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."

Comments

Make Something New

[mfh]

Video-game industry mulls over the future beyond shoot-'em-ups

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.

"We need games with better stories, more interesting and complex characters; games that keep you up at night wrestling with whether you made the right ethical or moral choices," says Doug Lowenstein, president of the Entertainment Software Association (ESA).

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.

Re:Make Something New

[Hellad]

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.

Re:Make Something New

[mrchaotica]

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.

I don't know about that -- I like the kind of game that makes me think, for the same reason I like Science Fiction: it's something more interesting to think about than everyday life.

Re:Make Something New

[TheKidWho]

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.

Re:Make Something New

[compass46]

As someone who actually reads the newspaper regularly, no I wouldn't expect such a simplistic idea from them...

The Christian Science Monitor tends to be one of the more liberal newspapers in the US. I wouldn't classify them ideologically with papers like the Washington Times. The CSM is also not about spreading the the Christian Science church's doctrine. It was started by Mary Baker Eddy to provide fair and accurate reporting. This was a response to attacks on her from a Joseph Pulitzer newspaper.

For a more indepth explnation:
http://www.csmonitor.com/aboutus/about_the_monitor .html

Geez

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Geez

[UserChrisCanter4]

I'm going to pick on AC here for a minute, because every time any article such as this is posted, people trot out the ol' "Gameplay rules over graphics argument."

You're correct. Gameplay does trump graphics. In a purely theoretical world, if given choice A or B, almost everyone would choose gameplay over graphics. Fortunately, we don't live in that world.

Further, when people create this dichotomy, they ignore the fact that graphics have an enormous amount of power in enabling good gameplay. Without the simple hardware power increases of the last five years, many of the great games from that same timeframe wouldn't have happened.

Take Grand Theft Auto 3/Vice City/SA, for example. People love the storylines, and the satirical look at the world, but both of those chracteristics were present in GTA 1 and 2. Neither of those games was particularly succesful at all compared to the last three. The sense of immersion was provided by a major jump in graphical capability that afforded the developers the ability to create an extremely immersive environment. In GTA 2, you could still choose to abide by the laws or mow down pedestrians, take alternate missions as you desired, and run amok with a gun or just listen to humorous radio DJs. The only difference was that the whole game took place from a top-down perspective. Arguably, every gameplay aspect of Grand Theft Auto would be do-able on a Sega CD, but I guarantee you it simply wouldn't be as much fun. I enjoy GTA 2, but it can't come close to holding my interest like GTA 3.

Or we'll take Katamari Damacy, a game that will entertain almost anyone. The gameplay and quirky charm is what draws everyone in, but I'll lay straight out that said gameplay simply wouldn't have been possible with the graphical power of the PS1. Seeing individual objects rolled up in the katamri wouldn't be possible. Without the smooth zooming transitions of the camera, the gameplay and control would suffer significantly. Critics would refer to it as a solid idea that was poorly executed, and they'd be absolutely correct. Again, gameplay here is great, but it relies on the graphical capability of good hardware to make it work.

There are still plenty of simple gameplay improvements left to tweak that will rely on quality graphical capability. I want to see truly, totally deformable environments in an RTS. I want to be able to blast through a building to create an alternate path for my units, or fell that building to block the advance of enemy troops. I want randomized chunks of metal flying off of an exploding tank that can wound surrounding personnel. Realistically, both of those ideas could be implemented in a simple top-down strategy game, but they won't have that truly realistic feel until I can see the size of the building in relation to the troops, or until I can shoot out the corner to drop a chunk on te enemy. Just like GTA would be do-able on a SegaCD, those ideas would be do-able in the original Command and Conquer, but they're not going to have that same truly satisfying feel until they're implemented in full 3D with the proper accompanying physics.

FPSes would benefit from those same characteristics, so it's not as though they're immune from this issue, either. Yes, gameplay is king, but please don't create an argument that forces graphics to the other side. Many gameplay ideas simply need good quality graphics behind them before they can be properly implemented.

Wha does this mean?

[xquark]

"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

Breaking Down Borders

[ilyanep]

Perhaps there'll be a game in which players need to learn a new language? Talk about replay value. That'd be awesome though.

Re:Breaking Down Borders

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps there'll be a game in which players need to learn a new language?

Everyone in the world could learn to speak English... well, almost eveyone - I've given up on the Americans.

Christian Science Monitor?

[StikyPad]

I'm still waiting for Billy Graham's Bible Blaster.

"Convert the heathens!"

A game I would like to see

[suso]

I would like to see a game where you take on religious zealots.

Re:A game I would like to see

[imroy]

Yeah! Militant Muslims versus Crusading Christians. Then buy the expansion pack to play as the Ultra Orthodox Jews.
And it'll be called.... The Middle East!

</cheapshot>

Joining the army no longer required

[nizo]

Online games have the potential to transform entertainment into a global-community exercise, breaking down borders, cultural and language barriers, and even political prejudices...

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 feel funny...

[FuturePastNow]

...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.

Art vs. Concept

[NickHydroxide]

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

[harlemjoe]

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.

Over

[101percent]

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.

Re:Over

[NanoGator]

" Video games and other interactive media will never surpass textual resources for quality."

Erm okay. I don't buy that as an absolute. Teaching requires interacting with the student. Textual resources offer some interesting abilities here. However, it's not a safe assumption that this is correct every single time. I've actually watched kids pick up and grasp ideas they couldn't get from a book from simple Apple II games. Why did it work? a.) It was made interesting to the kids and b.) the games presented the information in a way the kids could really quickly wrap their minds around. Text books are fine and dandy, but they're not a one-size-fits-all approach.

"Give me a book any day. You can have your flash, video games, and propreitary applications."

Give me all of the above. A mix of all three has led me to indepdent study. Right now, I'm an animator for a full-length animated movie. Books got me interested in the story making process. TV/Movies got me interested in how the visuals are captured. (Special FX, filming actors, etc.) Video games got me interested in interaction and UI design. So now I'm writing tools to make the process smoother.

Nothing wrong with having multiple options.

All is not sweetness and light

[rufusdufus]

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.

Re:All is not sweetness and light

[DroopyStonx]

Here's a bit of what I call "the truth":

If anyone's racism or nationalism is even REMOTELY affected by something like Guildwars and the "Favor of the Gods" message, then they are fucking idiots.

The end.

The Christian Science Monitor is NOT Christian

[meatflower]

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.

As companies grow, innovation slows

[hellfire]

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.

Hmm

[mcc]

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.

But this has happened!

[NeoOokami]

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!

Re:Descent

[lnjasdpppun]

Descent was an awesome game and it highlights a problem I see with the game industry, or maybe the game audience.

Because it was *full* 3D in that you could move in any direction no restrictions at all, people had trouble learning to play it. I could easily beat semi-new players 50-0 if I cared to because they couldn't move properly in a 3D space (and my mentor could easily beat me 50-10 if he wanted). I have a demo of me flying rings around someone killing them with flares... Because it was hard to learn how to play people didn't spend time on it and it wasn't as sucessful as other games such as Doom/Quake.

I see this problem in other games too, like Natural Selection, it's a great game but it's very complicated and people don't spend the time learning how to play it. Complicated games will never become as popular as the flavour of the month straight FPS.

Counter-Strike is the most popular game on the internet because it's easy to figure out what to do and it has a low "skill-multiplier" ie its fucked up hitboxes (and spray weapons) add a large amount of randomnes to the game which replaces part of the skill required with pure random luck. Quake3 is pretty easy to figure out, but it has a high skill-multiplier so the newbies hardly get kills. Since they can't get kills they leave and play something like CS because not getting kills isn't much fun.

heard it before

[jkmartin]

...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.

As a game developer,

[Aggrav8d]

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.

Everytime I hear this...

[edremy]

I'm reminded of the old saying that there are only 7 book plots. I've got a freaking house full of books despite the fact there hasn't been any real innovation in content, story or characterization for a hundred years or more.

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.

Three words...

[andy55]

World of PornCraft.