In the spirit of my call for more innovative independent games, I’d like to second David Kushner’s suggestion in The Sandbox that students get access to cutting edge development tools.
Games that come packaged with level-building tools have fostered some real contributors to the gaming industry, and many of the great innovations in gaming have come from new outsiders who see things differently and are willing—and free—to take risks.
Kushner’s comparison of the future of video game design to YouTube is, I think, very insightful. Content development has shifted. Anyone can create a periodical, share a movie with the world, or publish a novel. And anyone can do these things cheaply. If it becomes easier for fancy games to be done inexpensively, we may well discover the next great type of game on some form of social network.
Sure, 99% will be crap, but the social networks already have tools in place to sift through silt to find the nuggets of gold.
July 25th, 2007
At least, that’s the headline of a Times Online piece, quoting Electronic Arts’ chief executive.
Obviously, I don’t agree. Dozens of genuinely fun video games exist. But the article touches on something that’s been bothering me since I first subscribed to PC Gamer about five years ago (a subscription I have since dropped).
That is, that almost all video games are created to fit within industry categories—FPS, RPG, RTS, and so on. Some spectacular innovation takes place within these categories. For instance, Thief: The Dark Project and its sequels
used the FPS genre to present a game with a very different feel.
And there are hybrids. I’ve seen a lot of games touted as “Action RPG” or “FPS-RTS hybrid.”
But we don’t see new categories. I remember the delight with which I played Ultima Underworld, which basically kicked off the FPS genre. And back in the 80s, people would put out just about anything as a commercial game, hoping it would stick. Such innovations are very few and far between, now.
Understandable, of course. Top-of-the-line games are much, much more complicated and expensive to produce than they were in the 80s. Companies want to make bestsellers, and it’s much safer to invest those millions of dollars in a tried-and-true game with a slightly different skin and some tweaks or refinements to gameplay than it is to come up with something truly fresh.
I think, therefore, that the truly great, new, genre-changing games will tend to emerge from independent innovators. Some absolutely terrific (though simplistic) Flash games, for instance, show up that experiment with just what makes a fun game. More will come.
These innovative games may not be the best, but when someone hits on a great formula, the big companies will probably co-opt it and make an A-list game out of it.
July 9th, 2007
