At least it’s great company
(Visited 7414 times) Game talk
Mar 152006
It appears I placed #3 on the list of Wildest Statements Made by Industry Veterans, according to IGN. That means I share space with the likes of Hiroshi Yamauchi, Ken Kutaragi, and Trip Hawkins!
I woulda thought what I said was at least good for #2, though. I have to admit, though, competition is fierce; Trip beat me out for saying that polygons had no future. At least the single-player games issue isn’t actually settled yet. 🙂
(For those late to the party, you need to read “Are single-player games doomed?” and :Is the shift to online a fad?” to get the context).
29 Responses to “At least it’s great company”
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Yea, but IGN only looks so far as the next game they can preview glowingly and then later bash knowingly. This is the irony of that list.
I think about some of what was quoted there. There’s certainly some ethnocentric pride talking, but I look at the three top quotes and think as such:
#3) Single player games are an anamoly. I’ve long agreed with you on this, a by product of entertainment devices that outpaced advances communications systems. This resulted in a whole generation of single player gamers, who also saw the rise of other tech as well. We’re not going to see Boomers and the Gamer Generation suddenly turn away from Single Player games en masse. But what about the next generation?
#2) I didn’t interpret that as Trip thinking polygons weren’t important. I read that as him thinking polygons were not the only important thing, and shouldn’t be treated as such. In this age of ultra-stylized console and PC games, I agree. The tech of polygons is not as important unto itself as the artistry of their use.
#1) Here again, I would think he meant “only cutting edge tech”. I’ve said often that technology itself is passe. Cell processors? So? Zillion/Gajillion polys? So? 96 channel sound? And? Like Trip, the point I believe Yamauchi is making is that selling games or systems is not about the technology on them but the experience one can have with them. I don’t agree that people don’t want “epic storylines”. Not sure where he was headed with that one 🙂
Well, actually, looking at the success with DS, and the looks of what they’re doing with Revolution, and for that matter the casual games explosion on the web, and I think Yamauchi was on to something. In short order, much of the gamer audience will not be after the polygons or even the storylines. The lifestyle is growing too bite-sized, in a lot of ways. Already, a sizable percentage of the PC market is choosing to go for bite-sized games rather than big productions.
Could that have anything to do with price? Availability? Or that “hey, what’s this” experiance? I’m not sure if I’m understanding correctly, since I don’t have much interest in games in general. But I’m suspecting that you’re talking about two entirely different animals. Sort of a thing like “This is my girl friend, and these girls are fun to flirt with.”
But maybe I’m way off the track.
I wonder if all the Japanese quotes were actually made in English, or interpreted into English. Something might have gotten lost in the translation.
You don’t have much interest in games in general? Why are you on this blog again? 🙂
More seriously — a lot of the hardcore fans of games today aren’t fans of just games per se — they’re fans of much of what surrounds the modern game too. Many of the hardcore gamer segment are looking for huge elaborate interactive entertainment experiences, with a movie’s worth of storyline, memorable characters, and lengthy time investments. Epics, basically.
But the thing is that this leaves little on-ramp for the average person. The epics have gotten complex and challenging to play, and they cost a zillion dollars to make, too.
Meanwhile, little scrappy puzzle games have undergone a renaissance with web distribution, Flash, Java, and so on. And a huge market that was formerly untapped has shown up and now demands to be considered gamers too. These are what the mainstream gamer would derisively call “minigames,” but they’re actually more the speed of the typical person out there.
Well, I don’t know if I disagree, Raph. I suspect that the hard core gamers are also playing the mini games. But yeah, I guess looking at it from the perspective of all the mini gamers, they probably aren’t in the market for more serious games.
My interest lies solely in the MMORPGs. That’s why I’m sorely out of touch when it comes to anything else.
So, it seems what you are saying relates more to a boom in gaming rather than a shift away from the mainstream stuff.
A lot of the core gamers are paying the smaller games too — witness the success of Live Arcade on the XBox 360.
The boom in gaming is largely demographic, I think. The shift away from the mainstream stuff is a trend I see rising because of a couple of factors: a bit of market exhaustion with the same genres over and over; and the rising cost of developing the big games.
Darniaq wrote:
#1) Here again, I would think he meant “only cutting edge tech”. I’ve said often that technology itself is passe. Cell processors? So? Zillion/Gajillion polys? So? 96 channel sound? And? Like Trip, the point I believe Yamauchi is making is that selling games or systems is not about the technology on them but the experience one can have with them. I don’t agree that people don’t want “epic storylines”. Not sure where he was headed with that one 🙂
I’d love to agree with you, but I got a 360 last weekend along with EA’s Fight Night and I have to tell you, the technology contributes massively to the game experience. I’m quite blown away by it actually. The subtle indications that the other fighter is tired or running out of energy or protecting the left side of his face, etc would not have been possible without the latest greatest technology. It’s one of the few games I’ve played lately where I felt that the raw technology power directly contributed to the game experience in an indisputably positive way.
I’ll also say that Geometry Wars rocks at 1080i. =)
–matt
Whoe! What am I missing? WoW is on fire. Is it the genre, or is it a tired play style, that we’re looking at here?
Amaranthar, I wasn’t referencing WoW… the hardcore gamer market is notorious for having whole genres just vanish.
Matt, good to see you here! Supposedly, my 360 will arrive on Friday. We’ll see — I am still not sure I trust the ship date of tomorrow that they gave me. 🙂
Good luck with that Raph! I’m greatly enjoying my 360 experience so far, with Fight Night, and the XBLA Geometry Wars and multiplayer Marble Madness Ultra, but the real fun doesn’t start until I can pop in Oblivion or, even better, play co-op with friends in GRAW. I actually bought the whole team (ok, so there’s only a dozen of us) 360s so that we can play GRAW together, though most haven’t managed to find one to pick up yet. Still, so far, very very slick. MS knows Live.
Also, a little more on-topic here, the Gamer Score is interesting. In a way it turns single player games into multiplayer insofar as I find myself stupidly and pointlessly motivated to increase my gamer score so that I can compare my score against my friends. XBLA is great for that in that they’ve chosen to display your ranking vs. your friends as the default rather than ranking vs. the world. It’s turned Geometry Wars into a multiplayer game in a way as my CTO and I keep competing for the best score (although my god do we, uh, lack talent, compared to some people).
–matt
See, Matt, I do believe you’re proving my point. 😉
Whether single-player games are “unnatural”, “abnormal”, “abominable”, etc., depends on the definition of “game”. If we follow Wittgenstein, then we cannot contain the term “game” with a single definition… There are many single-player games that humans developed prior to computer technology including puzzles, cards, forms of mimicry, and methods of practice.
Heh, I don’t think I am going to re-open that conversation again. 🙂 I do think, though, that the number of single-player games that humans developed prior to computers is dwarfed by the number of multiplayer ones.
I’m curious, what are some examples of genres that have vanished from the hardcore gamer market?
Wargames (turn-based strategy), flight sims (other than Microsoft’s), sub sims (GATO!), adventure games (seems to have found a niche), stock market games (Millionaire), political sims (a la Hidden Agenda), and the entire category of children’s games. These days, even the venerable space sim.
There’s more… mind you, all of these can still be found, but they are not supplied by the major publishers, by and large.
Even the fully single player games are surely social devices. The subconcious brain of the player knows that “if I learn how to do this I will become more valuable to my community”. The concious part of the brain is usually dissconnected from that reasoning and does something entirely different.
People sometimes argue and say that som 95 year old lady derives nothing of value from a single player game other than some time spent, I think those people are wrong. Also old people have massive processing power in their subconcious minds which relies on social motivation.
Wolfe reminds me of what games likely are. It’s just like a cat playing with a ball, or even a killer whale playing with a captured seal. (Does anyone else wonder if that whale, when shoving the seal back to the shore and releasing it, isn’t thinking something to the effect of “That’s OK little buddy, you were a good sport, take five”?) It’s entertainment combined with skills practice. We practice skills all the time, and will always turn it into a game if we can, even if only in our own minds. Unless, of course, if it’s too risky or just plain dumb to do so. People, with our advanced minds, practice mental skills. But you can see animals doing mental training as well, especially the more social animals that hunt in packs. But also solo. Ever see a squirrel hang on the side of a tree, challenging a cat or dog at the base? They inch their way down, just out of reach of the antagonists ability to quickly jump and reach them. This seems to me to be more a mental execise than anything. Training themselves in recognition of the distance of safety. They sometimes lose that game. I wonder if they feel a form of excitement at the risk.
So, what makes a game get “old”? Probably a combination of things. Feeling like you don’t need the practice? Feeling like you’ve progressed beyond “that”?
But then you get into the pure entertainment aspects. I wonder what it is in us that makes entertainment so attractive? Maybe our minds need to be stretched, much like our muscles. Our brains seem to have a vast reserve that rearely gets used, or challenged. Maybe, from a purely physical standpoint, the brain likes to be used. The whatevers that make it work most likely have some chemical thing that is satisfied by use, just like muscles. And with so much reserve floating around up in our heads, well, it probably likes to be used.
So, what trips the trigger here? A big one is unexpected surprises, I think. Maybe another is the satisfaction of knowing you were right, or could accomplish something. Picture electrodes shooting back and forth accross the brain saying to eachother “See, I told you so” and “Yes! I knew it” and “just look at that, will ya?”.
I’m guessing you haven’t read the book, Amaranthar, but what you’re saying is very much in line with what I argue there. You can check out a PDF of the original talk here, which lacks all of the cognitive science justification for the argument. 🙂
I’m guessing you haven’t read the book, Amaranthar
It was nice to read a refresher, though. I haven’t seen my copy since I loaned it to a professor and he “misplaced” it. I haven’t made up my mind as to whether that’s a good thing or not, but I don’t have my copy, so… bad.
Still, the faint revival of the discussion makes a distinct point: definitions are powerful. If you defined “game” as something inherently multi-player, then single-player games have never existed. They can’t. I’m not saying that’s an appropriate definition, though. 🙂 I’m starting to feel like a one-trick pony.
I took a stab at it because I was aware of your efforts on the subject. I got a little sparkle thing going in my own head from your feedback. Hey, even this tossing and turning of the subject matter is a game, as I’m sure you see too. In relationship to MMORPGs, wouldn’t it be something if this kind of mental exercise could be in the games? Logic, strung together through events and information, piece by piece building the puzzles. Remember in early UO when players were trying to do just I took a stab at it because I was aware of your efforts on the subject. I got a little sparkle thing going in my own head from your feedback. Hey, even this tossing and turning of the subject matter is a game, as I’m sure you see too. In relationship to MMORPGs, wouldn’t it be something if this kind of mental exercise could be in the games? Logic, strung together through events and information, piece by piece building the puzzles. Remember in early UO when players were trying to do just this ? But the overall effect failed I believe because of a lack of information to the general player.
Still, once I was on to it, I couldn’t resist following through. And I immensely enjoyed the game I was onto, even though I knew it could all mean nothing.
And, while I’m convinced it was a wasted effort, I still think there were people working on UO who also had hopes that it could someday have meaning. Whether I was right or wrong, a hope that there was a deeper meaning behind it all that would reveal itself at some time in the future. But future hopes sometimes always stay in that tense. I just wish that a better way of handling such things will be used, and that this kind of meaningfull game can show up sometime.
Hmm, html doesn’t work? I had a couple of links in there. These two….
In the first comment, you didn’t have the links for some reason, and in the second one you had links but no text (so they were invisible). I fixed them in the original comment, using the links you gave in the second post. 🙂
Thanks. I understand now. *Being a nub*
I suspect that the turn-based wargaming crowd has been subsumed into real-time or quasi-realtime wargaming crowd. Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron, and related games have mined out the genre to a great extent. And doesn’t the Total War series satisfy similar interests? I’m not sure I’d consider something to have “vanished” simply because it changes a bit.
And at some point, evolution may peak– my aircraft design instructor in college grandly referred to the fuselage-two-wings-and-a-tail design as “How God Intended an Aircraft to Look”. I know people who still play Starcraft. Heck, I pop it in myself from time to time. Lack of new sales doesn’t always mean something’s less popular; it just means people have what they want already. Although this might be very, very tough to track.
There’s also the downslope from the evolutionary peak; MOO3 comes to mind, when you bring up the space sim. (I suspect my computer had more fun playing that game than I ever did.) Were the follow-ons to Myst any better than the original? You may want to add “getting discouraged” to the “exhaustion” part of your own argument. And a commercial failure by a flagship game may lead the empty suits at major publishers to believe that the genre is too high-risk to touch.
I’d add to the downslope idea your point from AToF about games getting dull once you’d grokked them, but that’s belied somewhat by the fact that WoW is pretty much a dumbed-down, sped-up remake of Everquest. Or depending on your point of view, Everquest without all the parts that s**k. 😉
But seriously… if people get bored with games when they became too easy, when they realize they already understand all the patterns the game presents them with, why would any MMO veteran play WoW? Or are all of us playing, but quitting once we hit 60?
Do you think people will get exhausted by WoW, and the market for epic MMOs will just vanish? Or will the people who have gotten onto the WoW onramp continue on to more challenging games, leading to a renaissance in the genre?
The social challenge of a decent mmorpg is evolving at a pace which is suitable for a whole lot of its veteran crowd. The gameplay or designed content gets old pretty fast, but Blizzard tweaks it at a generally accepted pace to maintain the illusion of gameplay evolution aswell. Thereby maintaining the critically important social evolution, altho not in a way which satisfies me very much personally. The been there done that feeling is just too strong.
Apart from PvP, experimenting with item-sinks, and filling out Silithus, what has Blizzard changed in WoW recently? (I ask from ignorance; my WoW account hasn’t been touched recently.)
I think adding the same kind of content only works for a while. I don’t think you are alone with the unsatisfied feeling. But where, right now, is a player going to go?
I think the game play itself needs to change. Away from directed, “go here now”, and towards choices that revolve around “living” in the world.
Life is growth. To live, you must cause growth. And customization isn’t cutting it.
Hmm… I don’t know if this is an appropriate place to put this–Amaranthar’s comment made me remember it–but:
Referencing Costikyan’s piece, I Have No Words & I Must Design…
A world (assumed to be participatory) is a place with lots of Costikyan toys. The world itself is not a toy, at least not for the player(s). It is for the developer. Avatars are toys, even for the players.
A game can be applied to any collection of toys. So can a story. Neither are intrinsic to the world.
Worlds can be virtual or real, naturally, and might be toys themselves…