Slashdot Mirror
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."
3d immersive shooters have only really been around since Quake came out, for about a decade. Pretty much anything before Quake wasn't realized fully as games like Doom were missing the x/y/z components (and BSP AND lighting, for that matter).
Quake took the games industry by storm because it was the first true-3d game. Everyone had to eventually crank out their branded version of pretty much the same experience, twisted by the trends as they kept going towards the Counterstrike model of gaming.
Now we are overloaded with video game shelves filled with crap. Why?
Because nobody is inventing anything new. They are banking on what sells because the high cost of getting a new game on a shelf to begin with. This isn't the 80's when you could make two red square blocks fight a little jagged octagon shape, and bring home some big bucks doing it. You've gotta put millions into R&D and all that other jazz just to turn a profit. That's where companies like Id Software come in, who spend all their time working on the technology and only a sliver on the story anymore.
They are making it easier for games companies to get in, but you still have to come to the table with a pile of cash before you can launch anything at all. Back to LCD: Shooters.
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 dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Its not graphics and such over gameplay people. Look at FF3. That game beat all with 2d graphics. It still does. Id rather play that than over blown crap like Luigis Mansion or Mario Sunshine
"Indeed, the next generation of gaming platforms - Playstation 3, X
Box 360, and Revolution - which was the talk of this year's E3, rival
the computing power of the Pentagon"
Since when has the pentagon been a measuring stick for computing power?
Arash
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
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.
i feel so vindicated!
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
I'm still waiting for Billy Graham's Bible Blaster.
"Convert the heathens!"
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I thought Wolf3d + Dune 2 + Nethack was all we ever needed. Seems that way from all the ripoffs anyway.
The more you know, the less you understand.
I would like to see a game where you take on religious zealots.
Thats the best thing about online games: I no longer need to join the army to meet new and interesting people, and then kill them. Now I can do it from the comfort of my own living room.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I'm not sure which is more tiring, unispired games that are sequels or clones of successful titles or articles that bitch about how the game industry is stagnant and uninspired.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
...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.
The problem with the large volume of sub-par games being churned out today is the budget. From TFA, millions of dollars to develop a game is no longer unreasonable.
The problem is where this money is directed. I'm pretty sure the code monkeys at EA aren't seeing much of this. Distribution/production costs I'm sure haven't changed in the past 5 years (and if they have, I would be certain that they would have decreased). Ridiculous amounts of money are being shoved at top level executives and art designers.
If the focus is shifted from game art back into development of the actual game concepts themselves, then innovation will return. Naturally that's not to discount the necessity or preference for the look of a game, but it should never come at the cost of gameplay. This is why HL2 was received quite well, but Doom III wasn't. The latter looked slick, but all in all felt like House of the Dead in a 2 metre wide corridor. The former looked gorgeous, was amazingly engaging and interesting.
Independent development and (to an extent) open source game design can assist in these areas. Honestly, a successful publishing company would trawl the net looking for innovative independent developers, snatch them up and give them a budget to produce a game. The industry has outgrown itself and needs to consolidate to remember what games are for: FUN.
all i want to know is... when can we have adventure games back?
they can't be that expensive to develop -- i don't know about you guys but I liked guybrush threepwood better in 2D.
shooting is not too good for my enemies
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
Well technically you are right, but Doom lacked full BSP implementation -- it still had a lot of 2d "drapes".
But that was a nice try.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
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
I want a SimSlashdot game where you play the role of Cowboy Neal managing the /. website..
In this exciting new addition to the Sim line of games, which previously included SimCity and SimHospotal; you are challenged with the juggling act that is Slash Dot.
Blast through 24 different scenarios and try to keep the daily traffic level and number of posts by making sure the site has enough flamebait and re-posts to get the visitors streaming in.
This will, as usual, be released for the Phantom console.
Online games have the potential to transform entertainment into a global-community exercise, breaking down borders, cultural and language barriers, and even political prejudices...
Didn't they say that was what the internet was supposed to do?
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings
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.
In case anyone hasn't pointed it out, there are plenty of new and exciting concepts in gaming coming out all of the time.
It's just that the non-game-playing world doesn't notice much. Instead, they read articles by people who oveiously don't really play too many games complaining that gaming has become stale.
This isn't to say that the majority of games AREN'T stale, but there are still some new and interesting concepts in gaming coming out all of the time. You just have to be willing to try an obscure title from time to time.
Katamari Damacy and Yoshi Touch-n-Go are two recent games that stand out in my mind as really original ideas.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
from Wikipedia.org:
The Christian Science Monitor is an international newspaper published daily, Monday through Friday. Started in 1908 by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist, the paper does not use wire services and instead relies largely on its own reporters in bureaus in eleven countries around the world. Reporters at one time were drawn largely from church members but this no longer holds true.
Despite its name, the Monitor was not established to be a religious-themed paper, nor does it directly promote the doctrine of its patron church. However, at its founder Eddy's request, a daily religious article has appeared in every issue of the Monitor. Eddy also required the inclusion of "Christian Science" in the paper's name, over initial opposition by some of her advisors who thought the religious reference might repel a secular audience.
Make a game where I can escape into a terrific story
That's what's been missing. Good stories. I liked FF-X for example, but then it got tedious. I'd like a game with more story so that I could interact with other characters. More story, less leveling up.
"Even in a popular war game such as 'World of Warcraft,' if you have a strong character and a newbie comes into the game, you have to take care of him and help him out," he says. "The strong character gets stronger by taking care of the weaker."
Like that really happens in online games.
Quake was not the first true 3D game. Descent was fully 3d 2 years before Quake.
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"
n/t
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
When I play online games I receive all sorts of racial, nationalistic, and homophobic slurs despite the people not having the slightest clue about my race, nation, or sexual orientation. The borders are clearly gone!
...breaking down borders, cultural and language barriers, and even political prejudices.
The same things have been said about internet chat. At last we invented a medium that ignored age, sex, and location yet all we can seem to do with it is ask for age, sex, and location.
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.
I'm sick of hearing everybody say that innovation is dead and nobody is trying to innovate, for two reasons:
1. Inventing is hard. Admitedly I can only speak from personal experience based on a budget of pocket lint, hardware rivaled by 2600s, and a social life outdone by hermits.
2. There's a lot of innovation happening out there if you stop reading glossies at the 7-11 and playing multinational-controlled consoles. This is the same reason I'm tired of hearing "pc gaming is dead" FUD. Plenty of independent shareware developers are quietly pushing the boundaries and pcs are one of the only places they're allowed free reign.
Multinationals have been keeping a stranglehold on the tech specs and apis for their hardware since day one and I've been struggling to figure out why. My best guess so far is because they don't believe they would benefit if they gave up a little control. There is no evidence to prove this belief but, imho, when you're a mega corporation the mere shadow of risk is enough to send you screaming in the other direction.
If you want to see a lot of innovation check out a 48 hour game making contest, or find an indie developer's website and start hunting through the affiliates. Tucked away in those dark, mossy corners of the web are some really cool things with no eyes that wriggle and glisten.
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.
I don't care if something is "Innovative". I care if it's good. Two examples: Serious Sam and Morrowind. Was either remotely innovative? SS was a self-parody of shoot-em-ups. Morrowind was innovative only in the expanse of the game- there was nothing there that hadn't been done a dozen times before.
But both were fun. Thinking back, the last "innovative" games I really enjoyed were Thief and System Shock 2, and I'd be happy to play an SS3 or another Thief not crippled by XBox compatibility.
As far as online play transforming everything, I don't really want to play a game that requires a lot of interaction with other people around the globe- I've got two young kids, a wife, a job and a house to take care of. Every online game I've seen seems to assume that you have none of those and that you'll just spend 60+ hours a week in your guild.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
"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.
Correct me if I am wrong but most, if not all, on-line games are populated by users who log on with nicknames or anonymously. In other words, unless you were to do some serious analysis work, you probably have no idea of the skin colour, race or location of other people in the same game as you.
I get the impression that 99.9% of the human population just "gets on with it" irrelevant of skin colour and it's the politicians and publicity-seeking quangos like the Christian Science Monitor that feel the need to create racial barriers.
In a kind of related subject, on a UK radio phone in show last week, a topic was discussed concerning one of the UK National Health Service Trusts (= hospitals) that is making a decision to remove the left bibles from the cabinets next to patient beds due to the risks of inciting racial tension from non-Christian, specifically Muslim, patients. Most of the callers to the show were Muslims, all of them said that they have no problems with bibles next to bedsides, in fact most of them said they respect the bible as a "holy book". A few even commented that it's the politicians themselves trying to stir up racial tensions because they themselves have no problem with this.
I suggest the Christian Science Monitor would be better employed looking at the lack of morals and social responsibility amongst a great proportion of people in today's society rather than poking it's fat Christian nose into matters it has no knowledge about.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
World of PornCraft.
G-Force music visualization
Why do people treat it like it's a "Gameplay or Graphics" choice? Because that's the budget choice that publishers make every day, that's why.
Every extra polygon in models costs man-hours, which means dollars. Every new quest scripted into the game, or every fork in the plot if you want non-linear games, or every alternate way to solve a quest, that's dollars too. Every week spent tweaking the gameplay or balance, now that's _big_ bucks.
And it all ads up. You can't have everything.
Yes, it would be nice to live in a fantasy wonderland where developpers are given enough time and budget to make everything just right and perfect: the best possible graphics (including someone modelling all the chunks and the interiors of the buildings you want to blow holes in), _and_ the perfectly tuned gameplay, _and_ plenty of interesting and unique quests. Quite a nice fantasy, I'll admit. But in the Real World it won't happen.
In the Real World, whatever you do will be a compromise. To put extra money in X, you have to give less budget to Y. To hire an extra scripter for the quests, you give up one artist for the graphics. Or more often viceversa.
Even inside one such category it's a compromise. You could make your game as vast and full of quests like Morrowind, but on the flip side they'll be all generic fed-ex quests and all NPCs will say the same deliberately generic one-size-fits-all lines. Or you could make every quest unique and each area unique like the Tribunal expansion pack to Morrowind, but then it will be a _lot_ smaller. Or have something in between like Bloodmoon. As I've said, it's all a compromise.
But back to the "Graphics vs Gameplay" choice, that _is_ the story of the last decade straight.
What do you think was _really_ the reason why FPS exploded, while a _growing_ market like adventure games was dropped by Sierra and the rest? Yes, more people were buying adventure games than ever, yet that genre skirted with extinction. You know why? Because of that budget choice. Licensing a 3D engine, slapping together a bunch of graphics for it, and calling it a game was cheap. Scripting a complex adventure game was more expensive _and_ didn't leave you enough budget for flashy graphics to flood the screenshot sites with.
Gameplay is even more so. Coming up with something even vaguely original _and_ tweaking the gameplay and controls to be just right, is something that takes lots of testing, lots of tweaking, which all means lots of money. Licensing a 3D engine, and just putting new skins on the monsters and weapons of whatever game sold well last year, meant you had to invest exactly 0$ in gameplay. So everyone and their grandma took that route.
So there you go: _that_ is what and why some of us are ranting about. Because the "gameplay or graphics" is a choice that's very very real, and which is in fact why for a while the market was flooded with pure crap and clones.
Yes, it's gradually getting better, and in the meantime more publishers increased the budgets to sorta cover all bases, at least half-arsedly. But it's still a compromise, and still a choice they have to make: how much goes to gameplay, and how much goes to graphics.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.