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Games Entertainment

Games We've Never Seen Before 404

Posted by Zonk from the go-for-the-gusto dept.
anaesthetica writes "The Christian Science Monitor is carrying a story on new directions in game design. The article notes that big gaming companies are not pushing innovation beyond taking advantage of newer hardware. New areas of innovation are coming from education, training, and online communities." From the article: "Online games have the potential to transform entertainment into a global-community exercise, breaking down borders, cultural and language barriers, and even political prejudices...I doubt any other form of entertainment holds out that promise...We have only scratched the surface of what [interactive entertainment] can be."
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Games We've Never Seen Before More

Games We've Never Seen Before

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  • Make Something New (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mfh ( 56 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @07:27PM (#12731642) Homepage Journal
    Video-game industry mulls over the future beyond shoot-'em-ups

    3d immersive shooters have only really been around since Quake came out, for about a decade. Pretty much anything before Quake wasn't realized fully as games like Doom were missing the x/y/z components (and BSP [wikipedia.org] AND lighting, for that matter).

    Quake took the games industry by storm because it was the first true-3d game. Everyone had to eventually crank out their branded version of pretty much the same experience, twisted by the trends as they kept going towards the Counterstrike model of gaming.

    Now we are overloaded with video game shelves filled with crap. Why?

    Because nobody is inventing anything new. They are banking on what sells because the high cost of getting a new game on a shelf to begin with. This isn't the 80's when you could make two red square blocks fight a little jagged octagon shape, and bring home some big bucks doing it. You've gotta put millions into R&D and all that other jazz just to turn a profit. That's where companies like Id Software come in, who spend all their time working on the technology and only a sliver on the story anymore.

    They are making it easier for games companies to get in, but you still have to come to the table with a pile of cash before you can launch anything at all. Back to LCD: Shooters.

    "We need games with better stories, more interesting and complex characters; games that keep you up at night wrestling with whether you made the right ethical or moral choices," says Doug Lowenstein, president of the Entertainment Software Association (ESA).
    I disagree, Doug. I have to make these choices in life -- I play games to escape life. That's what you guys have been doing WRONG this WHOLE TIME. Make a game where I can escape into a terrific story that lets me showcase myself and MY PERSONAL TALENT. I'll pay for THAT game. Not your moral ethics quandaries... they are simply boring to me.

    • Re:Make Something New (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Hellad ( 691810 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @07:31PM (#12731661)
      Huh... I thought Quake did so well because the bodies blew up real neat. Maybe thats only my reason for playing... As far as nobody doing anything doing anything new, this is only half true. While there is less innovation in the PC game market, this is exactly what Nintendo hopes to do with their new system. They want to create new genres and new ways of playing games. This is already evident on the DS and soon on the Revolution (or whatever they end up calling it). I think that Nintendo will be the first to make the innovative moves in relation to online play as well.

    • Re:Make Something New (Score:3, Informative)

      by ThePuD ( 743548 )
      errr, doom used bsp trees for its level format.

      • Not Exactly (Score:2, Informative)

        by mfh ( 56 )
        Well technically you are right, but Doom lacked full BSP implementation -- it still had a lot of 2d "drapes".

        But that was a nice try.

    • Re:Make Something New (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mrchaotica ( 681592 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @07:36PM (#12731697)
      I disagree, Doug. I have to make these choices in life -- I play games to escape life. That's what you guys have been doing WRONG this WHOLE TIME. Make a game where I can escape into a terrific story that lets me showcase myself and MY PERSONAL TALENT. I'll pay for THAT game. Not your moral ethics quandaries... they are simply boring to me.
      I don't know about that -- I like the kind of game that makes me think, for the same reason I like Science Fiction: it's something more interesting to think about than everyday life.

    • Re:Make Something New (Score:5, Interesting)

      by TheKidWho ( 705796 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @07:38PM (#12731712)

      I disagree, Doug. I have to make these choices in life -- I play games to escape life. That's what you guys have been doing WRONG this WHOLE TIME. Make a game where I can escape into a terrific story that lets me showcase myself and MY PERSONAL TALENT. I'll pay for THAT game. Not your moral ethics quandaries... they are simply boring to me.

      But you sir are not everyone, I certainly do like playing games where I can make ethical choices, ie be a complete evil bastard which im not in real life. For example KOTOR and KOTOR II, I find it highly entertaining when I choose the darkside options.
    • Make a game where I can escape into a terrific story

      That's what's been missing. Good stories. I liked FF-X for example, but then it got tedious. I'd like a game with more story so that I could interact with other characters. More story, less leveling up.

    • Descent (Score:4, Informative)

      by rufusdufus ( 450462 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @08:31PM (#12731985)
      Quake was not the first true 3D game. Descent was fully 3d 2 years before Quake.
      • I,Robot was a true 3D arcade game that came out in 1983, so it predates Descent by a decent margin.

      • Re:Descent (Score:5, Informative)

        by lnjasdpppun ( 625899 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @09:29PM (#12732295)
        Descent was an awesome game and it highlights a problem I see with the game industry, or maybe the game audience.

        Because it was *full* 3D in that you could move in any direction no restrictions at all, people had trouble learning to play it. I could easily beat semi-new players 50-0 if I cared to because they couldn't move properly in a 3D space (and my mentor could easily beat me 50-10 if he wanted). I have a demo of me flying rings around someone killing them with flares... Because it was hard to learn how to play people didn't spend time on it and it wasn't as sucessful as other games such as Doom/Quake.

        I see this problem in other games too, like Natural Selection, it's a great game but it's very complicated and people don't spend the time learning how to play it. Complicated games will never become as popular as the flavour of the month straight FPS.

        Counter-Strike is the most popular game on the internet because it's easy to figure out what to do and it has a low "skill-multiplier" ie its fucked up hitboxes (and spray weapons) add a large amount of randomnes to the game which replaces part of the skill required with pure random luck. Quake3 is pretty easy to figure out, but it has a high skill-multiplier so the newbies hardly get kills. Since they can't get kills they leave and play something like CS because not getting kills isn't much fun.
        • Descent was easy once you figured out a control scheme that made it actually possible to control your ship in full 3D. I used a Joystick, which was a must. Along with this I used the numeric pad, + and enter for forward and back, and then 8,4,6,2 for up,left,right,down, and adjust the roll with 7 and 9. That's quite a lot of controls for someone to master. It was either that or spend hundreds of dollars on one of those thrustmaster control systems. Anyway, Once i figured out how to play, I had tons of

        • Re:Descent (Score:3, Funny)

          by Dread_ed ( 260158 )
          Because it was hard to learn how to play people didn't spend time on it

          Change "hard to learn how to play" to "making me puke...literally" and I think you might get close to the real thing. I REALLY wanted to learn how to play that game (and by play I mean master it). I loved the totally 3D environment and the way it made me think was really cool, however the visual stimulus was making me nauseous after a while. So much so that I actually started retching a bit when I kept playing in spite of the warnin
    • Pretty much anything before Quake wasn't realized fully as games like Doom were missing the x/y/z components (and BSP [wikipedia.org] AND lighting, for that matter).

      Ultima Underworld came out before Doom, before Quake and was full 3D.
    • Because nobody is inventing anything new.

      I think games like WarioWare, Animal Crossing and Pikmin are good examples of new types of games and gameplay. Oh, you mean PC games aren't doing anything new. Yeah, everyone knows that already.

      when are they going to come out with the MMORPG where I can play as the dragon, or the inn keeper, or the weapon master? The real future of gaming is to elliminate the NPGs ion favour of humans.

      • Re:Make Something New (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Afrosheen ( 42464 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @10:45PM (#12732670)
        NPC's exist because they take on jobs nobody could possibly find fun or entertaining. Being a blacksmith or an inn keeper would be dead boring. You sit in one spot and make do one task. Yay.

        Then again some people don't get enough repetitive button pushing in everyday life. Who am I to judge?

      • Re:Make Something New (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Elsebet ( 797203 )

        when are they going to come out with the MMORPG where I can play as the dragon, or the inn keeper, or the weapon master? The real future of gaming is to elliminate the NPGs ion favour of humans.

        You are correct, however MMORPG design is fundamentally different from normal game design due to the fact that MMORPG success is based on continual subscription volume. If it does not turn a profit, it is no longer a valid MMORPG design scheme. Allowing freedoms like true roleplaying (as you stated) is one of t

    • Descent was fully 3D even before Quake. Descent was one of the best games of its generation. Too bad it didn't get the attention it deserved. Actually, I would like to argue that it was 4D, as it was possible to create levels that defied the possiblities of a 3D world. I made a room once, that was a giant cube once, and there was a floating cube in the middle. When you entered the floating cube, you entered a bigger room, that was bigger than the previous room. I wish I still had a copy of that level
    • I definitely agree with your comments about moral/ethical choices.

      If I'm playing a game vs a computer then from my point of view there is no immoral or unethical choice because no other human is getting a bad deal, it's only a game.

      However if I'm playing something like WoW and my choice is to kill the lowbie in 2 seconds then I have to make an ethical choice to do it or not since it will inconvinience another real-life person. It still doesn't require much thought on my part, if killing them will help me

  • Geez (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 05, 2005 @07:29PM (#12731649)
    Its not graphics and such over gameplay people. Look at FF3. That game beat all with 2d graphics. It still does. Id rather play that than over blown crap like Luigis Mansion or Mario Sunshine
    • It was also fairly graphically advanced among it's contemporaries, for it's the time. It also utilized Mode 7 for pseudo-3D effects.

    • Re:Geez (Score:5, Insightful)

      by UserChrisCanter4 ( 464072 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @09:53PM (#12732413)
      I'm going to pick on AC here for a minute, because every time any article such as this is posted, people trot out the ol' "Gameplay rules over graphics argument."

      You're correct. Gameplay does trump graphics. In a purely theoretical world, if given choice A or B, almost everyone would choose gameplay over graphics. Fortunately, we don't live in that world.

      Further, when people create this dichotomy, they ignore the fact that graphics have an enormous amount of power in enabling good gameplay. Without the simple hardware power increases of the last five years, many of the great games from that same timeframe wouldn't have happened.

      Take Grand Theft Auto 3/Vice City/SA, for example. People love the storylines, and the satirical look at the world, but both of those chracteristics were present in GTA 1 and 2. Neither of those games was particularly succesful at all compared to the last three. The sense of immersion was provided by a major jump in graphical capability that afforded the developers the ability to create an extremely immersive environment. In GTA 2, you could still choose to abide by the laws or mow down pedestrians, take alternate missions as you desired, and run amok with a gun or just listen to humorous radio DJs. The only difference was that the whole game took place from a top-down perspective. Arguably, every gameplay aspect of Grand Theft Auto would be do-able on a Sega CD, but I guarantee you it simply wouldn't be as much fun. I enjoy GTA 2, but it can't come close to holding my interest like GTA 3.

      Or we'll take Katamari Damacy, a game that will entertain almost anyone. The gameplay and quirky charm is what draws everyone in, but I'll lay straight out that said gameplay simply wouldn't have been possible with the graphical power of the PS1. Seeing individual objects rolled up in the katamri wouldn't be possible. Without the smooth zooming transitions of the camera, the gameplay and control would suffer significantly. Critics would refer to it as a solid idea that was poorly executed, and they'd be absolutely correct. Again, gameplay here is great, but it relies on the graphical capability of good hardware to make it work.

      There are still plenty of simple gameplay improvements left to tweak that will rely on quality graphical capability. I want to see truly, totally deformable environments in an RTS. I want to be able to blast through a building to create an alternate path for my units, or fell that building to block the advance of enemy troops. I want randomized chunks of metal flying off of an exploding tank that can wound surrounding personnel. Realistically, both of those ideas could be implemented in a simple top-down strategy game, but they won't have that truly realistic feel until I can see the size of the building in relation to the troops, or until I can shoot out the corner to drop a chunk on te enemy. Just like GTA would be do-able on a SegaCD, those ideas would be do-able in the original Command and Conquer, but they're not going to have that same truly satisfying feel until they're implemented in full 3D with the proper accompanying physics.

      FPSes would benefit from those same characteristics, so it's not as though they're immune from this issue, either. Yes, gameplay is king, but please don't create an argument that forces graphics to the other side. Many gameplay ideas simply need good quality graphics behind them before they can be properly implemented.

      • Nice fantasy, now welcome to Real World (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Moraelin ( 679338 ) on Monday June 06, 2005 @05:23AM (#12733979) Journal
        Why do people treat it like it's a "Gameplay or Graphics" choice? Because that's the budget choice that publishers make every day, that's why.

        Every extra polygon in models costs man-hours, which means dollars. Every new quest scripted into the game, or every fork in the plot if you want non-linear games, or every alternate way to solve a quest, that's dollars too. Every week spent tweaking the gameplay or balance, now that's _big_ bucks.

        And it all ads up. You can't have everything.

        Yes, it would be nice to live in a fantasy wonderland where developpers are given enough time and budget to make everything just right and perfect: the best possible graphics (including someone modelling all the chunks and the interiors of the buildings you want to blow holes in), _and_ the perfectly tuned gameplay, _and_ plenty of interesting and unique quests. Quite a nice fantasy, I'll admit. But in the Real World it won't happen.

        In the Real World, whatever you do will be a compromise. To put extra money in X, you have to give less budget to Y. To hire an extra scripter for the quests, you give up one artist for the graphics. Or more often viceversa.

        Even inside one such category it's a compromise. You could make your game as vast and full of quests like Morrowind, but on the flip side they'll be all generic fed-ex quests and all NPCs will say the same deliberately generic one-size-fits-all lines. Or you could make every quest unique and each area unique like the Tribunal expansion pack to Morrowind, but then it will be a _lot_ smaller. Or have something in between like Bloodmoon. As I've said, it's all a compromise.

        But back to the "Graphics vs Gameplay" choice, that _is_ the story of the last decade straight.

        What do you think was _really_ the reason why FPS exploded, while a _growing_ market like adventure games was dropped by Sierra and the rest? Yes, more people were buying adventure games than ever, yet that genre skirted with extinction. You know why? Because of that budget choice. Licensing a 3D engine, slapping together a bunch of graphics for it, and calling it a game was cheap. Scripting a complex adventure game was more expensive _and_ didn't leave you enough budget for flashy graphics to flood the screenshot sites with.

        Gameplay is even more so. Coming up with something even vaguely original _and_ tweaking the gameplay and controls to be just right, is something that takes lots of testing, lots of tweaking, which all means lots of money. Licensing a 3D engine, and just putting new skins on the monsters and weapons of whatever game sold well last year, meant you had to invest exactly 0$ in gameplay. So everyone and their grandma took that route.

        So there you go: _that_ is what and why some of us are ranting about. Because the "gameplay or graphics" is a choice that's very very real, and which is in fact why for a while the market was flooded with pure crap and clones.

        Yes, it's gradually getting better, and in the meantime more publishers increased the budgets to sorta cover all bases, at least half-arsedly. But it's still a compromise, and still a choice they have to make: how much goes to gameplay, and how much goes to graphics.

  • Wha does this mean? (Score:5, Funny)

    by xquark ( 649804 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @07:29PM (#12731653) Homepage
    "Indeed, the next generation of gaming platforms - Playstation 3, X
    Box 360, and Revolution - which was the talk of this year's E3, rival
    the computing power of the Pentagon"

    Since when has the pentagon been a measuring stick for computing power?

    Arash

  • Breaking Down Borders (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ilyanep ( 823855 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @07:31PM (#12731659) Journal
    Perhaps there'll be a game in which players need to learn a new language? Talk about replay value. That'd be awesome though.
  • i feel so vindicated!

  • Christian Science Monitor? (Score:5, Funny)

    by StikyPad ( 445176 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @07:34PM (#12731681) Homepage
    I'm still waiting for Billy Graham's Bible Blaster.

    "Convert the heathens!"

    • Re:Christian Science Monitor? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Surprisingly, despite being founded by one of the most retarded sects of Christianity, the Christian Science Monitor is actually a reliable news source.

  • No way! (Score:3, Funny)

    by maelstrom ( 638 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @07:36PM (#12731694) Homepage Journal
    I thought Wolf3d + Dune 2 + Nethack was all we ever needed. Seems that way from all the ripoffs anyway.

  • A game I would like to see (Score:5, Funny)

    by suso ( 153703 ) * on Sunday June 05, 2005 @07:36PM (#12731695) Journal
    I would like to see a game where you take on religious zealots.

  • Joining the army no longer required (Score:5, Funny)

    by nizo ( 81281 ) * on Sunday June 05, 2005 @07:41PM (#12731730) Homepage Journal
    Online games have the potential to transform entertainment into a global-community exercise, breaking down borders, cultural and language barriers, and even political prejudices...

    Thats the best thing about online games: I no longer need to join the army to meet new and interesting people, and then kill them. Now I can do it from the comfort of my own living room.

  • I'm not sure... (Score:4, Funny)

    by ameoba ( 173803 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @07:42PM (#12731738)
    I'm not sure which is more tiring, unispired games that are sequels or clones of successful titles or articles that bitch about how the game industry is stagnant and uninspired.

  • I feel funny... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FuturePastNow ( 836765 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @07:43PM (#12731741)
    ...because the game I'm most looking forward to, Spore [ea.com], is entirely comprised of elements of past games. Being innovative isn't everything. Sometimes, it's how you make the game.

  • Art vs. Concept (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NickHydroxide ( 870424 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @07:43PM (#12731742) Homepage
    The problem with the large volume of sub-par games being churned out today is the budget. From TFA, millions of dollars to develop a game is no longer unreasonable.

    The problem is where this money is directed. I'm pretty sure the code monkeys at EA aren't seeing much of this. Distribution/production costs I'm sure haven't changed in the past 5 years (and if they have, I would be certain that they would have decreased). Ridiculous amounts of money are being shoved at top level executives and art designers.

    If the focus is shifted from game art back into development of the actual game concepts themselves, then innovation will return. Naturally that's not to discount the necessity or preference for the look of a game, but it should never come at the cost of gameplay. This is why HL2 was received quite well, but Doom III wasn't. The latter looked slick, but all in all felt like House of the Dead in a 2 metre wide corridor. The former looked gorgeous, was amazingly engaging and interesting.

    Independent development and (to an extent) open source game design can assist in these areas. Honestly, a successful publishing company would trawl the net looking for innovative independent developers, snatch them up and give them a budget to produce a game. The industry has outgrown itself and needs to consolidate to remember what games are for: FUN.

    • Re:Art vs. Concept (Score:2, Insightful)

      by vaporakula ( 674048 )
      Shame this is really hard to get across to the consumer.

      There's a really good track record of games that looked brilliant but played poorly selling well; very few manage to look bad, play well and sell amazingly.

      (I'd say your off mark with the comment about the art directors getting huge chunks of cash, btw - replace with Marketting and you're bang on the money. In a typical dev studio, the top programmer will earn as much / more than the top artist - depends on the studio tho, admittedly)

  • all i want to know (Score:5, Insightful)

    by harlemjoe ( 304815 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @07:43PM (#12731745)
    all i want to know is... when can we have adventure games back?

    they can't be that expensive to develop -- i don't know about you guys but I liked guybrush threepwood better in 2D.

  • Over (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 101percent ( 589072 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @07:44PM (#12731749)
    I think the whole "interactive media is the future of education" is totally off target. Video games and other interactive media will never surpass textual resources for quality. Furthermore most interactive media fosters ignorance because its not free software, which means you can't study it to see how it works. Are we going to have a future of learning tools whose very functioning is a secret? Give me a book any day. You can have your flash, video games, and propreitary applications.
    • I took an online chemistry course in college, the lessons were all taught on CDs and the homework was all online. I never did any of the homeworks and I didn't like the Videos all that much. For the final I decided to use one of my friends textbooks, managed to get the highest score ive gotten on any test in that class.

      Textbooks are awesome.

    • Re:Over (Score:5, Insightful)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @08:35PM (#12732004) Homepage Journal
      " Video games and other interactive media will never surpass textual resources for quality."

      Erm okay. I don't buy that as an absolute. Teaching requires interacting with the student. Textual resources offer some interesting abilities here. However, it's not a safe assumption that this is correct every single time. I've actually watched kids pick up and grasp ideas they couldn't get from a book from simple Apple II games. Why did it work? a.) It was made interesting to the kids and b.) the games presented the information in a way the kids could really quickly wrap their minds around. Text books are fine and dandy, but they're not a one-size-fits-all approach.

      "Give me a book any day. You can have your flash, video games, and propreitary applications."

      Give me all of the above. A mix of all three has led me to indepdent study. Right now, I'm an animator for a full-length animated movie. Books got me interested in the story making process. TV/Movies got me interested in how the visuals are captured. (Special FX, filming actors, etc.) Video games got me interested in interaction and UI design. So now I'm writing tools [nanogator.com] to make the process smoother.

      Nothing wrong with having multiple options.

    • Re:Over (Score:3, Interesting)

      by boomgopher ( 627124 )
      I agree. On a related topic - I was recently at a psychology lecture at a U.C. where the research presented showed that animation and interactive diagrams were only useful for people who already possessed good spatial abilities. The people who had poor spatial abilities did not benefit from interactive animations anymore than reading text descriptions. I.e. it helped the people who don't really need it. This is interesting, since interactive media is usually touted as a way of compensating for people wi

  • The Social Angle (Score:4, Interesting)

    by blueZhift ( 652272 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @07:46PM (#12731765) Homepage Journal
    When I first started using computers back in college, the thing that struck me the most was not the number crunching power, but its usefulness as a communications tool when coupled with the internet and the usenet groups of the time and of course email. I thought it was really cool being able to discuss anything with people down the block or on the other side of the planet. I spent a lot of time doing just that.

    Since that time, the depth of virtual worlds has only increased and holds real potential for providing the environment for new game experiences. I play games to escape reality and do fantastic things that I cannot do in real life. And being able to do those things with other real breathing people is the thing that keeps me coming back. Now I'm not the most social person in the world (hey this is /. afterall), but in virtual worlds I can experiment and be more than I am in real life. That's the hook that I think will keep people coming back. Allow people to do more interesting things in virtual communities with each other (not just blowing each other up) and they'll keep coming back. What shape will these things take? I don't know, but almost anything you can do with friends is better than doing it alone with NPCs.

  • Be very ascared (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Marko DeBeeste ( 761376 )
    when the state sees your recreation as a means of getting proper thoughts in your head.

  • A new SimWhatever game (Score:3, Funny)

    by drspliff ( 652992 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @07:47PM (#12731775)

    I want a SimSlashdot game where you play the role of Cowboy Neal managing the /. website..

    In this exciting new addition to the Sim line of games, which previously included SimCity and SimHospotal; you are challenged with the juggling act that is Slash Dot.

    Blast through 24 different scenarios and try to keep the daily traffic level and number of posts by making sure the site has enough flamebait and re-posts to get the visitors streaming in.

    This will, as usual, be released for the Phantom console.

    • I want a SimSlashdot game where you play the role of Cowboy Neal managing the /. website..

      Yeah, but I heard some guy already came out with an editorbot hack that totally ruins it for everyone else.

  • Break down cultural borders indeed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by B1ackDragon ( 543470 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @07:50PM (#12731794)
    Online games have the potential to transform entertainment into a global-community exercise, breaking down borders, cultural and language barriers, and even political prejudices...

    Didn't they say that was what the internet was supposed to do?
    • Didn't they say that was what the internet was supposed to do?

      I forget where I first heard something like that and what it was referring to, "this technology will bring the world together, there will be no more war, bla bla bla..." was it the communications satellite (invented by Arthur C. Clark so many decades ago) offering instant (minus speed-of-light delays) communications around the world, or was it Television itself?

      It was likely said even earlier about radio, the telephone, and the telegraph.

  • All is not sweetness and light (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rufusdufus ( 450462 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @07:52PM (#12731809)
    Its nice to think about how games can break down cultural, national and racial barriers. However, they can also amplify them.

    Case in point: the popular new game Guildwars.

    For reasons that might have been innocuous at the time, the designers decided to pit region against region in battles for the "Hall of Heroes". The 3 main regions are America, Korea, and Europe. Whichever region has the most wins on its side has the 'favor of the gods' and this is announced after every battle.

    This decision has engendered incredible racism and nationalism. Spouting of slurs is incessant. American teams gang up on Korean teams to keep them from getting the favor of the Gods. They accuse the Koreans of cheating [belied by the fact the America is always in favor], and the Europeans of being cheese eating wimps. They fling hate like a frisbee, and they rationalize their horrible behavior because, I suppose, the Gods are on America's side.

    It's an ugly sight. With the only basis being an artificial division in a made up game for the favor of made up gods.

  • New Concepts (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Jace of Fuse! ( 72042 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @07:52PM (#12731811) Homepage
    In case anyone hasn't pointed it out, there are plenty of new and exciting concepts in gaming coming out all of the time.

    It's just that the non-game-playing world doesn't notice much. Instead, they read articles by people who oveiously don't really play too many games complaining that gaming has become stale.

    This isn't to say that the majority of games AREN'T stale, but there are still some new and interesting concepts in gaming coming out all of the time. You just have to be willing to try an obscure title from time to time.

    Katamari Damacy and Yoshi Touch-n-Go are two recent games that stand out in my mind as really original ideas.

  • The Christian Science Monitor is NOT Christian (Score:5, Informative)

    by meatflower ( 830472 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @07:56PM (#12731831)
    from Wikipedia.org:
    The Christian Science Monitor is an international newspaper published daily, Monday through Friday. Started in 1908 by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist, the paper does not use wire services and instead relies largely on its own reporters in bureaus in eleven countries around the world. Reporters at one time were drawn largely from church members but this no longer holds true.
    Despite its name, the Monitor was not established to be a religious-themed paper, nor does it directly promote the doctrine of its patron church. However, at its founder Eddy's request, a daily religious article has appeared in every issue of the Monitor. Eddy also required the inclusion of "Christian Science" in the paper's name, over initial opposition by some of her advisors who thought the religious reference might repel a secular audience.
  • "Even in a popular war game such as 'World of Warcraft,' if you have a strong character and a newbie comes into the game, you have to take care of him and help him out," he says. "The strong character gets stronger by taking care of the weaker."

    Like that really happens in online games.
    • That depends. I take care of my weaker friends in online games all the time.

      Of course, I use the phrase "take care of" in the Mob-movie sense (two in the back of the head), so perhaps that's not what you were thinking of.
  • They can sometimes work REALLY well, Uplink is such a game. I still play that sometimes when I'm in a cyberpunk kind of mood.

    New gaming concepts need to be unique, interesting and they can be complex but if they are the complexity must make sense.

    LK
  • Tetris was cool. Rubik's cube was cool. Lots of new games and toys come from someone who knows a fun way to learn about physical principles, which is the basic form of play, then makes a simple version of it that "just works" like the real thing, and is easy to work with. The interestingly different ("innovative") ones seem to come from people who knew about the principle being played with, but who didn't come from the community of people playing with those kinds of toys themselves. Maybe an alien will land
  • I can order a goddamned pizza without closing the game or picking up the phone..

    think about that!

    no innovation indeed!

  • As companies grow, innovation slows (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hellfire ( 86129 ) <deviladv.gmail@com> on Sunday June 05, 2005 @08:36PM (#12732012) Homepage
    The bottom line is that you have to follow the money. We are in a era when game companies are being bought, merging, and growing fast. As game companies get bigger, innovation slows. This is the same with all companies. First you come up with some great ideas, then you put those ideas out in the real world and make a huge amount of money off them. Then you refine your process and repeat until it becomes a cash cow, and only attempt to alter the process as market fluctuates. During this latter time you aren't innovating that much, just slowly evolving. This is the nature of all business.

    Unfortunately as any entertainment industry grows, the market for edgy and unique games gets further and further marginalized. The populace wants more of what they had last year, only bigger and better. Why do you think the summer blockbuster movie season looks the same every year? Because this is what a majority of people want and/or what they are willing to see.

    You have to start scouring the net for smaller software companies online, much like you have to visit art house cinema deep in major cities to find the truly great movies of the year. It woul be nicer if the economy was more like the pre year 2000 era when all these obnoxiously crazy ideas were out there and tons of venture capital was available to try them out, and the best ideas survived. We lost that era and now all those companies are merging with each other and not coming up with risky new ideas.
  • So long as company B can make a rip off of company A's game, with slightly prettier screenshots and a gimmick that wasn't in A, and make a fortune, they'll keep doing it.

    Investors are scared of innovation, they want a garanteed return on investment, and you get that with same old same old, not unproved ideas.
  • Ok, here's finally the topic for me to post my game idea (because I'm too lazy to write it myself). I am GPLing this idea so hopefully somebody will make it.
    I want a shoot-em up game in 3D, SIRDS style. Yes, those magic eye type things that you look at and your brain tricks you into seeing a 3D picture from random noise. Maybe something Zaxxonish.
    So please, 31337 programmers with too much time on their hands, write this for me. I will be grateful. Otherwise, I'll have to do it one of these days - whe

  • Hmm (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mcc ( 14761 ) <amcclure@purdue.edu> on Sunday June 05, 2005 @08:52PM (#12732089) Homepage
    Online games have the potential to transform entertainment into a global-community exercise, breaking down borders, cultural and language barriers, and even political prejudices

    Ouch, man, have you ever actually ever seen an online game going on? Breaking down prejudices is the last thing going on. What are you, some kind of mexican jew lizard? [penny-arcade.com]

    Personally, I do not think online-playable games are the place to look for real change in video games. Online games require infrastructure-- sometimes not much, sometimes a lot. Sometimes you can cut down almost entirely on how much infrastructure you need by some clever design, such as Spore uses. But in general you're going to have additional costs for an online-play game. And the greater those costs are, the more risk-adverse the developer-- or more specifically the people funding the developer-- will become. MMORPGs in particular, since they require a fantastic amount of infrastructure, are probably the most homogenous, unsurprising, boring portion of the entire game market.

    But we are seeing some interesting backlash against the whole risk-averse thing, and some really interesting things are beginning to emerge. Interestingly, most of the really interesting things right now seem to be in the budget title area. The game I probably got the most out of that I've gotten recently is this absolutely bizarre nintendo DS thing called "electroplankton". I imported this from Japan about a month ago on the assumption that it would never be released in America, only to find a couple weeks ago that... it's planned to come out in America now. But anyway. It isn't really even a game, exactly. It's just ten little generative music toys where you mess with the touchscreen and automatically generated music results. But it's fun as hell. I play with this thing for days at a time without getting bored, while if you passed me your average full-price FPS I'd spend eight hours playing through the single player campaign once and then throw it away forever, since I'd seen all there was to see (of course, I paid full price for electroplankton since I imported, but anyhow).

    I don't think this kind of reaction is unique to me. I'm curious what's going to happen when people start to realize they have more fun with quick cheap katamari damacy or tetris like games, than they do with the current trendy video games that are basically high-budget interactive movies that, were we judging them by the standards of movies and not video games, would not be very good ones.

  • But this has happened! (Score:5, Funny)

    by NeoOokami ( 528323 ) <neowolfNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Sunday June 05, 2005 @09:12PM (#12732177) Homepage
    When I play online games I receive all sorts of racial, nationalistic, and homophobic slurs despite the people not having the slightest clue about my race, nation, or sexual orientation. The borders are clearly gone!

  • heard it before (Score:4, Funny)

    by jkmartin ( 816458 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @09:33PM (#12732317)
    ...breaking down borders, cultural and language barriers, and even political prejudices.

    The same things have been said about internet chat. At last we invented a medium that ignored age, sex, and location yet all we can seem to do with it is ask for age, sex, and location.
  • Personally, I don't want innovation in the game itself. And I am very happy to see innovation in the technology. Games are heading in exactly the right direction. Towards an ever better representation of reality. The big thing over the next year will be vastly better physics, skin that looks more like skin, cloth that acts like cloth, grass that looks like grass. This trend will keep going in waves, better physics, then better AI, always better graphics, better sound, better this, better that. At the

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @09:57PM (#12732426)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Unfortuantly we don't want innovation (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bluGill ( 862 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @10:04PM (#12732450)

    Most people are like me: buy a few games a year and that is it. When I get a game I expect it to be good because I'm stuck with it. (Returning a game is hard after you open it, not to mention the hassle of a special trip back to the store)

    I cannot afford a copy of every game made this year. Even if I could I do not have enough free time to play them. So I buy games that I can trust because earlier versions have been good. I wouldn't mind an innovative game, but I don't like all types of games, and I don't want to make a mistake.

  • As a game developer, (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Aggrav8d ( 683620 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @10:16PM (#12732524) Homepage
    I'm sick of hearing everybody say that innovation is dead and nobody is trying to innovate, for two reasons:

    1. Inventing is hard. Admitedly I can only speak from personal experience based on a budget of pocket lint, hardware rivaled by 2600s, and a social life outdone by hermits.

    2. There's a lot of innovation happening out there if you stop reading glossies at the 7-11 and playing multinational-controlled consoles. This is the same reason I'm tired of hearing "pc gaming is dead" FUD. Plenty of independent shareware developers are quietly pushing the boundaries and pcs are one of the only places they're allowed free reign.

    Multinationals have been keeping a stranglehold on the tech specs and apis for their hardware since day one and I've been struggling to figure out why. My best guess so far is because they don't believe they would benefit if they gave up a little control. There is no evidence to prove this belief but, imho, when you're a mega corporation the mere shadow of risk is enough to send you screaming in the other direction.

    If you want to see a lot of innovation check out a 48 hour game making contest, or find an indie developer's website and start hunting through the affiliates. Tucked away in those dark, mossy corners of the web are some really cool things with no eyes that wriggle and glisten.

  • New idea: virtual girlfriend (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @10:48PM (#12732680) Homepage
    Actually exists. [v-girl.com] It's a video cell phone application from Hong Kong.

    The virtual girlfriend is high-maintenance. She needs to be called frequently, expects her text messages to be answered, and wants to be bought gifts, for real money. Otherwise she gets annoyed.

  • Everytime I hear this... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by edremy ( 36408 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @11:39PM (#12732885) Journal
    I'm reminded of the old saying that there are only 7 book plots. I've got a freaking house full of books despite the fact there hasn't been any real innovation in content, story or characterization for a hundred years or more.

    I don't care if something is "Innovative". I care if it's good. Two examples: Serious Sam and Morrowind. Was either remotely innovative? SS was a self-parody of shoot-em-ups. Morrowind was innovative only in the expanse of the game- there was nothing there that hadn't been done a dozen times before.

    But both were fun. Thinking back, the last "innovative" games I really enjoyed were Thief and System Shock 2, and I'd be happy to play an SS3 or another Thief not crippled by XBox compatibility.

    As far as online play transforming everything, I don't really want to play a game that requires a lot of interaction with other people around the globe- I've got two young kids, a wife, a job and a house to take care of. Every online game I've seen seems to assume that you have none of those and that you'll just spend 60+ hours a week in your guild.

  • try psychonauts (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cyberon22 ( 456844 ) on Monday June 06, 2005 @03:22AM (#12733695)
    "Because nobody is inventing anything new."

    If you really feel this way, you should check out the new game Psychonauts [gamespy.com]. Easily the most creative computer game I've played in the last ten years.

    Addictive game and utterly bizarre. Various missions involve finding a milkman, destroying a city of fish, playing Risk with Napolean and floating through a pinball disco. Game of the Year easily.

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday June 06, 2005 @03:35AM (#12733725)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Three words... (Score:5, Funny)

    by andy55 ( 743992 ) on Monday June 06, 2005 @03:45AM (#12733744) Homepage
    World of PornCraft.

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