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Games We've Never Seen Before
anaesthetica writes "The Christian Science Monitor is carrying a story on new directions in game design. The article notes that big gaming companies are not pushing innovation beyond taking advantage of newer hardware. New areas of innovation are coming from education, training, and online communities." From the article: "Online games have the potential to transform entertainment into a global-community exercise, breaking down borders, cultural and language barriers, and even political prejudices...I doubt any other form of entertainment holds out that promise...We have only scratched the surface of what [interactive entertainment] can be."
Perhaps there'll be a game in which players need to learn a new language? Talk about replay value. That'd be awesome though.
~Ilyanep
To get message, take amount of carrier pigeons at each stage mod 2. Then decode binary.
Huh... I thought Quake did so well because the bodies blew up real neat. Maybe thats only my reason for playing... As far as nobody doing anything doing anything new, this is only half true. While there is less innovation in the PC game market, this is exactly what Nintendo hopes to do with their new system. They want to create new genres and new ways of playing games. This is already evident on the DS and soon on the Revolution (or whatever they end up calling it). I think that Nintendo will be the first to make the innovative moves in relation to online play as well.
I disagree, Doug. I have to make these choices in life -- I play games to escape life. That's what you guys have been doing WRONG this WHOLE TIME. Make a game where I can escape into a terrific story that lets me showcase myself and MY PERSONAL TALENT. I'll pay for THAT game. Not your moral ethics quandaries... they are simply boring to me.
But you sir are not everyone, I certainly do like playing games where I can make ethical choices, ie be a complete evil bastard which im not in real life. For example KOTOR and KOTOR II, I find it highly entertaining when I choose the darkside options.
I disagree, Doug. I have to make these choices in life -- I play games to escape life. That's what you guys have been doing WRONG this WHOLE TIME. Make a game where I can escape into a terrific story that lets me showcase myself and MY PERSONAL TALENT. I'll pay for THAT game. Not your moral ethics quandaries... they are simply boring to me.
The question is, how large a percentage of the market do people like you represent? I enjoy the types of games you have described, but I get much deeper into the games that Doug has described. They are both good game development paths, and really aren't that much different. I would buy a game that tests my sense of ethics and views of the world over one in which I get to show myself or whatever "mad skillz" I have off. I don't always want to escape life, and really enjoy games that are more a "part" of the many aspects of life. Knights of the Old Republic 1/2 are very good examples of these types of games.
But, as you almost said, that's just me. There is no one type of game that is a good game, even considering gameplay style and genre, as you have. I could say "a good game has a good story," but that is only a part of it. A good game is much more than that, and, as with everything else, no game can be universally good to everyone.
It's all relative, sparky.
...because the game I'm most looking forward to, Spore, is entirely comprised of elements of past games. Being innovative isn't everything. Sometimes, it's how you make the game.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
I think the whole "interactive media is the future of education" is totally off target. Video games and other interactive media will never surpass textual resources for quality. Furthermore most interactive media fosters ignorance because its not free software, which means you can't study it to see how it works. Are we going to have a future of learning tools whose very functioning is a secret? Give me a book any day. You can have your flash, video games, and propreitary applications.
When I first started using computers back in college, the thing that struck me the most was not the number crunching power, but its usefulness as a communications tool when coupled with the internet and the usenet groups of the time and of course email. I thought it was really cool being able to discuss anything with people down the block or on the other side of the planet. I spent a lot of time doing just that.
/. afterall), but in virtual worlds I can experiment and be more than I am in real life. That's the hook that I think will keep people coming back. Allow people to do more interesting things in virtual communities with each other (not just blowing each other up) and they'll keep coming back. What shape will these things take? I don't know, but almost anything you can do with friends is better than doing it alone with NPCs.
Since that time, the depth of virtual worlds has only increased and holds real potential for providing the environment for new game experiences. I play games to escape reality and do fantastic things that I cannot do in real life. And being able to do those things with other real breathing people is the thing that keeps me coming back. Now I'm not the most social person in the world (hey this is
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
when the state sees your recreation as a means of getting proper thoughts in your head.
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
Its nice to think about how games can break down cultural, national and racial barriers. However, they can also amplify them.
Case in point: the popular new game Guildwars.
For reasons that might have been innocuous at the time, the designers decided to pit region against region in battles for the "Hall of Heroes". The 3 main regions are America, Korea, and Europe. Whichever region has the most wins on its side has the 'favor of the gods' and this is announced after every battle.
This decision has engendered incredible racism and nationalism. Spouting of slurs is incessant. American teams gang up on Korean teams to keep them from getting the favor of the Gods. They accuse the Koreans of cheating [belied by the fact the America is always in favor], and the Europeans of being cheese eating wimps. They fling hate like a frisbee, and they rationalize their horrible behavior because, I suppose, the Gods are on America's side.
It's an ugly sight. With the only basis being an artificial division in a made up game for the favor of made up gods.
The bottom line is that you have to follow the money. We are in a era when game companies are being bought, merging, and growing fast. As game companies get bigger, innovation slows. This is the same with all companies. First you come up with some great ideas, then you put those ideas out in the real world and make a huge amount of money off them. Then you refine your process and repeat until it becomes a cash cow, and only attempt to alter the process as market fluctuates. During this latter time you aren't innovating that much, just slowly evolving. This is the nature of all business.
Unfortunately as any entertainment industry grows, the market for edgy and unique games gets further and further marginalized. The populace wants more of what they had last year, only bigger and better. Why do you think the summer blockbuster movie season looks the same every year? Because this is what a majority of people want and/or what they are willing to see.
You have to start scouring the net for smaller software companies online, much like you have to visit art house cinema deep in major cities to find the truly great movies of the year. It woul be nicer if the economy was more like the pre year 2000 era when all these obnoxiously crazy ideas were out there and tons of venture capital was available to try them out, and the best ideas survived. We lost that era and now all those companies are merging with each other and not coming up with risky new ideas.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Online games have the potential to transform entertainment into a global-community exercise, breaking down borders, cultural and language barriers, and even political prejudices
Ouch, man, have you ever actually ever seen an online game going on? Breaking down prejudices is the last thing going on. What are you, some kind of mexican jew lizard?
Personally, I do not think online-playable games are the place to look for real change in video games. Online games require infrastructure-- sometimes not much, sometimes a lot. Sometimes you can cut down almost entirely on how much infrastructure you need by some clever design, such as Spore uses. But in general you're going to have additional costs for an online-play game. And the greater those costs are, the more risk-adverse the developer-- or more specifically the people funding the developer-- will become. MMORPGs in particular, since they require a fantastic amount of infrastructure, are probably the most homogenous, unsurprising, boring portion of the entire game market.
But we are seeing some interesting backlash against the whole risk-averse thing, and some really interesting things are beginning to emerge. Interestingly, most of the really interesting things right now seem to be in the budget title area. The game I probably got the most out of that I've gotten recently is this absolutely bizarre nintendo DS thing called "electroplankton". I imported this from Japan about a month ago on the assumption that it would never be released in America, only to find a couple weeks ago that... it's planned to come out in America now. But anyway. It isn't really even a game, exactly. It's just ten little generative music toys where you mess with the touchscreen and automatically generated music results. But it's fun as hell. I play with this thing for days at a time without getting bored, while if you passed me your average full-price FPS I'd spend eight hours playing through the single player campaign once and then throw it away forever, since I'd seen all there was to see (of course, I paid full price for electroplankton since I imported, but anyhow).
I don't think this kind of reaction is unique to me. I'm curious what's going to happen when people start to realize they have more fun with quick cheap katamari damacy or tetris like games, than they do with the current trendy video games that are basically high-budget interactive movies that, were we judging them by the standards of movies and not video games, would not be very good ones.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I definitely agree with your comments about moral/ethical choices.
If I'm playing a game vs a computer then from my point of view there is no immoral or unethical choice because no other human is getting a bad deal, it's only a game.
However if I'm playing something like WoW and my choice is to kill the lowbie in 2 seconds then I have to make an ethical choice to do it or not since it will inconvinience another real-life person. It still doesn't require much thought on my part, if killing them will help me do my current quest (ie keep them from ganking me) then I have no problem with doing it. It's only a game.
The article make it sound like moral/ethical choices are hard, granted in real life things aren't always clear cut but in a game the stakes are so low that it's not worth working yourself up so much that you're having trouble sleeping!
There are new and innovative types of games around. People still like FPS style games and are buying them, when people stop buying them then I'm sure the game makers will find something new for everyone to play.
Just ask Codemasters.
It's very risky to come out with a game that breaks the mold, but every once in awhile some upstart crack team of developers comes out with a game that doesn't quite fit into any of the pre-defined Genres, and becomes very popular.
Case in point - Operation Flashpoint
Flashpoint took away three solid years of my life, and nothing has been able to even come close to matching up with it since its release.
Now Codemasters, the company who distributed Operation Flashpoint has become impatient with the developers of Operation Flashpoint, so they have decided to hire their own developers to write the sequel - Operation Flashpoint 2. Since Codemasters' contract gave them the rights to the Operation Flashpoint name, BIS, the original developers of Operation Flashpoint have been forced to change the name of the sequel they are working on and find another distributor.
The original Operation Flashpoint actually took four years to develop and was continually patched and updated for another three years after its release.
Codemasters is sure to develop their sequel in a quarter of the time, which will inevitably lead a sequel that is complete and utter rubbish - probably just another battlefield 1942 rip-off.
Many will end up buying Operation Flashpoint 2 without realizing that the game isn't made by the same people that made the first one. The core Operation Flashpoint fan base has already made their views know on the itnernet - they won't be buying Codemaster's sequel.
Armed Assault it is!
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Most people are like me: buy a few games a year and that is it. When I get a game I expect it to be good because I'm stuck with it. (Returning a game is hard after you open it, not to mention the hassle of a special trip back to the store)
I cannot afford a copy of every game made this year. Even if I could I do not have enough free time to play them. So I buy games that I can trust because earlier versions have been good. I wouldn't mind an innovative game, but I don't like all types of games, and I don't want to make a mistake.
3d immersive shooters have only really been around since Quake came out, for about a decade
,Monkey Island and to an lesser extent; Myst, stay with you for life. We need more cool adventure games with brilliantly rendered 2D interfaces and some sort of evolution of the SCUMM engine!
:)
Only? The games industry has only existed in the mainstream for about twenty five years, a decade is a huge about of time in gaming, theres no "only" about that sort of time frame. They say a week is a long time in politics, a month is a long time in gaming.
Furthermore, Counter-Strike's model was little different graphically from the Half Life engine it was born out of. The fundamental differences the game possesses rely solely on the perceived "realism" (ie. bullet paths, death from just a few shots, limited jumping and so forth). Aswell as the scenarios, hostage rescue or bomb plant.
NO mainstream FPS has or is going towards that model of gaming (there have only been some lesser-known niche market FPS's that incorporate CS style play), most FPS's stick to the traditional Quake formula. That you have quite ample health, and plenty of weapons to blast apart anything, leaving hundreds of alien corpses in your wake. Half Life 2 is a prime example, despite the physics, the bells and the whistles, it was fundamentally a jazzed up Quake with snipers.
Personally, for me games in general have lost a lot of what made them truly great back in the day. Its very true that most of the budgets are gone into graphical design, the stories are but an afterthought leaving much to be desired...
Monkey Island for one is an awesome game full of humour, satire and general fun and games. The graphics are still beautiful in their own colourful, pixelated way...and you get a memorable experience. Nobody recalls more than one level of Quake. Whereas games that have tales to tell like FF7
Seriously, who doesn't remember that weird variation of that "Knee Bone" song performed by Guybrush's deceased parents in Monkey 2?
The virtual girlfriend is high-maintenance. She needs to be called frequently, expects her text messages to be answered, and wants to be bought gifts, for real money. Otherwise she gets annoyed.
"Because nobody is inventing anything new."
If you really feel this way, you should check out the new game Psychonauts. Easily the most creative computer game I've played in the last ten years.
Addictive game and utterly bizarre. Various missions involve finding a milkman, destroying a city of fish, playing Risk with Napolean and floating through a pinball disco. Game of the Year easily.
I totally agree! I miss Full throttle, Simon the Sorcerer, The Dig and games like that. Games are much better "cartoon style", because then it looks right.
Check out Psychonauts for the Xbox (and PC I'm told) . It's created by the guy who did Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. I describe it as Mario 64 meets Prince of Persia (sands of time) with an incrediable amount of time and effort put into the story, characters and puzzles. It's my pick for Game of the Year
Eric