That’s the name of the game, or at least it should be
but what is it about Videogames that, unlike movies or literature,
different creators seem incapable of sharing techniques through?
One title might do something groundbreaking, only to see every copycat that comes
How else could this be worded
If you’re a novelist, a director, a musician, learning is the name of the game.
You start seeing what other writers, directors, guitar players that write similarly are doing
and how you can adapt those techniques to make them your own.
It’s how a genre like Hip Hop itself having established out of the late 70’s, can still be evolving and growing today. Different artists collaborate and learn from each other, musical techniques are established and experimented with.
The art form is allowed to be built upon, to grow.
On the other hand, if an art form is not allowed to grow, the entire community built around it
can be placed into a nightmare of creative-floundering, jumping from the one big idea to the next
hoping that it’ll be whatever it needs to set it back on the right course.
If you want a modern example of this happening; in the 90’s the mainstream Comic
industry faced a huge challenge with plummeting sales and stunted creativity.
“The Dark Age of Comics” wasn't just named for the amount of characters going ‘darker’ or ‘more’ realistic; it took its name from the literal Dark Ages for the lack of creativity between the biggest companies. The market for Superhero Comics was controlled by sales stunts like The Death of Superman that was little more than dramatic attempts to pull readers back.
Avid gamers reading now might realize that sounds a little more than familiar.
What happened to mainstream Comics in the 90’s had been an unwillingness to experiment and learn from each other: the head of DC comics was, at the time, convinced that the only way to do things was the DC way, and Marvel wasn't faring any better. They’d been playing the superheroes ball-game for the last 45 years spectacularly, only suddenly it wasn't working.
Generally speaking, superhero comics are so lowest-common-denominator that it couldn’t have been the actual subject matter at hand, but a lack of creativity lending to a homogenized set of stories being told for almost the entire duration.
Most popular characters that came out of 90’s Superhero Comics we’re the ones that went so wildly against the grain of what was expected, or outright parodied the genre conventions.
See: Deadpool (the landmark case of Wilson v. Wilson).
This year marks the seventh generation of consoles starting, which means examining the creative trends of the last seven or so years is more important than ever.
Perhaps more than any console generation, videogames have been tended to be more homogenized and ‘safe’. Cryteks Crysis series managed to create a market stranglehold through the efforts of probably paying off a bunch of journalists and being so safe and non-experimental that every single title managed to make even more sales than the ones before it. Responsible for pushing the industry one way or another, maybe, but other developers (like Infinity Ward and Bethesda) should be held to it much more. Infinity Ward hasn’t done anything besides be lazy and have appeal, so who else is there?
Crysis managed to add to the market stranglehold through the efforts of paying off journalists
and pitching itself so far below what you could consider the ‘common denominator’ that even the people that play it’s multiplayer professionally usually aren't even that good at other videogames.
Dominating the push for technology over creativity, the fad in the last seven years seemed to be Graphics with the common buzzwords from game enthusiasts being Resolution and Refresh Rate. Back of the box quotes praised production values over creativity, leaving titles like Nier to wallow in semi-obscurity.
A small set of bugs left behind from beta or because the developer couldn't afford better QA before being pushed to launch (see: Obsidian Entertainment) was a PR death-knell for a game.
Alpha Protocol an ‘Unpolished-Mess’ that was by all accounts ‘Riddled with Bugs’ is still considered so
despite the fact that the game did things with player-npc interaction and morality systems that not even Mass Effect has been able to figure out.
That resistance (inability?) to figure things out other titles definitely lead to the creative brick-wall that the last generation spent a good six years trying to hurdle over.
If you look at the impact of Grand Theft Auto on open world games, you’ll see a good example of this.
Comparing Grand Theft Auto IV and Driv3r or even open-world racing-games is eye opening.
While Grand Theft Auto is seen as laying down the genre conventions for fun open-world games, that’s the only thing other developers ever examine. You can even see it internally with Rockstar Games push to release for Grand Theft Auto V. The series has a strong timeline of design evolving over the years as each title incorporated, remixes or abandons things prior titles did.
A focus on storytelling and ham-fisted satire is evident, when Rockstar applied the same lessons to
L.A. Noire that timeline falls apart – you can tell by playing it that they were unaware of what lessons the genre they helped codify could benefit the game, but what lessons they might have learned from games they did not make. The game has a powerful narrative, but is set in an empty, soulless world.
When a developer does go out of their way to acknowledge that yes, another developer can in fact do something better than them, it’s, go figure, usually for the wrong reasons.
This goes beyond simply following trends, or even outright ripping off another developer.
Faux-learning is what happens when you get a lazy developer who knows people like one thing about A Videogame, so by that right Their Videogame needs to do the same thing often without knowing why.
One of the largest offenders is the Western World’s strange relationship with Shadow of the Colossus.
If there’s one thing that can be said about the game, it’s that it’s very much the antithesis of the way a lot of major studios handle design. A focus on barring the game down to only the strictest essentials required to tell the story presented effectively is the core tenant of the lead designer, Fumito Ueda’s, philosophy.
You start seeing what other writers, directors, guitar players that write similarly are doing
and how you can adapt those techniques to make them your own.
It’s how a genre like Hip Hop itself having established out of the late 70’s, can still be evolving and growing today. Different artists collaborate and learn from each other, musical techniques are established and experimented with.
The art form is allowed to be built upon, to grow.
On the other hand, if an art form is not allowed to grow, the entire community built around it
can be placed into a nightmare of creative-floundering, jumping from the one big idea to the next
hoping that it’ll be whatever it needs to set it back on the right course.
If you want a modern example of this happening; in the 90’s the mainstream Comic
industry faced a huge challenge with plummeting sales and stunted creativity.
“The Dark Age of Comics” wasn't just named for the amount of characters going ‘darker’ or ‘more’ realistic; it took its name from the literal Dark Ages for the lack of creativity between the biggest companies. The market for Superhero Comics was controlled by sales stunts like The Death of Superman that was little more than dramatic attempts to pull readers back.
Avid gamers reading now might realize that sounds a little more than familiar.
What happened to mainstream Comics in the 90’s had been an unwillingness to experiment and learn from each other: the head of DC comics was, at the time, convinced that the only way to do things was the DC way, and Marvel wasn't faring any better. They’d been playing the superheroes ball-game for the last 45 years spectacularly, only suddenly it wasn't working.
Generally speaking, superhero comics are so lowest-common-denominator that it couldn’t have been the actual subject matter at hand, but a lack of creativity lending to a homogenized set of stories being told for almost the entire duration.
Most popular characters that came out of 90’s Superhero Comics we’re the ones that went so wildly against the grain of what was expected, or outright parodied the genre conventions.
See: Deadpool (the landmark case of Wilson v. Wilson).
This year marks the seventh generation of consoles starting, which means examining the creative trends of the last seven or so years is more important than ever.
Perhaps more than any console generation, videogames have been tended to be more homogenized and ‘safe’. Cryteks Crysis series managed to create a market stranglehold through the efforts of probably paying off a bunch of journalists and being so safe and non-experimental that every single title managed to make even more sales than the ones before it. Responsible for pushing the industry one way or another, maybe, but other developers (like Infinity Ward and Bethesda) should be held to it much more. Infinity Ward hasn’t done anything besides be lazy and have appeal, so who else is there?
Crysis managed to add to the market stranglehold through the efforts of paying off journalists
and pitching itself so far below what you could consider the ‘common denominator’ that even the people that play it’s multiplayer professionally usually aren't even that good at other videogames.
Dominating the push for technology over creativity, the fad in the last seven years seemed to be Graphics with the common buzzwords from game enthusiasts being Resolution and Refresh Rate. Back of the box quotes praised production values over creativity, leaving titles like Nier to wallow in semi-obscurity.
A small set of bugs left behind from beta or because the developer couldn't afford better QA before being pushed to launch (see: Obsidian Entertainment) was a PR death-knell for a game.
Alpha Protocol an ‘Unpolished-Mess’ that was by all accounts ‘Riddled with Bugs’ is still considered so
despite the fact that the game did things with player-npc interaction and morality systems that not even Mass Effect has been able to figure out.
That resistance (inability?) to figure things out other titles definitely lead to the creative brick-wall that the last generation spent a good six years trying to hurdle over.
If you look at the impact of Grand Theft Auto on open world games, you’ll see a good example of this.
Comparing Grand Theft Auto IV and Driv3r or even open-world racing-games is eye opening.
While Grand Theft Auto is seen as laying down the genre conventions for fun open-world games, that’s the only thing other developers ever examine. You can even see it internally with Rockstar Games push to release for Grand Theft Auto V. The series has a strong timeline of design evolving over the years as each title incorporated, remixes or abandons things prior titles did.
A focus on storytelling and ham-fisted satire is evident, when Rockstar applied the same lessons to
L.A. Noire that timeline falls apart – you can tell by playing it that they were unaware of what lessons the genre they helped codify could benefit the game, but what lessons they might have learned from games they did not make. The game has a powerful narrative, but is set in an empty, soulless world.
When a developer does go out of their way to acknowledge that yes, another developer can in fact do something better than them, it’s, go figure, usually for the wrong reasons.
This goes beyond simply following trends, or even outright ripping off another developer.
Faux-learning is what happens when you get a lazy developer who knows people like one thing about A Videogame, so by that right Their Videogame needs to do the same thing often without knowing why.
One of the largest offenders is the Western World’s strange relationship with Shadow of the Colossus.
If there’s one thing that can be said about the game, it’s that it’s very much the antithesis of the way a lot of major studios handle design. A focus on barring the game down to only the strictest essentials required to tell the story presented effectively is the core tenant of the lead designer, Fumito Ueda’s, philosophy.
Yet, it still seems there’s a fault there because rather
than applying any of the rules the team of Shadow
of the Colossus did to design, what we instead was got a generation of
developers applying aesthetic
choices. The way the world was lit and traversed, perhaps inspiring more ‘realistic’
platforming than the PS2 release of Prince
of Persia, itself also tragically misunderstood by developer and director
alike.
To wrap up on a brighter note, though, we’re seeing a trend of Games Journalism moving away from valuing technical prowess when it comes to how journalists analyze and interact with popular titles.
Perhaps if we see ‘more’ of a trend of mechanical/design scrutiny, we’ll also see it employed as other studios take inspiration from earlier titles.
To wrap up on a brighter note, though, we’re seeing a trend of Games Journalism moving away from valuing technical prowess when it comes to how journalists analyze and interact with popular titles.
Perhaps if we see ‘more’ of a trend of mechanical/design scrutiny, we’ll also see it employed as other studios take inspiration from earlier titles.
-skeletons
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