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The Hookup on High-Def Gaming
Penny Arcade's semi-frequent column The Hook Up has published a new article, and this time around Stormy talks about the coming high-def revolution in gaming and the acceptance of gaming by the masses. From the article: "I'm definitely troubled about the 'dumbing-down' effect that bringing the casual gamers into our fold may have on the quality of games in the future. Sure, tight pants and big tits appeal to the hardcore elite just the same as the casual gamer, but I'm betting that Half-Life 2 on the Xbox will play a lot different than on its PC predecessor. For example, I really took it as a compliment when Valve simply threw me into the fray when I began the game. The beauty of it was that the storytellers assumed that we've all played a shooter before."
The gameplay still has to be there. It goes without saying that it doesn't matter how sexy a game looks, if it's boring to play it won't be a hit. The comments the article made about high-def giving people an advantage is interesting though - you really could get more accurate shots off with a higher res larger display. I don't think it takes into account the natural 'tunnel' that people's vision has though. On a really big screen, it's easy to miss stuff off to one side (try sitting at the front of a movie theatre and see how much of the action you're missing, to get my drift). Basically, unless someone's playing a sniper on an FPS, I don't see a huge advantage - it'll just be tradeoff of clarity in the small area you're staring at vs the guy without the clarity who can see the whole situation better. Interesting observations, anyway.
While the author is worried about console games losing the "level playing field" in terms of hardware, it certainly won't be as bad as in computer games. In computers you have a constant supply of new available upgrades, as long as you have the cash. As for the next generation of consoles, the only upgradable component will be your TV. Once everyone has HD-TVs, that's it, thats the upper limit of upgradability.
Sure, it will be a factor when the consoles are new and only a handful of people have HD-TVs, but these new TVs are the wave of the future, right? Isn't EVERYONE supposed to go out and buy a new one? Within a couple of years, a LOT more people will have HD-TV. You can't expect the hardware vendors to not include HD ability when it is right on the horizon of becoming mainstream. Heck, this could very well push more people to get that HD-TV set, so they can take advantage of new console features.
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"Blah blah, back when I got into [scene] it was so much better and more exclusive. Everyone was hardcore and there was none of this watered-down-for-the-mainstream crap."
It works for any subculture or hobby. Usually it comes from people who are too young to realize that there were always superficial aspects to whatever it is they're so concerned with, and that in 5-10 years they're going to wonder why they cared so much.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
I think it's more helpful to think of video games seriously in terms of genres, and take it from there, when speaking about the dumbing down of video games.
It's also helpful to consider that this argument has all been done before, in other media, again and again. Particularly in cinema. To resurrect a very old debate, there are those who said, and those who still argue that Star Wars constituted a dumbing down of sci-fi. Others, and I included, will contend that Star Wars does not "dumb down" serious futurist sci-fi or any genre of hard science-fiction at all, because it was never any of those things to begin with and doesn't aim at their market. Rather, Star Wars takes heroic tropes and conventions of children's literature and elements of every film genre out there, and makes of them a high quality film in a number of those genres. But to say it dumbs down sci-fi is to say it dumbs down something it isn't. To look at a fantasy hero saga in space and say it dumbs down science fiction makes about as much sense as saying that graphic novels 'dumb down' rennaissance principles of portraiture, or that modern electronica 'dumbs down' Baroque notions of musical composition or that 20th century urban architects 'dumb down' the aesthetics of greco-roman sculpture.
And the same thing is true of games and their aesthetics, in general. There have always been largely mindless video game genres, and there will always be largely mindless video game genres. Space Invaders, Pong and Demon Attack really didn't particularly inform my view of the world around me, I have to say. And there have furthermore always been games with simpler gameplay, instead favouring story, or simpler story, instead favouring action, and anywhere in between. What you'll find varies from genre to genre like night and day. What's wrong, therefore, is pointing to (just picking one of an infinite set of examples) Action Adventure genre games of the present and while pointing to them stating that they are dumbing down the D&D Dungeon Crawls of the past. There's no sense in it. Let the genres be. And finally, there will always be bad games, mediocre games, and games which simply say and do nothing of particular consequence for gaming in general. If anything, there are far, far fewer bad games today than once there were simply because budgets are too high to allow as many small titles.
I'm as orthodox a PC gamer as can be, so much so that I find myself immediately frustrated by the mere fact of not being able to easily hack and mod a console game, but I refuse to believe that console games are dumbing down gaming in general simply because when I see a simpler action game, based on an original PC RPG or RTS license, reinterpreted for console with simpler mechanics, I don't critique it as a PC RTS or PC RPG. I critique it as an action game, which has long been moreso the domain of the console than the PC. It doesn't say to me "games are getting dumber." It says to me "nothing new under the sun."