we've seen in gaming since Pong are going to become less and less. There really aren't any more distinct categories/genres of games that can be created. What we'll see is that advances in technology allow the games to look more realistic, the AI will continue to improve, and new features will be added that make things interesting. And let's not forget that ultimately, there are some games out there with really great stories! Half-Life changed the way people look at FPS games because it had an interesting story. It wasn't just run and gun. But, the industry is still being driven by how realistic the scenery and the killing is in the game. I doubt we'll have true photorealism any time soon, so that's enough to sustain the industry for a while. Hell, someone needs to get Dvorak a copy of Final Fantasy X. Say what you want about consoles and games being dead, but that RPG had one of the best stories of any game I've ever seen. My wife and kids actually enjoyed watching me play it. It's going to be games like that, where we see sort of a merge of gameplay and movie/story like entertainment that will continue to succeed.
Remember the Alamo, and God Bless Texas...
You mean you want a "Last Starfighter" game so you can hone your skills and then when you beat the game , get recruited to join the Galactic Starfighters?
Great Idea,
(It was the movie "The Last Starfighter" already)
I agree with John. Gaming HAS NOT EVOLVED much beyond extending the eye candy and the various platform francise reruns of the same basic gaming genre id made famous. Oh yeah man what about online gaming and XBox Live... plsssst! It was better without the consoles. Much better.
Now, I started playing Pychonauts last night and this is one game that definitely breaks the mold of convention. Yes its a platformer and yes its a collect'm sorta puzzler but IT'S DIFFERENT. Maybe TOO different for the numbed masses but at least its original for god's sake!
And that IS the point of John's article. Without some seriously original and creative games the next-gen consoles will NOT enjoy the massive growth of the predecessors. Better eye candy will NOT sell more consoles. SEGA proved that with the Dreamcast.
At least Nintendo is trying to innovate... TRYING NEW IDEAS... you know... innovating like MS and others have been claiming they've been doing since the very first PC/game console was born...again Plsssst!
Now release the fanboys... I'm outa here!
The one thing that blows virtual reality completely away!
ACTUAL REALITY.
Course, I'm not sure how much space there is in that particular realm for running around and shooting zombies. Perhaps one should stick with stealing cars, and slapping hos.
Informatus Technologicus
One day in the not-too-distant future, all games that can be invented, will have been invented, and all the gaming addicts (like myself) will turn off their computers to get a life. Right. I agree that someday photorealism will be achieved. If, or rather when that starts losing its appeal, game designers will (have to) remember what gaming is about: sound game mechanics, balancing and modability. Look no further than Starcraft, Q3 and Half-Life 1 to recognize that a *good* game, one thats worth playing for a long time, is not about graphics.
Also keep in mind that hardware technology will move on as well. One far-off example is the holodeck, but it doesn't have to be that complex. Direct nerve stimulation offers - beyond the usual sight and sound - force feedback and virtual reality like no current technology could.
Additionally, gaming concepts that today only attract few people (say, traditional point&click adventures or side-scrolling shooters) may be out of date today, but what about the future? The computer is a very good gaming machine, and it will always be. And as long as the principles of supply and demand apply, there will be a gaming industry.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
Dvorak is such a hoser!
When games achieve photorealism there are other areas to improve them. Like artificial intelligence, plot twists, more interactive scenery.
This supposed "plateau" is a long way off, and so is Dvorak (as usual)
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
A Bolshevik was talking to a Priest. "Your religion is dying. Marxism is the way of the future. Look at your churches! They are full of old ladies. What are you going to do when they all die?"
Priest: "There will always be more old ladies"
Dvorak is an ass. There will always be more kids who want to play shoot 'em ups.
It's like complaining that the movies are going to die because there are only six genres: horror, comedy, family, action, thriller and drama.
He's such an ass.
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
I think I have mixed views on it because I'm not a gamer. Personally, I like games because of the gameplay. I still enjoy 2D "platform" games like Leander just as much as I enjoy the original Doom, Doom2, Doom3, Quake, and Quake 3 (didn't like Quake 2 for some reason). I also loved Myst and Riven. If I had a choice, I'd go for games more like Myst and Riven because there is more to do than just blow stuff up. I especially like the puzzles that you need to solve in order to progress.
i ster
But, he's right. New graphics != new gameplay. New weapons != new gameplay. And if you add photorealism, it still doesn't equal new game play. Part of the limitations come from the technology itself. It requires you to be sitting in one place rather than actually physically doing something. There are plenty of non-computer games that are like this as well, but there are many different formats: card games, board games, RPGs, etc... But what about hybrids? Once wearables are commonplace, why couldn't we superimpose the virtual environments over real ones and make the player get up out of their chairs? Imagine a wearable gaming system that scans your entire house and then automatically builds a map based on it to superimpose baddies everywhere. You and your friends then run around the house and break the china, destroy the windows and kick over the potted plants. Lots more fun than sitting at a boring old 3D computer terminal... It could also be used as a way to force lazy (not all gamers are lazy) gamers into getting more physically fit. If they want to play the latest game, they have to get off their asses.
But the fundamental problem is one of creativity. The people designing games today are still, at the core, programmers. They are not people who spent their time trying to find ways to entertain people with actual games. That's OK for the most part because most gamers have a similar mindset. But think of the games that are not computer based that provide hours of fun for kids:
-Hide and Seek (still a favorite of mine)
-Leap frog
-Hangman
-Baseball
-Soccer
-Bowling
-Tw
-Chess
-Tic-tac-toe
The list goes on. The main thing, when it comes to games is good gameplay and computers can only go so far in their present form. Expect to see a lot of changes when they go wearable.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
"liberal" (why, thank you very much for drawing lines in the sand)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Although Dvorak is wrong about a "collapse" of the gaming industry, he is right that there is a fundamental change brewing. What he doesn't get is that this change is not just taking place in the gaming industry, but in the movie industry. Technology has reached a point where we can tell any story we want, in any way we want, effortlessly. There is no visual experience we cannot simulate cinematically (did I just make up a word?)
As the realtime visualization of a video game catches up with the pre-rendered illusion of film, the video game industry will end up having to solve some of the same problems that the movie industry is now starting to face: special effects are no longer enough. We take them for granted. Film-makers are now trying to catch our attention in other ways - mostly by remaking old stories or producing sequels. That will get old soon, and when it does there will be a new breed of films that reach people more deeply, challenge their emotions and intellect. We are seeing a smattering of this now, but not in force.
For game-makers, the challenge will be to use their newly available photo-realistic engines ot produce a challenging game. Currently, game companies are development shops - but soon the development will be complete and the art will take over.
I am looking forward to this - maybe I will start to play games again. But currently I am like Dvorak - I have seen too many versions of Quake, and I am not interested in memorizing the correct sequence of keypresses to fire the Super-Duper-Cannon in order to beat the boss on level 17. Great games have a low barrier of entry and are immersive. Think Tetris, and Bejewelled, but also think Doom or Half-Life.
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
OK, so who at /. is getting kickbacks from Dvorak? :)
Firstly, games are entertainment, and entertainment (music, books, movies, TV) has rarely, if ever, been productive.
sounds like a market opportunity to me!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Movies have been photorealistic for decades but people keep paying to see those.
In the comments of the last Dvorak article on Slashdot, it was pointed out that usually when Dvorak praises something it fails soon after. So if he trashes something then that is actually an indicator of a bright future for it.
All Dvorak did was make a frekin keyboard... Now everyone thinks he's some all-encompassing technology guru?
I'm sick of hearing stories on his "opinions"... maybe he should stop bitching and do something else for the computer industry.
His main idea seems to hinge on the fact that all first person shooters are the same. I would argue that is almost like saying all movies are the same because they are presented in 2D for about 90 minutes.
Yes the format is the same, but sometimes the story counts a bit. Yes, I liked the upgrades to the game engine in Halo 2 (and quick ass online play is never a bad thing), but at some level, I also wanted to see what would happen to Master Chief next. It's also why so many people where pissed off about the ending.
If they made Halo 3 with the exact same engine, but a new story line (and new levels...) I would probably go get it.
... he needs some other beloved business to trash.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Television now has Digital High Definition and TV still is growing.
It's called entertainment. There doesn't need to be endless advances for people to want to escape from their reality for a short bit here and there. The only thing that needs to exist is the entertainment itself.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
that there has been alot of good innovation in the gaming industry. he's not the best at predicting trends or playing the part of a doomsayer, but some of what he says does have a grain of truth. many of the games introduced are riding the coattails of their progenitors, sequels based on sequels and mods.
if you were going to take a very socratic view on the gaming industry, then you might say there hasn't been real innovation since chess and the playing cards. socrates might consider the FPS as nothing more than a derivation-of-a-derivation of chess.
i think a category dvorak missed is the resource management games. and pray tell what exactly is wrong with rehashing an old idea? gaming industry doomed? no, but it prolly will have a slight slump, smaller shops will get gobbled by the bigger ones, repeating the same cycle of growth and reduction that we seen in the last 25+ years...
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
Photorealism is for people who can't see the danger in .....D........@........
Well, to sustain growth you have to introduce the morphine injector so that when you win a level you get a little bit more drip . . .
But seriously, hasn't gaming become an addiction that ranks up there with meth use?
I have heard some scarey stories about people who no longer leave their rooms and just live in their virtual world.
It seems to me that games haven't progressed at all since the Playstation first came out. It is all point and kill. Pretty damn boring if you ask me. I would rather play Load-runner on my old Tandy 1000. It made a really cool sound when the level loaded as the 5.25" floppy was accessed for the next level.
Odd you know there are other gernes of gaming that don't even invold the ablity to shot or hide around the coroner....If you think gaming is dying due to first person shooters try RGPing. It's very creative and addtive too. Plus you and your friends can play on a team if you can unplug your self from the console. ;) Sure alot of them charge month fees but not much more then your xBox live!....Clearing someone needs to play a new type of game. :)
Life is like untied shoe laces; it always tripping you up and getting in your way.
The market for real life is coming to an end! Your life is just a variation on my life! Why would anyone want to go through that? Sure, it's photorealistic, but *where's the originality?*
My other processor is big-endian.
Nudity. Nudity and sex. (Our two chief weapons...) Nudity and sex and development kits that make it easy for any small shop to put their game out there. After the blockbuster, the next phase is ubiquity, where anyone with the right hardware and a dream can come up with the next big thing.
In film, you get a lot of crappy art-house flicks because of that, and a whole lot of cheap, derivative porn, but you also get some good movies. Same thing will happen with video games, it just won't take as long as it did with movies.
Information wants to be $1.98/lb.
This has been a long winded argument and rears its head every now and again. Being a gamer since the age of 10 and I am now 34 I have to add my 2 cents. I DO NOT and I repeat DO NOT play games simply because they are visually are stunning. I can download the latest version of 3d mark for that. Look at the game of chess, for example, nothing has been done to improve it other than changing the pawns to pretty civil war figurines for a mere 4 easy payments of $19.95. Yet the game continues to be fun. Genres will not go away. You will always have killer FPS or killer RPG games, killer tactical games like civilization etc.., The characters may change and get prettier over time but the general concept is there. Maybe what he means is that there is a lack of new 'genres' But MMORPG's are fairly new for that matter. By they way, I cannot get enough WoW and it runs fine on my laptop and the graphics are not 'stellar' by any means. The game is just simply FUN. And that my friends is what I will spend my hard-earned cash on! :)
Just because the messenger is suspect doesn't meant that the message isn't true.
In this case the raw facts are pretty accurate, despite the message being sensationalized unnecessarily. Once photorealism and realistic movement are achieved, what then? The current driving forces for new purchases will then disappear, so ability to innovate not technically but in game themes and in storytelling and in player interation will become the new frontier.
Yet, there is no sign that the current game blockbuster industry has the necessary creativity in those areas at all --- the change and progress in those elements of gaming has been very minimal indeed, with only a few exceptions.
What he says is valid. I'm currently on the existing games treadmill and I love it a lot, yet I do see his point perfectly.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
When I played Doom 3 I was blown away by the first level. It was the most immersive experience I had ever had in gaming. The sounds were scary, and the atmosphere was compelling.
Its like they stopped trying after level 1. Note to game devs. Finish the game with the same amount of detail you put into the 'hook-em' level 1.
Scott Dvorak pronounces television a fad. He states "Once all these sitcoms run out of jokes, the bottom will fall out of the industry and we're going to be playing stick ball for entertainment again"
Why don't we give this guy his own slashdot section?
Hey, Taco, let me save you some time, here's the URL
http://dvorak.slashdot.org/
Dvorak's right that the major source of growth is getting kids to buy bigger machines, but once we reach photorealism and perfect physics, the industry will not collapse. The market will demand real innovation and the developers will have to start making actual FUN games again. The industry "as we know it" may end, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Can anyone deny that the fun level of stuff on the old Atari outshines 99% of games published today? Technology wasn't the appeal then. It was all colored blocks moving around other colored blocks. The focus was FUN. With games like HL2 where you can spend hours just shooting a tire swing or throwing soda cans, having the time of your life, there's hope for the future of fun video games.
I've been waiting for this for awhile, but I'm sure it's coming at some point. The next big thing I'm expecting is an extremely sophisticated for game engine that allows people to create complex games without spending the hundreds of man-hours doing the same stuff over and over again. Such a system, if flexible and not too locked up in the FPS or RTS mold, could revolutionize the industry by allowing single person teams to create games again. If the development costs can be brought down enough we could see people taking more risks and coming out with more unique games instead of just releasing yet more sequels to successful franchies.
I read the internet for the articles.
Of course the gaming industry sucks...it still hasn't gotten Duke Nukem Forever to gold.
I can't be the only person out there who prefers the 80's arcade games / MAME games over the state-of-the-art "go fight as realistic a war as possible" selections. Call me old-fashioned, but I view games as a DIVERSION from the stuff I see on the news. They're meant to be relaxing, or at least take one's mind into challenging directions away from stress.
Directions future games will take? Once they get the simulations to 100% realistic, they may do the "Total Recall" type of thing (probably moving into sexual areas), but those aren't really games, are they? Maybe they'll move back to what a game, for many of us, should be.
And lets not forget that 90% of innovation is crap.
Vermifax
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I saw a PS2 game that is a digital personal trainer. You can exercise with the instructor, get information on healthy eating, and follow additional health and fitness information. Plus music to exercise by...
It was the most innovative PS2 game I have seen. It is useful and not a waste your braincells FPS.
It would be cool if they came out with a whole line of 'digital personal assistants':
- a digital lawer with basic law information,
- a digital accountant that could help you do your taxes like TaxCut,
- a digital teacher to teach math and science subjects...
All this stuff is available on PCs and via books and real people, but it would still be cool to see the PS2 have more functionality than just games.
The PS2 system has
As much I dislike this Dvorak guy, and usually disregard his sensational opinions, I really think he may be on to something this time ...
Apocalypse apoc = new Apocalypse();
apoc.cue();
Now, while I doubt the industry will suddenly implode as he asserts, I do think that it'll start to slowly asphixiate over the next decade or two before totally splitting into two separate industries with totally different philosophies and forms of presentation.
It should be mentioned that already in Japan, people are becoming increasingly bored with the state of gaming as it is, and it's for this reason Nintendo is hedging all of its bets -- the entire house of Mario trading cards -- on changing the way people interact with games, instead of just improving the graphics. Granted, Japan is the nation of pinball RPGs and other weird-ass games, so maybe their opinions don't apply to the rest of the world, haha.
Nintendo has always been a Japan-centric company, but with this trend of video-game disenchantment also starting to appear in Europe, I guess they're hoping America will eventually follow suit too. This is less likely, though, given how Americans like their media to do one thing: guarantee them an evening of vegetation until work tomorrow.
But as I mentioned, I personally think the games industry will divide: one side moving back towards the classic definition of "video game" that emphasizes a more abstract form of entertainment and focuses on gameplay; the other side will move increasingly towards movies and blend with them to create a new interactive cinematic experience.
I think when it's through, movie-games will no longer be "games" anymore, though, but something new, and a separate industry for the most part from what we consider video games today. The new industry's success will be dependent on Hollywood, so until Dvorak prognosticates the movie industry's future, who can say for sure what will happen?
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
Another person who knows nothing about games predicting a meltdown of the industry. How can anyone take this guy seriously?
John correctly notes the limitations of visual whiz-bang, and properly observes the tendencies of publishers, even now, to rely on whiz-bang in lieu of game design. However forgivable this was in the days of Doom, and throughout the end of the twentieth century, where there were few idle cycles left after the whiz-bang to do anything else but count the dead, that simply is no longer so today. This criticism, however, is not new.
John makes the useful and valid observation that the problem with whiz-bang as an end is that whiz-bang does end have an end, an acme, or at the very least, a point of diminishing return. However, to say that the end of whiz-bang is the end of the craft of gaming, would be like saying that the advent of photography was the end of art.
There is where the criticism loses faith.
It really isn't the advent of near-photrealism that we are witnessing. Behind the metal, what we are seeing is the capacity to do pseudo-photorealism, sound and networking with cycles to spare -- LOTS of cycles. No more whiz-bang will matter, so then we get back to basics -- designing games with game, and using those cycles to make games whole again.
Then John will start to criticize the linearity of our games once more.
Truth to tell, I don't think game critics have been criticizing games enough. Wow, are they ever beautiful and immersive, but still, it has been years since a game caught my spirit the way they did in "the old days." On the otherhand, my preferred mode of art has always been more suggestive than representational. So, for me, the cartoon of a Super Mario 64 was always hotter and more interesting than more modern and specially graphics-hot games. For me, the depth of a solid, beautifully written text adventure or strategy game was always more compelling. I found multi-player games on PLATO more compelling than modern MMPORGs. The heat was worth looking at, but never kept me at the game. Forgive me, I'm a luddite.
Anyway, what John does not appear to recognize is that the acme of hardware assisted graphic heat does not signal the END of the game industry. Rather, it signals the BEGINNING of the next generation -- the epiphany that its time to put games back in games (something many designers knew well), but with the hardware and software capacity to be able to do it!
Most of the innovative games came at a time when computing resources were limited and game designers had to rely on their imaginations more to find a concept which was fun. Nowadays with the technological barriers down, game designers are designing the things that they wanted to all those years ago.
In a sense creativity is not enforced anymore, and players don't have to use their imagination much with the game visuals. (simlar to the differences of reading a book vs watching a movie)
I do agree that there are too many FPS these days and the concept has been done to absolute death. Buying another FPS does not excite me, and as I get older I start getting more bored with games and realizing how much time I wasted playing them.... something I never considered when I was 12 years old... and now I see why my parents were telling me to stop and go outside.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Mmm... Photorealism...
-Rich
The original Deus Ex is the best single player game ever made. Huge levels and multiple ways of solving the problems - including multiple ways into the areas. It had an interesting story and fantastic music to boot.
DX2 was ok, but sucked on level size (partially as it was targetted for the XBox as well), the way tasks were completed and the music.
Half Life 2? Yeah ok, very nice and pretty, lovely atmosphere and great sparodic music, but really there is only one way to do everything, one way through the levels. Played like MOHAA.
Doom 3? Bordem in a can. I never bothered to complete it. Very pretty, but continously stumbling into the dark to just hit another trap point and doors to open behind you... yawny yawn. This is prob what dvorak was on about.
As for multiplayer, id like to see some development of the Wolfentein Enemy Terriorty concept of collaberative approach. The great thing about Wolf ET is that there is a place for most people. if you're an old fart like me who cant keep up with the twitch reflexes of 13 year olds, pick up a sniper rifle, mortar or play support as a medic
But once we get to photorealism, what is going to sustain growth?
... the next thing
The next thing : better interactions
and after that ?
I would immediately migrate my users to Dvorak keyboards. Nice way to fix the PEBCAK errors. CTRL-K a couple of users, spike their heads outside my cube as a warning to the others. Now that's a pleasant thought for a Friday morning.
I wouldn't say I'm a bad gambler but the last time I went to Vegas I even lost a buck on the soda machine.
As most other people who replied to this post have pointed out - many of these features existed in games before Halo.
But, thats not the point - pretty much every idea/feature in any game has been implemented at some point in some other game.
Hell, even when the first "holodeck" type games come out in god knows how long from now, even those ideas that made it possible will of been used.
What Halo did though, was use those features to add depth and playability to a game, and they implemented them WELL.
Implemetning an innovative idea is one thing, implementing it WELL is another - and that is exactly what Halo has done.
I call BS on this whole article. It's exactly the kind of thing I hear (with minor variations) from anyone who's not into computer gaming, especially those too old to have started as kids.
"Am I the only one who expects a collapse of the gaming business soon? Does anyone else think that it is overdue? It has happened before,"
When, exactly? When was computer gaming ever as big as it is now, and when did it subsequently collapse? And even if it did, the fact that it's back and as big as it is now downgrades that from a "collapse" to a "temporary dip".
"and I can't see how people will keep shelling out $50 or so for a video game when the games have hardly changed since the invention of the first-person shooter."
So when did that ever matter? There are about five-ten genres of games, and there are already one or more examples which are considered pretty definitive, or were at the time (shooters = Half-Life 2, RTS = Dune/C&C/Total Annihilation, Point-and-Click Adventure = Sam&Max/Curse of Monkey Island, etc).
Having these definitive games around didn't stop people producing new (and better/more complex/more involving) ones, did it? The point is the differences between the games, not the similarities.
And ok, $50 is a lot for a game, and we'd all like it if it was cheaper. But you'll pay $15 for a DVD, and that lasts a tiny fraction of the time a good game does.
"I complain to my kids about this, and they insist that things have changed markedly. They show me examples, and all I see are tweaks and weirder, mostly stupid weapons."
Yeah. But what they're showing you is new gameplay dynamics, improved graphics, better immersion and a more engaging storyline, you inattentive and obdurate prat.
"There are four or five simple game categories and nothing really new or different."
Ignoring the conservative "genre" number... Yeah, and before Dune/C&C there would have been four game categories, until someone invented one. But you can't do that forever - at some point someone will have tried every game-style worth playing, and the only thing to do is to make them technically better, and more involving.
Let's face it - as Aristotle thought, practically every movie can be broken down into the basic "initial balance/disruption of balance/re-establishment of balance" structure. Does this mean that every movie is the same? So should the movie industry collapse? No, because what's important is not the details of how you interact with the film, but the story the film tells.
Likewise, computer gaming is moving away from frantic innovation in how you interact with the game, more towards cinematic, immersive stories. That's evolution, not death.
"When my kids show me a game, I usually say that it's nothing but the same old running-jumping-kicking-shooting with a new background."
Bingo - that's because you're old, out-of-touch and writing an article on something about which you know nothing. Show me a Bollywood movie and all I see is a lot of silly dancing-annoying music-cheesy-plot twists with new costumes, but I don't assume that the entire Bollywood movie industry is without artistic merit and destined to die on its arse. That's because I don't have my head jammed up my arse, and don't assume that "I don't understand" = "Contains no merit whatsoever".
"in almost all the big games, the so-called boss characters are all beginning to be pretty much the same: big, creepy monsters."
Apart from the ones which are big, creepy robots. Or large, tough fighters. Or large numbers of smaller weaker units working together, or...
Actually, John, they're just tougher challenges and moments of heightened tension, and it so happens that often equates to "bigger and creepier". But not always.
"If you want to see... how inane this is... rent... Starship Troopers... It's essentially a video game turned
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
"There are only 5 unique stories. Everything else is just a minor change on the same plot."
I realize I probably butchered the line, but still, the point remains.
I think the reason why everyone is fortelling the doom of the videogame industry is because they are right, mostly: There isn't the same kind of innovation that there was ten, twenty years ago. We are sort of playing the same games over and over again.
The thing that will keep the industry alive is the stories. Look at the RPG genre, for example. With the exception of anything made by Bioware, the genre's kinda been in a gameplay rut for a while now. There really hasn't been a lof of innovation there in a while.
But the RPG genre remains because its the best avenue for storytelling in the video game industry, because it gives players the most oppurtunities to mold their character in their own images, and changing the plot along the way.
Eventually that's going to spill into all of the other genres. And, in some ways, it already has.
Why do people want a Starcraft 2? or a Halo 3?
They want to finish the stories, they want to tie up the loose ends. They want to know what happens to the Master Chief and the Arbiter, or Jim Raynor, Kerrigan and Zeratul. Yes, they are excellent games in their own right, but what's made them such a legacy is the quality of the story.
Look, the only way the game industry will live is if it can evolve, to change with the times so that the thing that drives it on isn't just massive improvements to gameplay or amazingly beautiful graphics.
Cause we are running smack dab into that wall right now.
Beyond the Polygons : Because 50,000 polygo
The first person shooter has been so successful because the computer interface is really well suited for it. A couple of buttons and a mouse seems to let the user do whatever he wants. Different kinds of strategy games also tend to work well using a keyboard and mouse.
Once new interfaces (tactile, VR, neural, and anything I can't even imagine) are practical and common, we will also see new games on the shelf. Until then, what you can do with a keyboard and mouse (or joystick) defines the game scene.
People keep buying books as a form of entertainment and they have the same resolution as they did a millennium ago.
Games like Jade Empire and Knights of the Old Repbulic show that story can be an important part of the gamming experience. I list these two because I am an RPG fan. Games like Halo and Half-life have shown that FPS style games can have rewarding plots as well.
Also, I don't think people will want to play photorealistic games outside of certain genres.
Sure, single player FPS games are typically similar and repetitive, but as any knowledgeable gamer knows, the multiplayer side of the game is what drives the fanbase and community. And, threaded right into multiplayer, and almost as importantly, is the user modifications.
There may be a few lingering on here who have played Team Fortress (not TFC) for the original Quake; that single modification opened a whole new concept to FPS multiplayer gaming, and there are still many mods trying to recreate it's success nearly 8 years later.
In any event, the validity of this article only applies to the single-player FPS side of gaming; the same could not be said for multiplayer FPS gaming.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
That's why I play the Sims, for the photorealism.
Cleaning the net one sed at a time! s/sex/sermons/; s/hot/holy/; s/goats/thebible/; www.holysermonswiththebible.com
hasn't hurt the book, movie or music businesses.
Like the output of any creative endeavor, the pyramid's base of game release quality will be a mass of retreads and insipid attempts at insight. The middle of the pyramid will contain the occasional advancement on a genre and interesting insight, and the very top of the pyramid will show us the rare flash of genius.
Dvorak is, and always has been, a professional curmudgeon.
-gary
1) "It all boils down to X basic themes that never change" - well duh, boil it down that far and life really only has a single track "gameplay": be born, eat, sleep, hopefully mate, die. Frighteningly linear, that. Why does anyone bother to play?
2) To suggest that "nothing is any different" only highlights the fact that:
a) John-John's never really PLAYED video games, and confines his interaction to them with a walk past his kids playing them, and an occasionally-muttered "why don't they get outside once in a while?". Despite superficially 'similar' games, there's a world of difference between Castle Wolfenstein and HL2.
b) MMOGs, John. Ever heard of them? Kind of a big deal now, didn't really exist until what, about 2000? Bit of a step forward, gigantic shared worlds, playing against other humans?
c) John's never even HEARD of Katmari Damancy, King of Dragon Pass, or a whole HOST of games that ARE novel, unique, interesting, and fun. I think John should stop making choices about computer games based on the Wal-Mart software bin and actually look around a little. Yes, it might mean he spends 30 minutes picking out a birthday gift for John Jr. instead of 5 minutes, but hey...
I guess what I'm saying is that perhaps his views are the way they are because as far as computer gaming is concerned - he's playing 'easy mode'.
-Styopa
I am so sick and tired of the cynical crap leveled at the gaming industry so often.
The gaming industry is more innovative and exciting than it has ever been. We've got platforms out the wazoo and people making great games for all of them. Everything from computers, to consoles to hand held gaming systems to cell phones. You've got games that are consistantly ported across all platforms, you've got free games, you've got web browser games, you've free massive online games, you've got commercial massive online games. What about shareware? Still going strong.
There is a way to play games anywhere on everything, and lot of those games are damned good!
Are there bad games? Sure a ton of em! But how is that any different than any time in the past? There are tons of good new innovative games that come out as well. The good games are coming out at least as often as ever.
I'm home from work today, want to know what I'm going to do? I'm going to play Quake3 online, which at this point is so competitive it's nearly a sport, then I'll play World of Warcraft, the current cream of the crop of MMO's, I'll probably play Jade Empire the brilliant Xbox action-RPG from the always awesome Bioware, and you can bet I'll squeeze in some Nethack (the latest version is less than a year old folks).
I have been playing games since I could walk, I'm a hardcore gamer who has played an owned the majority of gaming platforms, and believe me gaming is better than it has ever been. It's a golden age people and if you ask me the only real problem gamers have these days is there isn't enough time to play everything that's worth playing.
In my opinion, if you can't find something to play these days you just aren't a gamer, you're a poser. You probably flip about $2 a year into Galaga or Pac-man now and then so you think you're qualified to comment. Well I've got news for you buddy, I flipped the scoreboard on Galaga the other day, and I'm glad it only took 1 quarter and 45 minutes because I had to get home and play Gods of War on my ps2 (that game is awesome).
This is how we do it, player.
Sigs are awesome huh?
Morgaine already said it well enough, but let me throw my own details at why it's a problem.
The thing is relying _only_ on better graphics has worked well enough to motivate people to buy this year's 10,000 polygon game for $40 instead of last year's 5,000 polygon game for $10, or the game from 2-3 years ago for $3.
The way it works is that it creates an artiffically low supply, helping keep prices up. There are only so many games available which are up to this year's standards. It helps keep a certain ratio between supply and demand.
It's not that games from 5 years ago don't exist any more, it's that most people don't even consider them an option. When recently I bought an old city-building game, everyone I told about it was like, "why the heck do you play ancient games anyway?" Or even "eew, that thing has less polygons than a cube and smaller textures than a desktop icon" when I pointed them at the screenshots.
So artifficially everyone only considers 1-2 years worth of releases in their options.
Even better for the industry, it also addresses the other side of the equation. It raises demand too: it creates an artifficial sense of needing to "upgrade" to the latest games. Even if you have a game which you're happy with, you're told that, hey, don't you want the better graphics of a new one?
E.g.: You still like Quake 2? That's sooo old hat, you should move to the more photo-realistic newer games. You still like Gran Turismo 2? Eeew... that looks sooo pixelated, you should get GT4 instead. You still like the original Unreal? Tough luck finding many low ping servers, because everyone else moved to UT2004. Etc.
So basically this push is good for the industry at the moment.
And unless they change focus from just graphics to something else, it's coming to an end. Fast.
E.g., the game "Singles" already has 30,000 polygons per character. They look great. Doubling that won't make much difference. Even going from 30,000 to 100,000 polygons won't make the same difference that going from 300 to 1000 did.
Basically the race to make it _more_ realistic comes to an end: the point where it's _already_ photo-realistic anyway.
Which also brings an end to the above described pressure on both supply and demand. Once at that point:
1. There is not much more reason to buy the latest 100,000 polygon game, instead of a two year old 30,000 polygon game. Suddenly it creates a lot more supply and a lot more competition in the market.
2. There's a lot less reason to "upgrade" to the latest and greatest game, if you already have one you like. If you're already content with, say, a 30,000 polygon/char multiplayer FPS, there is no reason to ugrade to a newer 100,000 polygon/char one. Or not for the graphics.
That's the problem. Actually reaching the realism point will change the market a lot.
Will that mean the end of gaming? Dunno, probably not. But it will certainly _need_ a very abrupt change of focus to something else than "look, we have higher res textures this time".
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Why does Dvorak toss in the totally off-topic slam at Starship Troopers? Anyone else noticed how close the portrayal of the pilots in Battlestar Galactica - indeed the whole feel of the thing - to Paul Verhoeven's movie (which was overall a fairly faithful adapatation of Heinlein's book)? So if Dvorak's right and games are in similar style to a successful current TV series, and a decently entertaining, if not overwhelmingly wonderful B movie, isn't he like someone around 1960 assuring the world that the rock and roll business would soon collapse, as kids demanded again the rich and wonderful experience of the big bands and tired of trivial and repetitive art?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Can someone predict when John Dvorak will be out of his job? Hopefully it will be before Doom 4's release.
... as long as you hand over your Bigots Of America membership card..
...
just because i 'belong' to a society doesn't mean i have to agree with its principles. i'd move to a peaceful neighborhood the moment i was sure the good ol' US of A meatheads wouldn't invade it, "just 'coz they have a right to"
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
And the biggest gap...
"Co-gaming" besides some top down revisionist versions of Gauntlet (Baldur's Gate, FF, etc.) there is very little co-play. And even less in the first person shooter mode. And even less still anything beyond 2 people.
I got board with deathmatch back in 1994. I've been wanting to see a game that allows for at least 4-players (possibly more when online) to play that requires users to play co-operatively and intelligently (not just unload a thousand rounds everywhere).
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory sounds like the right path but they only put a few side levels. Now if someone did an entire game in such fashion I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
for once he is right.
.. and its not simply an open source collobarative methodology question.
sony and the giants want to leave it to the smaller less failure resilient players innovate and therefore to take all the risks.
this will not do
whilst it can be a valid model [for maybe an engine] it doesnt scale as well for all the copyrioghted./ copylefted unqiue media such as cut scenes.
dialogue.
writing.
music
art direction
graphic design.
and so on.
the uk smal dev market for 8 biut and 16 bit ST/amiga was great
the codemasters literally were sixteen year old innovative coder deisgners in their bedorooms and so on.
it can no longer be like this mny more.
competition is too great and barrrier of entry too high#
even post open sourced tools etc.
you have valve with a counter example.
innovative distribution methods
great games and lsowly does it gameplay
amazing tech innovations
the invention of steam delivery; love it or hate it
its a cool thing that may be enable small studios to compete easily not needing a dsitributor. [for windows really as you have red carpet or some custom apt on debian]
im sorry this may sound obvious or redundant
as i stoped being gamer when the era of theif 2 and half life was over.
half life 2 and thief 3 as well as the splinter cells does make my fingers itch.
just not my heart, imagination or brain.
which is what the older games did with each iteration.
here we are not going through iterations for refinement. perhaps ion the business models - but that is all.
dvorak is SEEING how the wintel alliance did for win 3.11 --> win95 ---> millenium/XP
MS drove hardware sales and hardware drove upgrades to teh new os iof needed.
if hes wrongt; fine. if he's right i can see him not pulling it out if his ass is all.
I think the popularity of The Sims and team based shooters shows that the future is greater and greater immersion into realistic worlds, virtual worlds that are free of the risk of real worlds. Games will focus on creating realistic environments and realistic interactions with actors in the environment.
I don't know whether this is a good thing. It seems odd to create games that are less and less like games and more like the real world. Take the recent Grand Theft Auto games. Much of the enjoyment in the game is from just running around and interacting with the environment, not achieving goals.
Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful!
Here he says gaming is dead but lo and behold the gamers, his children, are full on gamers. I think this article imploded due to the fact that he stated an example of how gaming is thriving. Gamers are gaming.
But whose fault is it? Look at the top ten games at any time. [Insert sport here] 2005, car racing and shooters. It's what the market wants.
On the computer side I downloaded a few games by independnet developers. Eh... nice codework, but they were still basically rehashes.
Someone is going to have to finally develop a good VR helmet display system. I'd be interested in some sort of online VR gaming I could play at home. Not looking for magical Matrix-like inversion, but a purely visual system shouldn't be impossible.
Until the multitude of bugs in it caused it to die a horrible death, and it has never come back. I basically payed $54 USD for Steam.
Now it can't even load any levels on HL2 without some sort of errors about missing model files, memory that can't be "read" (their emphasis, not mine), and a bug where the level starts to load, but after two ticks of the progress bar it drops back to the main game menu and the only thing that can be clicked on is the exit button.
If only "common" sense was actually that common...
The first FPS was released in 1980, with Battlezone, where you drive around a tank from the first person perspective in a 3D world, and you shoot things. It used vector graphics to draw wire frame 3D objects. So I think Dvorak is wrong. Allot has changed in the gaming industry since 1980. Inexpensive gaming PCs, internet multiplayer, etc... that really added to the ability of gamers to form international communities around games. That has to be considered a big change.
But yeah, games can be very derivative, and this has not changed since 1980. Look back even then, everybody was copying eachother. There will a million and one Pacman rip-offs in the early 80s. Before 1980, there were tons of Pong rip offs.
Most kids who start playing games never played Doom before and never will, because there is Doom3 and HL2 now. Of course, the industry will colapse and kids will play Doom4 till the end of time.
Seriously, we need to stop looking at halo as a "revolution" in the FPS genre. It didn't bring anything that wasn't already there, folks.
You're near the mark...and you're correct in that we'll be dropping back in time, and the ramifications will be far reaching and nearly immediate. But think big. Books? We don't need no new-fangled technology!
In the 21st century, (shortly after we perfect time travel), the "new" media will consist of popping back in time a few million years and chucking rocks at dinosaurs to see what happens.
Who needs video games with that kind of excitement?
Has Netcraft confirmed it?
I don't think I will believe that DNF has shipped until Netcraft confirms that too!
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
This is the same guy who predicted the 2.5" floppy....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Innovation does not equal fun. Fun equals fun. I dont know about you, but I am not out there playing games because they have the latest technology or are revolutionary. I play games that I think are fun.
Take Blizzard for example, none of its games are really innovative per say. People have made other RTS and MMORPG games in the past. But are the Blizzard games fun and well designed? Heck yes! And that is why people play them.
Dude, you so should have used the word prognostications instead of predictions. It just fits the snake-oil idiom of Mr. Dvorak and his ilk so well.
Halo is a slow piece of shit game that has a couple
:)
really nice bits of coding in it. Nothing that makes it
worth playing as a REAL FPS. FPS are supposed to be FAST!!! F'n Halo sucks and will suck until they can speed up the game play.
Everything you mentioned as innovative has been done in other
games before. Heck.. I've played text games that had battle systems that worked like the damage system halo uses. At least parts of it. (nothing new there)
Granted I don't play a whole lot of games these days anymore
but sitting down and playing Halo 2 for the first time? (Having never played Halo 1)
That was fucking TORTURE!!!! So SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW
and friggin lame. Sorry if I missed all the Hype
that M$ paid for (Don't watch tv or listen to radio or read print mags so I never caught any X-Box commercials) but I don't see anything great
about that game. *shrug*
I'd rather play Doom 1 for laughs
Dvorak is right...present games look dangerously similar to yesterday's, and tomorrow's games will be even more similar to current ones. It is not that gaming will die altogether though: it's arcade-style graphics-admiring gaming that will die. Gaming that has a plot and requires the player to be engaged either physically and/or emotionally will continue to be successful.
But I more or less agree with Mr. Dvorak. I still remember staying up all night playing Doom 1 when it came out, thinking it was the coolest, and most immersive game I'd ever played. And it was at the time.
But after getting all the way through the game, playing it at different difficulty levels didn't interest me too much. Same old levels, with a bit more speed, and a few more creatures... Playing multi-player online was also interesting for a little while, but it too got boring fast (this was admittedly before todays technologies, wherein you can talk and interact with the other players more fluidly).
I was all geeked about Doom2 when it came out, but after playing it awhile, I quickly got bored with it. New graphics and a new(er) storyline didn't make up for the fact that the game looked and felt like Doom 1.2.
Other FPS games also felt the same to me. Half Life 1 has got great graphics, and a rather involved plot, but other than this, it feels like every other FPS out there, to me at least. Half Life made me think a bit more, as opposed to the hack and slash mentality of the aforementioned Doom series, but it didn't really draw me into the game.
For the record, I've never played Half Life 2 - The whole Steam thing turned me off... I don't think I should have to be connected to the Internet just to play a game myself (non-multi player), and the horror stories of Steams reliability made it something I've avoided ever since.
Long story short, all FPS games have similar controls, similar graphics - They obviously use different graphics, but nothing is spectacularly different in the implementation of the graphics. You're still walking along, with a bobbing hand, or weapon in front of you.
Plus, as these games have tried to get more realistic, the key combinations of them have gotten so out of hand. There just has to be a better way of handling all of the complexities of a 3-D game, without adding 50+ key combinations to do things. No, I don't have a solution to the problem, but neither do I like having to either memorize so much information just to play the game.
Speaking of that bobbing hand/weapon which FPS games always seem to have, some of the implementations of this have gotten so out of hand that it gives me motion sickness just to play the damn things. Although it's not a great game, a good example of this is the South Park FPS - I played this for 5 minutes, watching the bobbing hand, holding a snowball, and felt like I was going to throw up!
How game developers came to the conclusion that there has to be some viewable, hand-related element on screen at all times is beyond me. For instance, using the South Park game as an example, how many of us really hold our hands out in front of us when having a snowball fight? We also don't hold our weapons outstretched at all times, but in these games we do! It all seems to detract from that feeling of realism for me, and when they make these items move as we walk, it just throws the whole "look" of the game off. Yes, I can understand seeing the barrel of a rifle, if I'm carrying one, as it'll stick out in front of me, but why all weapons have to be handled this way is beyond me.
There have been other variations on the FPS themes, and one of the more impressive of these is the Quake tournaments, but even these get old for me fast.
The games that keep me coming back the most are actually the Civilization line of games. No, it's not action packed, and sometimes it too can get boring, but the challenge, and the AI of the game keep me coming back for more again and again.
I also can appreciate the online games, such as Everquest, or Ultima Online a bit more than the average FPS, simply because they're different, and feel more "immersive" to me, even if they're not photo quality, or 3-D. I also tend to return to Mame and SNES games (via an emulator) far more often than I do the FPS's.
In fact, I think that the continued (and growing) interest in emulators, and ol
I have never heard of anyone else who experienced bugs remotely similar to that.
But I agree with your initial premise.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
This just seems to me to be an editor of a PC magazine writing about a topic he knows nothing about. Does he not realize that the simple mentioning of how his kids enjoy the newest games, much like another generation of kids enjoyed the newest games of thier times, just proves himself wrong. Games are not designed with 40+ year old men in mind. They are geared towrds younger people, with some imagination left in them, enough to let themselves be brought into the world of the game and enjoy it.
But once we get to photorealism, what is going to sustain growth?
Movies have been photorealistic for 100 years. What has sustained them? Stories Creative stories.
Games are moving to become immersive worlds -- first person Shooters/Adventures/Horrors/Mysteries/Dramas
Gaming Tech *will arrive* at a photorealistic reporduction of the world (VR helmets are coming too...) and then, the game designers will be the scriptwriters/directors etc.
In short, seperate the Medium (3D Tech) from the Content (story). Games are simple entertainment, and technology has enabled that entertainment to become less paired with the underlying technology.
Pacman's game mechanics were a limit of technology. Fun game? yes, of course. But the tech has arrived (or is arriving) to liberate creative content to produce an immersive world in which to set a person to be entertained (ala movie theater), technology isnt as relevant at that point.
Sure, people are going to want ever-increasingly-capable machines to get more-realistic worlds (more immerisve), but the fact that compelling content is being deliverd via the game-medium is the point.
I've noticed that as people get older (myself included), things that used to be exciting and fun eventually get tedious.
I think it's that eventually you become familiar enough with the art, field, whatever, that whenever a new game, pop song, etc. comes out, you can clearly see that ton of similarities it has with past works.
I've noticed this myself with music, gaming, and programming. Eventually everything seems to me an uninteresting instance of a general case that I know well.
"But once we get to photorealism, what is going to sustain growth?"
3 things: the standard "storytelling" bit that has been going on for thousands of years...new backgrounds, universes, characters, plots, whatever.
#2 things other than visual. Sounds can still be improved...and how about smells? Tactile responses?
#3 (and more appropriate for the question): AI. Photorealism might be right around the corner, but a perfect AI is *not*. We're still a LONG way away from an AI with the intellect of a mouse. Once games are VR is actually realistic, we'll still be left with a lack of realistic AI. That's an area we can get progress from for a long time. And once AI gets good, new types of games that are currently impossible (due to lack of AI) can be made.
Pretty Graphics? Check. ... ...
CD quality sound? Check.
Recognizable license? Check.
DVD quality video? Check.
Celebrity Endorsements? Check.
Hype parties? Check.
Consumer product tie-ins? Check.
Good programming?
GOOD PROGRAMMING?
Oh, God! What have we done?
"Hey you stupid kids, get off my lawn!"
I guess we are all destined to become our parents.
Saying Nintendogs isn't original: well, it's a much, much more detailed example of a virtual pet than the Tamagotchi one he brought up, enough so that it transcends the extremely simplistic "gameplay" that Tamagotchi had. He missed the boat on this one though: if he wanted to find a program that was similar to Nintendogs, he could have mentioned Dogz, which is almost forgotten now but was a nice little niche once upon a time. Still, Nintendogs seems to be doing extraordinarily well in Japan....
The music-creation game he mentioned is probably Electroplankton, one of the weirder DS programs (I hesitate to call it a game) coming down the pike. I doubt it's as similar to the Mac program he mentioned than he thinks it is. But even if it were similar, I doubt Nintendo knew anything about it, and neither does most gamers I'd guess, so it doesn't matter.
It's weird seeing Dvorak, who probably knows next to nothing about video games, decrying the lack of originality in gaming. I, and a good many others here, have been doing that for years, but of course we don't have a column/loudspeaker in PC Magazine to get people to listen to us. His listing of genres (and, I presume Iwata's too), was: shooters, puzzles and mazes, adventure games, sports games, and simulations
Of these, Shooters and Sports are legitimate narrow genres: they each have a fairly narrow design language, and while they may have subgenres that are differentiated by each other (especially in sports), it isn't as much as you might think it'd be. (The metagames -- player trading, training, that kind of thing -- surrounding most team sports games are usually pretty similar.)
Adventure games, in practice, are fairly narrow as well, but it's *possible* to break out of that field. This is why Nintendo usually tries putting one huge "gimmick" into every Zelda game they release, like time travel, a three-day system, or an oceanic overworld. Even so, the basic 3D Zelda play mechanics have now been around since Ocarina of Time; shame that it looks like Nintendo has been cowed into not messing around with the series all that much in the next installment, after the furor over Wind Waker's cel shading.
The other two "genres," puzzle/maze (maze?!) and simulation, tend to be catch-all categories; even if someone does release a genre-busting game, many people will lump it into one of these two categories rather than try to devise a new one. (Oh, the times I've seen Mario Party listed, when a genre is demanded, as a puzzle game!) Most games look like puzzles from a sufficently distant perspective, though some are "real-time kinetic puzzles," that is, action games. And most games simulate *something*, even if that thing isn't excessively realistic.
He claims that 'games have hardly changed since the invention of the first-person shooter.' His kids have obviously showed him too much Halo 2, and not enough Half-Life 2.
Yeah, because Half-Life 2, there's a fucking revolutionary game. You get guns, and shoot aliens -- HOLY SHIT. But wait, there's more! You can also pick up boxes and throw them around, just like Deus Ex! REVOLUTIONARY! Important gameplay advances!!!
Nitwit fanboi.
There are a few revolutionary games you could've put in there. Half-Life 2 is not one of them, and it never will be, no matter how much you want it to be. It is yet another cookie cutter FPS. The addition of a grav-gun does not make it revolutionary.
Of course, I will get modded troll for this, because everyone *loves* Half-life 2. But I am tired of simply watching this mediocre game get treated like the second coming of Jesus.
Random and weird software I've written.
What about TV? Movies? Books? Everything has been done, but that doesn't mean those forms of media will stop progessing. The gaming idusty will go on just like all other major forms of entertainment.
These two sentences precisely nail exactly what is wrong with Dvorak's article. For example:
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that this is MORE true of television than video games. But I'm a curmudgeon.
Tetris is probably one of the most addictive and popular games of all time, but if it was invented today no one would pay $50.00 for it.
Let's bear one very important thing in mind about Tetris. There was nothing really "state of the art" about it when it first appeared in the mid-late 1980s.
Put simply, if you ignore the pretty-but-unimportant backgrounds/pictures, etc., you could write Tetris for the Atari 2600 or the Sinclair ZX81 without any change in the gameplay. In short, if you asked someone with no previous knowledge of the game (generically, not regarding a specific implementation) when it first appeared, they'd probably guess something like:-
"Pong, Breakout... Tetris. Probably not too long after Breakout, but before Space Invaders or Asteroids."
Tetris came out at around the same time as OutRun, but it doesn't feel like it.
It's worth remembering that it only became a really big hit when the Nintendo GameBoy came out in the early 1990s, and that was when it was *bundled*. No-one paid $50 for it then, and (although it got good reviews), it wasn't *that* big a smash when it was being sold as a full-price game for home computers (8 and 16-bit) in the late 1980s.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Where oh where is the option for us to mod articles themselves? I really, really need to peg Dvorak with a "troll -1" mod.
There are "contrarian view" columnists like this in every industry, meant to get our ire up, but few of those are so blatant (and so blatantly wrong) for so bloody long.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I have come to terms with the fact that gameplay is second priority, only because I believe we will reach photorealism soon. At that time the game industry will not implode, but it will be a re-birth of the all mighty gameplay. Once all the graphics are the same quality they will have to actually make fun games again. "Perfect" graphics are the only way to stop the graphics war and start a war that will create fun games again.
photorealism is not the plateu, it is the bottom of a much more glorious mountain.
Stop posting this useless drivel!
"Washed out pundit who knows nothing about the games industry shares his incredibly deep insights about it".
Modern Gaming Industry Trashes Dvorak
He's a dick!
But seriously, speaking as a game programmer (just made unemployed by liquidating employer, cheers guys), he's probably correct to an extent.
Games rarely undergo really fundamental shifts in how they work. It's fairly easy to trace paths of evolution in fairly small obvious steps concept-wise from Space Invaders (shoot bad guys on a single screen) through Operation Wolf et al (shoot bad guys from a first person non-interactive scrolling view) to Doom (shoot bad guys from a first-person interactive view) to Half-Life 2 (shoot bad guys from a first-person interactive view when Steam will let you connect). You get the odd new genre-busting title, or one which suddenly kicks a genre into popularity (e.g. Wolfenstein 3D was pretty popular, but Doom reached a whole new level of infamy among the non gaming populace).
I guess I just don't see how it can necessarily be a bad thing that most of the big companies don't go reaching for the genre-buster every time, or even some of the time. I remember when EA first brought out John Madden on the Megadrive/Genesis, it was pretty ground-breaking stuff, same with the first FIFA soccer games. Now they mostly just change the player names every year, and make a metric assload of cash out of it. By contrast, you get a company like my previous employers, who try for big original IP concepts with every game, then crash and burn because no-one will publish them (and in our case the managers seem to have no clue about business, but I digress).
I'd love to work on games which revolutionise gaming every year or two. I'd also quite enjoy actually having a job, where I get paid, can buy a house and car and so forth without the spectre of unemployment hanging over me literally every day, which is what happens at smaller game studios unless they're very very fortunate.
I'm now looking at moving to a different country, because there are very few games jobs left where I am, none of them are hiring. Perhaps I'll end up somewhere cool, but I'll settle for a regular paycheck even if it means making Generic TemplateGame 2006/7/8/...
Game dev and music blog
The business is going to attempt to sustain growth and creativity by making game players buy newer and newer machines
hold on a sec. is he talking about the video game industry or the music industry?
well, think about it. music industry wants to require all kinds of DRM protection on "athorized" devices to play their music
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Pick up a dictionary and learn what the word 'athwart' means and how it is entirely relevant to this thread and DNF. Then go fuck yourself.
Who the hell put that in the /. article?
...
.. and it's possible to do a really awful one even with awesome technology behind you (Unreal..)
Halo 2 = Half-Life 2 = Doom 3 = Quake IV =
They're all the same. Yeah, there are nudges here and there that make them play a little different
The industry is no longer there to make new genres of games. The industry is there to sustain what it has, and in the ideal world, to advance what we have now, to the point where it can be indistinguishable from reality if we wanted it to be.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Why would I be shelling out thousands of dollars on a wife when in millions of years women haven't changed that much? I complain to my kids about this, and they insist that things have changed markedly. They show me examples, and all I see are breasts, butts and mostly stupid people.
I fail to see how Half-Life 2 exemplifies changes to games since the first person shooter.
I think we can all agree that Dvorak is wrong about the industry imploding, but Half-Life 2 (note: a seqel!) is hardly evidence that he's wrong about a lack of creativity.
After reading the doctors comments, I found myself disagreeing with his fundamental definition of game types. Gaming is the projection of ones self into a pseudo environment. This "gaming" environment currently branches into 2 main gaming types, "Reactive", and "Strategic". There is a third gaming type that is morphing from the "Reactive" branch of the tree. NASA and the Military-Engines use this gaming method to pilot their drones. What makes this gaming method different is that the damage points are real, and the logistics of game piece survival and repair are real. The day is quickly approaching when if you wish to go down to the bottom of a real volcano and "6 Sense It", you will just rent some time on an available game piece. I think what will be a real money maker is when the game masters allow renting of towing services for those pieces that cannot make it back to the docking station.
"worth playing as a REAL FPS. FPS are supposed to be FAST!!! F'n Halo sucks and will suck until they can speed up the game play."
They could speed up the game, but then console gamers would have to dislodge there heads from there butts and admit that gamepads are inefficient, inaccurate pieces of crap.
There slowly begining to realise this as some halo2 players who have a kboard/mouse set up flaunt what seems almost magical accuracy and speed to the weak minded little console gamers.
That being said, i still enjoy playing platform, and 1vs1 fighting games with a gamepad =)
The categories are shooters, puzzles and mazes, adventure games, sports games, and simulations.
When my kids show me a game, I usually say that it's nothing but the same old running-jumping-kicking-shooting with a new background.
Actually there are more game genres: Fighting, First-person shooter, MMOGs and MMORPGs, Racing, Role-Playing, Simulation, Sports, Strategy, Third-person shooters, Puzzles, Stealth, Survival horror. Did I forget any?
Well, if we apply this logic to the movie industry there would be just a few categories also: Action, Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Crime , Documentary, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Film-Noir, Horror, Musical, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Short, Thriller, War, Western.
And also we can say that it's nothing but the same old over-rated-bad-hollywood-actors-following-dumb-plo ts with a new background. (Which is partially true).
There aren't that many good movies, but from time to time there is a movie that catches our attention and we are eager to see.
The movie industry has been here for more than 100 years and I don't see it collapsing in the near future. Also, I don't think anyone would be stupid enough to say otherwise.
Game industry is here to stay and as with the movies there are the same old type of games and the ones that stand above the crowd from time to time.
By the way, perhaps Dvorak's children should look for new type of games so that their daddy don't come to dumb conclusions.
Why do people even listen to him any more? He's as important to the game industry as buggy whips to the auto industry.
But once we get to photorealism, what is going to sustain growth?"
One word: Smell-O-Vision!
Mod the parent up!
wow, that looks like about as interesting a concept as ... well.. what i dropped in the toilet this morning.
So, you've got a book, a screenplay, and a video game.. none of which actually exist, although you can download the first 70 pages of the book, and you can call someone to get a copy of the script.. and you're working on an initial version of the video game, using UT2 + mods, but going to redo it all to use UT3 when it's done.
This sounds WONDERFUL!
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
So there.
Frankly, there is some truth in there.
Back to 8bit machines ages, games were really inventives, even though they were extremely limitted by hardware. I'm looking forward to see more of those game concepts with actual implementations.
Hords of designers and 3D modelers never gave me the same fun that I used to have with thsoe small clever games...
List of things that are dying:
...
- BSD
- Apple
- Bob Barker
- VIDEO GAMES!
Awesome
The problem is that no matter how much everybody talks about how sequels suck, they always end up going to see/play these same sequels. The people pulling all the strings in the movie and game industries are not stupid. They know that the public is all talk, that they don't have the balls to ridicule something and then NOT go to see it. No matter how much we think we are self-contained and in charge of our own lives, we all still get sucked into the hype. As an example that people here might understand, who among you won't be going to see the new Star Wars movie? ... I didn't think so. Despite all of the hatred spewed towards George Lucas I would bet every last one of you will go to see it, and therefore prove that the comfort of sequels (new but the same) is a valid business model.
Aside from the other criticisms posted already, I'd like to add that a sizeable part of the gaming target market is young teenagers with short memories. The quality of games for this market is about as important as the quality of boy bands.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
FarCry has a lot of innovations not seen on previous FPS. You can think of a lot of things to do to gamming in the future, not just photorealism. When will 3D virtual reality glasses finally become a peripheral as important as the mouse? When will all the games share the same virtual environment on the INternet so someone driving a car game will see a plane on the sky, flown by a real person on a flight simulator game. Sorry english mistakes.
I don't know that this indicates anything for the industry, however. When we're young, it's easier to be fascinated by the shiney new technology. As we age, story becomes important. But there's always a new crop of buyers looking for the shiney thing.
There's a long, long way to go in terms of realism. I won't be impressed by any of it, as by my standards stuff already looks good, but to someone who's 8 today, improvements over today's standards of gaming realism will really stand out.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
What an idiot
But once we get to photorealism, what is going to sustain growth?
We'll worry about crossing that photorealistic bridge once we get to it.
" Word processing has hardly changed since the invention of Microsoft Word . The business is going to attempt to sustain growth and creativity by making IT managers buy newer and newer machines. Memo writing has always been sustained by never-ending improvements in resolution and realism. But once we get to basic document creation , what is going to sustain growth?"
I kind of parallel this to what happened in the PC industry. There was a lot fast paced improvemnts in hardware, fast enough to obsolete your machine as you were getting it home. Then the fixation on MHz while the software side still hadn't stabalized. Then the point where they are now where they are faster than most people need and still not usable to the average peron.
games advanced fast until it was possible to get 3D environments, then focused all the work on "realistic looking" ones until we get stuff like HL2 and D3. but, the gameplay hasn't kept up for the majority of games. They look nice and play crap.
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
Kids these days will play what is put in front of them because of what gets advertised and what is considered "cool." I'll use a game that doesn't even fit into the "run around and shoot crap" mold: Magic the gathering. It's a card game. Very basic idea. I think the genius exec's over at Wizards of the coast (or Hasbro for that matter) took a look around the industry and saw how much money other groups were making in a similar fashion. Where did the sights land? Yu-gi-oh! They have a card game now, along with the movie empire they built for the kids, and all the other junk they sell with the name branded on it. So...WOTC sees that Japanese cards and themes are the new "cool" thing, so they release a new edition of cards based on.....you guessed it, Ninjas and the like. I think all the games that end up being popular and whatnot revolve around the same ideals, because that is what makes money. The heads at the companies that make these games just want to sell units, not make ground breaking discoveries on new platforms or graphics. They are slave to whatever gets the units into the kid's hands, and the money in their bank accounts. The bottom line is a very powerful driving tool when you are a business...after all....no one will run a company that loses money, just so they can come out with new platforms, graphics, options (unless it makes them money).
Just seed a copy of "One night in Dvorak" on major P2P networks, and P2P instantly becomes the second cause of mortality in the English-speaking world right behind suicide by monitor ingestion...
Thomas-
"But once we get to photorealism, what is going to sustain growth?"
Did Art die when artists started creating photorealistic paintings? No, they just moved into other mediums. Computer Graphics, mixed media... It encouraged new forms of creative thinking.
I think the game industry will also go the same way. We already see this. Games are starting to have 3d cartoon graphics. Photo realism is not the objective, They are trying new ways to immerse the player.
As Dvorak can no longer "credibly" write about how Apple and the Macintosh are dying, he has found a new target: the gaming industry. If he really wanted to pick something that really is dying, he should have went with BSD. Because as we all know, even Netcraft has confirmed it.
-Mike
Schrödinger's cat is not amused—maybe.
e isn't self-important middle-aged white men. a demographic that's closer to the mark is kids and teens. *they're* the ones who are providing the main revenue stream for the industry
I remember reading statistics once that surprised me...the gist of it was that there are far more "older" gamers than people realize, and that the teen market doesn't even make up the majority. Still, I'm inclined to agree with the idea that he's projecting his own dissatisfaction onto entire gaming audience.
... for me the games industry is dead and has been for quite some time. I have absolutely zero interest in playing another Doom variant, always found video game RPGs stultifyingly boring, etc. Indeed the only thing I do play on occasion are classic games: Bosconian, Mappy, Robotron, Food Fight, etc, etc, all via MAME (MacMAME, specifically). Those games are still fun and indeed are more fun than the latest variation of Doom and they take a *lot* less time to play too - they're perfect for killing bits of time. Oh, and I play "Parachute" on my iPod mini when I'm on the pot ;), but it annoys me that the game just ends for no apparent reason.
--- What?
If you missed the sarcasm in that one, you'll really hate this:
Love is blind
God is Love
Therefore, Ray Charles is God.
Hmmm...
Nothing to see here
He then held up a physics boox ...and said, "Ph34r my l33t b00x0rz skillz!"
What he says in his article could be said about the Hollywood mechanism, almost verbatim. I wonder when that industry will go belly up. The one thing that was curiously missing from Dvorak's analysis was his authority. I checked the bio, nothing... oh he has kids and buys their games for them, riiight. So read this as if a restaurant critic is writing about how bad the food is ...which he might have never tasted.
When I was working for nintendo as a game counselor (late 1980s) there was a broad range of ages in the demographic of our call base. Of course most were teen and pre-teenage, but the fact that we had parents and grandparents call for tips on how to defeat Ganon spoke volumes to me which can be summed up as a reponse to Dvorak: everyone loves to play a game at some point; be it cards, chess or pong etc. It's all in individual preference, so it would take a good deal of social engineering analysis to really make this sort of "prediction"
Personally, I'm a fan of the older stuff and old machine emulation but then I'm middle-aged and permanently hooked on JetPac, Atic Atac & Lords of Midnight... But the fact is, in those days it was possible to make a good game just by being a bedroom coder with a good idea and a few months left alone on a ZX Spectrum or a Commodore 64. Yes, you might have one guy help you with some graphics and another with some music but that was it.
With games today, players are going to feel ripped off if each brand new title they buy doesn't include a soundtrack by a current popular music artist and a huge cinematic intro sequence at the start - all of these add to the production costs of games which, in turn, adds to greater risks when releasing an innovative title that might flop. So why should games companies come out of the "safe zone"?
I'm not sticking up for games companies, I think all the major ones are money-grabbing corporate powermongers but then I don't buy that many games any more anyway - I'm more than happy tinkering with emulators and old PCs to play a lot of them again so why do I care?
Yes, there's not the range and variation in games that there used to be but the current younger generation of gamers, the target audience for these companies, seem pretty happy with what's out there so I say leave them to enjoy it.
The problem with the "old games are better" whingers is that they're just too damn lazy to go hunt down some games ROMs and a few emulators and go play those old games the way they were supposed to be - instead, they just want to throw money at some fat bloated corporation and expect a CD in return they can just throw in a drive in a PC or games machine without having to raise a finger or do any hard work.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
... gaming will continue.
I think Dvorak is right about one thing: That some of the hardcore gamers or those of us that are getting older are a bit disenfranchised by many games today, and the rushed quality of them. Many games just aren't as fun as past generations, it seems we're getting less and less content in a game as graphical horsepower increases, less levels, less characters, less everything, except visuals with a few exceptions like RPG's, but even gameplay in RPG's is stagnating. I can list many games that re-hash the same concept again and again and get amazing scores.
Many kids have never experienced much of the past history of gaming. When I was young it was about the time the NES was released and thats was mainly the system I knew. The other video games and video game systems prior to that were basically non-existant to me. I did have a cheap tandy with one or two crappy games but I mean really. Gaming for me started with the 8-bit NES.
The same is true of modern consoles today, kids will be first discovering video games from the SNES, PS1, or PS2 era and onward. As long as fresh faces are constantly brought into the world, prior games and gaming history don't mean a lot for continued sales.
People keep forgetting that they are not the only generation playing games. Many new people who've only been born within the last 10-15 years have only known the PS1, N64 or PS2, Xbox and GC.
He claims that 'games have hardly changed since the invention of the first-person shooter.' His kids have obviously showed him too much Halo 2, and not enough Half-Life 2.
Half Life 2 was a terrific disappointment to me. I expected more than integrated cutscenes and better graphics. You still have the basic "narrow-path" environments, in which there is one correct way to go, and mysterious walls to prevent you exploring, even in the outdoor levels. The vehicles are no significant improvement over the offering of several other FPSes, and indeed are worse than many. In short, HL2 does NOT represent a great departure from the tired FPS conventions, it only offers better graphics. I believe that was what the article was talking about. While I disagree with the basic premise of the article, I think you could have chosen a much better refutation of it, such as Far Cry (great graphics and multiple paths/options throughout the game) or No One Lives Forever 1 & 2 (good graphics and innovative gameplay). Half Life 2 was okay, but it did not live up to any of the hype, excepting graphics, in my opinion.
http://xkcd.com/386/
Dvorak proclaims the death of apple, combined with the death of video games, to cause a cascade failure and cause California to sink into the ocean. Why is it that whenever I read Dvoraks stuff these days, I hear Dennis Hoppers voice...?
I'm serious. Sony has patents. and there is a lot of research going on in basement labs and self storage units thanks to the low cost of crack...
Wow, trolling with a 3-digit UID. Hope you didn't pay too much for that.
Nintendo's overall popularity may be on the decline, but is the remedy for that to compete with Microsoft and Sony at their own game? Nintendo has itself quite a lucrative niche, Saying Nintendo should back off and innovate less (or differently, or whatever) is like saying Apple should try to be more like Microsoft or Intel, because they have greater market share. What does it matter so long as a ton of people still immensely enjoy your product, and you're consistently turning a healthy profit?
But he's right, isn't he? I know we take for granted that games are sometimes to the ultimate end of evolution, but some people have brighter minds, and bigger ideas -- and they continually get shot down by the publishers because the 'big ideas' are the ones that cost mucho deniro, and have a good bit of risk to boot.
:)
First person shooters are a slow and steady evolution. The leap from Quake3 to Half Life 2 isn't that great, in terms of immersive gameplay. You still have the same movements, the same basic weapons, the same basic objective, and the same strategies to win the game. The ante is sometimes upped because they throw in a vehicle to fight with, or turn the lights out to make it a 'dark' game (ala Doom3).
The end goal currently with games nowadays is that they are created with technology first at hand. More physics, more water affects, better bump mapping, increasing frames per second, better texture and lighting, better shadow effects, better human movement, etc... but the gameplay is largely the same.
I cannot suggest what type of game to make, or what's missing. I'm not a game designer, nor am I that creative in those areas. But for perspective... when Wolfenstein 3D was released, it was something ENTIRELY different. When the first real time strategy was released, it was ENTIRELY different. And I think that's the point Dvorak is TRYING to hit home, even if he's missing at every swing.
The thing is that, I don't think the lack of new types of gaming is going to put off consumers. We are a culture that buys and buys, and buys because others buy. If Halo3 is hyped as much as Halo2, it could be the same damn game except the main character is a chick. Wow! What a revolutionary idea! A chick, who'da thought it!?!? And it would be bought like mad because of the hype that ensued. Bungie could pay off a few magazines that are rags (I won't name names) and they come back with an A+ rating, or BEST GAME EVARRRR!!! review.
The lack of gaming evolution isn't the fault of developers -- I think they are full of good ideas, and it's why most of the concentrated efforts are made to improve technology -- better physics, fps -- as I mentioned before. I think the game publishers, and these are the EA Games, the -- oh wait, there are no more independant publishing companies. EA bought them all or ran them out of business. The only decent independant gaming company is id software, and they have to focus on their technological feats to stay in business -- their engines run almost every game out there, and that's their cash cow.
So in the end, we have to demand, as gamers, new types of games. I just bought Guild Wars, because it's something slightly out of the norm. I played World of Warcraft for a month, and was put off because it's essentially an EQ/SWG/AC clone. Guild Wars at least lets me get instant gratification, and the bulk of the game is pitting player versus player. Granted it's not a first person shooter, but it's a game that requires skill over your opponent to beat. And while FPSes do the same thing, it's always from that first person point of view.. and that gets tiring and boring after a while.
Especially since I kick so much ass
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Aside from ignoring that future markets will always want to play *new* games. There really is another way that development will go. Once photorealism is achived, eventually we will be capable of having it work well even with increasing cost of code (think about the debate of assembly vs. C/C++ some decades ago). I think that "middle-ware" to make it easier to create video games will become more and more available, allowing more people to have creative input into gaming. Imagine if one day creating a video game were as simple as designing a movie. I don't know if that can happen, but I do think that will be attempted, with a high percentage of success. Of course, a good example of this potiential is the modding markets of today. Who provide new content to "old" engines (half-life 1 + counter-strike). Of course another example would be with television, I could have watched "I Love Lucy" and "Gilligan's Island" reruns instead of the more modern shows (which work on the same format and prinicipals) like "Friends". (eventually, one gets tired of watching Gilligan screw up the plan)
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
See the GDC rant session which was previously reported on Slashdot.
What will sustain growth is better story lines. Look at Darwinia It's totally low res old school graphics but it's FUN!
Years ago I worked for Software Sorcery, producers of the games "Sea Rogue", "Jutland", "Aegis, Guardian of the fleet", and "Conqueror 1086". with each game the graphics got better and better, but the game play wasn't as fun.
What I want in a game is a story line that keeps me involved. And I want to have fun. That's what's missing in a lot of games today. They just arn't very fun.
Maybe hardcore gaming will take a hit, but gaming is on really good health. Between consoles expanding the target, and the fast rise of mobile gaming (already overtaking computer gaming for revenues in some countries), I don't see any risk of implosion for the gaming industry, at least for the companies able to evolve and adapt.
Once visual artists explored realism in the renaissance, they moved into increasingly non-realistic explorations of the medium (for a while). It's simple. As visual realism gives fewer returns, the best creators will explore other areas. The market will reward games that provide satisfaction without relying on the realism, or which are more expressive rather than realistic in their depictions.
where will games go?
Better AI
Better Physics
Better interfaces (see Will Wright's "Spore")
novel uses of networking
Better actors (plenty of room for more realism in human expression)
The industry is in its infancy, but there are plenty of fertile areas for exploration. I think things are going to get more exciting, not less in the near future.
I almost forgot about that one... I think their main point covers the Developers vs Publishers though, but some points are definately covered in there.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
...that Dvorak was needing some attention. I mean isn't this one of the real reasons people make predictions of doom and gloom?
Iminent Death O The Net Predicted!!!
Film at 11.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Why didn't he comment on the increasing consolidation of the industry (see EA), the incredible difficulty of breaking in as an independent gamemaker, or the resurgence of console emulation as factors for killing creativity in the industry? The death of creativity in modern gaming is a consequence of these factors, not necessarily a cause of anything like a forthcoming bubble burst.
However, the knock on hardcore gamers is definitely a valid observation. Then again, hardcore gamers pay more, buy more, and demand more. Normal people like Dvorak can stick to their Minesweeper, and their kids can play Super Smash Brothers on free-to-cheap used N64's.
There are already plenty of games out that can cater to the casual gamer, that don't require any innovation on the part of the corporations. If casual gamers crave innovation without increases in difficulty, companies can just slap on a new layer of graphics and make it compatible with the latest console. Which is exactly what they do.
If anything, Dvorak provides a valuable layman's look at the current industry. It's like stepping back and seeing the big picture. The downside is that the industry is a lot more complex than a reductionist view may provide for.
Game industry hammers journalism as close to a collapse due to journalists with gravity bending egos and corporate sucking up that endangers the most sturdy industrial enamels. In response, corporate suck-up Dvorak responds; "I am so going to hammer you back in a rhetorical diatribe that will double my page hit-count as soon as Microsoft's check for the XBox 3 review clears." At that time, it is projected that the XBox 3 will lead to a new renaissance of computer gaming. You have to have a dark ages every year or two to have a renaissance, you know.
Dvorak rehashes points made more insightfully by others. I think the translation of "Cranky Old man yelling at kids to get off of lawn," is actually the most accurate. Other cranky old people who are dubious of this whole 'technology thing' will read him and be assured--I can see them nodding their aged heads now, in-between sips of Jasmine tea from StarBucks. They can now go back to their non-technical job and be reassured that the supergeeks they fear will never understand the 'real world' that they inhabit. Dvorak has deftly parlayed his hackneyed credentials as a technical guru due to confusion with a geeky keyboard that never caught on, to a sage for techophobic cranky old people who have never caught on to much of anything and actually like Ashcroft because he IS cranky, thus providing almost anybody with a 5% base of approval rating.
Just doing my bit to explain the world.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
And lemme tell you why. Try to walk around the street with a tube in front of each of your eyes. To see what's to your left, you have to rotate 90 degrees. And the motion gets you REAL DIZZY.
I also hate that to turn your head around to shoot the enemy (while you're running FORWARD) you have to wait a stupid number of seconds, that's completely unrealistic.
I wouldn't mind having extra-large monitors with some fish-eye distortion at the sides so you can *actually* emulate the human vision.
Until then, all 1st person shooters should include a BIG warning label saying "WARNING! This game causes motion sickness. Use with care".
What will sustain gamming after photo realism? Why Sony's bream beam of course! ;)
Games beamed into your head, as in a simmilar way to .hack!
Thats the future... whether people like it or not! XD
they said the same about the movie industry 10 or even 20 years ago, and its still going, oh wait, it must be only because of the new resolution change to HDTV ;)
:)
my fav quote "I suspect that the next generation of machines will be the last--or at least the last in the current boom market" wow, what a load.
his kids probably only play consol fps games so he only sees lmao consol games, pc gaming is more varied. of course there are only a few 'genres' of gaming, just like in anything else. how many types of books are there? did people stop writing books 5000 years ago after the 6 genres of writing were discovered?
and to top it off there are way more than 1 iteration left in resolution increases, i can see 5-10 iterations left in screen projected resolution, 2-5 iterations in sound technology, and then there is the whole field of VR which could go on forever, that is at least 20 years of continuing resolution increasing just with the eyeballs, then we move into the wire to the brain where who knows what is possible... this is the eve of gaming, not the end
The DS is a bit weird and quirky, but will likely prove to be fun in a lot of different ways, in unusual ways (as well as the traditional ways).
The PSP looks pretty solid. The wide screen, delicious graphics, ooh, wanna have that. I really do. But how long will that last? Not more than a year, I think. This gets especially exaggerated with the low battery time, since I don't feel like bothering if I know I'll run out, and I don't feel like charging all the time either.
That's the trick, there. I feel like the DS will be more "useful", while the PSP will be more "mindblowing". I really like that Nintendo doesn't blow my mind all the time. I've seen so much in gaming history by now that there isn't much to blow anymore, except my nose, which is reserved for Schindler's List, so it doesn't count.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Couldn't this entire article be re-written by replacing "game" with "movie" and blasting Hollywood?
-David
Is still my favorite computer game. So what, it's only like 90 megs big and the game is like 10 years old? No one's topped it.
Dvorak is talking computer games, here, not console games, so don't bring up those other guys. Innovation has moved to consoles and cell phones. PCs are just vanilla RTSs, a couple RPGs and a couple shooters. And a smattering of board games/ strategy games that are moving online.
I'm oooooold! And I'm not happy! And I don't like things now compared to the way they used to be. All this progress -- phooey! In my day, we didn't have multiplayer video games or francy-shmancy graphics. There was only one arcade in each state with one game called pong -- it was open only one hour a year. And you'd get in line, seventeen miles long, and the line became an angry mob of people -- fornicators and thieves, mutant children and circus freaks -- and you waited for years and by the time you got to the teller, you were senile and arthritic and you couldn't remember your own name. You were born, got in line, and ya died! And that's the way it was and we liked it!
... That's right! You'd sit in the middle of an open field and stare up at the sun till your eyeballs burst into flames! And you thought, "Oh, no! Maybe I shouldn't've stared directly into the burning sun with my eyes wide open." But it was too late! Your head was on fire and people were roastin' chickens over it. ... And that's the way it was and we liked it!
Life was a carnival! We entertained ourselves! We didn't need console games. In my day, there was only one game in town -- it was called "Stare at the sun!"
Progress?! Flobble-de-flee! In my day, when we were angry and frustrated, we just said, "Flobble-de-flee!" 'cause we were idiots and we didn't know what else to say! Just a bunch o' illiterate Cro-Magnons, waitin' in lines for our head to burst into flame and that's the way it was and we liked it! -- John C. Dvorak
What is beyond photorealism?
- Photorealism combined more and more with the massively multiplayer experience. Worlds more vibrant and entertaining than the any movie ever dreamed.
- AI's becoming indistinguishable from human players. Single player games where playing through a second time yields an entirely new gaming experience just because the AI decided to do something different.
- Physics systems (add-in card maybe?) that will literally rock your world.
- More unique interface with the games. Joysticks, mice, and keyboards? One day we may laugh at such primative devices.
Photorealism isn't the end-all be-all in gaming. Once that hurdle has been cleared, and less time is spent on making games look better, it could be the beginning of the next gaming revolution.
Duke Nukem Forever In racing, DNF means "did not finish".
If you're going to RAISE your voice like that you should at least check your SPELLING.
The categories are shooters, puzzles and mazes, adventure games, sports games, and simulations. That's it.
He then goes on to talk about how un-revolutionary the music making software is. So music making software falls under what category? It seems like he just poked a hole in his own argument.
Where does WarioWare fit in? Puzzle? It's not really a puzzle game, it's a reaction game (as in the mini-games aren't HARD, you just have to move fast enough to recognize what to do).
I guess Katamari Damacy would be labelled a puzzle game, too? Again, I don't think it is really true.
Aside from the fact that numerous games don't fit in his categories, his categories are so overbroad that they are meaningless. Take the toughest category to argue that the categories are overbroad - sports games. If the upcoming EA cricket game is really pretty much the same thing as NFL Street, then the "sports" category is pretty useless.
Hey, the car hasn't changed since the 1920's. It's still a vehicle that gets you from A to B on 4 wheels. I guess that's why that industry is dead, right? belch.
Let me think a bit... (note: this is coming from a non-gamer, who only hears about the Next Big Thing when it's already reached critical mass.)
The most recent "sleeper hit" in gaming I can think of is Katamari Damacy (sp?), which is in essence a puzzle game but really is more a "let's have fun" type game. It's replay value seems to be limited but everyone who plays it seems to suffer what I'll call the Tetris Effect.
I think the last big "revolution" in gaming would be Dance Dance Revolution (pun sort-of intended), which actually has something in common with Katamari Damacy--people play it for the sheer enjoyment rather than to get the best possible score, and players strive for style and admiration of their audience more than anything else. It's partly evolved from the kinetic sports arcade games (jet-ski racers, et.al.), but more than any other game it's found a way to combine the fun of video games with the physical satisfaction of a good short workout.
Then there's the whole phenomenon of networked gameplay, which is mostly divided between deathmatch-style games and MMORPGs. Both these genres existed before, but before the Internet made them easy to play with dozens of other humans they weren't quite the same. No new genres there, but the ability to play on a network has revolutionized a whole chunk of the gaming industry.
I agree with the other posters -- there may not be much that's new as far as genres, but there's a whole lot that's been happening within them.
I understood what they were trying to point out, all the parallells with the nazis, propaganda wise, verhoven has always done that in his movies, have a look at robocop for example, it's full of criticism of media and corporate power.
If anything, I thought the antiwar, and nationalist message was overemphasised,but I guess maybe I pick up on this more eaily, most people I've talked to about it never even noticed.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
The computer game market is now essentialy the same as the Pop music market. The product is marketed in fashion waves and is purchased by 13yr old boys. Unlike pop music however for some reason girls dont seem to be so keen.
In the begining computer games were only marketable to wealthy older people who could afford the computers and were clever enough to want to make primitive computers do something useful. There were also things known as video arcade games with which children wore the phosphor out on their parents black and white television screens playing pong - or on which drunks sat down to and attempted to hammer buttons off whilst in the persona of pac man - trapped in a maze being persued by ghosts.
So contrasting the current market with the earlier one is obviously a fairly stupid thing to do, Brittiny Spears has little in common with Aaron Copland. And the modern video arcade game computer or console is probably not significantly less human than its owner in the Turing test. Things have changed.
However it does have to be said that running around in a virtual world effectively playing paintball is a strange mismatch of activities - sitting on ones arse, eating donuts, drinking sugary soft drinks and clagging up your arteries with fat whilst pretending to lead a physically challenging adrenalin pumping existance in a virtual world is also a fairly stupid thing to do. Go and play paintball if you enjoy that sort of experience, its bloody fantastic by comparison.
The virtual environment of a computer on the other hand lends itself well to more intellectual activities which even the avid game addict has recognised by claiming that "I dont play games that have no plot".
The game industry needs to look outside its current teenage fashion market if it is to achieve the sort of respect that the film industry aspires to.
It may well be trying to do just that - but if it is, it hasnt reached crusty old farts like me who would rather configure obscure Linux server functions and occasionaly play the original demo version of Doom than buy what is on offer. A demo version that seems sufficiently representative of the last 11 years of video gaming that I doubt I have missed anything.
Give me "Zac Mckracken and the Alien mind benders" any day, that had me microwaving an egg long before the Cambridge Trojan Room Coffee Machine saw the light of day. Mind you, tell that to the youngsters of today and they wont believe you.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Dvorak has an opinion on everything these days... probably just pissed people play WASD in FPS rather than >OEU.
I was playing Pac-Pix on my Nintendo DS the other day, while not all of the industry is innovating, the DS clearly shows there is creativity and originality still to be had in the industry. And with games like Nintendogs, Electroplankton, Goemon etc in the pipeline I think there's still plenty of originality if you look for it. The main problem is the big EA games with million dollar marketing budgets make the games industry seem more stale than it really it.
While I admit that the FPS is dominating most advances in the game industry, MMORPG's are fast catching up, with most players doing both...
Counter Strike:Source is only an incremental improvement over CS 1.6. But the thing is that the gameplay is so good, I'll keep playing similar games (eagerly awaiting BF2).
Speaking of Gameplay, Tony Hawk Pro Skater series is the one console game in the last decade to truly have such great gameplay, that it was fun, even if you weren't interested in the topic (skateboarding). These aren't solely technical hurdles, but creative ones... Creating a game that is fun to play for all skill levels is challenging on many levels, and I commend those that manage to put the resources into making a great game.
Also, the FPS isn't that last big revolution in gaming. That was the internet. Sure, the internet existed before the FPS, but playing with/against real people is really what has driven the FPS market.
If any of you young'uns remember the Donkey Kong Country series on the SNES..
I am the maverick of Slashdot
He said it himself in fact. There doesnt have to be new ideas for games. It's a generational recycling. There will always be a new crop of kids ready to play a prettier version of what was available 10 years ago. His kids don't mind playing the same thing that was around years ago because, well, they didn't play it.
NMG
According to Dvorak:
<i>
The categories are shooters, puzzles and mazes, adventure games, sports games, and simulations. That's it. Most of today's hottest games are combinations of two or three of these categories, with a storyline added to keep the players from being bored stiff.
</i>
By using his logic, movie industry should also be dying too. This is because if we look at the movie catagories today, what do we have? Just your every day basic: Drama, Comedy, Horror, Action, Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Most of today's hottest movies are combinations of two or three catagories with a storyline added to keep the viewers from being bored stiff.
Why do you keep going back to movies when there's only 17ish plot lines in existence? Special Effects are about as photorealistic as they can get and still we have hundreds of new movies each year grossing more and more.
Get real man! If you want to debate the future of an industry, check out an industry that has already made it there!
play video games, anyway.
--
Hell, look at Poker. It hasn't changed in a very long time and people are playing it now more than ever.
"Nades have also been around for ages, though not sticky ones"
In the interest of accuracy i would point out that in quakeworld (a mod for quake 1) and also i believe megaTF, had grenades that bounced once and then stuck to something.
personally i thought halo was OK. it seemed more like a neverending movie that you had to play for a long time because it sucked you in. I couldnt see how it would be fun to play more than once, but thats how i feel about all non networked games so.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
I read the article, am I the only one to notice he seems to be referring to "console gaming"? I don't think that the gaming industry itself is anywhere near in peril as he would lead us to believe. Rather I think the console industry is in need of a revamp. Though as technology progresses so do the consoles, they always have since before the first Atari 2600 console. Who here had to have a Nintendo? Then a Super NES, then N-64? What was the difference then? Better gameplay, better graphics, faster gameplay?
What seperates then from now other than the progression of the technology and the willingness of the consumer to part with their money? I own several consoles, I rarely play them. I have no need, all my console games are available on PC so I play them on my desktop. I stopped buying consoles after PS2 came out. I see no point anymore. After a year or so even the titles solely released for a certain platform almost always go cross platform. Lisencing rights have to end sometime and producers will always try to squeeze every dime from a release. I simply wait till it's out on PC.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Hate to say it, but Dvorak is absolutely right. Half Life 2 was NOT an innovation. It has the same elements as Doom 1. Better graphics and a story do not make an essentially different game. Half Life 1 was an innovation - an immersive story-based game. But the elements are essentially the same - get weapons, shoot bad guys, find way to open door to next level, repeat.
We're stuck in a first person shooter pothole.
Starship Troopers did not portray a draft -- the idea was that the military was all-volunteer but you had to serve to earn the right to vote.
Anyway, as to the original article, many of my friends in the gaming industry (most of whom work for big players like EA, Blizzard, etc. where this problem is perhaps the worst) tend to agree with Dvorak. In fact, I knew one guy who quit EA after three months because the content at E3 depressed him so much.
Interestingly, he went back to EA later because he'd decided that as long as he had no control over the content and was only developing technology, he wouldn't let himself get worked up over it.
Meanwhile, in the film industry, where I work, there are lots of the same feelings but at least there's a history of interesting stuff popping up every once in a while that keeps people going.
Computer games have become like Heavy Metal music. They don't need to make anything new, they just need to find a new audience. Fortunately, there's a new crop of 13 year olds every year...
Look, there are some real gems of games out there, but you have to look past the top 20 shelf in the game store.
Here's one I've been hooked on for about 6 months now, with no sign of getting bored with it: Planetside. Someone on Planetside Stratics claims it's "all games". I don't know why Sony doesn't advertise the heck out of it, because it would advertise very well, and it's terribly addictive, and fun the whole time. If you start doing something that's not fun, it's very easy to completely redesign your character, so you're not stuck.
There are other games out there that are innovative, but I don't think you're going to see those at the front of the store. I remember playing a game a few years ago called Battle Cruiser 3000. That was VERY innovative. It does happen.
Why is Dvorak given continued attention by people with a clue? His consistently self important "wrongness" just drags PC Magazine down the the level of the National Enquirer... if it could actually be pulled any farther down in that direction.
To continue to give this guy credence just reinforces that he's more coherent than a clueless nitwit on crack.
The world according to SComps
Girls probably like you because you're so hard core a game player. They probably sit with you and make fun of the rich kid console owners with gamepads up their butts.
Get over yourself, please.
When one game looks as good as another, then hopefully then games will have to rely on more innovaite gameplay to make themselves stand out. No longer will they be able to simply have excellent graphics(I hope.) Who is this guy anyway? Kind of an idiot, me thinks....
Having played Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, Dark Age of Camelot and now World of Warcraft, it is my opinion that there's a tremendous amount of innovation in MMORPGs.
Yes, they're all based on the tried and true fantasy RPG theme. But once you start looking at how they've gotten these worlds to come to life, its amazing how much advancement in gameplay has been forwarded.
These games are here to stay, folks.
Gamers don't want photorealism. I'm not sure why people seem to think that we are working towards photorealism as the end goal of graphic gaming; we're not. We could have been there long ago taking a different path to that outcome, but it's been shown many times before that a game that looks real does not have the same appeal as a game that is slightly less real looking.
We want to escape into a fantasy world, not into a photorealistic world that is undistinguisable from our own. I realize that in a photorealistic gaming world, we could still have non-real things, but the fact is that many studies have shown that the typical gamer prefers the slightly stylized images of a non-photorealistic world to that of a photorealistic one.
Game developers have known this for years, and while we've been working towards better and better graphics, photorealism is not the direction we've been headed.
In the early days of virtual reality, I was involved with Autodesk, which built the first prototype PC-based gloves-and-goggles virtual reality system. (It took two chassis of special-purpose boards, but the CPU was a 286.) Early thinking was that you'd be able to design and assemble things in virtual reality. Didn't work, and not for technical reasons. Without really good touch and force feedback, trying to do anything in VR is like trying to work while wearing heavy mittens. Working with your hands in empty air is slow, tiring, and error-prone. VR CAD turned out to be a dead end.
But shooting works well in games and VR. This, fundamentally, is why shooting occupies such a central place in games.
I believe that was the slogan of NBC during the late '90's.
What John glosses over in his article is the impact new gamers entering the market on a daily basis have. While FPSs, RPGs, racing, flying, etc. games may be considered passé to someone who's been playing them for a while, a steady stream of n00bs are just discovering these genres for the first time.
I also believe there's something to be said for making evolutionary improvements without entirely discarding the original design. It seems to work well in nature! Game designers will adapt to the market's desires and new technology as necessary. As in any market, there will be ups and downs.
Where have all the flowers gone?
Where's the Spy vs. Spy of this gaming generation?
How about the JumpMan?
M.U.L.E.?
Paradroids?
Marble Madness?
How many gamers today even know what these games are?
I like a little FPS now and then, but it saddens me greatly that today's gamers can't seem to enjoy anything but. My favorite PC games used to be the Sierra/Lucasgame adventures. Now I'm lucky if a "decent" game comes along once every two years.
What irritates me is that the game engines are there to make something more interesting. Why not make a 1st person adventure game? Not one with shooting and slashing, but one where you have an inventory and have to push things around. How about Space Quest 3D?
How about a multiplayer 3D game where the participants have to activate multiple devices in separate areas to continue in the game? (I.E., player 1 has to stand on door trigger A so player 2 can press button B that turns off a laser so player 3 can...)
Personally I think 3D has ruined gaming. It seems as though the simulation games (Starcraft, warcraft, Civ., etc.) are the only ones that get the fact that "2D" (really 3-d with the camera pointed down) is worth anything any more.
What a shame.
And it really comes down to the gun. Give me a game in 3D that doesn't involving pressing the gun trigger (don't get me wrong -- I love counterstrike) and you can probably win me over. I mean, look at the Sims! Look at DDR! You don't have to have a machine gun or a rocket launcher to get a fun game.
Are we destined to rarely see a new Dig Dug?
Ultima III?
Original Zelda?
Beach head?
Frogger? (Oh, wait, this one WAS done in 3-D, and it was pretty fun!)
Some times I think what we really need is a SourceForge team to rewrite all the classics with modern graphics and sound.
But I guess modern gamers just wouldn't get trying to take over another robot not by shooting it, but rather by maximizing your circuit takeovers from sending your energy bolts down the right branched pathways.
Oh well, I guess this officially makes me an old-fogey.
Where have all the good games gone?
Gone to bit buckets, every one.
"The categories are shooters, puzzles and mazes, adventure games, sports games, and simulations."
For computer games is worse: 99% of new games are FPS, RTS or simulation. The "adventure" category is as good as dead, the last decent computer adventure was Runaway. There were a few RPGs with some story, but they are all go-there-and-kill-the-guy, like Vampire Bloodlines. At least in the console, there are good RPGs or action games like God of War for PS2. I'm honestly thinking of quit buying computer games altogether. Why isn't there anymore Day of Tentacles or Monkey Islands?. And please, Larry Magna Cum Laude and Warcraft III are not adventures, although I love Warcraft
He's wrong, though, on claiming that the gaming industry is poised to collapse. That is just silly. The main reason is that every few years, you get a new generation of gamers who were too young to enjoy games like HL2, and now drive the sales back up. Plus, we are still years away from achieving the real-time photo-realism that he is claiming. Moreover, once that is achieved, focus will follow on different areas like improving the physical interaction, or making those dumb monsters a bit smarter.
As usual, Dvorak doesn't bring anything new to the table, and is too short sighted to see into the future. He doesn't really have the background or experience to predict the future of the gaming market, and his own kids seem to agree with that.
Seriously, does anyone bother with this man or take him seriously. I used to read PC Magazine back in the 80's and his stories were seriously off the mark. Every prediction I ever tracked him on was dead wrong. He'll never be a good prognosticator of anything dealing with technology. Usually his articles are just meant to piss people off and drive people to reply to him driving up the page hits. You never know if he believes his own bullshit. The best thing to do with Dvorak is ignore him, and hope he goes away.
Huge opportunities will abound in the gaming industry as tools are released that lets the global community mod their favorite games. Storytelling will come to dominate games at every turn, as graphics, physics engines, and audio approach reality.
Mods are cool, but they generally fail to tell a compelling, cinematic story.
- Mod teams can't afford professional voice actors, so until voice synthesis technology advances a few light years that will heavily detract from the immersion.
- Mod teams don't have 8-16 hours a day to work on the content, unless they're living at their parents' house without a job. So either it will take many years to make a professional quality game, or the end product will suffer because the team doesn't have enough training or maturity.
- Mod teams who make total conversions are (at least in my experience) incredibly hardcore dorks (and I say that as an incredibly hardcore dork), so if they make a story-based game it's the kind of thing that appeals to the very limited hardcore dork fanbase of whatever they're basing it on.
- Mod teams generally end up with a handful of people doing a variety of tasks that they're not specialized in, e.g. one person comes up with the basic premise, most of the script, and the basic character designs. Then they freak out and refuse to accept constructive criticism that would make it better, and you end up with a Star Wars prequel.
- Most mod teams come up with grand ideas, get = ~10% finished, and realize they'll never be able to complete the project, then the "beta" sits on their site for years.
There are some really, really cool mods I've seen for a variety of games, particularly the ships people have put into Homeworld. But that is trivial compared to making an entirely new game using that engine.
I have yet to see a single-player mod that I thought was as compelling as, say, the original Soul Reaver. This does not surprise me, given that it took ~30 people three years working overtime to make Soul Reaver, and that was on the Playstation with its primitive 3D graphics.
I see the strength of mods as building on an existing game, like adding ships to Homeworld, or weapons and maps to UT. Making an entirely new game even with an existing engine as the base is a lot of work. That's why people get paid to do it for a living. This difficulty is only going to increase as the presentation quality goes up with new consoles and computer hardware.
Maybe in 50 years there will be the Playstation 14 equivalent of Adventure Construction Set from the early 80s, where you say "ok, AI, I want a game that has a hot chick in a metal bikini as the anti-hero main character, now make it!" But not in the near future.
Disclaimer: some exceptions apply, B5 I've Found Her, there are always going to be anomalies, etc etc.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Why does he focus on the video game industry, i feel there has been a LOT of improvement on the entire gameplay experience. How come people say video games are stale, when porn hasnt really changed since its release? Yet despite this, the porn industry makes more money than the video game industry.
Lois: The safety word is 'banana'.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
John C. Dvorak = Fucking Retard
Yeh gaming is dead if you use his keyboard, like the AWSD keys arent in the right place anymore to play quake correctly.
6 degrees of freedom on the other hand is completely different. If you dont know what that is, check out this
The Descent series were 6DOF and there are some really dedicated individuals who saw the demise of the company that created Descent, who are working to keep a 6DOF genre alive.
He claims that 'games have hardly changed since the invention of the first-person shooter.' His kids have obviously showed him too much Halo 2, and not enough Half-Life 2."
h ah ahhahahah!
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahaha
hahahahahahah!
hahaha!
Yeah. Half Life 2 - a new gun, some pretty physics. Definitely breaking new ground there.
Not Alanis Morrisette?
Not Free SF Reader
People play games for the engagement and the escape from normal life. It doesn't have to be a revolutionary new type of game every time, it just has to keep someone interested. It's not some race to photorealism, it's about being able to give the content that will give the players what they want.
When consoles reach photorealism, that's when the games will start to get really good, because designers will no longer be fettered by silly hardware limitations.
There is an grain of value in what he says though -- companies that don't put emphasis on good design in the coming "photorealistic era" will die. But mostly all the article really says is that John Dvorak is not a gamer.
From Dvorak:
"Some of today's games are ridiculously hard to play--unless gaming is your so-called life--and so daunting to casual players that they will quickly reject them. Who needs to devote themselves to a game just to play it once in a while? I'll take Spider Solitaire instead."
Way to take a jab at MMORPGs without saying the name, John. I've played nearly every MMORPG on the market: Ultima Online, EverQuest 1 & 2, Asheron's Call 1 & 2, Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot, SWG, and many more including tons beta tests and random Korean games.
So I must think MMORPGs are pretty killer and innovative since I play them so much, right? Well, I don't think they've done much of anything innovative. I think UO and EQ did some interesting things, but beyond that everyone has just been copying each other in the genre and it has only progressed in minor details. No *MAJOR* gameplay enhancements. Even a space MMO, Earth and Beyond, felt and played like EQ, except twice as boring. MMORPG has become another cookie-cutter genre just like FPS and adventure games.
Vanguard, the game in production from Brad McQuaid's new company, looks to be a solid upcoming MMO. But it's not going to revolutionize the genre; at best, it'll revitalize it.
It's good to see games throw ideas around, take ideas that have worked and build from them. But you also need to add your own spin to things, especially in the design if anything. There are only a few MMOs who have done anything interesting at all in terms of design. Anarchy Online probably had some of the best original design, but unfortunately it suffered from sub par gameplay.
MMORPGs haven't contributed much of anything other than massive servers with thousands of people playing together. The idea is great, but it's hardly a gameplay feature. You're not playing with those thousands of people simultaneously; at most you'll be playing with 70 on a guild raid depending on the game. On average you'll be playing with about 6 people in a group, which is less than a FPS. The gameplay is like any other RPG: going around killing monsters for loot and experience. MMORPGs are different from regular RPGs in some ways, but they're far from avant-garde.
Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this: that you are dreadfully like other people. - James Russell Lowell
of practically everything... including the Internet (which he thought was pretty lame 13 years ago). I quit reading his articles about then and I'm amazed he still has any audience at all.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Look at the movie studios, I'm sure when color movies came out some idiot said "OMG what are we gonna do! Now we have color once people see one movie they're not gonna want to see another boring old color movie! There will be nothing new to add! The whole movie industry is doomed!"
there will always be new stories and new ideas, it doesn't matter if games look exactly like a movie. Best thing about games is they can keep recycling the same old games with new graphics every few years like the new leisure suit larry game, etc.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
It is like saying that hollywood is going to go under because all the good storelines have already been made into a movie.
There is more then one variable in this equation!
He's mostly wrong, but he's right about one thing: the modern gaming industry is driven by graphical improvements, much like the software industry is driven by processing power improvements. Once the upper limit in graphics is reached, games will have to find a new way to appeal to people.
However, I think there's a lot of people trying to do that already. Nintendo is the most high-profile, but a lot of people are trying to find new ways of approaching game development. And even if they didn't, all Grand Theft Auto sequels are selling very well, even though they dont really have any graphical improvements from GTAIII.
I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
... but you, sir [points to Dvorak], are a penis.
*AppleTRON*
damn people miss the point of gaming so easily.
#1 reason to game: FUN.
seriously who cares what a game looks like if you play it an go "meh this isnt fun"? actually dont answer that cuz those people are ignorant.
fun is CORE of gaming.
I KUT J00 M4NG!!!
Go to your average library or bookstore. How many spy novels are there? Thousands. Has the book industry collapsed? Of course not!
Go to Blockbuster and see how many movies are remakes or derivatives of other movies (Remember the "Deep Impact" vs "Armageddon" jokes?). Has the movie industry collapsed? No (although some wish it would).
Dvorak said his kids "showed" him games, but the proof is in the playing. Sure, a lot of games are deriviative of others, but isn't that the case with a lot of industries? I would argue that System Shock 2 and Deus Ex are far cries from Quake II in terms of gameplay; the only things they share is that they are both first-person and they both contain weapons. The stories, items and functionality of the games are drastically different. (Sorry for the old examples; my PC is from 1998.)
Of course, I agree that $50 is really a gratuitous price for games. That was why I loved ESPN NFL 2K5. ($20 for a spectacular game; awww, yeah.) I believe that games would sell twice as well if the prices were permanently lowered by one-third to one-half.
Dvorak makes his living doing what all pundits do: making wild predictions (based upon mistaken, uninformed gut-feeling opinions) that rarely come true. He can write decent columns, but look at his columns from five or ten years ago and you'll see what I mean.
I picked up a game a few weeks ago that I hadn't seen mentioned yet, and isn't really like anything else I've seen yet.
Sid Meir's Pirates, released by Atari.
Pirates I would say is a good mix of the adventure and sim genres. Most of it is an adventure game, with the sim part being the realistic wind and ship physics. Hell, it's almost a teaching game, as you'll learn more about sailing from playing this game than you thought possible.
Today, I try to split my non-girlfriend alloted time between;
CS-Source, Tony Hawk PSP, World Of Warcraft and Katamary Diamacy.
In fact, I'm really tempted to buy MLB for my PSP.
As far as maybe being a kid with no expirence with games, I'm close to middle aged (ugh), male and have been playing video games since Star Castle used to sucked my weekly allowance in 3 minutes (Lord Nelson, Landsdown Mall RIP).
Given how much MORE I'm spending on games this year, I would have agreed with an article that said the game industry is booming.
The sooner we all start ignoring Dvorak, the sooner he'll go away. Apparently he is now trying on new sports for size besides Mac bashing?
I'm not a huge "console gamer" to begin with, so maybe this should be taken with a helping of salt... But my experiences have been, Nintendo is focused pretty sharply on the younger gamers out there. Being a "30 something" myself, Nintendo has no real charm for me. I think of GameCube as something my daughter might enjoy playing with in a few more years.
Whether they're especially "innovative" or not, I think it's all being lost on their target market. Younger kids tend to be happy with even the "been done a million times already" titles, because they're not old enough to remember playing the originals they're based on.
Was the release of Peter Molyneux's "Black and White". It was a novel idea, using the mouse gestures to make things happen in a semi-RPG... but too bad the game sucked and I damn near got carpal tunnel from trying to play it :\
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Firstly, Halo 2 isn't "innovation" in that it simply adds balance to Halo 1 (and nice balance). I will, therefore, focus on Halo 1. I enjoy playing the game splitscreen or LAN with friends, but still, it's no PC FPS.
Health/shields - This idea I like. Especially for Halo's speed and ground based gameplay.
Vehicles - Tribes 1 (late 1998) and even better, Tribes 2 (2000). Tribes 1 has a basic "scout" vehicle that could fly around slowly and shoot easy to avoid rockets. It also had two flying APCs. Tribes 2 has a ground-based hovering "grav cycle" for fast light armor transport; a three man bomber, having a pilot, a gunner, and a guy that stands on top repairing the vehicle, using a sensor jammer pack if he chooses, and throwing flares / weapons to help avoid enemies; a one-man shrike that's fast and good for transportation, anti air, slamming into enemy cappers, bailing out of near the enemy flag to let your own capper have a ride, and it has a fairly good pulse sensor built in; the tank, which requires a driver and a gunner; and the APC which has room for 5 passengers (kaboom!). Not to mention all the other modern games which now have vehicles, like the Battlefields and the UT2Kx's.
Carrying only two weapons at a time - Tribes 1 and 2 (limited to three weapons with light armor, four with medium, five with heavy.) Most people use light or heavy, so the strategy is definately there for light. As well, Tribeses add other things that the player can choose before fighting: you can pick your armour, your weapons, and your pack. And you can choose them all at inventory stations, so there's no hunting around.
Melee attacks - Nice in a ground based game like Halo. I think they're a bit more fun in Halo 2, but yes, nice.
Grenades - In Tribes (if you havn't guessed, I like this game) grenades and mines can be held and used with seperate buttons by all players. You can use them for similiar things as in Halo.
Plasma / particle weapons - Tribes: Blasters puncture shields, elfs drain energy, and the weapons work quite differently (ie. mortar is strong as heck but has quite the arc to it).
Motion tracker - Tribes has one up on this, I think, especially in the teamwork sense. Enemies only show up on player's Command Circuit, or have IFFs over their head, if they are in range of the team's sensor network. The sensor network is built up on long-range base sensors (part of map), deployable pulse sensors, deployable cameras (which can be looked through as well), and deployable motion sensors (lower range, but can detect cloakers or people with sensor jammers). As well, if an enemy is close enough to a player and in view, that player's armour suit will automatically send the enemy's position to the sensor net. =)
IMHO, the biggest draw of Halo is that it's the best console FPS. It's not that terrific compared with some PC FPS games, but you can play this one with 3 other friends on the same machine. That's fun.
Halo isn't as "by the numbers" as, say, Doom 3. But then, when you take Tribes' "skiing" (rapidly jumping down hill to gain speeds that can get to 100kph easily), jet packs, and other things, Halo still looks pretty much over to the every other FPS side of the spectrum. Half-life 2 isn't so much better, but the story telling, physics, and modability (Big!) of HL2 are just cool.
I think the craze of the near future is going to be active gaming. DDR, the Eye-Toy, etc are just the beginning. I think we're going to see mobile games that respond to your physical location as well as physical activity.
I think gaming is going to merge into our real life enviroments. Your cell phone may beep with a message from other players as you follow the GPS coordinates on your PDA. A hologram might be projected over the scene and you'll be required to battle with it. A camera might watch your movements to decide how the game should react to you.
Once we reach ultra-realism in games then improvements will be in portability, I/O, and networking.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
The next leap in gaming will come in the form of "brain games," which will send information directly to your brain!
90% of video games are bought by adults (not always for themselves, though). 12-year-old kids can't really afford $70 video games, where us 20-something white males with high-tech jobs can buy one every two weeks.
Also, the average age of video gamers is 25-29 now. Sure there's a lot of middle school and high school kids who get games for Christmas or from their parents, but there's just as many adults in their 20's and 30's who play 5+ hours of video games a week.
Hell, why would you want to watch television when you could be playing GTA:SA or HL2 or World of Warcraft?
Am I the only one who expects a collapse of the [fashion] business soon? . . . It has happened before, and I can't see how people will keep shelling out $50 or so for a [piece of clothing] when the [clothes] have hardly changed since the invention of the [brassiere].
I complain to my kids about this, and they insist that things have changed markedly. They show me examples, and all I see are tweaks and weirder, mostly stupid [styles].
There are four or five simple [garments] and nothing really new or different.
The categories are [coats, shirts, skirts, pants, shoes, and hats, plus some add-on utilities like stockings, belts, gloves, bags, and jewelry]. That's it. Most of today's hottest [garments] are combinations of two or three of these categories, with a [marketing pitch] added to keep the [shoppers] from being bored stiff. When my kids show me [an outfit], I usually say that it's nothing but the same old [stuff] with a new [fabric, hemline, or collar]. They leave in a huff.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
The gaming industry is certainly stuck in a rut. First person shooters do seem all the same. There must be games that set the player free. What I suggest is games that have a single interface and a single world. What you do in that world is up to you. Instead of having scripts to follow, stories must be driven by your own imagination.
A way of accomplishing this is with style sheets. In the same way they style a web page they could style a virtual world. If you wanted a world war two game you would add 1940s style sheets. A generic set of AI would drive the system creating strategic and tactical events. Alternatively if you liked racing games a style sheet would add super cars.
This would work because the systems that run games are now quite generic. You just have to add all those systems together and let the user define the environment.
Bottom line is that people aren't(that) stupid: if games didn't bring something new to the table--whether that's a brand new or a refined experience, then people wouldn't buy them for $50 a pop. Considering that the gaming industry is raking in more an more dollars every year, I'd say the numbers speak for themselves.
(insert witty/esoteric/dumb quote here)
I was playing Tetris on a clone AT (286/6/12khz) in the mid eighties in monochrome from a 5 1/2" floppy. No graphical nightmare, that was just what it was capable of. I also used AutoCAD 11 on the same machine.
Dvorak's sweeping generalizations are a load of crap, to be sure, but the game industry does an amazingly good job of falling flat on its face with most releases. Let's face it: the vast majority of games that hit the market aren't worth the bargain bin price, much less $50. Hell, most of them aren't worth playing even if they're *free*.
I don't think the problem has anything to do with new ideas, since most of the 'old' ideas are so poorly implemented. I think the real problem with most of these games is that the designers are often programmers despite the fact that there's absolutely no correlation between being able to design a game and being able to translate the design into code. In my opinion most coders are terrible game designers - but try telling that to someone who's convinced that since he can code he must also be able to design, even though there's no logic whatsoever in that belief.
There are exceptions, of course, but for every Fallout or Planescape: Torment or Thief there are dozens of games that're so awful they never should have seen the light of day. And even these games aren't "10's"; they're "6's" or "7's", but we're so used to being exposed to shit that when a 6 or a 7 comes around we go ballistic and proclaim the game to be one of the best things since sliced bread. In fact, they aren't anywhere close to a best effort, just markedly better than most of the trash on the market; and because of that we tend to put the game on a pedestal and ignore all of its faults, or the things that could've been done to improve it.
As an example, take Morrowind. This game is not only buggier than 3-month-old road kill, but it also has lousy gameplay and doesn't even bother to try infusing any sort of balance into the experience. Even so it's head and shoulders above most of the RPGs out there, so players deliberately ignore the games faults (and even attack those who dare to point them out). But is this game anywhere close to the original Betrayal at Krondor in terms of story, or gameplay, or balance, or game system implementation? Nope, not at all. It does have much better graphics, but you'd expect that since BAK came more than a decade before Morrowind. For everything but graphics BAK takes Morrowind to town. And it' a pretty sad state of affairs when one of the games that defined CRPG is *still* one of the best CRPGs out there.
What to do? Perhaps if companies were to hire some actual game designers to design the game, and the coders stuck to implementing the design, we'd get better games. For example, if we want good strategy or tactics games maybe companies should think about hiring the designers who used to make games at SPI or GDW (assuming they're even still alive). If we want a decent RPG then maybe the guy who made RuneQuest would be a good choice for that sort of game. And so on. Coders do what they do best - code - and game designers who've proven themselves design the games.
Sounds like a decent plan to me. The result certainly couldn't be any worse than what we're getting right now.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I do worry that FPS has us cornered now. I think that the way people had to create games that were quite abstract and fun (think platforms, map games) is in danger.
Also, movie franchises for video gamescause a lot of damage. They are an easy sell, regardless of quality.
He says it like it's just around the corner. I think there's still a long way to go before we are actually there.. if he doesn't mean realistic still images, but then the games would be as funny as watching .. um.. still images..
--
it's never to late to give up
/* it's never to late to give up */
I mean, seriously. Why not just post to some 15-year-old script kiddies blogs? That would be just as enlightening.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Dvorak is not exaclty wrong here. Look at Doom...Doom 3 is just like Doom 2 with much better graphics and different weapons. Otherwise it's the same thing, and Doom 2 was much like Doom. Quake is like Doom. Quake 2 and 3 are like Doom.
Age of Empires, Rise of Nations, Conquest, etc. are all the same. Zoo Tycoon, RollerCoaster tycoon (1, 2, 3), etc. are all the same. Diablo (1,2), the Sims (numerous), GTA (numerous), NFL, NHL, baseball.
There are very few new games...most are updates of old game ideas. The only thing that is keeping the video games industry afloat is how impressive each generation of video cards becomes. Once that slows down, people are not going to keep buying rehashes of the same old games.
And as for the movie industry...how many more Star Trek movies do you want to see? How many moe Star Wars movies? How many more Friday the 13th's, or I know what you did...still...and again. Even Pixar realized they were getting stale and hired new writers for the Incredibles.
What the gaming industry needs is some new genre's for video games...something not already done and being milked for all they're worth.
Just like when he insisted Apple would switch to Intel Processors
You say that MMORPGs are pointless, repetitive grinds that people while away their lives at, and that they'll never really be popular until they stop being pointless, repetitive grinds.
But wait! People do spend time on them. People spend as much time as they plausibly can, and then a bit more. People are absorbed into these mindlessly moronic tasks. You think folks need absorbing gameplay, a compelling storyline and the ability to think on their toes? Fuck no! Folks will throw money at a company that allows them to engage in Pavlovian click-here stimulus-response pap.
As you may have surmised, I'm not a fan.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I think it was a bit like "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen". The book was something rather spectacularly different, with a whole host of ideas that the director cheerfully ignored when he made the film, which, as a result, was pretty forgettable. As such, fans of the original end up defending their fandom and sounding like idiots for it.
Sigh.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
For the last 20 years, people have one bought new magazines because of crisper pages and glossier photos. We've seen very little inovation in the magazine industry since the invention of double sided pages.
... it make have new fancy sidebars, but really it is simply a recycled "doom of the gaming industry" prediction, in no way more inovative than the article where Confucious claimed the end of weichi and lupui many centuries ago.
Sometimes one of my hip friends will bring me a magazine and show me an article which they claim is new and different, but I just see the same old thing. For example this article by that Dvorak fellow
Do you really believe that, counter to the example provided by all of human history, people will someday stop buying the same old thing in a new package?
> I'm not sure where all of the Nintendo doomsaying comes from.
I think it was the cube being more or less dropped pretty early on, leaving just xbox and ps2 in the running.
Assuming we ever have the computing power for photorealism we will finally get to a point where the next eye candy isn't what drives the game. Designers will have to rely on really good stories and interactivity with the environment to make quality games. Half Life 2 went in this direction. I hope more games go this way. The story was good and the interactivity with the world was unparalleled.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
"Mods are cool, but they generally fail to tell a compelling, cinematic story."
Video games are not about telling a compelling cinematic story. Video games are about exploiting the "reoreintation of view" response from the brain. Similar to how TV works. Constant fast paced reorientations compell attention and are difficult to ignore. Some of the most popular video games tell no story at all. Street Fighter 2, Galaga, and Tetris come to mind as games that tell no story but were best sellers in their time.
All this talk about the lack of innovation in first person shooters is really ridiculous. The supposed innovation of Half Life 2 is minimal. Now, for an actual innovative FPS why don't we all run out and play Metroid for the Gamecube. Nintendo has been forever innovating the industry, and will continue to do so for a long time. It's just unfortunate that most gamers feel that playing games with blood or prostitutes somehow makes them a more mature person and so Nintendo doesn't get the credit they deserve.
Just because you have seen it before doesn't mean a 6 year old has... Everything is new to them so there will always be a market for Halo XVI Super Duper Extreme "Wet Your Pants" XP Edition. Face it there will always be a market, so quit yer bitchin'.
Far Cry.
"I have yet to see a single-player mod that I thought was as compelling as, say, the original Soul Reaver" Also, I found Soul Reaver to be an uninspired, linear game with poor level design and little replay value.
Well, obviously his kids should be proof enough to him that he's wrong. If his kids were bored with this 'same-old-running-jumping with a new background', then they really wouldn't be interested in it, would they?
And his paranoia over virtual dog sex on the DS is pretty hilarious. This guy obviously hasn't had a clue distributed his way in a while, and is just pissing and moaning.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
I agree with you on this. Dvorak is on to something. I have noticed a stagnation in the gaming industry and I have a feeling Electronic Arts has a lot to do with it.
10 or more years ago the gaming industry was made up of a lot of small outfits. Now they have been merged into a few big players, one being hugely massive (EA Games). Once that happens its about share holder value and not what's a great new gaming idea. The best killer of inovation is always success.
I heard some one say EA Games bought the exclusive rights to use NFL player names and stats in there games. As soon as I heard that I thought that was the death of football video games. Where is the incentive to develop a better Madden Football when there is no compitition.
Dvorak wouldn't be Dvorak if he didn't start some flamewars now and then... :-)
Most of the time I don't agree with him, but he does address some of the hotter isues and has some glimmers of insight sometimes.
As a PC Magazine reader, I would definitely miss his column.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Kind of like I, Robot.
Or "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen". Man, that pissed me off.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The crux of Dvorak's argument seems to be that the gaming business will die off because there have been no new 'types' of games. Well, there are essentially 3 types of movies (and books for that matter): man vs nature, man vs man, and man vs himself. Yet, you don't see anyone predicting the end of the movie industry.
"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
what does dvorak know anyway, he's the crackpot that suggested the non-qwerty madness that is am "efficient keyboard".
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
The thing is, in the business universe you are either growing or dying. Staying the same is not considered success in the business world. The ultimate goal of any business is to become GE or WPP or some other mega-corp with a quarter of a million employees worldwide.
I usually read John C. Dvorak just so that I can get a good giggle, but after this article I was just angry.
t ml
Now, the content of the article was not upsetting to me, I thought he had a few valid points. Instead, I was upset because rather than think for himself, Dvorack just wrote a cheap knockoff of a similar article posted on www.pointlesswasteoftime.com.
http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/games/crash.h
The interesting thing here is that not only is the PWOT version of this argument much more entertaining, it is also more convincing.
Does anyone else find it ironic that Dvorak article decrying the lack of new ideas in the gaming industry is itself a recycled idea?
I gotta tell you, Resident Evil 4 has pretty much dispelled the "Nintendo is aimed at kids" myth for me. They may INCLUDE a lot of child-friendly games in their lineup, but they are by no means "focused pretty sharply on the younger gamers".
I think it's more that Sony (and Microsoft, lately) are focussed on the 16-25 year old male market, pushing as much "mature" content as possible. Maybe I'm now *too* old for modern gaming, but a game like Pikmin seems a lot more mature to me than gunning down hookers and playing Madden 2007 (now with 3x the BLOOD!!!).
I'm still waiting for Bonestorm to come out for the PS3.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I just had a job interview today and somehow in the midst of talking about the job we got on the track of computer games. It seems we both agreed the industry has been going downhill for quite some time. We both reminesced on the days when we found a good game and played it religiously, and how such games just don't exist anymore. I'm not talking about pac-man here. I'm talking about half-life, or tribes, or civilization. Sure there are a billion variants of these games now, but that's the whole problem - they're all variants of the same games.
Need for speed was cool. The 20th edition is not. Even halflife 2 sucks in comparison to its predecessor in part because its just a continuation... its been done already. Where the hell did the innovation go?
I find myself playing games less and less every year. As did my potential employer. As are my friends. You just can't find those games that inspire you to play them anymore. Graphics are NOT gameplay.
You're nothing; like me.
We don't participate in the English language subculture. WE MAKE OUR OWN WORDS UP, MAN. Don't try and limit us with your "conventional spellings."
I've enjoyed reading Dvorak's stuff over the years, but this time he's way off. I never pegged him as lacking imagination, but that's the only explanation that makes sense.
...it shows you
> I can't see how people will keep shelling out $50 or so for a video
> game when the games have hardly changed
But clearly they ARE still shelling out $50 per game despite Dvorak's claim. And that's despite the fact that games are ridiculously overpriced.
> I complain to my kids about this, and they insist that things have
> changed markedly.
Perhaps Dvorak's kids aren't experts in this area.
> There are four or five simple game categories and nothing really new
> or different.
Yep, same old categories. And yet people keep buying the next big shooter. Why is that? Mainly, because it's new. A new game, particularly if it's well designed, is like a new world to explore.
> When my kids show me a game, I usually say that it's nothing but the
> same old running-jumping-kicking-shooting with a new background. They
> leave in a huff.
Everyone's entitled to their opinion. Clearly Dvorak isn't interested in most games. Does it make sense to assume that if he doesn't like something, nobody does? Plenty of people are buying games.
> Iwata mentioned that in almost all the big games, the so-called boss
> characters are all beginning to be pretty much the same: big, creepy
> monsters.
Not sure exactly what Dvorak is looking for in a boss, but a big, creepy monster sounds good to me. It appears that Dvorak has no appreciation for the incredible artwork that goes into games these days.
> If you want to see exactly how inane this is, go out and rent the
> brain-dead Paul Verhoeven film, Starship Troopers.
> just how lame these games actually are.
A movie that shows how lame games are? I don't get it. I agree that movie was lame. The game that was made from it was also lame. How Dvorak is able to generalize this to all games is beyond me.
> The other idea that Iwata presented is music-making software that
> creates tunes on the DS. This sort of thing appeared on the Macintosh
> years ago
So what if it's an old idea? If it's good, people will buy it.
> None of this will save a doomed industry. The business is going to
> attempt to sustain growth and creativity by making game players buy
> newer and newer machines. Computer gaming has always been sustained by
> never-ending improvements in resolution and realism. But once > we get
> to photorealism, what is going to sustain growth?
Dvorak has this backwards! It's been obvious for years that it's the game industry that drives the PC hardware industry. How much of a market would there be for 3D graphics cards if PC games didn't exist? Zilch.
> All this will do is make the visuals more lifelike and the blood and
> gore more realistic and nauseating. While the kids who are used to
> this "progress" may not be put off by it, newcomers may be > repulsed
> and skip these new generations of machines altogether.
Dvorak's premise here seems to be that people will stop buying game machines once the graphics get "too realistic." I don't even know where to start - this is just plain silly. If someone doesn't like gory games, they can simply avoid those games.
Consider:
[1] People replay games they've already played numerous times, even if the action in those games is scripted. Finding alternate paths, improving scores and times, or just having fun with an old friend explain this behaviour.
[2] Occasionally, an old classic is upgraded with new graphic detail. This always generates a lot of interest. Take any good game and upgrade it with better sound and graphics and although the appeal will be limited, people will play it.
[3] Now create new levels/missions with an old
I understand that English is a living language, but I object to changes arising merely from repeated errors.
Ever tried Metroid Prime 1 or 2? I can't imagine a kid playing those and appreciating them, and they're some of the best games ever made.
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
sure there's a chance you're doing int wrong but there's a better chance you're wearing a condom.
(ie Something Wrong? so sue me.)
I think you're generalising a lot here. There are some very professional mods that aren't just for hardcore "dorks". Natural Selection for HL is one of my favourites, and Alien Swarm for UT2004 is another very well done mod. Hell - look at Counter-Strike. Not to say that most mods never make it. You're comment "most mod teams come up with grand ideas, get = ~10% finished..." is dead on the mark.
~ Crummy
I see a lot of people speaking of Story, and that is very important, but for technical growth, Physics has a long way to go. I want to be able to blast holes in the ground, make a pile of dirt, control the flow of water...
Enemy AI; particularly Pathing in a 3d space, an NPC should be able to determine the best path to it's goal; given it's sensory field.
Multiplayer; 2 players needs 2 data flows through the server (12,21), 4 players needs 12 (12,13,14,21,23,24,31,32,34,41,42,43), 100 players 9900. That's why deathmatch style game servers are rarly set to the max players, and most MMOLRPG's are broken into sub-sections.
Sound; Currently, almost every game uses pre-recorded sounds. Speech generation is very far behind visuals.
I once walked into a computer lab with 21 PC's, power fans, cpu fans, hard drives all whirring; people talking, typing, etc. The moment I entered the room I knew something was wrong. I walked around a bit and quickly homed in on the file server, and gently touched it, it was blazing hot because it's main fan wasn't spinning. Somehow, subconsiously, that one noise being absent registered and gave useful information. It'll be a heck of a long time until a game can match the details that humans are capable of perceiving.
honestly: it's a faux-syllogistic version of transitivity.
but it's a glarding fallacy to use an argument form like that with ADJECTIVES instead of existential verbs. only using an equating/identity verb "is" and a noun does the argument work-- just according to transitivity, though you still might not like the form.
Compare
Dogs are fat
Yo Momma is Fat
Therefore, your momma is a dog
that's a real glaring error. compare it to:
Santa is Kris Kringle
Old Man CHristmas is Chris Kringle
Therefore, Santa is Old Man CHristmas
when you use "is" with an identity-noun, it's a fine argument-- at least casually. it's transitivity, though you may not like the placement of the items. (notice how the transitivity with the identity-noun remains unaffected by the order of a/b and c/b in the first two premises
that form is problematic with adjectives only
(The building is tall, Timothy is tall, therefore timothy is the building...)
i'm talkin out my ass!
The problem with todays games is that they are all fluff and no substance. Take for example the games of yesteryear for the best system that ever was released. The SNES. That system had games that rocked hardcore, but did so almost purely on storyline and gameplay(because the graphics of the time just weren't that great). The problem happening right now, is that the industry and many of the players are focusing so much on appearence rather then the fun factor. Lets look at some recent games. Halo 1 and 2-Good but nothing new. Starwars Battlefront-Starwars mod for BF1942. Metroid Prime-Innovative and fun. Goldeneye-The first good FPS for console. Showed how FPS should be done on a console. Final Fantasy 258- Solid game, but not as good as the old ones for the SNES. Needs to focus on improving the genre rather then repackaging the same stuff. Ironically, the games that I still play the most are the classics like 4 player superbomberman, chrono trigger, earthbound, secret of mana, FF2/3, etc. Those games I still love because they focused on FUN and story because that is all that they could really work with at the time. Now with the focus on graphics, it detracts from the fun and story factor too often.
Someone tell peckerhead to go get a copy of "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" and see how incredibly good a video game can be. It's not the gaming industry that's going to lose ground, it's the film industry.
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
So Dvorak designs a keyboard nobody but His Majesty can use, and then goes to trashing people who don't need his miserable excuse for a keyboard to have fun.
Next.
"Well, my telephone rang it would not stop,
It's President Kennedy callin' me up.
He said, 'My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?'
I said, 'My friend, John, Brigitte Bardot,
Anita Ekberg,
Sophia Loren.'
Country'll grow."
Bob Dylan, "I shall be free"
Yeah, I agree that the DS is definately more innovative, but unfortunately that could end up killing it in the end. The whole touch-pad thing just seems gimmicky to me. A lot of the game reviews I've seen for DS games seem to say the same thing: "This seems more like a tech demo than a game". (Check GameSpot or GameSpy's recent DS reviews, like of the Pac-Man game)
At work, I played around with Tablet PCs when they first came out a few years ago. Was it innovative? Sure. The hand-writing recognition, touchpad features, etc. were all neat. But at the end of the day, I would never buy one. Too expensive, and the innovation wasn't really that useful in the end. I'd stick a conventional laptop anyday.
Anyone remember the Virtual Boy? That was unarguably innovative, but it was also a horrendous failure. It was too big, no one wanted to design for it, it caused headaches when played too long, etc.
-- jchenx
some people have exposed the "photorealistic plateau" arguments as idiotic.
but nobody has mentioned this point so far: just because developers may eventually have the same photo-realistic capabilities at their disposal does NOT mean that every game will be "created equal" in the sense of stimulating and engaging the player.
all of us can take a video camera and make a "photorealistic" story movie. a long time ago it wasn't so easy: film was expensive, cameras were ornate, etc. but anyway, we all have a photorealistic capacity but that doesn't mean we will use that capacity to make COMPELLING scenes/images/shots that people will actually enjoy.
this is only one dimension of what's wrong with Dvorak's argument. the photorealistic plateau-- even if it happens, whenever-- doesn't signify anything. it's a base-line standard of POTENTIAL/CAPACITY, not actual artistic exploitation of those powers.
to make another point, photorealistism itself doesn't automatically equate with "good" at all. some of the most interesting games are yet to come that don't use photorealism at all: for example, the game Darwinia looks amazing to me-- i want to play it, and it comprises cartoonish/pseudo-retro 3-d environments and items.
another point that noboyd has made explicitly: real-time SPORTS do not introduce many superficial or glaring "INNOVATIONS" yet millions of people love them, year by year. in fact, the dynamics of play-style and skill-level completely change the nature of every game played--- basketball has been arguably the "same damn thing!" for a hundred years, only considering a few technical rules, but the game changes dramatically from decade to decade. the aggression-tolerance changes, the show-boating changes. in baseball, the pitcher/batter dynamic has completely reversed itself over the past century: pitchers are amazing contenders-- vis-a-vis the batter-- today compared to 80 years ago.
likewise, the basic elements of MUSIC (temporal organization; rhythm; melody; development; unity) have stayed static while the infinite permutations of those elements have been realized by wholly unique artists.
you might as well say "all these songs have a bunch of chords that seem to move to a resolution and away from it!!! it's all the same!"
or "can't somebody do something INNOVATIVE? every musician just uses various instruments to shape sounds in essentially the same ways"
likewise, the essences of human storytelling have remained the same even while the accomplishments of artists have expanded or grown, arguably, or fluctuated throughout time
we're talking about a complete disconnect between the "boring, sameoldness" of a cardboard tube: a kaleidoscope, and the PERCEPTUAL PERMUTATIONS OF EXPERIENCE that the device gives rise to
paradigmatic video games: IF IT AIN'T BROKE DON'T FIX IT
but by all means, go out on a limb, go nuts, be creative--- sometimes it pans out and amazes us, sometimes it sucks. oh well better luck next time. meanwhile old bored men will complain about doomsday scenarios, in a contradictory idiotic or otherwise totally fallacious manner.
I guess my point was Dvorak is an MS suck up. He's calling his own people idiots.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That game had very, VERY graphics for its time. And some of the graphics add-ons/improvements by modders, I found I could make "reality" scene screenshots from Morrowind. Most non-gamer people that saw my Morrowind screenshots did a double take as they routinely mistook it as some real place or some cinematic-quality photo. The character animations in Morrowind weren't exactly as realistic as, say, UT2004 (which came out years later), but it did look pretty close to cinematic when you watched Morrowind in action.
But aside from the graphics (and many people even think Morrowind's graphics was crap in its day), Morrowind had a hell of a lot of story lines. It literally had more side quests (and side quests spawned by side quests) than the US Army has bullets. It had night, day, and varied weather as well. You could spend an hour or more sitting around and reading the books you found in the game and learning the histories and cultures of the world you played in. You could go exploring in any little nook and cranny and expect something different going on just about all the time. What you did in Morrowind had consequences, too. You could be a criminal and pay a fine, be a wanted fugitive, or sit in prison for what you did. You could even get a permanent death penalty and find yourself at war with every single guard in that world. You could choose to kill someone or show them mercy (in some cases) and people would remember you for it either way. A single gamer would spend over a year exploring the entire world of Morrowind just one time. And that's just to play it as a particular species, for a particular faction. Then they went back and played it as another race for another faction. Then you had all the killer mods that added tons of new lands, new mega-quests, and so on.
You could, as a single player, befriend NPCs and assemble a team, like some other RPGs. These NPCs followed you kind of like bots in a FPS, instead of being "locked" at your side, and they were good at following you, for the most part. User mods created even better "follower" companions, with their own long, engrossing stories and complex dynamic reactions to your behaviors.
Morrowind's interface was by far the best I've ever seen, it didn't take long for me to learn it and there was a lot to play with. Morrowind's RPG system was the best I've seen - it had no arbitrary level limits except your skills maxed out at 100. In all cases you gained better skills simply by doing them successfully, repeatedly, and you gained levels and increased vital stats by increasing certain key skills you defined at the start of the game.
Morrowind, of course, had its fallbacks. Stores stayed open 24/7 instead of opening and closing at certain times. There were relatively few people around in the cities; this is no doubt because of the limitations of the CPU and its ability to keep "mental" track of - much less graphically render - Morrowind NPCs. People did not come and go, they just wandered around one particular area. Enemies did not follow you into buildings to pursue a fight. You could not enter a building and see what was going on outside. But again, these limitations were the result of CPU limitations.
IMO, Morrowind was and still is the absolute pinnacle in nonlinear gaming. It even eclipses Deus Ex in every single possible sense. It literally stretched the limit of CPU power but the bang you got for your buck was measured in megatons.
What would I like to see? TES III Morrowind done on the UT2004 graphics engine with UT2004 style sports. You Morrowind fans would know what I mean lol!
* Who can kill the most Cliff Racers in 30 seconds?
* Three Way Capture the flag: Redoran vs Hlaalu vs Telvanni.
* Onslaught: choose your faction!
* Rescue-or-Capture-the-slave: Imperial Legion vs the Dunmer
and so on.
Anyway... Morrowind aimed for what people call "Total Immersion" and "World Building", and in my opinion it hit the mark in a way that games might not hit it for years to come.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Total immersion
but do you play them?
I always pay whenever I want a new game. The last game I bought was God of War and now that's collecting dust due to the fact that I finished it.
I want a game I can't finish.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Why is this even a post? Has it not been established that Dvorak is either and idiot or a troll? Honestly, this article is a waste of disk space.
Oh, and I like the Halo 2 bashing... not. Have you even played it? I mean, grow up. They're both great games. Half-Life 2 may be better technologically but it's rather unfair to compare them side by side as their intentions are rather different.
Personally, I think Half-Life was more interesting than HL2...
Revolution isn't always a good thing; it's true. It is sometimes.
However, I think the most appropriate word here is EVOLUTION. We're talking about how the gaming industry improves over time, and whether that should be by rehashing old ideas, or creating new, mutant ideas. That is precisely what evolution is about, and if you know how evolution works, you know precisely why new mutations are so important.
By contrast, revolution is more about starting from scratch with a new approach entirely. If computer gaming became running around outside with a computer on your back and a hud, that might be more revolutionary.
On the other hand, evolution DOES make huge changes in the beginning, as non-viable lifeforms appear, then quickly die. Only the good ones go on to be refined, and that process of refinement is much slower. Still, occasionally a mutation event will still come along, and if it's good, it'll take over.
Maybe the problem with Dvorak is that he just doesn't realise how long evolution takes. So far, the computer industry has been moving pretty fast, considering the history of organic evolution ;)
For many years, the worst movie I'd ever seen was Treasure of the Four Crowns, a 3-D movie that has a Robert Blake clone and a few other adventurers wandering through a castle with 3-D booby traps jumping out at them. There's almost no dialog in the first half of the movie, which seems bad, until you get to the second half, which does have dialog, and it's even worse :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
your emphasis on books is misplaced--sure, books may always be around, but eventually they'll only be in museums, and as backups--as another poster hinted at, portability to the past is not a major force behind the perserverance of a given technology--and books will eventually be replaced by electronic equivalents.
Haha, you actually put me on your 'enemies' list? Yeah, that'll teach me a lesson! Hahahaha
What is that supposed to be, some kind of punishment? Heh. Ooo, I'm quivering... with laughter =)
Think about it.. are you so incapable of handling the occasional retort or argument (which you started, and in a very rude manner, by the way), that you have to lean on a filter as a crutch?
Well, I'm proud to be the first of no doubt many of your Foes. You are truly enlightened. *snicker*
Vale!
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
I've been reading essays by Stainshaw Lem lately and he points out that a lot of so-called science fiction is just a rehash of popular myths and plots from other genres with a "space" or "future" setting tacked on. While what I just wrote is an overly simplistic summary of his works, it does have a point that resonates in that Sci-Fi claims to look at the possibility of possible futures (and indeed does sometimes pull it off) but more often than not, the author has no experience of a future and so goes back to what he knows: existing stories where a couple of elements are changed to suddenly make it sci-fi (e.g. Gravity no longer works)
Anyway, I see many parallels in the gaming industry, even among the more innovative games, they are relying on old plots (Save the princess) and elements, trying to be re-worked with one or two elements changed and then claiming to be entirely new!
If it was entirely new, nobody would know what to make of it and it wouldn't get published.
Creativity is never perfect.
Far Cry is a great game and gives you a lot of latitude, but the levels are still levels with entrances and exits, and progression is somewhat enforced. For example your objective is indicated by an arrow and for the most part, that's the way you must go. Often this is forced on you by steep walls, cliffs, or insta-deaths if you try going out of the game zone. The best zones in Far Cry are where you *don't* have to follow a path and there might be several ways to get to the objective, but some levels are certainly not like that.