A close friend of mine used to work at Electronic Arts as an animator. He left for the usual reasons people leave EA: overwork, underpay, and cattle-like treatment. One of the eyerollers, though, was when he told me, “Our project manager sat down with us and said, ‘Play a lot of Half Life. Because we want this game to be exactly like that.”
So I’m inclined to flashback eyerolling when John Riccitiello, CEO of that (very successful) company complains that “We’re boring people to death.”
He thinks the problem is that games are hard and that you’re supposed to be a hardcore gamer to even play. I think that’s only part of the problem, and Nintendo may have cracked that with the Wii (though I’m not seeing the kind of innovation I’d like, it may be because I don’t own one). I think the other problem is that the focus is on licensing and polygons, not, you know, the game. Games are games: they engage certain parts of your consciousness
in a way that doesn’t hurt you. That is, telling stories is fun because you get to experience something without having to take the hit from it; you get to evolve emotionally without having to go through what the characters went through. Or you get to build and try a giant robot without having to invest the millions to make it work. Or you get to fight a war with all the fun shooting and yelling but none of the horrible dying and sadness. Or you get to solve curious puzzles without your personal finances being on the line. Or you get to fly around in an X-Wing because it’s awesome, but you can’t do it in real life.
These things are fun to do! I don’t want to invest $1000 so that I can then slog through a bunch of stuff to get to the fun parts. I don’t want to get hosed online by a 15 year old who plays every day after school. I want to engage these parts of my consciousness.
Now, it’s mentioned sort of weirdly in the article I linked above, but I want to say this clearly: this is, and has been for years, a priority of Nintendo’s. They understand games very well. I have a GameCube and it gets a lot more play than my PlayStation because the games are better. I think EA’s complaint may just be a dying breath, though. Maybe, just maybe, something interesting will happen to make game play the center of attention again. I really want to see a video game revolution like that we’re seeing in fiction games and RPGs: people with clever ideas making clever things that bring people joy without requiring a huge audience and budget.
It more looks to me like video game design culture is more similar to film. You get your big blockbusters which are ultimately prohibitively expensive and boring (EA and cohorts), the come from behind wins which raise the bar (Valve) or fail (too many to even mention), and finally the studios which produce consistently progressive and challenging pieces and win lots of awards (Ion Storm, Looking Glass, RockStar etc).
There’s a sort of steady pace of progress and innovation built into these mediums that just isn’t present in the more stagnant mainstream RPG culture. RPGs, like popular music, rely entirely upon their vibrant underground culture to invigorate them.
Indeed! Video games have been a little off limits for a while, though, because of the licensing costs usually associated with the platform. I’m very curious to see how the Wii thing works out. I have a bad feeling that the API is prohibitively weird, but we’ll see.
Holy cow the Wii is awesome.
It has even got my wife, never a gamer, to demand to play with me.
This is a real video game revolution we have on (in) our hands, and we’re loving it.
Nice post, good points. To learn more about “WiiWare,” click here.
~Jeff