Design of the times [Die unerträgliche Leichtigkeit des Designs]
Posted in Game Design, Industry, games on June 24th, 2009 by Jan
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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