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Game Industry Has Lost Its 'Spark'?
Gamasutra is running a short interview with game designer Chris Crawford. The discussion in the article centers around Crawford's assertion that the games industry is no longer a creative place. "I haven't even seen any new ideas pop up. The industry is so completely inbred that the people working in it aren't even capable of coming up with new ideas anymore. I was appalled, for example, at the recent GDC. I looked over the games at the Independent Games Festival and they all looked completely derivative to me." I'm not sure I agree. What do you think? Is there anything creative left in the games industry, or are we going to be playing Halo 6 and Final Fantasy XVII ten years from now?
Yeah, but only after the refractory period.
Seriously Chris Crawford cracks me up. "I've been working on this for 14 years and NO ONE has ever done anything like it!" Apparently the man doesn't know what a MUD is (a real MUD, not one that is all about kill-loot-sell-repeat), and he's never heard of White Wolf either. Seriously, like... wtf. The guy goes ON and ON about rehashing old ideas and recylcing things... people improving but not actually innovating. Look in the mirror, man.
Almost on a daily basis someone in a forum will say that games are stagnant and lack innovation.
To that i say bull...
Games don't lack innovation, people fail to even try the most innovative games or to even find the innovation in a game.
People always seem to think that "innovation" should equal "revolution" in gaming. People are just waiting for the "next" big thing that is just isn't coming anytime soon:
- Text-based games to static-graphic games.
- Static-graphic games to dynamic 2D graphics with sound.
- Dynamic 2D graphic with sound games to polygonal "3D" games.
- Polygonal "3D" games to ???
It's the ??? that people confuse with innovation.
True "Innovation" comes in small doses...
A game like Halo: yes, it's YET another FPS. It introduced a couple of concepts that made for overall good gameplay.
A game like the Original Doom: very similar to other games that came before, it introduced better level designs and a perspective of height.
The game Life Line: Used almost exclusively vocal commands to control a character in a survival horror game. Innovative... even if it failed to work properly.
The game Indigo Prophecy: Multiple endings to every scene. Player action impact on overall story. It was done before, but this game took it to an entire new level. It was a main aspect of the game rather than a simple afterthought.
Other developpers take these small innovations and include them in their games... Over the course of years, this is the innovation that amount to something.
Comparing Top Spin 2 to the old Tennis game on the NES, i can't help but think that it's not only graphics that have changed. The gameplay has too.
If you want to look at this as a problem, then yes, it's clearly the fault of the consumers. People only buy FPS, RTS and MMORPG games, so that's exactly what they're going to get. Developers won't make games that won't sell. I don't know what you mean by the MGS2 outrage, but I can imagine what would have happened if Half-Life 2 would have been radically different from the first game... the fans would have probably been angry. They don't want change, yet at the same time they cry about the lack of innovation.
Chris Crawford seems like a person who contributes nothing, but complains a lot. He also has some very strange ideas about things:
If new ideas don't go anywhere, what's the point of innovation?
Well gee, let's think about this: during the 80s, the industry was pretty much getting started, and many of the genres we have today didn't even exist. Also, the primitive graphics required developers to come up with a solid gameplay idea. Nowadays you can easily get away with recycling an old idea, but repackacking it with good graphics and sound. Of course, it's not like they didn't recycle ideas in the 80s...
Sims? World of Warcraft? Second Life? Sports games? Racing games? I should think that they reach out to the "general public" (what does this even mean, exactly?) well enough.
According to Mobygames, he hasn't done anything related to video games for fourteen years, except that storytronics stuff. Also, "innovation" is a retarded buzz word that doesn't mean anything, just like "next gen."
Is it daily now that we get a story about how
- the games industry is dying
- there's no creativity in games any more
- nobody's buying games
- nobody likes games
?Huh?
Yet WoW has passed 6 million users, an utterly-unheard-of number in the MMOG world. The computer/electronic games industry (which didn't EXIST prior to what, 1975?) is now bigger than Hollywood. More people than ever play games, to the point that we're generationally reaching the point where the 'mainstream' of society are electronic gamers.
If this is failure, what's success?
Like any industry, in it's fledgling decade there was a great deal of innovation (much of it sucked), success (and failure), and a non-zero-sum universe of customers. There used to be companies like Studebaker, Packard, Nash, and Hudson, too. Like every industry, there are periods of innovation and expansion, and periods of consolidation and centralization. It's the capitalist equivalent of breathing.
If we're exhaling now (and I'm not convinced we are), relax. The industry will inhale soon enough.
-Styopa
It depends what kinda new thing you're looking for. If you're going to make comparisons just on theme then you can always find similarities. "Hey look, there's nothing new - they're all just shapes and stuff moving on the screen!"
If Spore really works as advertised then the reason it will be somewhat different is because everything is procedural. You get to design your own creature and the system makes it walk or swim or whatever based on the mechanics of the body parts. It's not limited to a preset number of creatures that the game designers thought of in advance.
I think this represents the true path to innovation in the game industry - making things open-ended. This is hard and it will come slowly. I remember a PS2 game a while back called "Red Faction" that was supposed to be different because the environment was supposed to be modifiable. In other words you could do things like shoot the walls and pieces would fall off. But in reality, I found it to be just like every other FPS. Modifying the environment only really helped when the designers had already thought of it in advance.
Just think of all the ways you could make a game open ended. Modifying characters is one. Modifying the world could also be cool in different ways. Then you could do all kinds of things with open ended story line as technology improves. That will be really hard but I think it will happen to some degree eventually.
Once we've got this kind of AI, I also think there is the potential to use games to improve education and society in general. Read The Diamond Age, for example. Anyway, I don't think game creativity will plateau for a long time.
... rice, rice, gravy
He was good in his day, but he just doesn't have it any more. His ideas for "innovation" are basically old style adventure games with dialogue trees. I apologize, he did have one idea that was more of the Sims than of an adventure game. At best, his ideas are TES4:Oblivion, but that's pushing it.
He's done, his day is over, but he just doesn't want to admit it.
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
You clearly weren't listening to him very properly, because the things you mentioned (dialogue trees?? Oblivion?) are the last things he wants to do. If you read more into the subject, either from his books, his website, other articles, or even other articles about interactive storytelling written by other people, you'd see something completely different.
yep high costs are a barrier to innovative games. But there is hope, maybe someday some easy game creator kit will be developed which is only as complex as photoshop and still allow one to create innovative games easily.
...what matters is what you like, not what you are like...