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A New Golden Age of Gaming?
Calathea writes "The BBC has an interview with 'Elite' legend David Braben where he talks about the next generation of games that will herald a golden age and equates them with Hollywood of the 30s." From the article: "A similar transition happened in the early 1930s in the film industry. In the 1920s, films were almost pure spectacle, and that spectacle became ever more extreme to keep the audiences coming back - cars skidded around towns, people dangled and fell from buildings, cars were forever being smashed to pieces on railway crossings. The stories were light-weight justifications for linking the dramatic moments together ... But it opened the door for the golden age of film, where Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd gave way to Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles in the 1930s. With hindsight the contrast is immense, and I think we are on the cusp of a similar change in the games industry."
If this is what comes after the golden age, I'm not sure I want that to happen.
I'd argue that the golden age in gaming, comparable to the movies of the 30's, was the NES-era. The NES opened up gaming in ways that was unheard of before and Nintendo's dominance of the market remains unrivaled today. The current gaming era more closely resembles the movie industry today, with bloated budgets and the emphasis on special effects over substance and style.
It's not like you can predict a golden age anyway. You can only objectively define a golden age in hindsight long after that era is over.
Braben prefers to keep monetizing works like Elite. I'm more of an Ian Bell fan, if only because he has the balls to make the original Elite free.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
I haven't read the article yet, and I am not going to dispute his point, BUT one should realize that the summary compares silent film stars to directors of largely talking pictures. Silent film is almost an entirely diferent media than film with a synced audio track.
People consider the 'classic' era of great games has come and gone. The reality is games were so simple then that a great one could really stand out. There wasn't much to compare besides pure gameplay.
Now games are judged on Dolby 5.1 sound, 1080i graphics, broadband online abilities, and gameplay. It is harder for a great game to stand out because there are so many different elements to master that appeal to so many different people. Add this to the fact that the gaming industry is booming creating massive competition and things get really blurry.
If we aren't in a golden age, oh well. Madden 2006 on 360 may not have the best gameplay of any football game (I think it does) but the surround sound and native wisdescreen HDTV graphics makes an amazing gaming experience.
The stories were light-weight justifications for linking the dramatic moments together
So what he says is that games are now so bad that they can only get better in the future?
Hosting 20G hd, 1Tb bw! ssh $7.95
Movies were original then.
e tto-Part-Eleven"l ay-Soldier-Here-At-Home-Part-Five."
We're stuck with gems like:
"Run-Down-the-Hallway-and-Shoot-It-Part-Six"
"Suburban-WhiteBoys-Pretending-They're-from-da-Gh
"Not-Enough-Guts-to-Join-the-Army-but-Enough-to-P
If by "Golden Age" he means games worth pissing on, then yeah, I'd say MS & Sony are bringing it on..
I thought the groupthink was that we're heading for a gaming crash.
If someone made an online multiplayer Elite for the PS2, my social life would be devastated.
Why aren't there any Elite-like games for PS2?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
The article is just PR for a game called "The Outsider." Don't bother.
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
This article seems to become a commercial at the end for this guys game. The author thinks the key to next gen games are more interaction. Maybe. I would like to see someone make a 3D "game" that is nearly totally passive. It is no longer a game, but a piece of cinema. You may make a few choices, for instance to change the ending or to make something less violent. You may get the option to watch the drama or comedy unfold from "spectator mode", so you can view the action from different angles and distances. Or you can view it from predetermined camera views, your option.
Journal
I thought it would be something like that (see my previous comment).
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Reminds me of a Paul Graham article.
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
The new "Golden Age" of gaming is when the detail is so high we can't tell the difference between live video and the graphics (generated in real time) we see on the screen.
I've give it two more generations before we see this... (PS5 and XBOX4)
Of course this might entail that we've reach the computational power of the singularity. Actually, I think when a games physics engine includes the Heisenberg uncertainty principal then we can say we've reach the golden age of gaming.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Future games just have to take a cue from Deus Ex, the first one (not the second one). You could have a repitition of maps, with different figures in different places, the advancement of the main character, and with a good story to bind them all together, these things become a very entertaining item.
Think "Rear Window."
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
While the tech for gaming might be getting better and better, there is the problem of expense. It costs a ton to make textures, etc. as we all know. That means titles are more of a financial risk. Which leads to... Focus Groups! Every publisher will be trying out new games on a room full of teens in a Southern California mall and "refining" the game based on the results.
Unless, of course, they are doing that now...
Actually, now that you mention it, that would be kind of neat.
At first, I thought: "Passive game? That's just like a movie without the flesh -- boooooring"
But then I thought: What if you have a little world which you can explore, where multiple stories unfold simultaneously. And you're like a ghost, flying around, following people, eavesdropping on them, seeing what they're doing, watching the stories of your choice unfold. Night-time comes, your character of choice goes to sleep, what do you do for 7 hours? Fly over to the bank where there's a robbery in-progress. You could easily have several weeks' worth of scripted storytelling.
Plus, there's very decent replayability value, since you could explore each story separately and their intricate interactions (similar to movies like Go, where the story is told completely differenly from 3 different characters' persectievs).
Then, once this medium of storytelling is mastered (should be rather tricky, intertwining and synchronizing the world like that), they could start adding minute possibilities for interaction. Later on, you could become part of the story by playing a character (think racting, like in Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson).
Lots of potential, indeed.
- shazow
Braben makes the oh-so-common mistake of comparing the development of film to games. But while there are certainly patterns to the development of a media format, their very format changes their maturation. Radio and TV developed very differently than film, for a variety of reasons. Likewise, so will (and have) games.
Perhaps the greatest weakness of Braben's argument for a "golden age" is that the type of games he believes will populate this golden age already exist. He writes that "[the] game character's objectives are defined rather than the overarching story narrative, to allow the story to unfold in response to the player's actions." He derides his own game, Elite, by saying it only hinted at this freedom. But I can think of other older games, like Pirates! or Ultima or Starflight or even Simcity, where the player does exactly what Braben suggests will happen in his next game.
Secondly, Braben chastises recent games for putting the player on "pre-defined railway-lines." Ok. Sounds good. But then the harbinger of this new age, his own The Outsider, apparently has its own railway-line: "This is a thriller where the player begins by being accused of a terrible crime but can respond in many different ways, from getting revenge, to proving his innocence, to joining the secret organisation that came after him." Seems like I was presented with similar choices in games like Elite or Pirates. So there are branches in the railway, but it's still a railway. What made GTA so fun for many was the player often created their own objectives. Maybe this was to kill as many innocents, or explore every nook and cranny, or make the boat jump onto land. But Braben has already up a set number of objectives. Ok, so there are 4 rather than one. Big whoop. So what makes this game better? Apparently, the very thing Braben prophesies against: graphical enhancements.
Elite certainly gives Braben some credence, and if The Outsider is anything like Elite it will probably be quite fun. But if it's open-endedness he's after, he needs to stop superimposing film onto the very different medium of the video game.
But know with digital camera's it has become far far easier to just shoot on location. Saving huge amounts of money in not having to have a studio and set building costs while at the same time being more realistic.
So how does this relate to games?
Morrowind was an open RPG placing you in a large continues world that you could freely explore. To help you find your way there were roadsigns (with gibberish text) that if you targetted them had a popup to tell you the direction.
One of the best user mods? Made use of the fact that most people had better PC then the minimum requirement and replaced all the signs textures with REAL readable text.
Of course that was a lot of work. BUT if I had known I could have easily written a simple PHP script that would have generated all the textures needed for all the signs.
Where the original signs were handcrafted, the replacement real text signs were marco'ed in photoshop I see a future game where the "artist" will only supply the look of the sign and the computer will draw in the necessary text.
The sequell to morrowind in fact already uses the computer to generate art. Supposedly the large forests you explore are computer generated. From what I seen they look beautifull and do not require an artist to place each tree and bush by hand.
Take this further and you could come to an era where the artist will have less and less work to do. In Half-Life if a wall had to show damage then the artist needed to draw a seperate texture and place it on that wall. Silent Storm had fully destrutable enviroments and some mods used this to pre-damage a building. Rather then carefully putting in holes the engine did it for the designer.
I think this is going to happen more and more. Were it is the computer itself that will adding a lot of the artwork. Think of it like this. The early vga games used seperate images to show a city at night or by day. Modern games got 1 set where the computer just changes the light levels.
Another cost saver could be the reuse of models. The mod scene already does this were you can often find one persons model of a gun in several games.
Same is true with the shift towards ragdoll physics. Before every animation of a character had to be inserted by hand. With ragdoll physics you can at least save on the death animations. Perhaps in the future even such things as walking will be created by the computer and not entered by filming an actor?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I was thinking about games and their relative merits the other day. I think what really screwed up gaming for the last few years was, more than any other single thing, the transition to 3D.
:)
3D programming is enormously more difficult than the old 2D variety. It takes an order of magnitude more programming skill and computer power to to animate and move things in 3D. But people *really like* 3D, and stopped buying 2D games.
So everyone made the transition, whether they were ready or not. This resulted in subpar games, because most of the development effort went into simply getting the 3D engines working.
As an example, look at the huge amount of gameplay that's in the Baldur's Gate series. By using a 2D engine, they were able to cram a game of immense proportions into just a few CDs. Instead of having to model and texture hundreds of critters in 3D, they could use 2D sprites instead. Result: very probably the finest RPG ever created.
At this point, the pain of the 3D transition is easing off. There are many more programmers and artists that understand it, and have optimized their workflow to support it. The canonical example is probably Civ4. Civ4 is a fully 3D game in all respects, but it offers all the power and flexibility of the old 2D games... plus a bunch of stuff you can easily do only in 3D. For the first time, we have a 3D game that trades off absolutely nothing. And it's tremendous fun.
Another example would probably be WoW, which is an incredibly deep and fun experience. There's so much content there that it compares very well with the Baldur's Gate series. There are some story issues with the world not really being malleable to individual characters, but the total experience is world-class. 500+ hours of gameplay is pretty much standard in WoW.... where with Baldur's Gate 2, even if you replay it several times, you're usually looking at no more than 100 or so.
I think, at this point, 3D has been mastered sufficiently that they can start, once again, writing Truly Great Games. 2005 was a good example of some of the stuff that's coming.... there were some phenomenal games this year. Hardly any of them were mainstream... Civ4 being the major exception. Darwinia, Space Rangers 2, Fate... just some awesome games this year. (I'm in a hurry here or I'd list some more examples... there were a TON of great games in 2005.)
I think, ultimately, that this author is exactly right. The next Golden Age is coming.... 2005 to 2010 will have games you'd have killed for if you grew up in the 70s and 80s, like us old folks.
The press just won't "get it" about games. Even game developers don't seem to get it. I saw the topic list for some game conference and one of them bemoaned the lack of innovation in gaming.
These articles follow this format: 1) Person states, "there is no innovation in gaming." 2) Audience nods because everybody likes to agree with negative criticism. 3) Same person then states, "here is my answer."
It's the standard format to force people to listen to your stupid thesis.
But really, we mustn't ignore the biggest elephant in the room right now in gaming: MMORPGs. Korea shows MMO matches on television. World of Warcraft has made over a billin dollars, and has 5 million people subscribed right now. The creation of these worlds are huge undertakings, and oftentimes require budgets larger than Hollywood blockbusters.
TFA talks about an open-ended narative? That's what World of Warcraft is! You pick and choose the quests and plotlines you want to follow. Every guild has its own character and drama and storyline as well.
TFA also talks about some supposed golden age in narratives in gaming. Please. Sure the XBOX 360 is an upgrade in graphical detail, but I think there's just something fundamental about gaming that makes it skew toward action and less to story. There have been games with great open-ended stories, but they don't sell too well, and as a result, we don't see too many of them. But then there are the MUDs, with wonderful stories. Improvements in graphics won't magically permit the innovation of open-ended narratives. If open-ended narratives were going to fly with gaming, they would already be successful, graphics are not the problem. The market is.
so TFA is just some lucky writer who found a gullible editor to promote his stupid game.
Philosophistry
It's something that exists only in the past, never in the present. It's not something that can be seen coming, because it won't even be recognized when it's here. When it does get here, it will be criticized and ridiculed until it's reduced to smouldering ashes. Some could say the Atari 2600 was the golden age because it freed us from pong. Others will say NES because it freed us from the likes of the 2600. Still others will say the 360, PS3 or Revolution because they've taken it a step further.
But the details make no difference whatsoever because the grass is not greener on the other side of the fence. It's always greener yesterday than it is today. Times are always getting worse, just ask the old timers. Some, no doubt, still think living in a medieval times in a castle was "romantic" and fighting with a sword and shield "noble" (even if living conditions back then required almost a miracle to survive). Some think the 50s was a golden age because they managed to ignore problems like prejudice and pretend there was no drug problem (even if Elvis was a pill freak and drunk). No, people will argue about golden ages forevermore, but the simply fact is they don't exist. At least not in the sense of a "heaven on earth" type scene. Instead, they exist as a part of canonization and selective memory. Something people can point to for argument's sake when their midway through their rant on whatever topic. But never something they'll truly enjoy unless it win them the argument or helps them quit complainging about how things have gone to hell for that moment in time.
>> so TFA is just some lucky writer who found a gullible editor to promote his stupid game.
TFA is David Braben, creator of Elite. Years from now, after procedural modelling of virtual worlds becomes the standard not the exception, Elite will be looked back upon as the breakthrough first example of how to generate massive worlds.
Ideas from Elite will be mentioned and discussed in lecture theatres 20 years from now.
This is entirely impossible given the current bean-counter-controlled game publishing/development system. Until the next-gen consoles are "cracked" and can run third-party, independant developer code easily, a "golden age" like we experienced in the 80's/90's can't happen.
Gaming is controlled by risk-averse corporate goons without souls. The only place you're likely to see innovation is on open computer platforms (and "open" here means any platform that has readily available development tools, where people can create and run whatever software they feel like).
Sure the odd gem will appear (c.f. Katamari Damacy), and Nintendo will continue to innovate (c.f. the DS and the many interesting games it's generated), but the vast, vast majority of games released in the foreseeable future will be recycled sequals and weak movie/TV licenses.
I think we're much more likely to see a gaming crash (like in the early 80's) before the next golden age.
- chrish
... I think we're more likely on the cusp of more John Madden, Need For Speed, NFL, Splinter Cell, LMA Manager and Colin McRae Rally sequels than the video gaming equivalent of Citizen Kane.