GTA itself -was- pacman. it also sucked. it wasn't until Vice City that they really explored the full range of gameplay. With the depth they added, with the polish and the honest attempt to tell a story that just happened to fit with their existing gameplay, -that- is when rockstar struck gold.
This strikes me as so preposterous that I almost can't tell if you're serious. Yet...
When you abstract Vice City out to the level of 'pac man', then everything is pacman. Get the power up, win the game.
That's exactly right. In fact, most narrative media (including games) can be abstracted down to conflict-climax-resolution.
[Snip a bunch of stuff I agree with]
Porn and Predator do not diminish all 'mature' film - so why should bmx xxx, or quake 3 diminish gaming's legitimacy?
Perhaps we need to establish a distinction between "mature" content and "sophisticated" content. Or, if that sounds snooty, then some other way of describing the difference between Predator and Glengarry Glen Ross.
Right now, gaming is dominated by big publishers, like film is dominated by big studios. We don't have an underground scene yet, and quite frankly we are only recently able to attract actual actors and writers to work in our media.
As another poster noted, I think gaming does have a thriving underground scene, but it's an amateur scene rather than a commercial one. Some of the most interesting stuff is beind done in mods and in interactive fiction, but I'd argue that they're able to do this because they don't work under the pressures of the marketplace. This always results in more experimentation and risk-taking.
How do we get some of that risk-taking into the commercial arena? Tough to say. In visual art, for example, you often see innovations appear in fine art and then slowly make their way into commerical art, presumably because said innovations represent less of a risk once they've been time-tested in another context. (Another way of saying this is that underground/indie efforts serve to provide some measure of R&D to commerical efforts, where those ideas can be exploted and reach a large audience. This may well be a natural and beneficial cultural cycle. If memory serves, Dave McKean's essay Storytelling in the Gutter dealt with this issue eloquently.)
Am I the only one who feels a bit weird when reading something like this and see 30-something being considered old?
Yes, and the problem lies in the conventional belief that video games are for children. 30-something is only "old" if you think games are for 12-year-olds.
Are pheromones delivered through the *exact same* sensory mechanism as smell, or do they diverge into separate paths at some point?
I ask because I have congenital anosmia -- no sense of smell. None. What I want to know is whether I'm still picking up on the subtle messages delivered by pheromones.
Morrowind, an example of the depth of PC RPGs, came out on the XBox, not the PS2 or Nintendo because you can talk to thousands of NPCs and be involved with hundreds of quests at any given time. GTA3 on the other hand merely records which missions you've done, at one bit each, your cash, a small number of cars, and which save spot you're at. It's even made for a console with just a few meg of ram, face away from a car and it probably won't be there when you get back. And suprise, it was developed for a PS2... Even the best of console graphics look like PC games from two or three years ago. Crappy lighting, low-poly, jerky graphics, low-res textures.
I've always thought it was commonly accepted that consoles are on the bleeding edge for about 6 months after launch, and then consumer PC hardware surpasses them technologically. So, for those 6 months, the console people are like, "Look what console X can do, it's so much more powerful than your piddly general-purpose PCs!" But then, after that 6 month mark, the PC gamers always say, "Hey, we can upgrade our PCs to be more powerful than your lame console, and you'll be stuck with that old tech for years!"
But it's a pointless argument because consoles and PCs are constantly subject to this cycle.
And they are effectively removing the aspect of XBox that made it cost effective and appealing to developers: easy porting to the PC through common components and CPU architecture.
You know, I'm not sure this is really a relevant issue. Most Xbox games have *not* had PC ports. Granted, developers appreciate that the Xbox's structure is similar to PCs and thus easier to work with than, say, the parallelized PS2, but that's different from wanting it for ease of cross-platform development.
You post implies that one must be traded for the other. I do not assume this. Do not seek to hold me back because of your lowered expectations.
I'll hold you back and you'll like it, buddy.
Seriously, I don't think you can have it all. The more powerful hardware gets, the more detail becomes necessary in the art assets, the more time it takes to construct those assets. In Ultima 4, a "mirror" was a custom sprite; in a contemporary 3d engine, a "mirror" means a fair amount of extra technology. In Super Mario, adding a damage anim to an enemy meant painting a few more frames; in a modern game, it means several days of animation time.
If you want to maintain a long game, then you need to lower the density. Otherwise the amount of work you need to do grows out of control, extending your schedule beyond reason or making it necessary to hire many more people. Either of these will make your budget grow, so that you'll either have to charge more for your game or you'll have to somehow guarantee that the game will be a hit.
People aren't generally willing to pay dramatically more than the high water mark for their games, which leaves the developer & publisher in a position where they have to guarantee the game will be a hit in order to be profitable. I don't need to tell you, it's pretty hard to guarantee a game will be a hit.
What kind of person asks for value to be removed from a product?
Don't necessarily agree or disagree with your main points, but this one is short-sighted. If a developer is able to focus on a shorter (in length) game, that surplus effort will go into making the shorter game denser and deeper. Length vs. density is a struggle that game developers face every single day.
But Sonic Foundry doesn't sell it anymore and they were just bought by Sony. Will Sony issue me a new activation code in the future if/when I move to a new computer?
Boy, you said it.
I bought a copy of Lightscape 3.0 in 1998. Lightscape (the company) was then purchased by Autodesk, which slowly starved the product to death. So now the infrastructure necessary for product activation (which involved putting a serial number into Lightscape, getting another number back, calling a human being and reading them that number, getting yet another number from them, and putting that into Lightscape) no longer exists.
So what does that leave me with? A $500 coaster. (And I was a poor man in 1998! That's like $1500 in adjusted 2003 no-longer-poor dollars.)
But really, the worst part is that the product wasn't replaced with anything. There's nothing out there (that I know of) that does what Lightscape did as well as it did it. And it's lost in time because of a kooky, useless activation scheme. (Well, again... virtually "lost" because I'm holding the CD in my hand right now.)
Even thought the environments seem really nice in DooM3, I have to disagree with the good art direction claim in regards to the monsters.
I'd even go so far as to suggest that the art direction on the environments is lacking. There seems to be an absence of subtlety when using the new technology. I know, id isn't known for its subtlety, but there's a difference between over-the-top demon-robots and rooms where every single thing is polished to a high shine. It just looks bad. Or no, worse than bad -- it looks tacky. It almost looks like the new tech makes it hard to create matte surfaces.
I know, it's not fair to make these judgements before the game is released, and I'll be happy to take it all back if the screenshots and E3 movies turn out to have been misleading.
There's the problem that people mistake complexity (as in anti-simplicity) as a requirement for good art.:)
I'm not asserting that innovation is necessary for good art, but it is necessary for a medium to grow. I probably didn't balance my original statement carefully enough, because the position you're arguing against is more extreme than mine.
Of course there are elements that "adult" entertainment shares with "children's" entertainment. Good storytelling is good storytelling. If you've mastered tension and release, you're already three-quarters of the way there.
But what I was getting at specifically in that point was the difference between a good Dr. Seuss book and a good David Mamet play. Seuss is making great art, but it's less likely to appeal to adults than the Mamet play. Yet I've worked with many in the industry who, because the game industry hasn't yet seen its Mamet, just want to reproduce an experience that impacted them at some point in the past.
It's not a relevant question. We went through this in the 80's and 90's with comic books. Comic creators asking, "Why aren't comics considered art?" It's too broad a question, with too many players.
A creator can use any medium to create a great artwork. The medium is simply the form that artwork takes.
That said, most interactive entertainment (games) are not worthy of consideration as great artworks. Why? It's terribly complicated.
*There's the problem that games have never been, until recently, anything other than a commercial medium. Mods and the IF community have broken through that barrier with remarkable results. Still, people intent on making a living in games are constantly fighting forces (particularly in publishers) intent on duplicating proven successes while pushing innovation to the back-burner.
*There's the chicken-egg problem that comics had -- we don't make games for adults because adults don't play games. Well, adults don't play games because games aren't made for them. Well, developers (and very slowly, publishers) are starting to understand that adults are playing games now. One glance at the success of "The Sims" will tell you a lot about the age and gender of potential ("casual") gamers.
*There's the problem that games are a terribly young medium. Between 25 and 30 years old, depending on when you start counting. How long has oil painting been around? How long have people been writing and performing plays? How long have people been writing and performing music?
*There's the problem that creative individuals aren't being drawn to the medium. Or, dare I say, the problem that individuals who lack vision and ambition aren't being drawn to the medium. Folks who are satisfied to re-create the simplistic games that fascinated them as children, rather than explore the full potential of the medium. (Boy that one's going to get me in trouble.) I think we all fight this one within ourselves, and it's a worthwhile fight.
Will games eventually produce its own equivalent to the classics of literature, music, painting, and theater? Absolutely. It's in our hands (as creators and as consumers) to vote with our money, to give risky games a chance, and to foster an environment where creators feel comfortable taking chances.
I'd like to respectfully point out that NWN and Baldur's Gate are not US products. They are Canadian.
Good point. I think all of those listed could safely be called "North American" RPGs;)
However, it would be most appropriate to categorize them as "Western" RPGs, because that's really what we're talking about here -- Eastern vs. Western RPGs and their significant stylistic differences.
I did find it interesting to read that recently-localized GTA3 is selling quite well in Japan...
"The US just isn't exactly known for producing the best RPG titles."
I'd like to respectfully disagree. Case in point: Neverwinter Nights, Baldur's Gate, Planescape, Deus Ex, the Ultimas, Temple of Elemental Evil, Arcanum, and Fallout.
Now... if you're speaking specifically of console RPGs, please say that, and we can debate that assertion separately.
Not just "they messed up my vote" screwed, but entire-election-results-legitimately-contested screwed.
The problem is that they're raising the margin of error by an unknowable amount. No matter which party wins in the 2004 Presidential election, the loser will easily be able to argue that the voting system was highly flawed and vulnerable to foul play. It will be a replay of 2000, except worse.
Using a system that's known to be insecure for national elections... it's just a guaranteed disaster. We'll have another election settled in court, and the populace of the U.S. will become even more polarized.
I thought BSP trees were meant to be fast and cheap in comparison to per-poly tests, much like octrees. Is there some reason you can't use octrees alone? I'm betting it's because octrees have similar problems, which is why you get rid of as much as possible by octree culling and then do per-poly on as little as possible. You could have done that with BSP.
Again, I'm a designer, not an engineer, but I believe that's what they're doing -- using the octree for gross spatial culling and then only colliding against polys that are "close enough".
In my own experience as a designer, many engines that use the BSP tree for collision suffer from a sort of *precision fragility*. You're fine with big brushes that stick to the grid, but as brushes get smaller and angles deviate from 90 or 45 degrees, you start to get these little precision errors that create big problems at runtime. Usually it's either holes in the world that the player can fall through or tiny slivers of collision geometry that prevent movement through what should be empty space.
Many times I heard our programmers cursing "that damned epsilon".
(The project I'm currently on uses octrees and per-poly collision against the world, and while I believe it may be a little slower, it's vastly more robust.)
The view of most sane, rational human beings is that this is just another stage of the highly competitive video card market, and that anyone who spends time arguing over which company is better needs to be tranquilized, preferably with something meant for very large animals.
I'm not a rabid fanboy, but I'd still like some of that animal tranquilizer if at all possible.
So we used heavy bullets.... what about the chemicals that Iraq used?
You left me mouth-agape... why would you make a point against your own argument? You do know, I assume, that Iraq didn't use any chemical weapons against the U.S., right? Nor bio weapons, nor nuclear weapons?
Allowing Windows software firms to package it with their stuff and say "Runs on Linux"? Is this the point?
Here's the main blurb from their site:
AclereX is the industry leader in cross-platform portability enabling Windows applications to run on the Linux desktop. If your organization is considering a move to the Linux desktop, AclereX can provide seamless and transparent support for your enterprise applications.
Sounds decent enough. "If your business is sick of Windows but dependent upon Windows-only applications, we can make those applications run in Linux."
Is this our new genre to be mass-copy catted? First it was the FPS, then the RTS, then the MMO games... I guess we're all in for a steady stream of crime-game clones in the next few generations....
Yes, precisely. And what really burns me up is that many developers seem unable to divorce the genre from the mechanic. I honestly think the magic of GTA3/VC was in the mechanic -- free, non-linear, mission-based, emergent. These elements could be applied to *any* genre. You mention RTS -- the RTS needn't be wedded to war. What if you did an RTS based on shopping in a mall? Or putting out forest fires? Or termites eating out the foundation of a house?
It's this inability to distinguish between mechanic and genre that results in endless "clones" of games. I'd love to see a bunch of GTA3/VC clones, but I just wish they'd clone the right part!
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I think the Debbie Does Dallas franchise did a pretty decent job of keeping its audience up.
On the contrary, there was a pretty steady decline in the quali--
Oh... you were kidding.
Heh.
That's exactly right. In fact, most narrative media (including games) can be abstracted down to conflict-climax-resolution.
[Snip a bunch of stuff I agree with]
Perhaps we need to establish a distinction between "mature" content and "sophisticated" content. Or, if that sounds snooty, then some other way of describing the difference between Predator and Glengarry Glen Ross.
As another poster noted, I think gaming does have a thriving underground scene, but it's an amateur scene rather than a commercial one. Some of the most interesting stuff is beind done in mods and in interactive fiction, but I'd argue that they're able to do this because they don't work under the pressures of the marketplace. This always results in more experimentation and risk-taking.
How do we get some of that risk-taking into the commercial arena? Tough to say. In visual art, for example, you often see innovations appear in fine art and then slowly make their way into commerical art, presumably because said innovations represent less of a risk once they've been time-tested in another context. (Another way of saying this is that underground/indie efforts serve to provide some measure of R&D to commerical efforts, where those ideas can be exploted and reach a large audience. This may well be a natural and beneficial cultural cycle. If memory serves, Dave McKean's essay Storytelling in the Gutter dealt with this issue eloquently.)
Am I the only one who feels a bit weird when reading something like this and see 30-something being considered old?
Yes, and the problem lies in the conventional belief that video games are for children. 30-something is only "old" if you think games are for 12-year-olds.
...except "The Future War On Terror"? C'mon, guys...
Are pheromones delivered through the *exact same* sensory mechanism as smell, or do they diverge into separate paths at some point?
I ask because I have congenital anosmia -- no sense of smell. None. What I want to know is whether I'm still picking up on the subtle messages delivered by pheromones.
But it's a pointless argument because consoles and PCs are constantly subject to this cycle.
And they are effectively removing the aspect of XBox that made it cost effective and appealing to developers: easy porting to the PC through common components and CPU architecture.
You know, I'm not sure this is really a relevant issue. Most Xbox games have *not* had PC ports. Granted, developers appreciate that the Xbox's structure is similar to PCs and thus easier to work with than, say, the parallelized PS2, but that's different from wanting it for ease of cross-platform development.
You post implies that one must be traded for the other. I do not assume this. Do not seek to hold me back because of your lowered expectations.
I'll hold you back and you'll like it, buddy.
Seriously, I don't think you can have it all. The more powerful hardware gets, the more detail becomes necessary in the art assets, the more time it takes to construct those assets. In Ultima 4, a "mirror" was a custom sprite; in a contemporary 3d engine, a "mirror" means a fair amount of extra technology. In Super Mario, adding a damage anim to an enemy meant painting a few more frames; in a modern game, it means several days of animation time.
If you want to maintain a long game, then you need to lower the density. Otherwise the amount of work you need to do grows out of control, extending your schedule beyond reason or making it necessary to hire many more people. Either of these will make your budget grow, so that you'll either have to charge more for your game or you'll have to somehow guarantee that the game will be a hit.
People aren't generally willing to pay dramatically more than the high water mark for their games, which leaves the developer & publisher in a position where they have to guarantee the game will be a hit in order to be profitable. I don't need to tell you, it's pretty hard to guarantee a game will be a hit.
What kind of person asks for value to be removed from a product?
Don't necessarily agree or disagree with your main points, but this one is short-sighted. If a developer is able to focus on a shorter (in length) game, that surplus effort will go into making the shorter game denser and deeper. Length vs. density is a struggle that game developers face every single day.
But Sonic Foundry doesn't sell it anymore and they were just bought by Sony. Will Sony issue me a new activation code in the future if/when I move to a new computer?
Boy, you said it.
I bought a copy of Lightscape 3.0 in 1998. Lightscape (the company) was then purchased by Autodesk, which slowly starved the product to death. So now the infrastructure necessary for product activation (which involved putting a serial number into Lightscape, getting another number back, calling a human being and reading them that number, getting yet another number from them, and putting that into Lightscape) no longer exists.
So what does that leave me with? A $500 coaster. (And I was a poor man in 1998! That's like $1500 in adjusted 2003 no-longer-poor dollars.)
But really, the worst part is that the product wasn't replaced with anything. There's nothing out there (that I know of) that does what Lightscape did as well as it did it. And it's lost in time because of a kooky, useless activation scheme. (Well, again... virtually "lost" because I'm holding the CD in my hand right now.)
Even thought the environments seem really nice in DooM3, I have to disagree with the good art direction claim in regards to the monsters.
I'd even go so far as to suggest that the art direction on the environments is lacking. There seems to be an absence of subtlety when using the new technology. I know, id isn't known for its subtlety, but there's a difference between over-the-top demon-robots and rooms where every single thing is polished to a high shine. It just looks bad. Or no, worse than bad -- it looks tacky. It almost looks like the new tech makes it hard to create matte surfaces.
I know, it's not fair to make these judgements before the game is released, and I'll be happy to take it all back if the screenshots and E3 movies turn out to have been misleading.
Okay, cool.
:)
There's the problem that people mistake complexity (as in anti-simplicity) as a requirement for good art.
I'm not asserting that innovation is necessary for good art, but it is necessary for a medium to grow. I probably didn't balance my original statement carefully enough, because the position you're arguing against is more extreme than mine.
Of course there are elements that "adult" entertainment shares with "children's" entertainment. Good storytelling is good storytelling. If you've mastered tension and release, you're already three-quarters of the way there.
But what I was getting at specifically in that point was the difference between a good Dr. Seuss book and a good David Mamet play. Seuss is making great art, but it's less likely to appeal to adults than the Mamet play. Yet I've worked with many in the industry who, because the game industry hasn't yet seen its Mamet, just want to reproduce an experience that impacted them at some point in the past.
It's not a relevant question. We went through this in the 80's and 90's with comic books. Comic creators asking, "Why aren't comics considered art?" It's too broad a question, with too many players.
A creator can use any medium to create a great artwork. The medium is simply the form that artwork takes.
That said, most interactive entertainment (games) are not worthy of consideration as great artworks. Why? It's terribly complicated.
*There's the problem that games have never been, until recently, anything other than a commercial medium. Mods and the IF community have broken through that barrier with remarkable results. Still, people intent on making a living in games are constantly fighting forces (particularly in publishers) intent on duplicating proven successes while pushing innovation to the back-burner.
*There's the chicken-egg problem that comics had -- we don't make games for adults because adults don't play games. Well, adults don't play games because games aren't made for them. Well, developers (and very slowly, publishers) are starting to understand that adults are playing games now. One glance at the success of "The Sims" will tell you a lot about the age and gender of potential ("casual") gamers.
*There's the problem that games are a terribly young medium. Between 25 and 30 years old, depending on when you start counting. How long has oil painting been around? How long have people been writing and performing plays? How long have people been writing and performing music?
*There's the problem that creative individuals aren't being drawn to the medium. Or, dare I say, the problem that individuals who lack vision and ambition aren't being drawn to the medium. Folks who are satisfied to re-create the simplistic games that fascinated them as children, rather than explore the full potential of the medium. (Boy that one's going to get me in trouble.) I think we all fight this one within ourselves, and it's a worthwhile fight.
Will games eventually produce its own equivalent to the classics of literature, music, painting, and theater? Absolutely. It's in our hands (as creators and as consumers) to vote with our money, to give risky games a chance, and to foster an environment where creators feel comfortable taking chances.
I'd like to respectfully point out that NWN and Baldur's Gate are not US products. They are Canadian.
;)
Good point. I think all of those listed could safely be called "North American" RPGs
However, it would be most appropriate to categorize them as "Western" RPGs, because that's really what we're talking about here -- Eastern vs. Western RPGs and their significant stylistic differences.
I did find it interesting to read that recently-localized GTA3 is selling quite well in Japan...
"The US just isn't exactly known for producing the best RPG titles."
I'd like to respectfully disagree. Case in point: Neverwinter Nights, Baldur's Gate, Planescape, Deus Ex, the Ultimas, Temple of Elemental Evil, Arcanum, and Fallout.
Now... if you're speaking specifically of console RPGs, please say that, and we can debate that assertion separately.
...we're screwed. I mean all kinds of screwed.
Not just "they messed up my vote" screwed, but entire-election-results-legitimately-contested screwed.
The problem is that they're raising the margin of error by an unknowable amount. No matter which party wins in the 2004 Presidential election, the loser will easily be able to argue that the voting system was highly flawed and vulnerable to foul play. It will be a replay of 2000, except worse.
Using a system that's known to be insecure for national elections... it's just a guaranteed disaster. We'll have another election settled in court, and the populace of the U.S. will become even more polarized.
Elite
Indeed. SunDog as well.
I thought BSP trees were meant to be fast and cheap in comparison to per-poly tests, much like octrees. Is there some reason you can't use octrees alone? I'm betting it's because octrees have similar problems, which is why you get rid of as much as possible by octree culling and then do per-poly on as little as possible. You could have done that with BSP.
Again, I'm a designer, not an engineer, but I believe that's what they're doing -- using the octree for gross spatial culling and then only colliding against polys that are "close enough".
In my own experience as a designer, many engines that use the BSP tree for collision suffer from a sort of *precision fragility*. You're fine with big brushes that stick to the grid, but as brushes get smaller and angles deviate from 90 or 45 degrees, you start to get these little precision errors that create big problems at runtime. Usually it's either holes in the world that the player can fall through or tiny slivers of collision geometry that prevent movement through what should be empty space.
Many times I heard our programmers cursing "that damned epsilon".
(The project I'm currently on uses octrees and per-poly collision against the world, and while I believe it may be a little slower, it's vastly more robust.)
The view of most sane, rational human beings is that this is just another stage of the highly competitive video card market, and that anyone who spends time arguing over which company is better needs to be tranquilized, preferably with something meant for very large animals.
I'm not a rabid fanboy, but I'd still like some of that animal tranquilizer if at all possible.
Great Book....But The Censored Book is Censored!!
...but the censored book comes with a free frogurt!
...but the frogurt is also censored!
So we used heavy bullets.... what about the chemicals that Iraq used?
You left me mouth-agape... why would you make a point against your own argument? You do know, I assume, that Iraq didn't use any chemical weapons against the U.S., right? Nor bio weapons, nor nuclear weapons?
I doubt that Half Life 2 will have a corporate version ;)
Sure they will. Half-Life 2 Enterprise Edition, or HL2EE. It's just a high-res real-time scene of the G-Man saying, "Get back to work, you!"
Here's the main blurb from their site:
Sounds decent enough. "If your business is sick of Windows but dependent upon Windows-only applications, we can make those applications run in Linux."
Is this our new genre to be mass-copy catted? First it was the FPS, then the RTS, then the MMO games... I guess we're all in for a steady stream of crime-game clones in the next few generations. ...
Yes, precisely. And what really burns me up is that many developers seem unable to divorce the genre from the mechanic. I honestly think the magic of GTA3/VC was in the mechanic -- free, non-linear, mission-based, emergent. These elements could be applied to *any* genre. You mention RTS -- the RTS needn't be wedded to war. What if you did an RTS based on shopping in a mall? Or putting out forest fires? Or termites eating out the foundation of a house?
It's this inability to distinguish between mechanic and genre that results in endless "clones" of games. I'd love to see a bunch of GTA3/VC clones, but I just wish they'd clone the right part!