A Few Miscellaneous Things and Video Games
Blogger is owned by Google, and in exchange for giving this space away, they put a banner ad at the top of my blog. I don't mind banner ads, especially Google's ads because they only use text, so, visually, it's less intrusive.
However, I noticed something the other day about this banner. At the time of this writing, it has two ads relating to the U.S. Constitution. One of my more recent posts is about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his views on the Constitution, wherein the word 'constitution' appears so often that I actually copy/pasted it to save time on typing.
I don't know if it's neat or scary that they troll my page for keywords in order to place the most relevant ads in the banner.
On a related note, if you search Google for 'Naznarreb,' you get some forum posts I've made, but not this site.
Finally, Video Games!
I have a theory about the next generation of games: I feel we are about to enter the third... phase, for lack of a better term, of video games. First, some history, as I call it.
The first phase, in my estimation, was from the beginning of home consoles through the end of SNES/Sega Genesis Era. In this era, game developers were limited, graphically speaking, in designing games; there's only so much you can do with eight or sixteen or 32 bits. to overcome the graphical shortcomings of games, they had to focus on gameplay and story. This is why games like Super Mario Bros. and the early Castlevainia's, Sonic The Hedgehog and other of the age still stand up after all these years. If you don't believe me, then you probably haven't played the games I'm talking about. My favorite games of all time are the Original R-Type from the Sega Master System and Contra: The Alien Wars from the SNES. Super Metroid is widely believed to be the best game ever.
Second Phase, the one we're in now, began around the time of the N64 and Playstation. During this time, the graphical capabilities of consoles exploded, and the talk was all about how many polygons could a given system push, particle effects, ambient lighting effect and anti-aliasing. Game designers shifted their focus from gameplay and story to whiz-bang graphics. This is not to say that gameplay was totally discarded, just put on the back burner.
Now that we are at the end of the second phase, I feel that graphics have 'plateaued' to a point. Things will continue to improve, but I think the improvements will be more subtle than mind blowing. At any rate, game designers now have the graphical freedom to do pretty much whatever they wish in a game.
The third phase, which I predict will be in full swing by the time the next generation of home consoles, will bring the focus back to story and gameplay. I've seen several things that I think point to this happening.
First, any game that is even moderately successful, or even suck out loud as in the case of the recent Tomb Raiders or any Army Men games or most anything put out by 989 Sports, will get at least one sequel, probably many. A coherent story is needed to sustain a series over many games, otherwise you're just changing the setting and the trinket that the hero or heroine is questing after.
Second, the recent success of games that are very story-dependant: Halo, Morrowind, Splinter Cell, (though this one does run the risk palette swaping the setting) the first Jak and Daxter and others that don't come immediately to mind.
Third, the fact that R. A. Salvatore and Orson Scott Card have been tapped by developers to write plots for video games.
All this point to a trend of the focus moving back to story and gameplay.
Hopefully.
We'll still have to deal with crappy games, cheap knockoffs and second-string imitators, but then again we've always had that trouble.
1 comment:
Ok, I agree with Naz on this to some extent. While I would love to see videogames with much more story (oh god, would I), I just don't really see this happening. I think one of the next trends will be to re-release all the older videogames from our childhood-teenage years with graphical and mechanical touch-ups. It's already happening. Is this a bad thing? Yes and no. No, if you have played the original games, and yes if you have not. People who haven't played the old ones, assuming they try the oldies, will find the graphics unbearable and can not handle the numerous flaws that we had to deal with when the game is first released. It is those flaws and how to bypass them that made the game such a piece of nostalgia.
However, I am Glad to see some really great games re-released, but it seems that doing such things is all some companies are planning for some systems (Nintendo's GBA for example). It is stopping any 1st party ingenuity by just throwing out all the games we played 15 years ago. Why is this important? Because 1st party companies have the most money to throw into game development (Plot, Music, etc.) and have the greatest ability to work within the limits of the Consoles capacity (Graphics, sound, interface). Essentially, with the exception of a few 3rd party companies, 1st party companies have the ability to produce the best games
The other trend I see is the continued emphasis on graphical enhancement over content. This is what makes consoles marketable. Would a noob to the gaming world look up what genre they might like and research which games and console would be best for them? HELL no. We might, but the average user would consider two different things: Graphics and cost. That's it. That has ALWAYS been the struggle in the console wars since the beginning of time. Then once they have made a choice, they stick with that company until the end of time, or somebody slaps some sense into them. I used to be a Nintendo fanboy myself, but the recent generation of consoles really slapped me out of it. Few gamers, if any, ever come to that realization. Until such time as the companies who produce the consoles decide that the market is no longer graphically driven, the emphasis of content over graphics will never come to be. People who want to see the change occur (myself included) have very few options to take. We can pay the console companies a hefty sum for a development packet to produce new games, which would inevitably suck due to our lack of formal training in many departments of game development. Actually, some companies (cough*NINTENDO*) don't even sell the development packs to people. You have to be a well known and world renowned game producing company to get them. Due to this there have been people and companies who have even tried to create an open source console. How cool would that be? If you ask me, really awesome. However, support for those consoles are negligible at best. Anybody remember the Indreama project? I sure do. I also remember it tanking. Badly. The real problem with performing the necessary events to produce change are covered by my next argument.
My next and final argument against this is the simple fact that we as a society are on a trend of laziness and stupidity. Statistically, the common person has read 1 book in the past two or three years, or something close to that. Most people these days don't want to read or hear a story, they would much rather be dazzled by polygonal vectoring or watch something explode or see some sort of soft core pornography. Anytime there IS a story that people "enjoy", it is generally very boring and intellectually shallow, even by the general populace's standards. Most people who play videogames these days (generally the playstation generation) don't want to "slog" through text or story. They would rather virtually disembowel something with a knife (not that a virtual stabbing is such a bad thing, as long as you are 18 or older) or play virtual sports, than play 15 minutes of any thought inducing game genre. VIRTUAL SPORTS for Christ's sake!! I believe this due to the uncoolness of being smart and/or reading that has been developed in our culture for a long time (possibly as long as 100 years). Videogames are rapidly becoming a lot like television in that respect. How many people in the general populace watch the history channel? Or the Discovery channel? How about just watching the news? I would guess not many. They are all probably watching Who wants to marry a millionaire, or Outback Jack or some Bullshit like that. The same thing is happening in videogames, or already happened, depending on your stance.
However, RPGs, Strategy and adventure games will always have a plot. It is almost a requisite for these types of games to have one. Perhaps, with the increased graphical capability of the next generation consoles, these types of games will have a much better ability to convey both plot and emotions, but the general videogame player isn't likely to play them.
Essentially, I don't see the end of the current trends anywhere in the near future. Due to the laziness of society and greed of production companies, we will be on this trend for a long time. Until we manage to make a open source game console which would be cheap to manufacture and produce games for it, or force change of games by boycott or whatnot (like that will happen) Game companies will have no reason to listen to our complaints or even feel the need to change.
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