The "General Games Chat" forum, which includes Retro Game Reviews, has been archived and is now read-only. You cannot post here or create a new thread or review on this forum.
Personally, I sympathise with people that express a depression with gaming in general, and a lack of ability to generate enthusiasm. I think I know where this is coming from. I also feel a profound apathy toward 99% of titles that are released, as I do with the current slew of movies and comics and all the other media. I am jaded of retro this and rehashed that. I will not even look at Barbarian, or any of these so-called updates like Spy Hunter. Why? Because they're just limp marketing exercises, that's why. They promise nothing new from the outset, like sequel movies. And we are fast approaching the point where the lack of newness will bite the industry hard.
The situation is the gaming equivalent of the dotcom bubble. In the dotcom bubble, success was built upon investor confidence. In the gaming bubble, success is built upon the public's supposedly insatiable need for brands-as-games. However, neither are limitless. Investor confidence in the dotcom bubble was justified in the early days because Amazon et al were on to a good thing. However it became more and more apparent that more and more of the IPO flotation raising hundreds of millions of dollars were increasingly made of air. While market value rose and predictions went through the roof (the oft-quoted 25,000 Dow), the air in the bubble grew increasingly thin. Then came the pop, with lastminute.com.
Gaming is the same. There is nothing wrong with a licensed game. But a cheap shoddy game is another story. With three formats now vying for attention, the market will split. As the quality of the licensed games and sequel games continues to diminish, and the quantity increases, the predictions go through the roof, the gaming bubble continues to grow, and the air is getting thinner...
Where will it pop?
Well, perhaps it doesn't have to. A little deflation my save us all.
I was very interested and happy to see Edge open up an issue for discussion in this month's issue regarding the death-through-faff cycle of licenses and sequels that currently endangers the industry. It is depressingly true that every last movie, game or comics license is currently getting put through the shredder as the advance of retro continues seemingly unabated. The message seems to be that unless you are working with the canon of everything established between the 60's and the 80's, then nobody will want to know.
What seems to have happened is that a canon of what is good has emerged in the minds of the business people. A few examples of What Is Good are:
·Anything that Shigeru Miyamoto creates
·Tolkienisms and Conanisms
·Gangsters
·Survival horror
·Endless RPGs that involve high school plots and save-the-world dynamics
·Third-person kids crap
·Licenses on every last bit of crap from the 80's
·Movie and TV licenses, however dodgy
·Realistic military stuff
·Peter Molyneaux
·George Lucas
·Sports licenses
Note that this doesn't mean that the person/people/games involved are all bad or good. I'm just pointing out what producers regard as accepted canon. The point of canon is that anything else doesn't fit the canon in at least one way, hopefully more, will not get made in the current climate. It's not just the brand names that are part of the canon; it's the whole application of exclusive genre styles to gaming that compounds the problem.
Example: Super Mario Sunshine.
If you are the sort of person that follows the Miyamoto canon rule, then you believe that SMS will be the most fantastic game ever. I mean, Mario 64 was amazing. Zelda rocked. Roll on the unquestioning faith. Does it matter that it's basically the same thing again, but with more refinements? Apparently not, if you follow the canon. Does it matter that all that is happening is that the cycle of Nintendo products is repeating? No. Does it matter that Miyamoto seems to basically be feeding off the same set of ideas again and again, and doesn't seem to have had many in the way of brand new ideas for characters or games for a long time? Again, apparently no. Because everything that Miyamoto does is great.
For Nintendo and Miyamoto, this is great. Never ones to break their business mould, Nintendo long ago figured out that the best way to stay alive in the industry is with cheerful characters and toy consoles, and forget about the rest. They are permanently aimed at 6 years old.
However, the problem as I see it is that the rest of the industry, journalists and all, think that this is the way that everything should be done. It's as though the movie industry were always continually trying to replicate the patterns of Walt Disney. Nintendo are the Disney of gaming. They have a kind of product that is their own and they basically replicate it every few years. Other companies that do this include EA Sports and Games Workshop. What these companies have in common is a refinement ethic rather than a defining ethic.
To my mind, they do a fine job of introducing children to gaming, but the devotion to what is an essentially conservative model of game design and creation causes many problems for the rest of the industry. Simply put, everybody wants to do the same thing as Nintendo. They want to make the defining games of their sector and essentially repeat that model again and again. Witness Rockstar’s recent and very public attempt to become the hip-urban-rebellious publisher.
But the problem with most of these efforts is that they fail to recognise one thing: Nintendo’s target audience defines their corporate operation, just as EA Sports’ audience does for them. Both sports fans and young children are specialist sectors, but mainstream gaming fans love one thing: Change. They like to do new things, see new things, and experience new things.
New things are the furthest thing from the minds of publishers and most developers right now. Brand strategies are proven, and the industry’s heavily defined genres are also supposedly proven. Mix the two together and you apparently have an eternity of success, right? Wrong. The mainstream loves change.
At the first stages of any successful trend, the uptake is among the cognoscenti first. From them, it spreads out to the wider audience. Then it suddenly goes global. That’s when a trend can become a canon. It acquires a set of rules from somewhere that define all subsequent content. The cognoscenti lose interest at that point, but the mainstream hang on. In gaming, you might even call that the ‘parent factor’. Parents recognise names and buy games for Johnny or Jane as a result. However, even the mainstream does not stay with anything too long.
Trends do not last. More often than not, they very quickly implode (mostly when they appear to be on the verge of achieving impossible success, like the dotcom phenomenon), leaving many companies holding junk in their hands. In some cases, they are replaced by new trends. Music and literature, for example, are led by the work of the underground. When the current trends fade, the underground is full of ideas waiting to burst through. It is a healthy cycle of renewal.
However, when there is little in the underground, serious recession can result as the public becomes bored with the very idea of the medium, let alone the individual content. The film industry has experienced massive recessions, such as the collapse in the late 60’s, and seems to be going that way again. The public simply became bored of the cinema in total.
This is my fear for the gaming industry: That the fact that what should be the cutting edge designers of games seem to be absent, and that they seem to be just as eager for retro ideas and the Nintendo style as they were five years ago. There is no underground. According to precedent, there should be massive collapse, probably within the next two years.
What is needed?
New thinking. Not just new technology thinking or interesting-but-dull experiment games. What are needed are new attitudes to the creation of a game. If you create games, are you a fiddly boffin making interesting levels in some typical game, or are you an artist, creating a vision? Is your spirit mature enough to make real games?
There seems to be a great fear in the industry of the word ‘Art’ as it applies to games. To the best of my reckoning, this is because of some vague idea of gaming people turning into snobby lit and art gallery types. Given the very technical background of gaming and games creators, I’m not surprised, but it says more about the perceivers than the perceived. It’s just like cinema. In the first decades of its life, cinema was regarded as a fairground attraction, gaudy and unimportant. It would never attract serious attention (went the view) and would only have any application for news and Charlie Chaplin.
Even most film people believed that it was just work, when the theatre was where it was really at. Ditto for television’s rise. Cinema was then the real goal. Now that television drama has finally made its mark, many are the game designers that really want to write for TV. In all cases, the creators of the day lacked a fundamental confidence in the value of their own work. In gaming even now, most creators (especially successful ones) would be loathe to talk like a film director about the value of their work. Games interviews are typically very low-concept nitty gritty affairs, as though creators want to deflect away the possibility that they might actually create something serious.
It has taken this long for gaming to evolve as an entertainment form, just like cinema and TV, but entertainment simply is not enough. The many oft-quoted designers and artists that answer “Entertainment” to Edge’s Art or Entertainment question are fundamentally missing the point. Entertainment without art is empty noise. Entertainment without art is McDonalds. It fills a spot but has no substance. Do they really want to be high-paid McDonald’s workers for all their lives?
Art without entertainment is also fatally flawed, an exercise in philosophy. Black and White, for example is high on the conceptual achievements, but low on actually being entertaining. The question is therefore not one of Art or Entertainment. They are inherently together. To be an artist is not to be a goatee-wearing philosopher with bizarre affectations (in most cases). To be an artist is to bring some belief to what you create. That is where inspiration to new directions comes from. It's also where meaning comes from.
You stop being a designer and you become a creator, author, director, or whatever you call it. You become an artist. New thinking and courage are the only things that save any creative form. In other art forms, the examples are numerous. Some are mainstream successful, others are not, but that’s the nature of the arts.
To avoid a spectacular implosion, radical thinking seems necessary, possibly a new language of confidence and even some ego. We need to take ourselves seriously.
Thanks for readong,
LF.
The situation is the gaming equivalent of the dotcom bubble. In the dotcom bubble, success was built upon investor confidence. In the gaming bubble, success is built upon the public's supposedly insatiable need for brands-as-games. However, neither are limitless. Investor confidence in the dotcom bubble was justified in the early days because Amazon et al were on to a good thing. However it became more and more apparent that more and more of the IPO flotation raising hundreds of millions of dollars were increasingly made of air. While market value rose and predictions went through the roof (the oft-quoted 25,000 Dow), the air in the bubble grew increasingly thin. Then came the pop, with lastminute.com.
Gaming is the same. There is nothing wrong with a licensed game. But a cheap shoddy game is another story. With three formats now vying for attention, the market will split. As the quality of the licensed games and sequel games continues to diminish, and the quantity increases, the predictions go through the roof, the gaming bubble continues to grow, and the air is getting thinner...
Where will it pop?
Well, perhaps it doesn't have to. A little deflation my save us all.
I was very interested and happy to see Edge open up an issue for discussion in this month's issue regarding the death-through-faff cycle of licenses and sequels that currently endangers the industry. It is depressingly true that every last movie, game or comics license is currently getting put through the shredder as the advance of retro continues seemingly unabated. The message seems to be that unless you are working with the canon of everything established between the 60's and the 80's, then nobody will want to know.
What seems to have happened is that a canon of what is good has emerged in the minds of the business people. A few examples of What Is Good are:
·Anything that Shigeru Miyamoto creates
·Tolkienisms and Conanisms
·Gangsters
·Survival horror
·Endless RPGs that involve high school plots and save-the-world dynamics
·Third-person kids crap
·Licenses on every last bit of crap from the 80's
·Movie and TV licenses, however dodgy
·Realistic military stuff
·Peter Molyneaux
·George Lucas
·Sports licenses
Note that this doesn't mean that the person/people/games involved are all bad or good. I'm just pointing out what producers regard as accepted canon. The point of canon is that anything else doesn't fit the canon in at least one way, hopefully more, will not get made in the current climate. It's not just the brand names that are part of the canon; it's the whole application of exclusive genre styles to gaming that compounds the problem.
Example: Super Mario Sunshine.
If you are the sort of person that follows the Miyamoto canon rule, then you believe that SMS will be the most fantastic game ever. I mean, Mario 64 was amazing. Zelda rocked. Roll on the unquestioning faith. Does it matter that it's basically the same thing again, but with more refinements? Apparently not, if you follow the canon. Does it matter that all that is happening is that the cycle of Nintendo products is repeating? No. Does it matter that Miyamoto seems to basically be feeding off the same set of ideas again and again, and doesn't seem to have had many in the way of brand new ideas for characters or games for a long time? Again, apparently no. Because everything that Miyamoto does is great.
For Nintendo and Miyamoto, this is great. Never ones to break their business mould, Nintendo long ago figured out that the best way to stay alive in the industry is with cheerful characters and toy consoles, and forget about the rest. They are permanently aimed at 6 years old.
However, the problem as I see it is that the rest of the industry, journalists and all, think that this is the way that everything should be done. It's as though the movie industry were always continually trying to replicate the patterns of Walt Disney. Nintendo are the Disney of gaming. They have a kind of product that is their own and they basically replicate it every few years. Other companies that do this include EA Sports and Games Workshop. What these companies have in common is a refinement ethic rather than a defining ethic.
To my mind, they do a fine job of introducing children to gaming, but the devotion to what is an essentially conservative model of game design and creation causes many problems for the rest of the industry. Simply put, everybody wants to do the same thing as Nintendo. They want to make the defining games of their sector and essentially repeat that model again and again. Witness Rockstar’s recent and very public attempt to become the hip-urban-rebellious publisher.
But the problem with most of these efforts is that they fail to recognise one thing: Nintendo’s target audience defines their corporate operation, just as EA Sports’ audience does for them. Both sports fans and young children are specialist sectors, but mainstream gaming fans love one thing: Change. They like to do new things, see new things, and experience new things.
New things are the furthest thing from the minds of publishers and most developers right now. Brand strategies are proven, and the industry’s heavily defined genres are also supposedly proven. Mix the two together and you apparently have an eternity of success, right? Wrong. The mainstream loves change.
At the first stages of any successful trend, the uptake is among the cognoscenti first. From them, it spreads out to the wider audience. Then it suddenly goes global. That’s when a trend can become a canon. It acquires a set of rules from somewhere that define all subsequent content. The cognoscenti lose interest at that point, but the mainstream hang on. In gaming, you might even call that the ‘parent factor’. Parents recognise names and buy games for Johnny or Jane as a result. However, even the mainstream does not stay with anything too long.
Trends do not last. More often than not, they very quickly implode (mostly when they appear to be on the verge of achieving impossible success, like the dotcom phenomenon), leaving many companies holding junk in their hands. In some cases, they are replaced by new trends. Music and literature, for example, are led by the work of the underground. When the current trends fade, the underground is full of ideas waiting to burst through. It is a healthy cycle of renewal.
However, when there is little in the underground, serious recession can result as the public becomes bored with the very idea of the medium, let alone the individual content. The film industry has experienced massive recessions, such as the collapse in the late 60’s, and seems to be going that way again. The public simply became bored of the cinema in total.
This is my fear for the gaming industry: That the fact that what should be the cutting edge designers of games seem to be absent, and that they seem to be just as eager for retro ideas and the Nintendo style as they were five years ago. There is no underground. According to precedent, there should be massive collapse, probably within the next two years.
What is needed?
New thinking. Not just new technology thinking or interesting-but-dull experiment games. What are needed are new attitudes to the creation of a game. If you create games, are you a fiddly boffin making interesting levels in some typical game, or are you an artist, creating a vision? Is your spirit mature enough to make real games?
There seems to be a great fear in the industry of the word ‘Art’ as it applies to games. To the best of my reckoning, this is because of some vague idea of gaming people turning into snobby lit and art gallery types. Given the very technical background of gaming and games creators, I’m not surprised, but it says more about the perceivers than the perceived. It’s just like cinema. In the first decades of its life, cinema was regarded as a fairground attraction, gaudy and unimportant. It would never attract serious attention (went the view) and would only have any application for news and Charlie Chaplin.
Even most film people believed that it was just work, when the theatre was where it was really at. Ditto for television’s rise. Cinema was then the real goal. Now that television drama has finally made its mark, many are the game designers that really want to write for TV. In all cases, the creators of the day lacked a fundamental confidence in the value of their own work. In gaming even now, most creators (especially successful ones) would be loathe to talk like a film director about the value of their work. Games interviews are typically very low-concept nitty gritty affairs, as though creators want to deflect away the possibility that they might actually create something serious.
It has taken this long for gaming to evolve as an entertainment form, just like cinema and TV, but entertainment simply is not enough. The many oft-quoted designers and artists that answer “Entertainment” to Edge’s Art or Entertainment question are fundamentally missing the point. Entertainment without art is empty noise. Entertainment without art is McDonalds. It fills a spot but has no substance. Do they really want to be high-paid McDonald’s workers for all their lives?
Art without entertainment is also fatally flawed, an exercise in philosophy. Black and White, for example is high on the conceptual achievements, but low on actually being entertaining. The question is therefore not one of Art or Entertainment. They are inherently together. To be an artist is not to be a goatee-wearing philosopher with bizarre affectations (in most cases). To be an artist is to bring some belief to what you create. That is where inspiration to new directions comes from. It's also where meaning comes from.
You stop being a designer and you become a creator, author, director, or whatever you call it. You become an artist. New thinking and courage are the only things that save any creative form. In other art forms, the examples are numerous. Some are mainstream successful, others are not, but that’s the nature of the arts.
To avoid a spectacular implosion, radical thinking seems necessary, possibly a new language of confidence and even some ego. We need to take ourselves seriously.
Thanks for readong,
LF.
Yh, if you'd dare set foot in the Nintendo forum, then you'd see a post by me, near the top, probably, which involves a discussion about what's happening to the industry in terms of gaming ideas. It's more to do with how Nintendo are going about it, but never mind.
Enough of advertising my own posts, and on to a more current problem - and that Lawless Fever slating Miyamoto and his latest masterpiece, Mario Sunshine!
*Ahem*
Super Mario Sunshine is NOT the same thing again, it just LOOKS it...read about the game at hand more deeply, lad, and you'd realise.
What's the point in making another game that's basically the same? Mario Sunshine is only the same as Mario 64 in terms of style of graphics characters and basic, overall objective - to collect "Stars", or whatever they're called now - sun tokens?
Anyway - the storyline (if there is one) is different...there is no Bowser. You do not jump through paintings to different worlds. You do not have just Mario in his dungarees...he has a NEW and ORIGINAL piece of kit to help HIM carry out his tasks and you to enjoy the game more, to make it feel DIFFERENT. Super Mario Sunshine is totally different in the way that you progress through it. Mario can do different things. There are even new characters.
So basically, Miyamoto is a bad influence because he does what every other developer does but better? Sonic is the same but had many spawned sequels that, to identify difference, had NEW ideas. Same as TimeSplitters. same concept, different levels. New ideas. Same as Super Mario Sunshine. A game doesn't get 36/40 for nothing, you know. And in a review it said that Mario Sunshine hid a rather surprisingly high difficulty level in terms of puzzle complication.
So don't say that Super Mario Sunshine is just a repeat. Because it ain't.
Enough of advertising my own posts, and on to a more current problem - and that Lawless Fever slating Miyamoto and his latest masterpiece, Mario Sunshine!
*Ahem*
Super Mario Sunshine is NOT the same thing again, it just LOOKS it...read about the game at hand more deeply, lad, and you'd realise.
What's the point in making another game that's basically the same? Mario Sunshine is only the same as Mario 64 in terms of style of graphics characters and basic, overall objective - to collect "Stars", or whatever they're called now - sun tokens?
Anyway - the storyline (if there is one) is different...there is no Bowser. You do not jump through paintings to different worlds. You do not have just Mario in his dungarees...he has a NEW and ORIGINAL piece of kit to help HIM carry out his tasks and you to enjoy the game more, to make it feel DIFFERENT. Super Mario Sunshine is totally different in the way that you progress through it. Mario can do different things. There are even new characters.
So basically, Miyamoto is a bad influence because he does what every other developer does but better? Sonic is the same but had many spawned sequels that, to identify difference, had NEW ideas. Same as TimeSplitters. same concept, different levels. New ideas. Same as Super Mario Sunshine. A game doesn't get 36/40 for nothing, you know. And in a review it said that Mario Sunshine hid a rather surprisingly high difficulty level in terms of puzzle complication.
So don't say that Super Mario Sunshine is just a repeat. Because it ain't.
Your point seems to be that the games industry is stuck in a bit of a rut at the moment, with no new ideas about. To which I say "That's not strictly true."
There are new ideas out there, you just have to know where to look. Games like Blinx and Project Ego are pushing the gaming boundaries along.
However, the games market will continue to push out the same type of stuff for two reasons:
1. It's easy to do - It's easy to take an existing idea and tart the graphics up a bit and release it on a new platform to critical acclaim. Just look at the ridiculously overhyped Gran Turismo 3 for a perfect example.
2. It's going to make money. The mass market wants to buy something that it knows is good. Why take a risk buying Brand New Game A when you can buy Sequel 7 and be sure that you'll enjoy playing it. Games like Mario and Final Fantasy fit this description perfectly.
I personally don't have a problem with sequels for a couple of reasons:
1. It keeps the industry in money. If I need to see shelves of games like Tomb Raider 7 so the developers have enough money to develop brand new titles like Chu Chu Rocket, Blinx etc, then that's fine by me. I appriciated the fact that the more outlandish titles can take longer to develop, and will almost certainly sell less copies than FIFA 2002. So the money has to be made back somehow.
2. I have no problem with sequels if they actually improve more than just the graphics in a game. If the whole gameplay is adjusted then that's fine as it shows that the developers have more thought into it than just giving Lara bigger norks for example.
I don't thik you need to worry about the gaming industry becoming like the film industry as a bad thing. In fact I think it would be quite good if the gaming industry followed in the path of films, as there are plenty of great films out there that aren't cliched mainstream rubbish.
The mainstream films give the studios enough money to take a chance with a less well known franchise, or story or director or whatever, and the results can be amazingly good. If the games industry goes the same way, I won't be disappointed.
There are new ideas out there, you just have to know where to look. Games like Blinx and Project Ego are pushing the gaming boundaries along.
However, the games market will continue to push out the same type of stuff for two reasons:
1. It's easy to do - It's easy to take an existing idea and tart the graphics up a bit and release it on a new platform to critical acclaim. Just look at the ridiculously overhyped Gran Turismo 3 for a perfect example.
2. It's going to make money. The mass market wants to buy something that it knows is good. Why take a risk buying Brand New Game A when you can buy Sequel 7 and be sure that you'll enjoy playing it. Games like Mario and Final Fantasy fit this description perfectly.
I personally don't have a problem with sequels for a couple of reasons:
1. It keeps the industry in money. If I need to see shelves of games like Tomb Raider 7 so the developers have enough money to develop brand new titles like Chu Chu Rocket, Blinx etc, then that's fine by me. I appriciated the fact that the more outlandish titles can take longer to develop, and will almost certainly sell less copies than FIFA 2002. So the money has to be made back somehow.
2. I have no problem with sequels if they actually improve more than just the graphics in a game. If the whole gameplay is adjusted then that's fine as it shows that the developers have more thought into it than just giving Lara bigger norks for example.
I don't thik you need to worry about the gaming industry becoming like the film industry as a bad thing. In fact I think it would be quite good if the gaming industry followed in the path of films, as there are plenty of great films out there that aren't cliched mainstream rubbish.
The mainstream films give the studios enough money to take a chance with a less well known franchise, or story or director or whatever, and the results can be amazingly good. If the games industry goes the same way, I won't be disappointed.
Personally, I sympathise with people that express a depression with gaming in general, and a lack of ability to generate enthusiasm. I think I know where this is coming from. I also feel a profound apathy toward 99% of titles that are released, as I do with the current slew of movies and comics and all the other media. I am jaded of retro this and rehashed that. I will not even look at Barbarian, or any of these so-called updates like Spy Hunter. Why? Because they're just limp marketing exercises, that's why. They promise nothing new from the outset, like sequel movies. And we are fast approaching the point where the lack of newness will bite the industry hard.
The situation is the gaming equivalent of the dotcom bubble. In the dotcom bubble, success was built upon investor confidence. In the gaming bubble, success is built upon the public's supposedly insatiable need for brands-as-games. However, neither are limitless. Investor confidence in the dotcom bubble was justified in the early days because Amazon et al were on to a good thing. However it became more and more apparent that more and more of the IPO flotation raising hundreds of millions of dollars were increasingly made of air. While market value rose and predictions went through the roof (the oft-quoted 25,000 Dow), the air in the bubble grew increasingly thin. Then came the pop, with lastminute.com.
Gaming is the same. There is nothing wrong with a licensed game. But a cheap shoddy game is another story. With three formats now vying for attention, the market will split. As the quality of the licensed games and sequel games continues to diminish, and the quantity increases, the predictions go through the roof, the gaming bubble continues to grow, and the air is getting thinner...
Where will it pop?
Well, perhaps it doesn't have to. A little deflation my save us all.
I was very interested and happy to see Edge open up an issue for discussion in this month's issue regarding the death-through-faff cycle of licenses and sequels that currently endangers the industry. It is depressingly true that every last movie, game or comics license is currently getting put through the shredder as the advance of retro continues seemingly unabated. The message seems to be that unless you are working with the canon of everything established between the 60's and the 80's, then nobody will want to know.
What seems to have happened is that a canon of what is good has emerged in the minds of the business people. A few examples of What Is Good are:
·Anything that Shigeru Miyamoto creates
·Tolkienisms and Conanisms
·Gangsters
·Survival horror
·Endless RPGs that involve high school plots and save-the-world dynamics
·Third-person kids crap
·Licenses on every last bit of crap from the 80's
·Movie and TV licenses, however dodgy
·Realistic military stuff
·Peter Molyneaux
·George Lucas
·Sports licenses
Note that this doesn't mean that the person/people/games involved are all bad or good. I'm just pointing out what producers regard as accepted canon. The point of canon is that anything else doesn't fit the canon in at least one way, hopefully more, will not get made in the current climate. It's not just the brand names that are part of the canon; it's the whole application of exclusive genre styles to gaming that compounds the problem.
Example: Super Mario Sunshine.
If you are the sort of person that follows the Miyamoto canon rule, then you believe that SMS will be the most fantastic game ever. I mean, Mario 64 was amazing. Zelda rocked. Roll on the unquestioning faith. Does it matter that it's basically the same thing again, but with more refinements? Apparently not, if you follow the canon. Does it matter that all that is happening is that the cycle of Nintendo products is repeating? No. Does it matter that Miyamoto seems to basically be feeding off the same set of ideas again and again, and doesn't seem to have had many in the way of brand new ideas for characters or games for a long time? Again, apparently no. Because everything that Miyamoto does is great.
For Nintendo and Miyamoto, this is great. Never ones to break their business mould, Nintendo long ago figured out that the best way to stay alive in the industry is with cheerful characters and toy consoles, and forget about the rest. They are permanently aimed at 6 years old.
However, the problem as I see it is that the rest of the industry, journalists and all, think that this is the way that everything should be done. It's as though the movie industry were always continually trying to replicate the patterns of Walt Disney. Nintendo are the Disney of gaming. They have a kind of product that is their own and they basically replicate it every few years. Other companies that do this include EA Sports and Games Workshop. What these companies have in common is a refinement ethic rather than a defining ethic.
To my mind, they do a fine job of introducing children to gaming, but the devotion to what is an essentially conservative model of game design and creation causes many problems for the rest of the industry. Simply put, everybody wants to do the same thing as Nintendo. They want to make the defining games of their sector and essentially repeat that model again and again. Witness Rockstar’s recent and very public attempt to become the hip-urban-rebellious publisher.
But the problem with most of these efforts is that they fail to recognise one thing: Nintendo’s target audience defines their corporate operation, just as EA Sports’ audience does for them. Both sports fans and young children are specialist sectors, but mainstream gaming fans love one thing: Change. They like to do new things, see new things, and experience new things.
New things are the furthest thing from the minds of publishers and most developers right now. Brand strategies are proven, and the industry’s heavily defined genres are also supposedly proven. Mix the two together and you apparently have an eternity of success, right? Wrong. The mainstream loves change.
At the first stages of any successful trend, the uptake is among the cognoscenti first. From them, it spreads out to the wider audience. Then it suddenly goes global. That’s when a trend can become a canon. It acquires a set of rules from somewhere that define all subsequent content. The cognoscenti lose interest at that point, but the mainstream hang on. In gaming, you might even call that the ‘parent factor’. Parents recognise names and buy games for Johnny or Jane as a result. However, even the mainstream does not stay with anything too long.
Trends do not last. More often than not, they very quickly implode (mostly when they appear to be on the verge of achieving impossible success, like the dotcom phenomenon), leaving many companies holding junk in their hands. In some cases, they are replaced by new trends. Music and literature, for example, are led by the work of the underground. When the current trends fade, the underground is full of ideas waiting to burst through. It is a healthy cycle of renewal.
However, when there is little in the underground, serious recession can result as the public becomes bored with the very idea of the medium, let alone the individual content. The film industry has experienced massive recessions, such as the collapse in the late 60’s, and seems to be going that way again. The public simply became bored of the cinema in total.
This is my fear for the gaming industry: That the fact that what should be the cutting edge designers of games seem to be absent, and that they seem to be just as eager for retro ideas and the Nintendo style as they were five years ago. There is no underground. According to precedent, there should be massive collapse, probably within the next two years.
What is needed?
New thinking. Not just new technology thinking or interesting-but-dull experiment games. What are needed are new attitudes to the creation of a game. If you create games, are you a fiddly boffin making interesting levels in some typical game, or are you an artist, creating a vision? Is your spirit mature enough to make real games?
There seems to be a great fear in the industry of the word ‘Art’ as it applies to games. To the best of my reckoning, this is because of some vague idea of gaming people turning into snobby lit and art gallery types. Given the very technical background of gaming and games creators, I’m not surprised, but it says more about the perceivers than the perceived. It’s just like cinema. In the first decades of its life, cinema was regarded as a fairground attraction, gaudy and unimportant. It would never attract serious attention (went the view) and would only have any application for news and Charlie Chaplin.
Even most film people believed that it was just work, when the theatre was where it was really at. Ditto for television’s rise. Cinema was then the real goal. Now that television drama has finally made its mark, many are the game designers that really want to write for TV. In all cases, the creators of the day lacked a fundamental confidence in the value of their own work. In gaming even now, most creators (especially successful ones) would be loathe to talk like a film director about the value of their work. Games interviews are typically very low-concept nitty gritty affairs, as though creators want to deflect away the possibility that they might actually create something serious.
It has taken this long for gaming to evolve as an entertainment form, just like cinema and TV, but entertainment simply is not enough. The many oft-quoted designers and artists that answer “Entertainment” to Edge’s Art or Entertainment question are fundamentally missing the point. Entertainment without art is empty noise. Entertainment without art is McDonalds. It fills a spot but has no substance. Do they really want to be high-paid McDonald’s workers for all their lives?
Art without entertainment is also fatally flawed, an exercise in philosophy. Black and White, for example is high on the conceptual achievements, but low on actually being entertaining. The question is therefore not one of Art or Entertainment. They are inherently together. To be an artist is not to be a goatee-wearing philosopher with bizarre affectations (in most cases). To be an artist is to bring some belief to what you create. That is where inspiration to new directions comes from. It's also where meaning comes from.
You stop being a designer and you become a creator, author, director, or whatever you call it. You become an artist. New thinking and courage are the only things that save any creative form. In other art forms, the examples are numerous. Some are mainstream successful, others are not, but that’s the nature of the arts.
To avoid a spectacular implosion, radical thinking seems necessary, possibly a new language of confidence and even some ego. We need to take ourselves seriously.
Thanks for readong,
LF.
The situation is the gaming equivalent of the dotcom bubble. In the dotcom bubble, success was built upon investor confidence. In the gaming bubble, success is built upon the public's supposedly insatiable need for brands-as-games. However, neither are limitless. Investor confidence in the dotcom bubble was justified in the early days because Amazon et al were on to a good thing. However it became more and more apparent that more and more of the IPO flotation raising hundreds of millions of dollars were increasingly made of air. While market value rose and predictions went through the roof (the oft-quoted 25,000 Dow), the air in the bubble grew increasingly thin. Then came the pop, with lastminute.com.
Gaming is the same. There is nothing wrong with a licensed game. But a cheap shoddy game is another story. With three formats now vying for attention, the market will split. As the quality of the licensed games and sequel games continues to diminish, and the quantity increases, the predictions go through the roof, the gaming bubble continues to grow, and the air is getting thinner...
Where will it pop?
Well, perhaps it doesn't have to. A little deflation my save us all.
I was very interested and happy to see Edge open up an issue for discussion in this month's issue regarding the death-through-faff cycle of licenses and sequels that currently endangers the industry. It is depressingly true that every last movie, game or comics license is currently getting put through the shredder as the advance of retro continues seemingly unabated. The message seems to be that unless you are working with the canon of everything established between the 60's and the 80's, then nobody will want to know.
What seems to have happened is that a canon of what is good has emerged in the minds of the business people. A few examples of What Is Good are:
·Anything that Shigeru Miyamoto creates
·Tolkienisms and Conanisms
·Gangsters
·Survival horror
·Endless RPGs that involve high school plots and save-the-world dynamics
·Third-person kids crap
·Licenses on every last bit of crap from the 80's
·Movie and TV licenses, however dodgy
·Realistic military stuff
·Peter Molyneaux
·George Lucas
·Sports licenses
Note that this doesn't mean that the person/people/games involved are all bad or good. I'm just pointing out what producers regard as accepted canon. The point of canon is that anything else doesn't fit the canon in at least one way, hopefully more, will not get made in the current climate. It's not just the brand names that are part of the canon; it's the whole application of exclusive genre styles to gaming that compounds the problem.
Example: Super Mario Sunshine.
If you are the sort of person that follows the Miyamoto canon rule, then you believe that SMS will be the most fantastic game ever. I mean, Mario 64 was amazing. Zelda rocked. Roll on the unquestioning faith. Does it matter that it's basically the same thing again, but with more refinements? Apparently not, if you follow the canon. Does it matter that all that is happening is that the cycle of Nintendo products is repeating? No. Does it matter that Miyamoto seems to basically be feeding off the same set of ideas again and again, and doesn't seem to have had many in the way of brand new ideas for characters or games for a long time? Again, apparently no. Because everything that Miyamoto does is great.
For Nintendo and Miyamoto, this is great. Never ones to break their business mould, Nintendo long ago figured out that the best way to stay alive in the industry is with cheerful characters and toy consoles, and forget about the rest. They are permanently aimed at 6 years old.
However, the problem as I see it is that the rest of the industry, journalists and all, think that this is the way that everything should be done. It's as though the movie industry were always continually trying to replicate the patterns of Walt Disney. Nintendo are the Disney of gaming. They have a kind of product that is their own and they basically replicate it every few years. Other companies that do this include EA Sports and Games Workshop. What these companies have in common is a refinement ethic rather than a defining ethic.
To my mind, they do a fine job of introducing children to gaming, but the devotion to what is an essentially conservative model of game design and creation causes many problems for the rest of the industry. Simply put, everybody wants to do the same thing as Nintendo. They want to make the defining games of their sector and essentially repeat that model again and again. Witness Rockstar’s recent and very public attempt to become the hip-urban-rebellious publisher.
But the problem with most of these efforts is that they fail to recognise one thing: Nintendo’s target audience defines their corporate operation, just as EA Sports’ audience does for them. Both sports fans and young children are specialist sectors, but mainstream gaming fans love one thing: Change. They like to do new things, see new things, and experience new things.
New things are the furthest thing from the minds of publishers and most developers right now. Brand strategies are proven, and the industry’s heavily defined genres are also supposedly proven. Mix the two together and you apparently have an eternity of success, right? Wrong. The mainstream loves change.
At the first stages of any successful trend, the uptake is among the cognoscenti first. From them, it spreads out to the wider audience. Then it suddenly goes global. That’s when a trend can become a canon. It acquires a set of rules from somewhere that define all subsequent content. The cognoscenti lose interest at that point, but the mainstream hang on. In gaming, you might even call that the ‘parent factor’. Parents recognise names and buy games for Johnny or Jane as a result. However, even the mainstream does not stay with anything too long.
Trends do not last. More often than not, they very quickly implode (mostly when they appear to be on the verge of achieving impossible success, like the dotcom phenomenon), leaving many companies holding junk in their hands. In some cases, they are replaced by new trends. Music and literature, for example, are led by the work of the underground. When the current trends fade, the underground is full of ideas waiting to burst through. It is a healthy cycle of renewal.
However, when there is little in the underground, serious recession can result as the public becomes bored with the very idea of the medium, let alone the individual content. The film industry has experienced massive recessions, such as the collapse in the late 60’s, and seems to be going that way again. The public simply became bored of the cinema in total.
This is my fear for the gaming industry: That the fact that what should be the cutting edge designers of games seem to be absent, and that they seem to be just as eager for retro ideas and the Nintendo style as they were five years ago. There is no underground. According to precedent, there should be massive collapse, probably within the next two years.
What is needed?
New thinking. Not just new technology thinking or interesting-but-dull experiment games. What are needed are new attitudes to the creation of a game. If you create games, are you a fiddly boffin making interesting levels in some typical game, or are you an artist, creating a vision? Is your spirit mature enough to make real games?
There seems to be a great fear in the industry of the word ‘Art’ as it applies to games. To the best of my reckoning, this is because of some vague idea of gaming people turning into snobby lit and art gallery types. Given the very technical background of gaming and games creators, I’m not surprised, but it says more about the perceivers than the perceived. It’s just like cinema. In the first decades of its life, cinema was regarded as a fairground attraction, gaudy and unimportant. It would never attract serious attention (went the view) and would only have any application for news and Charlie Chaplin.
Even most film people believed that it was just work, when the theatre was where it was really at. Ditto for television’s rise. Cinema was then the real goal. Now that television drama has finally made its mark, many are the game designers that really want to write for TV. In all cases, the creators of the day lacked a fundamental confidence in the value of their own work. In gaming even now, most creators (especially successful ones) would be loathe to talk like a film director about the value of their work. Games interviews are typically very low-concept nitty gritty affairs, as though creators want to deflect away the possibility that they might actually create something serious.
It has taken this long for gaming to evolve as an entertainment form, just like cinema and TV, but entertainment simply is not enough. The many oft-quoted designers and artists that answer “Entertainment” to Edge’s Art or Entertainment question are fundamentally missing the point. Entertainment without art is empty noise. Entertainment without art is McDonalds. It fills a spot but has no substance. Do they really want to be high-paid McDonald’s workers for all their lives?
Art without entertainment is also fatally flawed, an exercise in philosophy. Black and White, for example is high on the conceptual achievements, but low on actually being entertaining. The question is therefore not one of Art or Entertainment. They are inherently together. To be an artist is not to be a goatee-wearing philosopher with bizarre affectations (in most cases). To be an artist is to bring some belief to what you create. That is where inspiration to new directions comes from. It's also where meaning comes from.
You stop being a designer and you become a creator, author, director, or whatever you call it. You become an artist. New thinking and courage are the only things that save any creative form. In other art forms, the examples are numerous. Some are mainstream successful, others are not, but that’s the nature of the arts.
To avoid a spectacular implosion, radical thinking seems necessary, possibly a new language of confidence and even some ego. We need to take ourselves seriously.
Thanks for readong,
LF.