Decrying the Excessive Emulation of Reality In Games 187
An editorial at GameSetWatch makes the case that game developers' relentless drive to make games more real has led to missed opportunities for creating unique fictional universes that are perhaps more interesting than our own. Quoting:
"Remember when the norm for a video game was a blue hedgehog that ran fast and collected rings and emeralds? Or a plumber that took mushrooms to become large, and grabbed a flower to throw fireballs? In reality they do none of those things, but in the name of a game, they make sense, inspire wonder, and create a new universe. ... We’ve seen time and time again that the closer you try to emulate reality, the more the 'game' aspects begin to stick out. Invisible walls in Final Fantasy, or grenades spawning at your feet when you go the wrong way in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 are examples of kicking the player out of that illusion of reality, and letting them know that yes, this is a game, and yes, the rules are designed to keep you in the space of this world, not the real world. In reality, as a soldier I could disobey my orders and go exploring around the other side. I could be cowardly and turn back to base. Games shouldn’t have to plan for every eventuality, of course, but it’s not so hard to create universes that are compelling but where the unusual, or even simple backtracking, is not so unfeasible."
Re:yes, but (Score:2, Interesting)
In that same vein, imagination, ingenuity and creativity builds with practice, and exposing ourselves to those venues of thought. If we don't, we become robotic consumers sucking on whatever 'the market' says is the shit, leaving all the creative niceties to those higher beings. No way, everybody can, and should be creative! Too bad the two most universal human traits are fear, and laziness.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:yes, but (Score:1, Interesting)
You're confusing risk-averseness with "fear" and conservatism with "laziness".
Go earn $50M and fund your own game, see how much you value abstract notions of "creativity" then.
exception... (closest?) (Score:2, Interesting)
Deus Ex
Re:yes, but (Score:3, Interesting)
need more and better RPG elements in games imo
This is a rising trend, though. More and more games are coming out with different types of "leveling systems." Borderlands is a prime example of this misplacement of RPG elements. If you've played it, you know that what you put your points into is fairly arbitrary, and has little to no bearing on how effective your character is.
This is the problem. We all wanted an RPG FPS like Deus Ex, but no company wanted to put the time or effort into making the RPG element meaningful. Now we have a ton of crummy games with watered down RPG junk in them, like Borderlands. Even Fallout 3 was a major let down in that arena.
In D&D, when you gain a level, you become more specialized. By level 7 or 8, you are already set down a very specific course. WoW manages this specialization effect fairly nicely as well. This is what people want with RPG, not whatever the crap Borderlands has.
I'm just saying, it's important to be exact in your wording. No one wants another big let down like Borderlands, or even Fallout 3. We want specialization, not just vague RPG elements thrown in.
I HATE invisible walls (Score:4, Interesting)
There are few more immersion-shattering elements.
So I plan: "This will be the right sniping spot. I will have them all right on the plate, and covered on their escape route too. The approach is covered, and the location provides decent cover behind these rocks. This should be easy then." Then - bump - invisible wall, border of the world. And I'm stuck with hopeless frontal attack which I barely survive.
Recently, I began playing Planeshift and learned how to find the perfect spots for mining. Unfortunately some of them are just past the invisible wall, leaving only crumbles for the poor in the open area.
Is it my line now? (Score:2, Interesting)
As game maker, I completely agree.
Gamisms are a good thing while reality is usually a burden. Of course it has its place in simulators, and mild levels of realism can be interesting (for example in robots, which I like to articulate in intricate forms), but videogames...they allow us to throw wild levels of nonsense and make them work. Gamisms allow our character to take a fireball to the face or defying death with credits, blessings or potions. It's convenient unless you aim to do a faithful simulation of reality.
But I think there aren't as many "fantastic" worlds because they require more imagination at work. Structuring a realistic city and putting it into the game is easier than inventing a different sort of world. You can use your mental image of a city, and the workforce will have less trouble adapting to that idea. In 2D it was easier to do because it was all drawn and required less detail and interaction.
The title is a reference to a game that used complete surreality as a plot device.
Re:Play ARMA2 instead (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep, I hate when games restrict your environment. Operation Flashpoint possibly still ranks as my favourite game experience ever. I started playing Just Cause 2 yesterday and it's amazing too, you can go anywhere, and while you can't do all the same things you can do in say GTA: San Andreas, you have some even cooler stuff like a grappling hook and an infinite amount of paragliders, which you can use together as a very unique mode of transport.. there are a lot of realistic elements to the game, but it is combined well with unrealistic elements like that to make it more fun.
Re:exception... (closest?) (Score:5, Interesting)
Frankly I tend to play medieval fantasy type games more because you have more of an excuse ("It's magic!"), but having said that I do kind of wish that DE's "Realistic" setting had gone for something more like "If you're shot, it will kill you". As opposed to... well, if you know what you're doing, you can blow yourself up just before the mission ends and start the next one as just a head with no limbs or body.
Re:yes, but (Score:1, Interesting)
The issue with computer gaming today is that it needs a business model that sits halfway between commercial games companies and those who contribute to game-related projects freely.
The game companies are only interested in quick high-volumes sales within the first couple of weeks of a games launch...
Game programmers who write mods and levels often start off with great ideas but so few mods get fully finished, due mainly to under-estimation of the free time and resource that will ultimately be needed to complete the project...
The compromise would be for games companies to be more supportive of mod programmers and allow them to sell their mods at low cost whilst taking a cut themselves - maybe even sell third-party mods on their web sites. Hopefully, the remuneration that the games programmers would receive would be encouragement to complete more projects.
Of course, it will never happen in the real world because greedy games companies will see this as extending the shelf-life of games and won't want gamers buying mods instead of new games...
The developers of Europa Universalis III have actually allowed some moders to get access to the source-code of their previous game (Europa Universalis II) and they sell it online, splitting the profit.
http://www.gamersgate.com/DD-FTG/for-the-glory-a-europa-universalis-game
Although they don't have this with the latest engine/game, but they are really god at producing expansions that actually have new game-play mechanism and not just more units/scenarios as many other do.
Abstraction and Epiphenomena (Score:2, Interesting)
...they, just like a hard core sim, lack the artificial scripting madness that has invested so many of todays games, instead the games provide you with some core gameplay mechanics and everything that follows is basically a result of those.
You're on to something. At risk of seeming old, I was always fond of the abstract or nearly-abstract games of the early 1980s— Qix [wikipedia.org] or Tempest [wikipedia.org]. Even in games like the original Centipede or Pac-man which purported to represent something vaguely physical, a lot of the excitement and interest was epiphenomenal to the game mechanics and was unknown at the time of design. Game businesses probably don't pursue such things so heavily because of the difficulty in predicting the level of interest.
Re:yes, but (Score:2, Interesting)
Doing what everyone else is doing isn't exactly low on risk because you're going up against very strong competition and for most companies that competition will beat them (e.g. releasing your FPS alongside a Modern Warfare game). Very few companies are capable of beating that competition and even then there's the risk that you did something in the process wrong and your big expensive (because you cannot go against that competition on a limited budget) game flops. Doing what nobody else is doing is actually less risky because there is no competition so you can afford to scale back on many expenses you needed to compete and a flop is much easier to absorb. You also don't need to get as close to perfect as you do in a competitive market because your product stands without competition, there are many more things it has that the competition doesn't and if those turn out successful you will get a gigantic sales boost, possibly eclipsing most of the competitive markets in revenue and since you did it at a much lower budget your profits will be significantly bigger.
This is called the Blue Ocean Strategy, there are some business books on it. For a successful example you can look at the Nintendo DS, when that went up against the PSP it had weaker graphics (less expense on R&D) but it turned out to be the winner because it had a touchscreen that the PSP didn't and because that allowed it to gain system sellers that the PSP could not support (Nintendogs, Brain Training, both of which are also examples of Blue Ocean games as they went into a fairly uncontested market and dominated it despite being fairly cheaply developed). Going neck to neck with the PSP by making a Game Boy with better graphics may have turned out differently but the DS won by offering so much more than the PSP did.
Re:yes, but (Score:5, Interesting)
>>>Not every game HAS to have super high detailed 3D graphics, a physics system plucked from the altars
Yes you would think that, but it's not how the average buyer (read: kid, teen, or young adult) thinks. As example I didn't know what to buy my nephews for Christmas, so I just bought a pile of new Xbox and X360 games, and let them pick the 4 games they liked best. I was surprised when they picked the X360 game "Pinata" (or whatever it's called) instead of the Xbox Splinter Cell 2 game. So I asked why they chose the kiddie party game rather than the military game (which is their favorite genre).
"Because Xbox games have poor graphics."
Yep. Already judging games on looks, not fun, and this is why you can't create some 2D or 2.5D game - it will be automatically judged as crap. Personally I would have picked the Splinter Cell game (since I thought the Pinata game was dull), but then I've learned to judge things based upon the personality (fun, challenge, et cetera) not the T&A (polygon or pixel counts).
Aside -
This is why I like Nintendo games, and get a little annoyed when I hear people say "Nintendo consoles are crap". Okay so their consoles are not impressive hardware, but Nintendo still uses their imagination to create fun games. Ditto Sega. FOR ME the less real a game is, the more I enjoy it, because it feels like I've entered another world. Simulations of reality are nice, but how many times can I watch a body blowup and splatter blood all over the place? I think I'm sick of that genre. (Plus it really isn't realistic that you can get shot a dozen times and still be moving. I'd like to see a real FPS where one shot and you're done.)
Re:yes, but (Score:3, Interesting)
The issue with computer gaming today is that it needs a business model
I disagree, what it needs is a complete and utter lack of a business model. It needs people who aren't making games to sell, but making games to play. We need the gaming equivalent of a bar band, whose musicians are talented and creative but have a daytime job to pay the bills, who do it because they love music. We need people who want a game you can't buy.
We need the equivalent of Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning. That was one funny movie! And it had no business model, just a bunch of people who wanted to make a movie.
The commercial aspects of computer games is what got me to stop buying them.
Re:yes, but (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting, I really liked Borderlands, liked it enough to finish it alone, then finish it with a friend in coop. Probably has something to do with guns that set enemies on fire and my characters ability to make that fire hurt more...
Acceptable breaks from reality (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:yes, but (Score:3, Interesting)
Steam does a lot of things right, and Valve in general. In fact, Team Fortress 2 is a very good example of how "good graphics" and "realistic graphics" aren't necessarily the same thing. I don't think I've ever felt a game has earned my money so much as Portal has, Steam is basically DRM done right (as right as DRM can be done), and now they're bringing it all to OSX. I love these guys.
Not to go too off topic, but here's a good interview [youtube.com] with Gabe Newell where he talks about his approach to development, steam, piracy, and some other stuff. I really like when he says, "When you look at our top ten issues on our list at any given point in time, piracy is almost never something that's on that list." He then goes on to explain his view that piracy is mostly the result of bad service. I think this man has his priorities straight.