Dear Videogame Industry, Please Stop Making Games
uk.gamespy.com
uk.gamespy.com
Why don't we just watch all the amazing films and TV shows of the past? Why do we listen to music that's in the charts when we've got over 5 decades of complete genius waiting to be listened to?
Because fundamentally these are social acts. We like listening to the music that others are listening to, to define ourselves by the films we like in common with others. It's the same with games.
Joyce is not better than Shakespeare and Prince is not better than Mozart.
This is even truer for painting, would anybody say that we are doing better than the Altamira cave painters?
I will say this; I have a clear preference for some modern stuff over the older stuff. The biggest one is modern TV vs. older TV; going back to 1960 or 1970 and trying to watch TV for me is simply infuriating; it's all so damned slow. Actually running it 30% faster (as in, watching it literally sped up 30%) helps quite a bit.
My point is that, in my opinion, there is no progress in art exactly for the reason you have just given that there is no objective "better" to measure progress with.
About TV..., if you are talking about TV shows I wouldn't consider them art at all.
Ernie Kovacs.
Also Playhouse 90.
Also tautological depending on your definition of "art". The definition I favor doesn't disqualify something for the medium it is in, but it certainly isn't the only relevant definition.
To point it out is pleonastic.
The following sentence is tautological.
The previous sentence is tautological and pleonastic.
"TV isn't art" carries a lot of connotation, but no actual denotation. I object to just lobbing the connotation into a conversation and acting as if something has actually been established.
We find more recent works more interesting than older ones, not necessarily because they're better, but because they speak to us more usefully -- similarly, we can find surprisingly old works surprisingly relevant for the same reason, or can rediscover materials that previous generations scoffed at.
Most of the plays of Shakespeare fall into this last category -- they were hardly ever performed in the late 17th and 18th centuries, and when they were, they were jazzed up with special effects along the lines of fireworks and performing bears. The gulf between the 18thC and our own is an enormous one in general, come to think of it; play _Empire: Total War_ for a sense of just how different even the visual aesthetics of their era were from our own.
Don't look at the art assets that are, necessarily, more or less faithful to the period; look at how the game's developers try to make the era look interesting to a modern. What most stood out to me was the vast gulf between the national flags used in the 18thC and national flags depicted in the game -- in particular Austria, where the red-and-white national flag is replaced by the yellow-and-black dynastic flag of the Habsburgs, and Russia, where the white-red-blue national flag is shame-facedly tacked on to the Romanov coat of arms. (The loading screens are the second most extreme illustration.)
But remember that there is also progress in at least the technically oriented arts. Even the best games of the past look positively dated compared to modern fare. I played Planescape Torment very recently. It is probably one of the best video games ever in my opinion, but it was painfully dated when compared to even budget games on my PS3. In music the entire Techno and Metal Genre's are relatively recent (I am a huge fan of Savatage for instance) and could not exist as they are today without technology that is relatively modern. Avatar is an example of a movie that could not have been made ten years ago....
Even in books, recently written books are often more timely than the classics. I love many of the classics in literature, but you will find few of them dealing with the issues raised by Artificial Intelligence (not none, Frankenstein and The Island Of Dr. Moreau are at least close, but very few).
So, I agree with you, but I think you are glossing over the very important factors of improved technology and timeliness of subject matter.
Yes, we rate "playtime" as one of our attributes of quality. "For $50, I better get more than 1 hour of playtime out of an RPG or other exploration game" is a common concern; vs. replayability or addictiveness of the casual gaming world.
But just like Blaise Pascal's quote (http://www.famousquotes.com/show.php?_id=1045873) “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead," (no, it's not Mark Twain), if we had games that took some of the time of adding just one more world or level and instead enhanced aspects of the main game, aka judicious editing, well, perhaps we'd be able to experience more of the game, and even feel a sense of completion. We'd have less stuff to conquer, but perhaps the conquering could be more subtle, have more ways to solve, have more realism, better characters, more complex motivations, whatever.
In playing some of these games he mentions as the good ones, I experienced meaningless quests (my friends called them "bolt ons"), busy-work, farming, all sorts of things that didn't move the story forward, or involved repetitive labor. They weren't puzzles, they were just grunt work. These could have been edited out and the effort spent elsewhere, reducing "time to complete" but making a good game even better.
So, if a game needs lots of time to complete a vast and compelling story, or it's a subscription game that needs more content, so be it. But instead of a game requiring as much work as, well, my job, perhaps a game that gave more enjoyment but also allowed me to feel a sense of completion would be a popular game.
Look, sometimes I love a 500 page book or a 3 hr movie or watching a miniseries or season in one sitting; we all do. But we don't want them all the time. Perhaps we should hold games accountable not on "hours to complete" but on "satisfaction felt upon completion, given that the game should take more than 1 hour". This puts the emphasis on immersion, storytelling, interaction and not so much on "cram more junk in".
As an aside, if we complete more games and feel more satisfied when we do, we will buy more games. Sounds like a win for both sides.
I'd have to add something else: the propensity for filler, especially "filler quests" in RPGs, degrades the quality of the main game. I really enjoyed _Knights of the Old Republic_ and _Jade Empire_, but their storytelling -- especially _Jade Empire_'s -- was a large step back from _Final Fantasy 4_ or _Final Fantasy 6_; neither of the Square RPGs had the hero wandering off to close a dam and kill an inn full of cannibals as opposed to progressing the story and/or interacting interestingly with the other major characters.
I believe the genre that you're looking for, and that I am, is called "hardcasual" -- short, high-quality, high-content games, not casual games at all but completely free of filler, aimed at people with lives and jobs but still a keen interest in games. (For total time to play, expect 3 hours at the low end, 10 hours at the high end -- and note, you can fit a _large_ story into ten filler-less hours.)
Unfortunately, hardcasual games appear to be rare; in particular, the mainstream games industry doesn't touch them...
My Advice: Pick the platform or genre you enjoy the most and focus on those games. You will never get to sample them all.
(Yes, FF may not be to $COMMENT_READER's personal taste, but you know what I mean.)
Even if you just focused on a single game like World of Warcraft, there is enough content and stuff to do that you would probably use up all your leisure time.
I have a monstrous backlog of games I feel I should play, sitting right next to the pile of books I should read and movies I should watch. Sadly, I have accepted the fact that I will never be able to get through them all.
In all serious though, if you want to truly get into the endgame of WoW, you generally don't have alot of time for other games (this is of course depending on how much time you have for gaming in general). Blizzard has definitely made it easy to spend the majority of that time in their world.
I think that's part of the experience, though. Having just finished Mass Effect 2, I can tell with certainty that there's a huge amount of the game I never got to see due to my choices, but I'm fine with that. One of the chief strengths of that game is its ability to give every player a unique experience - you don't need to experience every line of dialogue, every possible outcome of a situation, etc etc, to have a profoundly enjoyable experience.
Then again, the only games I've played this year are Modern Warfare 2, Dawn of War 2, Company of Heroes, Fuel of War and Red Faction Guerrilla - all but Modern Warfare 2 came on the THQ multipack I got off steam because I wanted a copy of Company of Heroes. Before this, I'd never even heard of Red Faction Guerrilla, but have been playing it a lot over the past two weeks!
I personally just buy games at a lag usually they are much cheaper (after a year or two) and time proven, if you are a pc gamer steam is amazing and for consoles I really have no idea I guess I just hear word of mouth about the new games.
I don't follow the recent developments, but I have a few people or teams whose opinions resonate with me, so I regularly read what they say. Here's "Top 9 Games of the Decade" by Auriea Harvey of Tale of Tales, whose opinions I value very highly.
http://tale-of-tales.com/blog/2009/12/31/aurieas-top-9-games...
If you're not familiar with their games, check their blog to see if is the kind of games you're interested in. But again, to even know these people whose advice I follow, I used to read many websites, magazines and even visit conferences.
I am not completely successful; I knew about Fallout 3 for a while because it got onto some of my RSS feeds that had nothing to do with gaming per se. But for the most part it works.
In general, the best place to possibly get good reviews is to have friends with similar tastes as you and ask them what they like. Not only will you get recommendations you know are good, you will have someone to talk about the games with/play multiplayer with.
And despite the fact they will be dated, don't forget some of the classics. Planescape Torment and Quest for Glory V were fantastic. Even with dated graphics they stand up well to many modern games, at least to someone with my taste in RPG games.
I think rabid video game fans should consider this point strongly. Part of having good taste is being selective because it's impossible to consume everything. Are these all good games? Maybe but you have a finite amount of time in your life. You need to plan accordingly. It may include making tough choices like playing video game X instead of video game Y but you'll survive and your life won't be significantly worse off no matter what choice you make.
I see every new game as a chance to be inspired by the artistry that goes into them. Of course there is plenty of crap out there, but an increasing number of games are undeniably amazing works of art. I want to experience as much of that wonder as I can. I want to see every mind blowing painting. I want to hear all amazing the music the world has to offer. Games are no different for me.
I was really surprised to hear that the number of games increased from say 15 years ago. Surely, the industry grew very much, but I thought costs and complexity of game development more than offset this, so I expected the number of games to decrease. Does anyone have numbers on that?
Also, I thought it became customary to say that newer games are not what they used to be (and the grass back when we were younger, but still). So I see Drucker's article as an opposition to the general notion of gloom and doom in the game industry, though again I am not sure how serious he is.
As jsz0 said above, good taste is about being selective. I think part of good taste is also knowing when you've had enough and when you've cleared your plate do not always occur at the same time.
As a non-game player, I was under the impression that there was only one or two big games released a year, based on the adverts I see on the tube. It's quite amazing how my internet is so different from a gamer's.
On the other hand, if you're going to buy them anyway, I don't suppose it matters for the producers.