Creativity, a Problem for the Gaming Industry? 522
Steeda95GT writes "A Reuters story reprinted at Forbes.com is an interesting read, saying that 'The gaming industry will shrink unless we start to see new games'. It talks about how the ratio of original titles to sequels is dropping dramatically, but it also goes on to say that upcoming sequels (Doom 3, Halo 2, Half-Life 2, GTA: San Andreas) will be successful only because their predecessors were."
Creativity? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who needs... (Score:5, Insightful)
Moving on (Score:3, Insightful)
Not Creativity. it's EA (Score:2, Insightful)
Tribes died, WIng Commanders, UO, etc, etc. It's all charts, numbers, and rehashing as opposed to highly motivated developers and a creative team.
If it's good, it's good (Score:5, Insightful)
But it is not just EA chasing after proven material. Upcoming titles such as "Halo 2," "Half-Life 2," "Doom III" and "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" are all expected to top sales charts this year, in large part because the games that preceded them were so successful.
Sure this will get them noticed more, but if the games don't have innovative graphics and gameplay, the popularity of the previous titles is not going to mean shit.
Sequels can't sell if they aren't entertaining (Score:3, Insightful)
Successful only because their predecessors were? (Score:5, Insightful)
They may not be original, but that certainly doesn't mean they won't be fun, which is what gaming's supposed to be about. Why reinvent the wheel when you know what people like?
Not too sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bottom line: Creativity has been floundering for a long time, but people keep buying games, keep watching TV, keep going to the movies. Businesspeople would be fools to abandon a known quantity (the revenues of any sequel are easily predictable) in favor of new stories and fresh faces, not matter how much some of us would love to see them. To think that people will suddenly stop buying games because they're all sequels is silly; gamers really have no choice except not to play... and only in WarGames/I. is that a real option.
Doom 3 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Creativity? (Score:5, Insightful)
Guts to throw your cash into funding for trying new things.
Worked for Hollywood (Score:2, Insightful)
Doom 3 (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Doom 3 is retro. The last Doom game came out while I was still in high school.
2) Doom 3 is a significant advance over the last sequel. It's not just new levels.
Saying Doom 3 is just a sequel is like saying Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was just a sequel. There's no comparison.
Still, I think that companies will start coming out with more creative games soon. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised of LARPing became the next big thing, and games that are offshoots of RPGs became bigger, such as the White-Wolf titles, only with more roleplay.
Re:Creativity? (Score:4, Insightful)
I particularly object to slapping HL2 with this label; if you've seen the previews and the screenshots you know that this game will be revolutionary in many respects (graphics/game-play/physics engine/characters), the fact that it is a sequel is not relevant.
Also, what about the the massive multiplayer games? I think they are the future, and the sky is the limit there.
Re:Creativity? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd bet that "yahoo games" or popcap games are as popular as the traditional store bought games.
Simulation type games (Monoploy Tycoon - SimCity) aren't touched neither, nor are Sports type games.
This article doesn't really seen to a variety of games at all. Yet it implies that "new" games aren't coming out. They are.
It's Like ClearChannel... (Score:5, Insightful)
The saddest thing about it is, if there were ever a new game that did what, say, Legend of Zelda did back in the 80's, the company that put it out could make zillions. It's not like they'd lose much putting out crappy stuff meanwhile, either.
Uh...again? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Creativity? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:4 kinds (Score:2, Insightful)
all platformers (Ratchet & Clank, etc.)
all sports games (SSX Tricky, etc.)
all strategy games (Civilization, Dominions 2, etc.)
all flight sims
all real time strategy (Warcraft, Age of Empries, etc.)
all CRPG's (Morrowind, Star Wars KOTOR)
all MMOG's (Everquest, etc.)
all fit into your "third person" category.
These games are even genre spanning like Thief, System Shock, etc.
That's quite a bit of diversity which gets all glommed over in your category system.
The sequels. (Score:2, Insightful)
(Shameless Plug) (Score:3, Insightful)
Ballers is coming up soon- I've played it, and I can say it's like no other game I've really played before- like the previews keep saying, it plays like a fighting game/basketball hybrid of some sort.
And, last but certainly not least- coming up later in the year is Psi-Ops, which (ahem) is going to be fantastic
Anyway, point being it makes me sad to see this constant claim of no innovation in the industry when I feel like there are people out there trying to innovate. It's not their faul that, at the end of the day, innovation may not actually be what the public wants!
Re:Who needs... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who needs... (Score:5, Insightful)
Industries that turned into re-dos of old ideas with only a small number of new ideas long ago, but don't seem to have hurt very much financially from it:
Books
Movies
Music
Magazines
I'm sure you can think of even more if you take a few minutes. I think the article is a little premature to say the gaming industry will shrink if we don't see more creativity. They don't seem to have any evidence of that beyond one developer's opinion. If you look at the hard numbers, I'd suspect that the overall industry continues to grow as more PCs and game consoles are sold to new households around the world.
Re:Garage Games (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Creativity? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Creativity? (Score:4, Insightful)
SimCity, while a great design for its time, has had four sequels of various types (I include the SNES version). I think the last version that Will Wright had direct input on was SimCity 2000. (I could be wrong on that.) And Sports games are arguably the least creative genre -- even the first sports video game was a copy, and there isn't really that much to distinguish each Madden (X) from its corresponding Madden (X-1).
Re:Creativity? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope, good graphics don't make a game any more then special effects make the new Star Wars movies. There's always been bad games and there's always been good ones. Cutting-edge graphics are a constant, they will always be of major importance.
Re:Creativity? (Score:5, Insightful)
exactly! currently, the overwhelming majority of games fall into the following categories:
everybody remembers when sim city first came out. it was revolutionary. why? because it developed a whole new category: simulations.
now there's a billion sim-foo games out there and the whole genre is in evolution mode: the sims "homeland security" expansion pack for example.
what the gaming industry needs is a genre-defining game. something that breaks open a whole new gaming motif like doom and sim city and warcraft did.
of course there will be those who say this isn't possible - that all the gaming paradigms have already been defined and nothing is really new anymore. but that's okay: we can't all be geniuses.
Problem is funders and bad management... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is with the people FUNDING the game industry. The independent shops are being swallowed by companies that have made loads of cash getting away with pumping out sequels that have only minor engine improvements. This sucks, but worked for a while in a few profitable genres. Many companies that tried to push it died after too many generations (I used to work at Accolade, that's part of what killed them...)
Unfortunately, people that funds games look at this seeming no-risk model, and refuse to fund anything that doesn't look like the same. They all want you to license an existing engine, and make a game that can be described in a single sentence as {profitable game A } crossed with {profitable game B.}
If you don't follow this model, you don't get funds.
As a related point, there are WAY too many companies in the industry for the amount of shelf space available, and the big players BUY shelf space, so its nearly impossible to compete anyway without cutting a deal with an existing major distributor. Want to do that? Guess what, you have to change your game to follow the same model as everyone else.
In the mean time, the EA's and Sony's of the world are pushing their developers harder and harder - they've currently got a surplus of available headcounts to replace all the burnt out ones with...
The industry needs more "angel" funders. But in this economy...
Re:Who needs... (Score:5, Insightful)
BOOKS: There's still new literature being published. If you have something really new and interesting, there are still places that think this is an asset instead of a liability. And even in relatively traditional genres like mysteries, there is some degree of innovation.
MOVIES: Again, studios still sometimes make thoughtful, enlightened work. The success of such films as Clerks and The Blair Witch Project make it clear that it's possible to make successful original cinema with little cash, a great inspiration to all those guys with a camera and a dream. Computers have really lowered the entry barrier on this one.
MUSIC: Well, you can believe the RIAA's story that piracy is hurting sales, or you can look at their preponderance of girl stars and boy bands, and Clear Channel's locking up of mainstream radio. Even so, there are plenty of independent bands out there that may not be famous or get rich, but are doing what they want, and having fun doing it.
MAGAZINES: Kind of a weird thing to bring up. Magazines tend to be driven more from utilitarian principles than out of a need to entertain and create. Even so, the field is constantly expanding and changing.
It's a basic human trait to seek novelty. The possible audience may go up, but people *will not* play the same game over and over again, forever. Even Tetris got old after the thousandth game. The question is, are new games different enough from old ones that people will keep buying them?
I'm also not so sure the audience is increasing. As more people get computers the market is becoming saturated. Most people don't need more than one, and the perceived benefit to upgrading is diminishing.
Re:Creativity? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it depends on what type of game experience you're looking for. If you're looking to shoot at things in a crosshair in a first-person view without a pesky story to get in the way, I might agree with you. Otherwise, I think your view is perhaps the most ridiculous and over-used sentiments in the gaming community.
Maybe I'm wrong, but looking back at amazing gaming experiences such as Fallout, Deus Ex, Half-Life, Splinter Cell, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (to name a few), I can't imagine how any these games could've been made better with human characters, rather than AI characters. Heck, I can't imagine how these games wouldn't be total shit if the characters were human-controlled. And where are you going to find all of these humans to play these characters for you in a manner which is the slightest bit as interesting as the AI characters?
In environments where games are designed to focus on the hero of the story, AI characters offer the best available experience. In a human-only gaming environment, you're just another name, and with only a few exceptions (ie. the most talented players), no one else in the game world could give a rat's ass who you are. That works great for some games, like Unreal Tournament and Counter-Strike, but games in that vain will never, ever replace great single-player experiences. Don't get me wrong; I enjoy both types of games. But I predict that the future of gaming to be much like it is now, as far as the relative number of single-player games vs. multi-player games on the market is concerned.
"New" was never a requirement (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider that men have been going to bars, drinking too much and going home with ugly women for thousands of years. (The oldest known human recipe is a Mesopotamian recipe for beer) Obviously humans can do what they like indefinately, even if they regret it the next morning.
It's worse than just retro (Score:3, Insightful)
The basic problem is the one we discovered in the early days of virtual reality - no matter how good the graphics get, all you can really do in there is move around, shoot stuff, point at stuff, and select things from menus.
Ratio vs number? (Score:3, Insightful)
Like, the number of new games showing up is constant, but besides them, more sequels appear?
I wouldn't be too surprised. Creativity not waning, but not growing either, market growing seriously, gap between market growth and available creativity filled with sequels. Nothing to really worry about.
Re:Creativity? (Score:3, Insightful)
if there are ten original games a year the next year there will be ten base games and ten more orignal games. the next year there will be 20 base games and still only ten more original, that goes from 50-50 to 66.67-33.33 and the next year when 30 games are bases and 10 are original the ratio is even further appart.
And the same goes for hollywood... (Score:2, Insightful)
Those of us in the real world are getting a lot more milage from watching euro films and the like. At least they have story tellers willing to be an original voice
adult sex games..... (Score:2, Insightful)
Specific porn people might enchance their Dvd interactiveness to the max, or make some PC based game, but nothing massive.
But most games are based on some real life event, unless its a puzzle wierd game like tetris.
So until we develop some insane AI that thinks like a 12 year old, we are doing still the normal thing, 'simming' real life with art.
Re:Creativity? (Score:4, Insightful)
One big problem I see as a bit of an outsider these days is just how inward gaming has become. It has it's own website, cartoons, language and television stations. Massively multiplayer games are exactly the wrong thing because they only encourage more niche culture and make gaming even moreso inward and exclusive. Interacting online is neat but I don't think most people want to become some Everquest playing vegetable who hasn't been exposed to sunlight in 96hrs.
To me the most interesting ideas have been those that encourage all sorts of people to play games like DDR and the Eye Toy. Gaming needs to involve more people and get out of the Penny Arcade mindset of in-jokes and niche vernacular. Creativity requires inspiration and when you live in that world of 16-21yo middle class males, well, of course things are gonna start getting as stale as your buddy's BO after a three day LAN party.
Re:What about... (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree. Theres little innovation now in the Action, Racing or Sports genres - but the RPG genre allows for alot more creativity.
Heck, flying around in a helicopter dodging gunshots gains a whole new meaning when your doing it to plant bombs on a building to lower property prices to help out Avery.
There's an increasingly strong consensus in the games industry that there should be a narrative that goes hand-in-hand with what your doing - I think this will help creativity.
Again with the Warcraft! (Score:2, Insightful)
Are you trolling here? While WC3 obviously implemented many RTS standards, I would hardly call it the antithesis of revolutionary. The game introduced the concept of Heros - special units that gained levels with battle experience. The various abilities they gained, the items they could purchase and use, the fact that they could be "rebuilt" once they died... these are very innovative concepts for an RTS. And since Heros were given so much power, one was obligated to use them which made them an integral part of the game. RTS is a pretty standard genre at this point, but I would argue that WC3 is a solid, creative implementation.
Re:Not too sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Creativity? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Creativity? (Score:5, Insightful)
Few "New" games capture my interest nowadays (Score:3, Insightful)
I am in my mid 30s. Most of the games I loved as a teenager are on MAME but don't allow for progression/devlopment - unless you play the sequal, of course.
Precious few computer games of recent memory really engaged me for more than a few days. They were, in no particular order:
1) Civilization II (the king of them all) and III
2) DungeonMaster (a close second from the Amiga, which hit the PC way too late)
3) Ultima III and IV (now I'm really showing my age...).
4) Diablo II and the expansion pack
5) Starcraft and Warcraft III
6) Myst and Siberia
7) uMoria (DOS and GUI).
IMO, these games were either truly innovative or so improved on their predecessor to merit BUYING the game and reccomending it to my friends.
also, IMO arcarde games were moved faster into obscurity by the fact that they focused to heavily on the street fighter genre. This is not to say that street fighter was not a great game because it was, but as time went by these were all I saw in the arcades.
Similarly, when I go into the computer stores today to buy games, I see a clear focus on the 1st person rendered/shooter types to the extent that they appear to be crowding out ideas for other games. Unreal is great fun if your reflexes are great, but snipers picking me off from God-know where just takes the fun out of it for me. Maybe this is the criticism that the article had in mind about few truly innovative game ideas.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to be said for gorgeous 3d rendered graphics and visual realism, but that should be the foundation, not the substance of a game.
.
Re:Creativity? (Score:4, Insightful)
Creativity vs. Finance... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is music repetitive, cliche, formulaic?
Why are motions picture even worse... special effects fodder? Mindless, action packed fantasies, design scientifically to appeal to the male and pimply... in the never ending quest to suck dollars out of young people's pockets.
If anything... the games genre is even more clearly designed to go after that young male demographic, with a second wave of assault aimed at male adults (namely violent games that include some degree of sexually explicit content.)
What has always been at the bottom of human experience is the compelling story, the deep and moving experience, a chance to go, do, be something you might never get the chance of doing or being in this life. A great game, has to first be a compelling story... it has to have a context, which is artful, involving, absorbing. It has to create a viable universe that allows people to discover themselves newly, heroic, or antiheroic. There will always be new and compelling paradigms for human interaction.
One could combine existing game categories creating comletely new game types... one could come up with a new game genre all-together... The interactive novel, you press a button, and suddenly you're part of an interactive, compelling universe, a story driven by actions, choices, and an author's intent. A story that is complex. subtle, mysterious, that demands that you be smart, show finesse, and strength... Or maybe one could create a game which is a puzzle, where a team of players has to take elements, visual, linguistic (programmable code?), or alternately perceptual (music, motion, magic.) And combine them, related them, assemble them into a whole, a creation, a unique solution to the puzzle space. Then in an arena, teams compete, either for the love and appreciation of the spectators, or for some kind of game points... It took only a few seconds to invent something unique... A bright person could spin ideas out all day long... this isn't magic.
People... it's a wide open universe, you can do anything y'damn well please. The limitation of guaranteed profit (the worst kind of fallacy), or get in quick, get out quick, hit and run, sloppy. greedy half-assed attempts to shakedown the lusers, is it's own resolution. In the end, people will just walk away shaking their heads and find something else to do with their time and money.
It's not hard to create something unique. It's not hard to create something compelling and beautiful. It is however impossible to create anything that satisfies the bakers and beancounters, when the first contraint, is to make money without risk...
One more reason, to give people who aren't bound by the profit motive, the tools and space to create new and unique play environments.
Genda
Creativity != features; improvement != revolution (Score:3, Insightful)
The Apocalypse of Gaming (Score:4, Insightful)
Come on, people, let's pull out heads out of our short term asses and realize:
-The Gaming Industry isn't doomed
-PC Gaming will not die out because of console competition
-The industry goes through cycles and there's no shortage of creativity
Oh yeah-- We'll be running out of oil in 25 years too.
Counter point (Score:2, Insightful)
It's an adaptive system.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Why would you try something new when you're guaranteed to make money on a FPS? They'll try new things when sales dip. As far as I knew, the gaming industry is at an all-time high. Why try and fix that?! Obviously I'm not undermining innovation, but come on, does the music industry lack creativity? NO! But that doesn't mean the creative stuff is on the top 40 every week. They play that shit cause it brings in the dollars. When the same music starts to get tired, they bring in some fresh legs.
Why would Microsoft fix all the bugs in their code when it won't affect the bottom line? What are people going to use instead, Linux? Please. You trying to say Microsoft doesn't think it would be a 'good idea' to fix their bugs? Of course they know, but they've got more profitable things to worry about. (Like X-Box
None of these companies are out there for good will. They're not stupid, and they definitely know the best use for their money. It's just amazing how many articles and posts are about these sorts of things.
Acar
www.PenguinMagic.com
Industry right on track. (Score:5, Insightful)
I will use the movie industry as an example and I believe the analogy will become fairly self evident. In the early phases of film making the director had to struggle with many technical issues as the art form was in it's infancy. Low light shots, grey balance, film processing, sound editing and duplication were enormous technical and logistical hurdles. As the technology of this artform became more complex, people involved became specialized in their particular niche of the process. The technical resources are now available to the director without the complete, in depth knowlege of each process. The director is free to focus on his particular job: making the best movie possible. (Please note, I'm not in the entertainment industry, I'm just hoping to make a point here)
A video game, without question, is a form of art and entertainment. I believe that the industry is still in a developing phase. In the beginning, the person programming the game WAS the director. Typically they concieved the game, developed, programmed and had the challenge of overcoming all technical and creative issues. (Relatively few creative issues, I might add [think: pong]).
Now the indusrty is seeing it's split of fields. People are now only responsible for texture mapping 3-d models. Other people work on physics engines. We have been seeing the specialization of technical fields within this industry. My arguement is that this specialization allows for greater creative freedom by those whose job it is to just "make great games".
Lastly, I think there have been a lot of crap games recently, but let's look at why that is. Well, why is it such a high percentage of early movies made are now considered classics? Well, they were good movies, but why? Because the people who made them were professionals and it was expensive to make a movie back then, so they took it seriously. Today, anybody with a DV Camcorder and iMovie can make a film, but how much of the stuff thats churned out is actually worth watching? It's the same with video games, the development and distribution costs of game making has dropped dramatically and the technology to produce games is now as easy as getting a developers kit and a PC.
Any discussion of the current state (or future) of the gaming industry without at least a footnote to the entertainment industries history, I think, is somewhat lacking perspective. I believe the industry is in an acceptable place, given its relatively short history.
Which leads to the unspoken truth... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the great unspoken truth that Slashdot won't admit. Rampant game piracy is a problem. Look at all the stupid copy protection we have to go through. It is still insane to expect people to have to put in a game CD every time they play, but publishers make the development teams put them in.
Re:Answer me something... (Score:5, Insightful)
He claimed that the RIAA is claiming that piracy is hurting sales, and then pointed out that their hand-wringing was contradicted by their continued success.
Be that as it may, I believe the grandparent's skepticism is well-founded. "Piracy" (what a terrible term) has -- according to pretty much every study that wasn't commissioned by payments from the major labels (and even a few that were) -- either a negligible or positive affect on sales.
I've never understood Slashdot's reasoning for this.
Well, first of all, -2 points for assuming that all of Slashdot has a single opinion on anything.
If you've never understood the reasoning behind people arguing that sharing a product also being sold doesn't automatically hurt sales, you are apparently unfamiliar with the concept of "advertising". You've also never read any of Janis Ian's or Cory Doctorow's essays on the matter -- two people in a position to actually be able to compare their sales figures before and after.
If you choose to remain ignorant of arguments being presented by either side, that's really not "Slashdot"'s problem.
Re:Who needs... (Score:5, Insightful)
There IS certainly innovation among all those categories (books, films, music, etc.), but the VAST MAJORITY of the innovation is usually being made on a very small scale, with just a handful of talented individuals working on the edge. Movies are a great example. Blair Witch was not produced by a Hollywood theatre, nor are the dozens of indie films snatched up by Hollywood distributors at Sundance and other film festivals. They are made by a few people, almost always on a shoestring budget (often funded on someone's credit cards!). A number of these films are made with astonishingly low budgets... El Mariachi was done on $10K, and many not much more than that. The same goes for books (where just a single person working in their spare hours can produce the next classic), music, and zines.
Now... back to the game industry. What can anyone do with $10K these days? That would hardly be enough money to purchase one high-end workstation with Maya and other requisite software tools. You see, people are EXPECTING highly polished graphics and gameplay out of each new video game. Long gone are the days where a single Russian program can whip out Tetris in a few weeks of effort, and create a sensation. I'm sure that thousands of slashdotters have tremendous ideas for awesome games, and many of them have the programming skills to pull it off. But if they are to to compete with the current big-name titles, they have to play by their rules. Who will do the artwork? The motion capturing and animation? The original music score? The voice-overs? The analogy to films would be like if the movie-going audience demanded to see Return of the King-quality battles and special effects in EVERY film they see. If that were the case, then the indie film industry would be dead as a doornail too.
There is room for innovation here (think of games like Snood) but the game-going audience needs to lose their addiction to big-name licenses and fancy production values and focus on the one thing that gaming is about : fun.
Bob
Re:Which leads to the unspoken truth... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem started as the cost of entry went up for developers and filmmakers. When it was cheaper to make movies, studios were (and smaller independents still are) more apt to make risky movies that don't fit into a rehashed, well trodden category. Same goes for game makers. You'll keep seeing Doom and Quake as long as Doom and Quake are easy to evolve and guaranteed to sell 15 million copies worldwide. The last thing any developer wants at this point is to throw an ungodly amount of money at a project and end up with another Daikatana.
Also at fault are the publishers. Some publishers just won't take on specific games because they feel they won't sell. What you end up with is what we all have today. People wanting something new or different but when they're given it, they don't buy into it heavily enough to send the message to publishers that 'we want something new, and we really mean it'.
If you're a smaller movie studio or smaller game shop, you can take bigger risks as long as you keep costs down. There have been some great indy films and smaller publisher games over the years.
Re:Answer me something... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Agreed. (Score:3, Insightful)
Developing a game (Score:3, Insightful)
How many have actually tried to develop a simple game? Compared to developing other end-user applications it is very difficult.
Even with access to a good high-level API, such as Managed DirectX, or a complete game engine, it is still very hard to get into the technologies behind the games. I remeber the first time I was writing a very simple game where the chararcter could walk around in a simple limited 3D world. I quickly gave up trying to get shadows working, and basic things such as gravity or collision detection was more difficult than I would've imagined. The easiest thing was actually the AI of the computer opponents.
What the gaming industry needs are simple tools and standards for creating games. Sure, there are a number of APIs and game engines available, but none is simple enough for a an average programmer to start with.
The problem with piracy in the gaming industry is also a problem. But I think the solution would be something like iTunes for games. And they have to get alot more cheaper. But that would come naturally when it becomes easier to develop games
Re:Which leads to the unspoken truth... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Answer me something... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not that laugh-out-loud. Take yourself out of the Clear Channel pop crap music section for, ohh about ten seconds. There's a whole world of tens of thousands of _great_, _original_ bands that you would never hear about, or be able to find the cd of if it weren't for file sharing. This holds true immensly for the underground scene. Let's enter this world for a moment.
I listen to dozens of bands from Europe and Japan that I would never have heard of if it wasn't for file sharing. They don't tour here. Their EP's and LP's arent distributed in the US at all; if we're lucky we might get 100 or so pressings that are quickly snatched up and resold on Ebay for 50 times their original price. In these cases, we have no other choice but to rely on our friends overseas to rip the albums and let us download them. Period.
Now, say one of those bands were to decide to tour in North America one summer. All of the fans would show up, pay $5 at the door, then buy every piece of vinyl and cotton that we could get our hands on. I'd easily blow $100 at a show if one of my favourite bands from Spain actually played a show in North America. (Hell, I'd spend $3k to fly over there and see them if I had that kind of money.) Multiply this by about 4 or 5 thousand.
Now, if it wasn't for file sharing, they wouldn't make a single dime from a tour over here, and would be lucky to draw a dozen people at a gig.
I think that more than makes up for "stealing" their work.
Underground and DIY artists and labels THRIVE on file sharing. The entire scene has literally EXPLODED in the past 4 years because of free advertising tools such as the internet and file sharing networks.
I've been in several bands that've cut albums. We put all our shit out for free on certain file sharing networks. Why? Because we play for the love of music, not for money. Download our shit, if you like us come to our next show; that's all we ask. Did we lose money? Nope. We made more and drew more at shows than we would have ever hoped to.
The plain fact is that kids aren't going to throw down their hard earned money on a band they've never heard, or don't know if they'll even like. They download it to try it out, and if they like it, you can bet damn well that those same kids are going to save up to have the real thing. Vorbis and MP3s can't touch the viceral qualities of a vinyl.
Those same kids are going to show up and pay at the door for every show you play, and buy every shirt and sticker and patch you sell. That's the truth. Of course if you suck, you won't be getting anything, but you're not losing any money either; chances are they wouldn't have bought your album in the first place.
As for the rest of the world: Clear Channel and your pop artists can fuck off; anyone who is stupid enough to pay for that shit should be shot.
The kids who download radio music and never buy the cd aren't music lovers. They would have never bought that cd in the first place, wouldn't have ever gone to a single concert, or bought a single piece of merch, period. For them mp3s are like a custom radio station that always plays what they want to hear. (and would be hearing for free anyway, so I don't see how it's stealing at all...) The labels and the RIAA are fooling themselves if they think otherwise.
It also goes without saying that major label artists as a whole make nothing from store sales of albums. That money goes straight to the label, the RIAA, and the publishers. Pop artists and bands make money from TOURING and MERCH sales. Most of them actually have to buy their CDs and merch back from the label and publisher to sell it at a show; it's pathetic really. It's sad but true that a band can put out a platinum *selling* album and end up in debt when it's all over, so don't for one second try to say that they're losing money from file sharing. It's not the bands losing money, it's the labels and the publishers
Take "Total Annihilation" as an example (Score:4, Insightful)
There were 2 switches for unit behaviour, that could be set per unit, directly, via a group selection or as a default for new units from a specific factory.
The first was aggression: always shoot, only shoot back, do never shoot and the second was allowed path deviance: break orders whenever aggression triggered, stray only lightly from the path, stay on orders no matter what.
That was perfect in my opinion, since you could easily create guards, patrols, offensive patrols and suicide missions without the need for any "pre-fab"-stances.
These stances also applied to non-combat units, since you had a multitude of construction vehicles, that were all able to interact with one another, automatically.
Set a constructor to shoot-all, and it will repair anything damaged and harvest any resource it sees along its patrol. Set path straying to light and it would only repair standing units and buildings, set it to liberal and it would follow damaged units until they are fully repaired, then returning to the next path vertex. And all would aid in construction buildings automatically.
Now imagine you do this with 20 construction aircrafts, that patrol your base, repair all buildings, repair all defense units, aid in all construction projects and harvesting minor resource thingies along the way.
Imagine another thing: you could set the aircraft factory with a predefined guard route and the stance behaviour, then assign some construction units to "guard" that factory. They will then aid in all construction projects this factory starts and will heal the factory if it gets damaged. Since there are 20 units helping, it churns out aircrafts extremely quick. All these go on an offensive patrol directly or meandering into enemy territory, sweeping anything away they see en-route. All this, while you concentrate on the main tank/battleship attack, resource expansion or a stealth operation behind the enemy.
This is automation and that's what I expect from todays games. Westwoods "Dune2 Battle for Arrakis" had essentially created the genre, but you had to click and command each and every unit on its own. Wasted mouse and brain of the avid gamer in less than 3 hours, but it was still a great game. Command & Conquer added a central build interface, unit grouping, hotkeys. Starcraft made this more RPG-like with clear values for each aspect of the units and allowed the first automations. "Attack ground" for a rapidly growing hydralisk army bred from 10 or more hatches was devastating against all but the most skillful micromanagers, since it used the most valuable resource in a realtime-strategy game - human attention.
Warcraft3 went leaps and bounds backwards. This game needs such a minute attention to details, micromanagement on all occasions, even special units to care and feed for and even an inventory to fill properly. Come on, I wouldn't consider this "strategic" anymore. Strategy is a concentration on overall goals, resource management, unit mix and attack plans. Warcraft is more like a tactical element on a smaller scale. If you like it that way, no problem. But it wasn't revolutionary on any aspects. It just consumed too much attention with no chance of recovery.
Strategic games shouldn't give the player the feeling of a trained hamster in a wheel. Recurring and trivial clicky-tasks should be assigned to some of the units in the game. "Repair all buildings damaged in the last whatever-storm" shouldn't involve more than 3 clicks. Let the player decide how much micromanagement he'd like to use. And through that, you not only make the game fun to play with, you also create possibilities for more discoveries and "real" skill & experience increase for the player as they find new ways to let the units interact. That way, you can win the game with less-than-perfect hand-eye-coordination since you don't compare click speed but some kind of "leadership"-qualities. At least it does not become a boring clickfest...
It is not only the game producers (Score:2, Insightful)
I want to give two examples:
Arx Fatalis and the Gothic series. Both excellent games but both had the biggest problem to find good publishers in the united states, because they were not walkin on proven tracks.
They belong to the most interesting and best games released in the recent years but game publishers were unwilling to pick up the already finished games and sell them to the US to fair conditions for the producers. Because they were no shooters and no clickfests.
Re:Creativity? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ultima and Bard's Tale are from a time innocent enough to label all roleplaying games as simply "RPG" and be done with it. IIRC Ultima had a clock and Bard's Tale was entirely turn-based. Then there's the old D&D games (Pool of Radiance or Hillsfar, anyone?) that we got to play on seriously primitive systems like the Apple 2. That's a graphically presented second edition dungeons and dragons simulation running without any apparent slowdown on a 1.023 MHz 6502, and the gameplay was slightly cumbersome but still in many ways (the fonts come to mind) the gameplay is on par with games of today. RPGs were some of the first games to really succeed brilliantly because they primarily require imagination - though on early systems, quite a bit of complicated programming might come into play as well to make it fast.
I personally feel that Civilization and its descendants are a genre unto themselves. (Civ CTP, AlphaC, etc.) It's closely related to the genre whose bottom is something like spaceward ho and whose top is apparently MOO3, as both are empire building games. Have you noticed also that the latest simcity is starting to gain a great deal of scale? I think in a couple more iterations we'll have Simnation (now it's something like simcounty.)
Re:Creativity? (Score:2, Insightful)
Suggestions. . . (Score:4, Insightful)
I've come up with several ideas for games which I would LOVE to play. They, of course, contain derivations at the lowest level, (for any computer game designer there are only two choices in only two categories; 3d/2d, (Doom vs Pac Man) and realist/iconic. (GTA vs Tic Tac Toe). You can jump/slide between degrees within both categories, and mix and match as you please. In the truest sense, of course, there is only 2d and iconic, as the screen is flat and points of light can only be representational. --I've yet to see a game where pixels are actually thought of as pixels. Sound is also a layer I consider to be largely under-exploited as a challenge/reward mechanism.
In any case, I certainly have game concepts which could be enormously enjoyable.
And guess what? I'm not the only guy with good ideas. Not by a long shot. I know a couple of game designers who cry, "There ARE cool new game concepts! Lots of them! It's just that they don't get any production and promotion money because financiers are too conservative!"
Money people would rather invest in a tried and proven concept than gamble on a new idea. New ideas come from weird people who don't fit in and who it is hard for people to overcome their self-protective herd mentality in order to listen to. This is self-evident. Financiers don't care about advancing the medium; they care about making their money back! If they cared about advancing the medium, they'd be Art and Design people. Not Money people.
Anyway, I don't really care. Computer games are a flimsy distraction from the much more vital and rewarding game of Life.
-FL
Be creative please - but do it in your sparetime (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Agreed. (Score:3, Insightful)
"Hey Bob, did you see how we dumbed down game x?"
"Yeah that totally killed the sales. The reviewers savaged it and all the fans hate us now."
"Great! How should we go ahead with DX2?"
"Let's dumb it down."
Not at all (Score:3, Insightful)
They expected some success but I'm sure not on the level it achieved. LOTR was a popular book but not THAT popular--it was always a geek thing. Once again, Slashdotters assume their niche opinions represent the majority.
Too much violence, too much sex, not enough story (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm a man in my fifties who started playing videogames when my then 8-year-old daughter first got a Sony PS1. She played Insomniac's Spiro the Dragon and its sequels for a few years after that, and we still play them from time to time some four years later.
When Insomniac released Ratchet & Clank for the PS2, we purchased and enjoyed that as well. Why? Because all of Insomniac's games have offbeat stories and a terrific sense of humor. However, the sequel, Ratchet & Clank Going Commando is a distinctly inferior game to the original. Why? Because the emphasis was on adding more weapons, more explosions, more of all of that, with a lot less emphasis on writing a clever, humorous story.
About a year ago we happened to pick up a copy of Final Fantasy X. Neither of us had played an FF game, though we had rented Kingdom Hearts and didn't like it very much. FF-X was a revelation. Here was a game with a complex story and attractive characters with whom one could empathize. It was also a game where the female characters were not simply bimbos in skimpy outfits. The heroine, Yuna, is brave, intelligent and, in particular, modest, and I felt no qualms about her being a role model for my daughter.
When the sequel to FF-X was released, what happened? Yuna's kimono was replaced by the usual skimpy outfit, and the two other main female characters were equally sexualized. No doubt they'd heard from their marketing department that they couldn't expect to sell their games to that all-important young male demographic if they weren't sexier.
The problem I see in the gaming industry is not an overemphasis on sequels, since well-made sequels can be just as entertaining as the originals (cf. Spiro I-II-III). It's the attempt to make every game appeal to the supposed prototypical gamer: a young man in his early twenties who only wants to pretend to drive fast cars, shoot lots of people, and fuck bimbos (GTA, anybody?). Reading comments about gaming on Slashdot could often lead one to believe this stereotype isn't that far from the truth. The games that get discussed are almost always in the Doom/Quake genre; role-playing games like FF or The Sims get short shrift.
Now, of course, FF games have their share of violence as well, but the gameplay is more like chess. In fact, I prefer the turn-based approach in FFX to the real-time approach in FF7 or FFX-2, because a lot of the skill in FFX is deciding which characters, skills and defenses you need in particular settings, not mindless button bashing.
But, when all is said and done, what counts most with us is the STORY, not how many weapons I can deploy, or how many ways I can crash a car, or how many ways I can slash an opponent's throat. I see games as a natural progression from movies, replacing passive viewing with active participation. We didn't like FFX-2 less than FFX because of any of the gameplay elements that usually get discussed on Slashdot. We didn't like it as much because the story was rather lame.
Of course, to have good stories means you need good writers, not good programmers or graphic artists. Unfortunately, I see little evidence that the gaming industry thinks that writing matters, because, in their view, why spend money on writing when the target audience of 14-29 year-old males just wants more sex and violence?