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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.
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
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?"
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.
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
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
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)
I have to agree. I've been reading John C. Dvorak since the 80's, and I tend nowadays to look at his columns as more 'humor' than 'editorial.'
This guy has always wanted to be the Nostradamus of the computer industry, but I don't think I can count on one hand the number of his predictions that's actually been true. He's been in the ballpark a few times, but he tends to blow things ridiculously out of proportion.
I don't agree that the gaming industry is going to face a 'meltdown', but certainly it needs to continue innovating if it's going to continue growing. But that's true of any industry. I do see his point that most games have fallen into a rut of rehashing the same handful of genres, but this will hardly lead to a collapse of the market - more likely it will just mean less *new* gaming demographics. Most consumers have already seen what the majority of games have to offer, and to effectively acquire those segments of the market that have already blown off video games, you need to be able to find something new that appeals to them.
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
----
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.
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...
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...
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
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?
Perhaps they read the book before they watched the movie, and expected something intelligent. It was a serious book that was absolutely ruined, after all. Kind of like I, Robot.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
That's funny, because when I saw it back in high school, I got the message immediately.
I guess some people need their preachy messages to be blatantly over-the-top in order to be considered worthy *rolls eyes*
I don't know about you, but I think we could use some more subtlety nowadays.
Cheesy as hell, but I think Verhoeven does it deliberately, commenting on both the movie industry and people in general taking themselves too seriously.
Likewise, there are always odd sexual references, like the Bugs who fire giant flourescent streams of jism into space.
The shower scene is an extraordinarily provocative mix of military politics, fear of intimacy, and that excruciating "take turns to introduce yourself" thing that people are forced to do by well-meaning trainers.
Verhoeven doesn't cleanly delineate his commentary like some producers but that's all part of the fun & craziness of it all.
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....
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?