Millenia has a neat post up on the innovation implications of this year’s top selling games. It’s well worth reading the analysis, but I’ll skip to the conclusion:
Think about it again, too; Guitar Hero effectively brings the Wii aesthetic to the single-player consoles. Unique interface, fun and easy to learn (well, unless you’re Gabe), great to play together... see where this is going?
Perhaps the most important change, though, is the phasing out of this idea of the hardcore gamer as the only gamer... The more we conceive of the ideal audience as the prototypical hardcore gamer the more clone-sequel syndrome is going to run rampant. That’s ridiculous and it doesn’t encourage developers to stretch the medium at all...
So I say, bring on the Guitar Heroes of 2008.
First, I agree with the sentiment and the bit about multiplayer gaming that I didn’t quote. I think hardcore gamer culture is probably a secondary factor to the proliferation of sequels. I think the original Guitar Hero was an exception, admittedly one that may have been possible because of a willingness to target non-gamers. But it’s presence on the list is in the form of two sequels, and the third game was a step back in terms of art design.
Anyhow, I don’t think companies are uncreative because they’re targeting hard core gamers, I think they’re uncreative because building a game is capital intensive and risky.I think ten million is basically the low end at this point for a major release. The innovative non-sequel to Guitar Hero is Rock Band, but that falls under a different rules. Successful studios and top game makers can to a degree write-their own tickets but Will Wright, Harmonix, and Valve aren’t not enough to provide industry wide innovation.
I Millenia is right in that we’ll see a lot more innovation in the near future, but one of the big drivers will likely be increasing freedom from the tyranny of graphical innovation.Both the Wii and the Nintendo DS have interface innovations, but I think that neither of them allows for lots of graphical advances in the way that the X-Box 360 and PS-3 do.That will free up a lot of capital and thought for other sorts of innovation or just allow the production of cheaper games. That said, I don’t see indy games playing the innovative role that indy films do. Indy games are fun and can be quite good, but for reasons I don’t entirely understand, possibly profit model or lack of console access, they’ve just never really taken off.
Details after the cut
Moreover, I think the obsession with graphics is only partially the fault of gaming culture. The key driver there was really Moore’s law.Graphics are hardware limited, but the hardware is steadily improving.So innovating to take advantage of new hardware becomes a fairly natural path and a less "risky" one aside from the 2d-3d jump which did ruin a lot of games.Moreover, there’s a somewhat natural alliance between hardware and software makers who can both make money by convincing gamers to buy the next gen.Also, graphical software turned out in some ways to be just easier to improve than AI which has made much slower progress both in games and outside of them.That said, I’m a physics gamer and I’ve got to say I’m really happy with the advances there that have been enabled by a similar dynamic as the graphics.
Anyhow, none of this is to say that gamer culture doesn’t matter.The Wii and the portable systems may not reach anything close to their potential if they’re dominated by remakes or re-releases of old games. I think the risk here is shown in No More Heroes. It has innovative sword fighting. Whoo. Quoting Gamespot on the premise:
As Travis Touchdown--an action-figure owning, porn-collecting, card-collecting obsessive--you find yourself caught up in the melodrama of a real-life assassination leaderboard. Armed with your trusty beam katana (obviously meant to approximate a Star Wars lightsaber), you slice your way through a dozen killers in your quest to earn the number
one rank.
Obviously this is self-referential camp and may well be a lot of fun. But if this sort of thing comes to define Wii gaming, than we’ll be back to old hard core gamer targeting.
So we really are quite fortunate that Guitar Hero came along at just the right time to shake up the focus on hard core gamers at the same time that the means of production are changing. That said, there were probably past points of possible divergence, such as the original Game Boy for one, that may never have reached their potential because the focus on hard core gamers strangled them in the crib.
It is amazing how you can sit down to comment on something, write for what seems to be forever, and realize you have said approximately nothing. Maybe I just need to be a little more concise about it? We'll call this take two.
I would agree 100% that the console game industry -- and I want to be clear we're talking consoles here, complete with their longer hardware development curve, even if the line between console and PC is blurring daily -- works effectively like the American film industry, in that your smash successes pay for your flops. For sure this contributes to the risk/reward equation game developers use when they're considering what to do with their intellectual property. But at the same time I think it's not so good to say that the influence of hardcore gamers as the ideal consumer has little influence, primarily because without that ideal consumer, where would the risk/reward equation pan out? Sequel glut works because it is presumed that the (relatively static) audience for product A will pay for product B with the same IP and generally speaking the same features.
Of course the idea of the "hardcore gamer" itself is a bit of a moving target, for sure; the author of that NYT article seems to think of the hardcore gamer as young, male, more interested in gaming alone than with others, perhaps even a little obsessive and antisocial. Schiesel certainly seems to imply, in his discussion of Wii Play, that hardcore gamers are interested in production values more than in 'having fun' (and really... 'fun' is not always the aim of any gamer, believe me; Johnson makes that point pretty well in Everything Bad Is Good For You, I feel). But consider, is the hardcore gamer who's interested in Madden '08 the same one who's been up for four days trying to beat Final Fantasy XII? Absolutely not. So Schiesel's definition is useful to a point, but not universal.
What I was focusing on, when I said that the idea of the 'hardcore gamer as the only gamer' was a major roadblock to innovation, is that the idea of the 18-35, White, socially awkward, somewhat violent, straight, hegemonically male gamer as the ideal audience means that producers never take chances. Effectively our two points meet at the middle in the realm of consumer behavior, which I'm not 100% qualified to speak on at any length, but can make some generalizations about. Sequels may be cheaper and easier to produce, and certainly more reliable in sales, but only to the extent that they buy in to this concept of the ideal game consumer. Shift the ideal consumer, and suddenly the field of risk/reward opens up. I mean, even in the realm of Guitar Hero, our resident positive example... that is standing on the shoulders of Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania, and similar stuff. To be perfectly blunt, GH takes those damn flashy disco music Bemani games and mans them up a bit by including rock music and excluding techno (and not requiring you to gyrate around like you're having an eplieptic fit). So not even that is exempt.
So while the risk/reward factor of game development certainly does account for a significant part, I still think gamer culture is a pretty strong influence as well. We are, really, meeting at the intersection of those two influences rather than disagreeing about either, I assume.
On the topic of graphics, however... I don't think the graphic fetish of the console game industry is ever going to go away. People don't make games that look bad unless that's... an artistic choice, and even then "bad" is usually just shorthand for "heavily stylized". And while the perceived tastes of gamer culture certainly influenced the need for greater development of graphics (the increasing shift toward polygons and photorealism, for example; there's a great article about that in Video Game Theory Reader) there's the simple fact that video games are... well, video. It's a visual medium.
Now, I understand at base you're arguing that the Wii has more room for non-graphic innovation because the developers chose not to obsess on the hardware's graphic capabilities like Sony did with the PS3, to what I am sure is their everlasting regret. That is certainly true. What I'm not so sure on is that third party developers are going to be looking to maximize control over graphics when they develop for the Wii. And honestly, that's a problem that may bear itself out and that I was concerned about back when the DS was new, really. The stylus and the wiimote are, at base, the same 'gimmick': more natural control over the goings-on of the game. Their appeal to non-gamers is based on that: not everyone knows how a crosspad works in conjunction with the R trigger but pretty much everyone can draw. What concerned many, and rightly so, was if the potential of natural control was going to be used or if it was going to become a gimmick, which is 100% what you're talking about with No More Heroes, or at least that's the sense I get: this is not the wiimote being used to potential, this is the wiimote as gimmick to fit a stylized sword-swinging game.
I don't really think that it's graphics that are to blame there, though, are they? Certainly if all that Ubisoft and the developers were going for was the prettiest stylized swordfighting game possible, the PS3 or 360 are smarter platform choices. Instead they chose to use the Wii's control possibilities. Maybe they didn't do as much as they could have (I really don't know; I've never played it), but I don't necessarily think that if they did short the control schema it was at the expense of making the game 'prettier'.
I think the issue is that 'good' graphics and 'good' control schema fall to different standards, and that one of them is considerably more subjective than the other. A game can look subpar and, if it plays well, still be enjoyable; Katamari Damacy is the poster child for that. Control scheme is considerably more important than the graphics and I would argue that it always has been. I think truly innovative games, rather than seeing graphics vs. gameplay as a competition, meld them together; while Okami might not have been enough to save Clover Studios (and let's face it, the abyssmally bad God Hand didn't help) it was a critical success because of how masterfully it married gameplay and graphics. The Celestial Brush concept and the stylized Japanese art go hand in hand (in fact, I believe Okami was originally slated to be more photorealistic).
What remains to be seen with the Wii and innovation, I think, isn't necessarily that "we don't need to worry about graphics." What's going to be more important is "how do we raise this control scheme above the level of 'gimmick' while keeping it accessible to non-hardcore players?". The market strength of the Wii is its universal appeal and unique approach, not it's graphics; I will totally agree there. But I think that if developers don't spend time making the control scheme of the wiimote work, and work in a consistently understandable way, then the platform is going to fail.
Posted by: Todd (Millenia) | February 08, 2008 at 02:26 PM