In response to "Excellence Never Goes out of Date" from The Escapist Forum: I think this article would have been a lot better if you had stuck to talking about classic games, rather than doing the by-now cliche rant about how games are all copying each other, and we don't have as much diversity and blah blah blah. As long as the big developers are making money, they're not going to change so complaining about this is useless. Point out a way for creativity to equal making more cash and you've got an article.
Also, I think "classic" gaming is romanticized a bit. Nobody watches old silent movies. The very first films were just footage of a train moving and things like that. Some DOS games are basically the equivalent of that kind of footage. It was just a bunch of programmers seeing what they could do, not really something worth playing anymore. You mention Hitchcock, but Hitchcock was making movies well into the history of film-making. He started in silents and then his "classics" are from the 50s and 60s. That's 60 or more years after films first started being made. So, you can't really compare Hitchcock to DOS games. There was quite a lot of film history for Hitchcock to draw from before he started making films. Hitchcock is probably more comparable to our current period, the Bioshocks and Metal Gears.
I think you just didn't think hard enough about some of the comparisons you've made.
- arrr matey
I find myself strongly agreeing with the idea that lowest-common-denominator game marketing is highly toxic to a fresh, creative game industry. Recently, I have had the distinct pleasure of playing through the original X-COM: UFO defense for the very first time. While the interface takes some getting used to, and the squad combat can be fiendishly difficult at times, booting it up in DOS-BOX for the first time and watching the beginning slideshow with MIDI accompaniment brought me back to a better time in games; bookended nebulously by around 1992-1993 with the release of Ultima 7 and Doom, and 2000 with the release of Deus Ex. I miss having games be really able to let my imagination run wild, and supply a game experience that was not a laundry list of things that the game must do to appeal to the biggest audience.
- karpiel
***
In response to "The Game Design of Art" from The Escapist Forum: Learning how to read and figuring how to use the DVD player can be considered the 'learning curve' of reading a book or watching a movie. These are the main points of access to these mediums and their artistic payloads.
The difficulty with games is that more often than not, the interaction is not as intuitive or fundamental as these other mediums. Once you know how to read a given language, you can access all the titles of that language. Once you know one DVD player, you know them all. However, more often than not, each game requires individual learning of the controls to experience the significant effect.
Games tend to be overly complex and laden with options and interactivity. In many ways, this can form a barrier that seems purposely designed to seperate gamers from other users, in much the same way that literacy differentiates those who can read from those who just look at the words without understanding. Such is the clarion call of 'challenging enough for gamers'.
- Da_Vane
