Lies, Damned Lies, And Gaming Statistics 40
Thanks to the IGDA for pointing to a recent Chris Crawford-authored piece discussing the unreliability of statistics that reveal an ever-more diverse gaming public. The piece cites a recent Entertainment Software Association study and suggests that, because they don't reveal their methods or sources, "...the ESA results are unscientific. We can't place any confidence in them because we have no idea what they really mean. It doesn't matter how representative the sample is or how large it is or even if the researchers wore white lab coats." The ever-controversial Crawford goes on to argue that "Games people are smarting about the tawdry, unhealthy image that their industry suffers", and then offers a way out: "What's especially sad about this is that the solution to these problems is obvious: start making respectable games."
Re:Aye, there's the rub. (Score:3, Informative)
Almost half of those games don't even rank in the top 20, while games that do (Half-Life, Myst) aren't there. Mario accounts for about 25% of the top 20, though.
It is much easier to make a game where you have to kill all your enemies, as opposed to make them loyal and win their friendship and love. And besides, most of us do the more complex task in our daily lives anyway.
Civilization (and most of it's sequels and derivatives) can be played this way. Obviously, though, it has a more niche appeal than the others. Of course, a handful of the top selling games involve no conflict at all, such as Tetris and Myst.
As far as comparing books and film to video games, the problem is interactivity. A person doesn't make choices in the two proven genres, but games are participatory.
This is also why games tend to get hit by controversy and that controversy tends to stick better than it ever did with music, movies, and books. This is also why controversy stuck with pen & paper RPGs. Still, it has little to do with whether or not they can be considered art, as that's a matter of the people working on them treating them as such.
The future of game development is going to be intresting, because current game sales have been based on improved technology; not improved gameplay. (ex: UT v UT2003)
As far as I knew, UT outsold UT2003, and Unreal outsold UT. Half-Life outsold Quake 3 by quite a bit. Super Mario Bros 1 outsold all other Mario games (though SMB3 is the best selling game never officially bundled with hardware). Doom 3 might be the exception, if it does well, because it has a better name in the mainstream than Quake. There are far more non-gamers that played Doom than Quake.
The proven game genres are going to have to take a back-seat, and be modified to make some fresh ideas. Who would have thought games such as The Sims would have been so successful? What the game business needs is innovation, not this repetitive stagnation.
As with anything else, the stagnation will remain. Movies certainly suffer from it, music suffers greatly, and books slightly less so, but still to a degree. Occasionally there are those rare games that surpass the current genres and/or bring in mass appeal. I am much happier to see Half-Life on the 'top selling games of all time' charts than Myst or the Sims, because it shows that an existing genre can appeal to the masses with some effort on the part of developers. Too many people are complacent to keep doing the same old things, to try to develop something cheaply that will bring in quick cash. The Sims is actually a solid example of this, as once the actual game took off they kept turning out expansion packs that required very little change to the game itself, and brought in tons of cash. Of course, Valve is nearly as guilty with Half-Life, turning out a dozen or so versions of the game over the past 4 years and selling mods developed by fans of the game (though, of course, those fans made a pretty penny in most cases, too).
People tend to go too far into the mindset of 'we need something completely new' instead of realizing that we just need people to tell new stories and create technology that tells the stories better. Even Half-Life's story was fairly derivative of the rest of the genre, with only a few twists and changes, but the technology they developed to tell the story made it a best seller. Of course, Quake 3 was considered better from a technological standpoint, but it's technology was focused around flashy eye-candy rather than story-telling, which is why it came nowhere near the sales numbers.
On the other hand, what are the SMB games really about? Those are the best-selling ga
Re:Aye, there's the rub. (Score:1, Informative)