Google Sets Its Sights On Gaming, Hires Noah Falstein As Chief Game Designer

MojoKid writes "Google has its hands in every other aspect of the tech industry, so why not gaming, too? It appears as though the company is eyeing a run at the gaming market by hiring Noah Falstein as its 'Chief Game Designer.' Falstein's LinkedIn profile has been updated to reflect his new title, which is the latest in a long career. He started out in 1980 and put in time at (the recently-defunct) Lucasfilm Games as well as 3DO and Dreamworks Interactive."

Comments

I miss the good old days.

[UltraZelda64]

Gaming used to be something much smaller that gamers could really take pride in being a part of. Just Nintendo and Sega for the most part and some highly dedicated hardcore gamers. Games were actually awesome back then, until the industry went on a slow, continuing decline once Sony came in and made it mainstream. As a Nintendo fan I had a couple extra generations of truly great gaming, but these days even they almost seem to be drying up overall. And now games are so big, they're becoming more and more like typical horror movies: cheap thrills, no substance, shitty games. Meanwhile, it seems that every fucking company in existence wants to cash in on the gaming industry's success by producing more of the same old garbage, eliminating *real* gaming hardware for multi-purpose multimedia products that don't do anything well.

I had such high hopes over the years. It's a shame everything took a turn for the worst. Well, at least Nintendo still seems to be closest to their original goal--but too bad they're starting to veer off course due to pressure from their kitchen-sink competitors and retarded demands from the masses.

Re:I miss the good old days.

[flayzernax]

Gaming is here to stay, and its definitely been branded and marketed as a "lifestyle choice" whatever the fuck you want to make of that, by all means.

But there are still dedicated gaming hobbyists you just have to circulate in the right communities on line and you will find them. Look towards the modding communities. Especially those that rise up around indie games or flexible simulations like Civilization.

I think these small communities have actually benefited more then the negative points you are demonstrating.

Re:I miss the good old days.

[PopeRatzo]

I love modern poetry.

Re:I miss the good old days.

[Anubis IV]

I know what you mean. Gaming was so great for a number of years, and then this upstart company called Nintendo came in with their Mario and Donkey Kong and ruined things after the blessed time we had with Atari.

Oh, sorry, are we only being nostalgic about your childhood?

Actually, truth be told, Nintendo was the video game company of my childhood too (NES was the first console I ever played), but I think it's a little silly how nostalgia tints everything for us, since I'm guessing that people that grew up in the Playstation era feel much the same as you do, and likewise with people who grew up in the Xbox era. Yes, there are things to miss about prior generations of games, both in terms of the design of the games and the nature of the community, but there are plenty of decent games coming out today as well, and there are pockets of the community that still cater to folks who appreciate good games from yesteryear. The problem is that the good games coming out these days are simply harder to find since the amount of chaff has increased significantly, and the parts of the community that are actually awesome tend to be a bit reclusive so as not to ruin things.

Re:I miss the good old days.

[Nemyst]

Now get your sodding rose tinted glasses off and look properly. Old games were simplistic, they had almost no depth of gameplay and while they had refined that gameplay very, very well, they're in no way objectively better (or worse) than newer games. If all you do is whine that the next Call of Duty isn't your cup of tea and games were "so much better back in my day", then it's your problem entirely.

For each Call of Duty, there's a gem of a game to be found. FTL. Minecraft. VVVVVV. Terraria. Don't Starve. Stardrive. AI War. Torchlight. World of Goo. Mark of the Ninja. Magicka. SpaceChem. Frozen Synapse. Heck, even AAA games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Far Cry 3 or Company of Heroes. Figure out what you like and play it, instead of just complaining about it on the internet.

Re:I miss the good old days.

[tlhIngan]

I know what you mean. Gaming was so great for a number of years, and then this upstart company called Nintendo came in with their Mario and Donkey Kong and ruined things after the blessed time we had with Atari.

Actually, until the NES came out, gaming was DEAD.

You may have forgotten about the video game crash of the 80s where after the Atari 2600 came out, everyone and their dog was creating games for it, leading to a huge massive glut of really crappy games that everyone got tired of buying and effectively killed video games.

In fact, it was Nintendo that effectively revived it - except to prevent unlicensed third parties from producing crappy games they added DRM (the NES-001 chip) and made everyone who wanted to release a NES game go through a licensing and approval process.

And this is how we ended up with consoles where you have to pay license fees and stuff. Or how Apple decided they wanted to approve all apps for the Mac App Store and iOS App Store.

Re:I miss the good old days.

[bfandreas]

Now get your sodding rose tinted glasses off and look properly. Old games were simplistic, they had almost no depth of gameplay and while they had refined that gameplay very, very well, they're in no way objectively better (or worse) than newer games. If all you do is whine that the next Call of Duty isn't your cup of tea and games were "so much better back in my day", then it's your problem entirely. For each Call of Duty, there's a gem of a game to be found. FTL. Minecraft. VVVVVV. Terraria. Don't Starve. Stardrive. AI War. Torchlight. World of Goo. Mark of the Ninja. Magicka. SpaceChem. Frozen Synapse. Heck, even AAA games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Far Cry 3 or Company of Heroes. Figure out what you like and play it, instead of just complaining about it on the internet.

The games of the 90ies were simpler but that doesn't mean they had no depth. Take for instance something like Lemmings. You had(if memory serves right) 10 different types of Lemmings and you had to use them to get them from A to B. Doesn't get simpler than that. Yet the gameplay had a lot of depth because there usually were a couple of ways to beat a level.

On the other hand you have games like the later Assassins Creed, Arkham City, LA Noire...
These games do not have more depth than the simpler ones. They have more activities. It's like they wanted to build a theme park for their gamers. Have a tower defense minigame in your murder simulator. Have badly done car chases in your point&click adventure. Have a Superman64 inspired fly-through-hoops thing in your action brawler. I don't see where they offer more depth. Rather more width, so to speak. And in some cases the multitude of activities do work and in other cases you can simply ignore them.

I've seen the tower defense thing in AssCred3 only once and decided against having anything to do with it. At first I LOVED the idea of training assassins and sending them all over the place for missions. But it was completely uninteractive. Pick one guy, assign him to a mission, game rolls the dice and tells you of the outcome. Basically they integrated a badly done version of Risk into the game. This doesn't create depth. And in many cases it takes it away.

How often have you seen a mission in a game that has to be played EXACTLY like the designers wanted you to? Mostly those are stealth missions. Be discovered and return to the last checkpoint. The option of simply going in guns blazing simply doesn't exist even tho you did it in the rest of the game. There is one strategy(ie stealth) because we told you so. That's the opposite of depth. And I didn't even go for the low hanging fruit of turret sections.

Or the current state of 1st person manshooters. Aw, what the heck. Too many of these seem to have cutscenes that are interupted by pesky gameplay. They will actually shoot you for not triggering a cutscene. But let's not go there. Let's take a look at regenerating health. In Doom1 if you lost a lot of health and armor in one level you might be very well borked in the next level. You had to plan ahead. There was a strategic element to this. It arguably had more depth than most modern FPS.

I see you mentioned Deus Ex. That was a GREAT game. Good writing. Interesting mechanics. You had conversation bosses. You could battle enemies with words. Yet they did something that reduced depth. You couldn't go fully charismatic to talk everybody down. You couldn't go full stealth to take them down one by one. You couldn't go full hacker and use their defenses against them. If you didn't go heavily on the combat skills you were borked. There were a couple of things you had to take because otherwise you would be screwed in the boss battles. These limited your choice of approach and arguably limited the depth of the gameplay.

World of Goo is the premiere snot stacking simulator. It has only that mechanic and it executes that brilliantly. Simplistic? Not past the tutorial levels.

tl;dr:

Depth is not the same as complexity. Depth does not automatically increase with the number of gameplay mechanics. Having only one gameplay mechanic and have that executed properly. Don't dress people down when they have a point.

Re:Emulators aren't very satisfying on my Nexus 7

[Nyder]

...Emulators aren't very satisfying on my Nexus 7 because a flat sheet of glass lacks any tactile feedback as to where the thumbs are relative to the on-screen buttons....

Dude, it's a fucking phone, of course it's not good for emulators. My sink isn't good for taking a bath, but can get me clean if needed.

You want a device that is good for emulators? There a a ton of cheap android devices for that: http://dingoo-scene.blogspot.com/ You can find reviews of various ones there.

As much as you want to have 1 device to rule them all, it's not going to happen anytime soon.

Re:hire a guy whos companies flopped

[phantomfive]

Orthogonal means (roughly) perpendicular in a multidimensional space. If you have two orthogonal lines, they meet at a single point. If one of those lines represents business skill, and the other line represents programming skill, it means they hardly have any overlap. A person can be completely good at one skill, and completely bad at the other, or vice versa.

The word means exactly what I think it does.

Re:hire a guy whos companies flopped

[femtobyte]

What amazing telepathic skills you've got there, to know that the poster is *thinking* the wrong thing despite an apparently sensible use of the word "orthogonal." Can you tell what number I'm thinking of now, too?

Re:Knowing Google

[icebraining]

That's not an ad hominem, that's a plain insult.

mobile gaming?

[PopeRatzo]

It would be great if there were finally some really good games on tablets.

  I mean, there are tons of games available for my wife's iPad or my Nexus 7, but I haven't seen any that were very exciting.

Have I missed the great Android or iOS games? The hardware seems ready, but the game designers seem like they have not been up to the task. And even if they get a halfway decent game, they spoil it with advertisements or micro-transactions. If a game were really good, I'd pay a price comparable to a AAA PC or console game.

Re:3DO?

[cbhacking]

[Heroes Of] Might And Magic series, at least the earlier set of them, were pretty big. A-list, perhaps not (although it depends what you go for; a serious first-person shooter gamer will have no reason to know this company, but to a turn-based strategy gamer they were a pretty big deal) but very successful for a time, and (IMO the more important point) developer of a number of games that are still popular now, over a decade later.

Lucasfilm is pretty obviously a big deal, even if not around anymore; the produced a number of very popular games.

Besides, I'd really rather have somebody who made good games than somebody who made big money. Whever the hell keeps churning out the Madden series? Waste of developer resources.

Rose colored glasses

[rsilvergun]

You're comparing 20 years of the best of gaming to 3 to 5 years of everything. Look back at not just the crap, but the mediocre. Take out the garbage from the last 5 years and you've got some amazing stuff. La-Mulana, Shogun Total War, Sonic Generations. And there's just no comparing old school racing games to modern stuff like Need for Speed and Burn out. I literally can't go back to playing 16 bit or even 32 bit racers Post Burnout 3.