Design of the times [Die unerträgliche Leichtigkeit des Designs]
It’s always impressive, right after E3, to consider all the games that I could (or will) buy this year. The graphics and environment get more and more realistic, the heroes cooler and cooler. So shouldn’t that indescribable excitement — the release day fever, the “just can’t wait” trembling — have hit right about now? Well, it should have, but…
The developments of recent years provoke in me, an active gamer for a quarter century, the opposite feeling. The ever-increasing pressure to add unique selling points, better graphics, physics, etc. has decreased the willingness of the developers (or rather the publishers) to explore new directions, and in the end, they mostly produce interchangeable pablum.
Back when blocky pixels and abstract forms invited us to fill their gaps with our own stories; when we waited for minutes in a submarine off Gibraltar for the sun to set; when, after endlessly repeated runs through a level, we finally found the hidden key and with it an indescribable joy, games were primarily sparks for our imagination. Today they simply fulfill our expectations. We used to buy the key to a new world; today, a consumable product.
Today’s gamer has been squeezed into a mold of expectations. He expects games to work in certain ways; any deviations must be carefully explained in advance. Confronting the player with a task that he must solve by his own efforts, without hand-holding, is no longer allowed. Recognizing the patterns and mastering new skills was part of the attraction of earlier games. These days, games have degenerated to pure entertainment. They no longer challenge, they simply divert. This parallels the development of films, which have gone from providing a topic of conversation for post-show socializing to grabbing our attention with ninety minutes of bombast that are immediately forgotten.
Whether lack of design imagination will eventually lead games to follow another film industry trend, namely remakes, remains to be seen. Regardless, throwing away the chance to create high-quality games will certainly confirm a widespread and long-held gamer prejudice: anybody can design a game!
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Congrats, you first post quite rocks. Keep it up
“games have degenerated to pure entertainment”
Oh no, suddenly we’re having fun with games. How did that ever happen?
I know what you mean and refering to Hollywood i agree, there are “mainstream” games and “blockbusters” which – set aside a few shining gems – are made only to entertain, not inspire. Some are pure rollercoaster rides, like Crank. I’m ok with that as long as i know where and how to get that other treat if i need to. Not all games have to be as deep and time-consuming as Fallout 3.
I’m not so sure about the conclusion, anyone can design a game? Of course they can … and should … and obviously they’ll succeed or fail with varying results. I think it’s great that games are finding common grounds, especially if it comes to controlling them (WASD anyone?). Pleeeeease don’t ever change that anymore for an FPS. Plus there are platforms for people to actually proove their skills: XNA, iPhone and obviously the PC as indie platform. These are the Youtubes of the game industry. And we all know we spend too much time watching Youtube videos. Granted, most of it really is crap but we can rely on friends and referals to point us to the cool stuff.
I think it’s a win for the industry and threatens the big publishers already because they can’t keep up with the pace the industry is changing. The only good thing for the film industry is that they sort of have a monopoly over cinema by directing via marketing what people want to see – and with cinemas actually providing additional value to the experience. Gamers on the other hand don’t need to go to an Internet cafe to enjoy their games “better”.
Partly I have to agree with the original posting. There are a lot of games nowadays I play for many hours but that I never finish because sooner or later the get boring even if they held me for a long time. In the past things seemed to be different…
On the other hand my past means a lot of spare time. As a student, for example, it is easy to raise a WoW character to the maximum level or trying a particular challenging game level several time until one finally succeeds (just to hit the next impossible obstacle) but as a fulltimer there are weeks when I don’t play at all.
I think in the past there were mostly games for hardcore gamers while currently the casual games take the point. Looking at it from a marketing point of view the market share for casual (or browser) games is much bigger than for true hardcore games. Therefore most publishers try to flood the market with corresponding titles in the hopes to score. And if the developing cycle for the n-th remake is only a fifth of what a new triple-AAA title would cost then lower selling rates are still sufficient to make money. Unfortunately the hardcore gamer is left behind…
arg, never forget proof-reading if there is no edit feature…
Pop music doesn’t excite me as much as it used to, either; maybe we’re just getting older and hence, having a broader standard of comparison, more critical.
IMO hardcore games are typically no more innovative than casual games, precisely because they can rely on a new audience of enthusiastic 14-year-olds each year.