Gamers Anonymous

[FireStag]

One of the most original games I've ever played was the first Tribes for PC. If that game had a campaign it would have been much more popular, but in 1998, what you could do and how fun it was blew me away. First real MMOFPS where you had to use tactics and junk, vehicles that flew and shot rockets, and you used jetpacks to get from place to place. Teleporters, deployable walls and force fields, turrets... I don't think I've ever played a game more...

[staticshade]

Shadow of the Colossus

but the article author is doing it wrong, you can't just grab the first casual game that comes your way to judge gaming as a whole. You're always gonna get what he describes as an adolescent and flashy game.

i only played that game a few weeks ago i was blown away i felt like a kid. the sense of adventure in that game was epic especially the fight with the centipide/flying colossus in the desert wow!!!

but then i think there are only a handful of games in this generation that are anything as spectacular as this game

[stanfy86]

And thats why my favorite platform is the hacked PSP, i can play all of the GOOD games of yore whenever i want....

That said i do think there are a few examples of good games that are more recent: zone of the enders 2, oblivion/fallout 3 etc. but i do feel that one previously valued metric for scoring a games overall value s the replay factor, im lucky if i get 1/2 - 1 week out of a game.

[Emulation_Chief]

Hello:

I have to agree and disagree about what this "non-gamer" said about video games.

The agree part. Certainly the hardware and software "evolved" to the point of high realism and high definition. But the game genres didn't changed much. an action game has the same style since the 80's. The main character is always a bad-ass, outnumbered and most of the time the boss level is always bigger than the playable character. RPGs uses pretty much the same formula since Final Fantasy and Legend of Zelda from NES.

The disagree part. Games DO EVOLVED during time. Although the companies today doesn't want or really need to reinvent the wheel in terms of game styles, small and big developers do create games that really push the imagination and, most of the time, begin a complete revolution. I will start with the most common of the games: Tetris. Who would believe that a simple and challenging game made in Russia become a phenomenon and begun the puzzle genre in video games? What about the 90's? Explored only by few developers and finally took form in Capcom's Street Fighter 2 begun the fighting genre to the popularity it has today. What about the new millennium? What about other genres? Sega brought us their greatest masterpiece. Redefining what an RPG could become, Shenmue hit the stores to a Dreamcast near you.

In conclusion, games will always be that, games. They're fun, distracting and challenging. Unfortunately, oversaturation of the same genres and high budget projects, big companies doesn't take much time to really start something that revolutionized the industry. Looks like small developers will work on that evolution more than the big ones.

[drunkenmonkey]

Arguing that any of these industries or media is stagnant or isn't evolving fast enough ignores the basic nature of what these things are: products sold by businesses.

These businesses, whether they be small indy developers or global empires, are trying to make money (no matter how much some indies protest that all they care about is the art - without money, they go back to being unemployed/overeducated artists). They make money by putting products up for sale. When they can get their hands on ingenious, groundbreaking material, they run with it: Myst, for example, used new technology and a pretty innovative game concept to sell more copies than just about any other game.

The same thing goes for other industries. The Harry Potter books sold so ridiculously many copies (despite writing of a quality that I'd consider mediocre at best)

Spoiler!

my first post: I'm testing the waters (i.e. I think mediocre is pretty generous)

in part because they were a relatively new treatment of a well-established genre/story. There's a similar concept behind remarkable movies like 300/Watchmen (everyone's familiar with comic books/graphic novels, and everyone's seen Batman/Superman/X-Men/..., but 300 and Watchmen - along with Sin City, which someone else mentioned - explicitly sought to transplant the aesthetic of the original work into a new medium in a way that hadn't really been done before), or remarkable blah like Blah (it's getting late, I have to get to work in the morning, and no great examples come to mind right now - but I know they're there).

The new book by Dan Brown (the guy who wrote The Da Vinci Code) has a planned first print run of 5 million copies. Is there something brilliant and innovative about it? Probably not. But he's sold an absurd number of books (and movie tickets) before, so the publisher is (understandably) counting on making a lot more money off of his work, even if it turns out to be thoroughly formulaic and predictable. Sound like a familiar scheme? I'm a turn-based strategy guy, so the first games-name that comes to mind is Sid Meier: legend, sure, but when was the last time he released a game you thought was totally new? Civilization, 1991? Even so, he still turns out games, and we keep buying them.

So what can we do to encourage the industries we patronize to innovate? If nobody buys Dan Brown's new book, no publisher will take another chance on him. If nobody buys third or fourth books by the same authors we've all heard of, publishers will eventually catch on (if they're still in business) and maybe go out and look for that new thing out there. They may even find some good writers with really original things to say or really original ways to say old things. But do you want to sit back and not play the next four iterations of Grand Theft Auto or Civilization because you hope game developers, at the prompting of their falling sales, will come up with something new? Or do you want to keep checking out the newest graphics and special effects, all the while whining that there's nothing really new about each new game before it even comes out?