On the shitful state of video games

Since it's 3 am and I'm having my usual bout of insomnia, I thought this might be an appropriate time to comment on the shitful state of video games.

My generation was the first generation to really grow up with video games. Nintendo and I came of age together, and as my voice was awkwardly breaking and loved ones were not-so-subtly suggesting that it might be time to start using deodorant, so too was Mario taking his first mushroom-squishing hops and was Link taking his first sips of healing potions in his eternel quest to save Zelda. It was the Eden of video games, and everything was pure and new, and we lived in blissful ignorance of how crapitudinous the industry would eventually become.

The graphics on those games sucked. They unavoidably sucked. So you had no choice but to actually focus on the design of the game. Gameplay was actually important. True, the standard was lower because people had never seen anything like those games, short of Space Invaders and Pac Man, but still...you couldn't blow hundreds or thousands of man-hours on getting the shadows of your gun just right even if you wanted to. So you actually had to design the fucking game.

Fast-forward to the modern day. Everything nowadays is either a ridiculous and increasingly pointless arms race in 3D graphics or a junkie-like reliance on franchises (NFL, NBA, Grand Theft Auto, etc.), and it pisses me off. Moreover, I think it pisses a lot of people off. The gamer community is getting fed up with the same shit. It's a community that by its very nature consists of thrill seekers, and the problem with thrill seekers is that their reaction to things attenuates quickly, and they need something new. So of course feeding them yet another goddamn First Person Shooter is eventually going to bore them to tears. There are thousands of them now, and they're all the fucking same. It's all just Doom or Unreal all over again with cosmetic modifications. If it's not Doom, it's Final Fantasy dressed in fancier clothing. Or, if you're lucky, it's Warcraft. That's it. Those three lineages cover most of the games out there, and it covered them five years ago.

Every so often, a new game does indeed come along, and when it does, it tends to sell amazingly well. The first instance of this was Myst. Myst was such a success because it threw away fancy interfaces in favor of creating a totally immersive, meticulously detailed virtual world and a gripping, dramatic storyline. It was new, and it had nearly universal appeal. Sure, it bored some people, but it was so simple that anyone could play it straight out of the box, and it was addictive. And it was the best-selling game of all time for a while.

...Until the next breakthrough came along: The Sims. Here again was, finally, a fundamentally new idea in gaming. It wasn't combat-based, but it also wasn't the quintessentially isolated world that Myst and other RPGs created. It was the first genuinely social game, and it was one of the first games that ever hooked women. The objective, the rules, and the gameplay were fundamentally different from anything else anyone had ever done. It had a vague similarity to SimCity, but it included that oh-so-important social aspect that drew girls into its addictive little world. And to my knowledge, nothing has yet surpassed its sales numbers.

What's my point? Basically, that I'm waiting for the next breakthrough game, and looking at the shape of the gaming industry, I'm beginning to despair at it. In some ways World of Warcraft is the next Big Thing(tm). The first-person RPG has been done before, but Blizzard made the game a masterpiece by meticulously planning their online experience, and it has its players entranced. And they're making a shitload of money. It is, after all, a publisher's wet dream: a game that continues to draw income for as long as a player plays, and moreover the publisher continues to have control over the game even after it's released, so he has a way to easily tweak the world to keep the players coming back, credit cards in hand.

So yes, there is an online dimension to gaming that is in its infancy, and maybe that's where we'll see the really cool stuff in the next few years. I have high hopes for Xbox Live...it has the possibility to set the standard for online game play. But still...in a time when graphics hardware manufacturers are in the same kind of arms race that processor manufacturers were engaged in a few years ago, the game publishers are being seduced by the excited ramblings of their marketers who are telling them that they can sell a zillion copies of anything if they can produce a shinier demo reel than their competitors. "Oooh! Look at the shiny explosions! Look how that guy fell off that ledge! The kids will love it!"

But they won't, and they don't. Ignore the graphics for a moment. Game play on these games hasn't evolved one iota in at least eight years. This is stupid. There's no reason other than a lack of trying and an unwillingness to try something new. One of the many half-baked ideas I have in the back of my head is to look at using the immense power of modern gaming hardware to enhance the game play of games rather than the visuals. At core, all graphics hardware does is accelerate certain mathematical transformations that happen to be useful for painting pictures. I'll bet you could use the same hardware to do some really cool shit with either the AI or with non-linear storylines. I dunno...maybe not. But either way, the field is ripe to create a genuinely new game instead of the billionth iteration of rehashed games from the mid 90s. And whoever does it will be rolling in money while the other idiots are left whining about lagging game sales of a game that was supposed to be a hit because, "...it was the sequel to a well-received game, it had the violent aesthetic of the popular Grand Theft Auto series, and it featured licensed songs from name acts like DMX and Public Enemy."

Ugh. How fucking retarded are these guys? Just reading that sentence makes me want to punch the CEO of Activision in the face in service to the remote hope that I might be able to knock even the tiniest morsel of stupid out of him.