6 ms·

I think a strictly technological view of videogames is very restrictive. For a variety of reasons, in the last decade (or in the last couple), videogames matur

I think a strictly technological view of videogames is very restrictive. For a variety of reasons, in the last decade (or in the last couple), videogames matured as a narrative medium, which is a radical difference from the 90s. One could argue that, from an whole - including artistic - perspective, 2010s are the golden era. I don't think there is a golden age, though. There are still radical improvements to come in the next decade(s), and it will require a long time to be able to have a judgment of what characterized video games/developemnt in each era.

twelvechairs 8y ago
For me the early 90s with the new technology came a lot of experimentation and new kinds of games. For example one of my favourite developers Bullfrog made games like Populous, Syndicate, Magic Carpet, Theme Park, Dungeon Keeper. All radically different game styles and all excellent games. The late 90s and 00s to me was all dominant single games (e.g. Starcraft, Quake, Halflife). A lot of it was about having the latest graphics, with big studios winning. And spinoff games were done with an 'engine', which often made them look/feel/respond similar to the original. You also saw a lot of sequels and series taking over from new game concepts because of this. And most of them were in a few genres (FPS and RTS especially). I agree its a good time now though, we are so flooded with different types of games that you have to do something interesting to get noticed.
coldtea 8y ago
>* For a variety of reasons, in the last decade (or in the last couple), videogames matured as a narrative medium, which is a radical difference from the 90s. One could argue that, from an whole - including artistic - perspective, 2010s are the golden era.* In an era when most mainstream movies are way dumbed down, I doubt games got much more "artistic" and "narrative". (Especially if one considers the text and graphic adventure games in the 80s/90s). At best they got some ersatz narrative qualities, but nothing to write home about.
- froasty 8y ago
  Agreed. Just look at franchises that were around in the 1990s and compare them to their 2010s counterparts. Almost none of them look good in comparison to their antecedents. Deus Ex -- You play as a cybernetic anti-terrorist operative in a prosaic and cynical vision of the future fueled entirely by the conspiracies of the mid-90s BBS scene. The world is complex, coherent, and fleshed out. You have the illusion that your choices matter. Deus Ex: Human Revolution -- You play as a super bad-ass private security in a neo-Renaissance world populated fueled by the hyperbole surrounding transhumanism. The developers deliberately make it less complex compared to the original for the sake of streamlining, use banal pop culture for their "inspirations," and intentionally design the game so that player choices are irrelevant. [0] It can be boiled down to "We want to make a western Metal Gear Solid." I'll just grab a quote from a random Fallout 3 retrospective here -- "[...] Fallout 1 and 2 were defined by complex storylines, detailed characters and far-reaching consequences to the player's actions. And that these elements are less prominent in FO3, while faster action and stunning visuals have been brought to the forefront." [1] Or a Thief (2014) review: "The three major strengths of past Thief titles - wide open mission design, sound propagation and narrative - are this game’s biggest weaknesses. That is a fundamental problem it cannot hope to overcome." [3] Video games "matured" in the sense that they became more like movies interspersed with interactive segments, but the notion that that made them more artistic is pretty unfounded. --- [0] http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015489/Reimagining-a-Classic-The-Design http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015489/Reimagining-a-Classic-T... [1] https://www.rpgwatch.com/articles/fallout-3-retrospective-218.html https://www.rpgwatch.com/articles/fallout-3-retrospective-21... [2] https://www.pcinvasion.com/thief-pc-review/ https://www.pcinvasion.com/thief-pc-review/
  - digi_owl 8y ago
    I think some article in PCGamer back in the day quoted Warren Spector regarding Deus Ex, and its complexities, as him regularly going into his office and sitting down to figuratively bang his head on the desk while asking why they make things so hard on themselves over and over. The decision that the player should be able to win via multiple paths, be it sneaking, gunplay, or something else entirely, really made it a beast to work on. Damn it, there is a whole sub-section of one of the maps were you can encounter mobs you normally only encounter towards the later end of the game. And you do this by following up on a missing person and finding a way into the sewers. That said, i keep coming back to a quote found over at Filfre, where one of the people that worked on the early Lucasarts (still Lucasfilms Games back then) games muses over how game developers have a bad habit of getting distracted by new toys. Meaning that whenever some new hardware came along that allowed more of something, more colors, more sprites, more anything, they would invariably churn out a mass of shallow action games or similar to show of how many sprites or colors they can make the hardware push. Effectively the industry is rolled back by several years of development practice (and i dare say something similar happened with mobile tech when the iPhone released). And it may well be that as we keep having AMD and Nvivida push out new GPUs, that we are stuck in a rut of continually colorful and well rendered but bland games. Never mind that with the gamepad being the more likely input device, many interfaces are hampered (Deus Ex inventory tetris anyone?).
barrkel 8y ago
Modern video games too often have far more linear gameplay, because AAA budgets means assets get wasted if they don't get consumed. See the entire CoD series, for example - tedious to play if you're used to a different kind of game. Many people want a movie-like experience from their game, but that isn't what I played games for. It was more about emergent situations, rather than scripted. That was also what made games replayable - it's very rare for me to want to replay a modern game these days.
- alias_neo 8y ago
  Can I ask, what does "assets get wasted if they don't get comsumed" mean? Also, I agree with emergent situations, as a gamer, I'd call myself an "explorer" I'll check every nook and cranny, often, with modern games, I end up breaking things because I go places I shouldn't yet, instead of following what the developer expected of me. As for replayability, I agree that it has mostly been lost, but, I don't feel it's a bad thing. I have a backlog of games on various systems to last me several more years, and I continue to buy games at a pace that means it'll sustain for some time to come. Coupled with increasingly less time to game as I get older, I struggle to play some games at all. Fallout 3 and Oblivion were two of my favs, New Vegas and Skyrim sit in their plastic wrap since day one, as I haven't found the time to commit to them. Fallout 4 got some 60 hours of my time compared to Fallout 3 in which I spend over 400 hours. I don't play COD, or similar games, their "experience" is too shallow and linear, and it's easy to just keep them out of my backlog. I want a game with a solid deadline that I can shelve when I'm done and move on in the backlog. The really greats will get a special "shelf" where they'll come back out, or are given to friends with similar taste.
  - the_af 8y ago
    > Can I ask, what does "assets get wasted if they don't get comsumed" mean? I think the parent poster means this: that because each "scene" in an AAA game cost a lot to produce, they want every player to experience it. If it was entirely optional, then some players would miss it, and then how can you explain to them why the game was so expensive? So they must see scene; in order to ensure this, the game becomes more linear and with fewer optional missions/situations/paths. Think of it as a big budget movie: they filmed the action-oriented, CGI-ladden scene, so they want you to watch it.
a008t 8y ago
Video games have gone Hollywood. Largely because of improvements in graphics, game budgets have gone way up and studios are afraid to take risks. Hence you get mostly sequels, online cash cows, linear on-rails shooters/cinematic experiences that are easy to sell. Content is expensive to produce so studios are afraid of "wasting" it. Yet I was still discovering hidden things in the original Deus Ex 10 years after I first played it. 1997-2004 I think was the golden age of gaming where technology was good enough that cool things could be made, yet bad enough that small-ish creative studios could compete. Games were popular enough to make it profitable for studios to make them yet not too mainstream to dumb them down for the lowest common denominator. System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill 1-3, Resident Evil 1-3, No One Lives Forever, Age of Empires, Warzone 2100, Mafia 1, Half-Life, Syphon Filter, Parasite Eve - in no particular order; I am sure I am forgetting many many more great titles from that era.
- robohoe 8y ago
  Maria 1 was the Grand Theft Auto of 2002/03.
  - cmyr 8y ago
    Wasn't Vice City was the Grand Theft Auto of 2002/03? ;) More to the original point, the first GTA remains along with Age of Empires one of my all-time favourite games. It's easy to forget in light of the franchise it became what a novel and crazy little game that was.
    - a008t 8y ago
      What I find absolutely fascinating is that there are only 16 years between the release of GTA1 and GTA5. How could such amazing progress have occurred in such a short timeframe? It's unbelievable.
  - a008t 8y ago
    GTA3 was actually released roughly at the same time and probably overshadowed Mafia. I think Mafia was the better game overall, though.
wilsonnb2 8y ago
Really? Currently, I think video games are a terrible way to tell a story. Much worse than a book, tv show, or movie. The way games are used as a narrative medium is by shoving movies inside them and forcing you to watch them instead of actually playing the game. Its like going to the movie theater, being handed a book, and told to read the book while we pause the movie between two scenes. Obviously some games are exceptions, but they are few and far between.
- Crespyl 8y ago
  Games are certainly a different way to tell a story, but I wouldn't say "terrible". > The way games are used as a narrative medium is by shoving movies inside them If that's how a game is presenting its story, then yes; they likely would be better served by simply making a movie. Games are an interactive medium, but that just means that storytelling in games will be different and use different tools than other mediums, while allowing for entirely new kinds of engagement with a story being told. The memorable video game stories in my experience have been those that were engaged, collaborative experiences that I felt physically involved in as a player. The wholly emergent stories from Dwarf Fortress, the dynamically simulated open world with a strong interactive narrative in Star Control II, or the incredible physical connection to the tightly presented stories of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons or What Remains of Edith Finch; these are all different ends of a spectrum of interactive narrative design. The kind of games you mention are certainly terrible examples of storytelling, but to dismiss the medium as being a "terrible way to tell a story" is to miss out on some of the most interesting interactive stories being told.
  - wilsonnb2 8y ago
    The reason I say it is a terrible way to tell a story is not because you can't tell a good story in a video game, but because most stories don't benefit from having gameplay elements thrown into them. In fact, I think it takes away from the story because the storyteller loses control over important things like pacing and the person experiencing the story has to constantly switch between story-mode and gameplay-mode. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is pretty much the only game I can think of that does this successfully, and I don't think it's something that can be done with any story. Books and movies, on the other hand, can tell pretty much any story. They are universal, while video games are limited. I believe that to be inherent to the mediums, and not just because we are still learning how to tell stories in video games. Emergent stories are not storytelling and have no bearing on video games effectiveness as a narrative medium. They are stories, yes, but they are not being told. They are being created in real time by the people playing the game, which is quite fun but not storytelling.
the_af 8y ago
Like a sibling comment says, in the 2010s videogames have "gone Hollywood". My perspective is similar to what you say, but actually in the opposite direction: I think videogames in the 90s experimented more and were less focused in graphics, even though of course there were very technical programmers like Carmack. In the 2010s, videogames seemed to think graphics were the most important improvement; but even worse, every game designer thought of himself as an amateur movie director. Unfortunately, most game designers would make terrible directors. I'm going to single out David Cage of Quantic Dream as someone who writes embarrassingly bad plots for his videogames (Indigo Prophecy, Heavy Rain), and actually calls himself a "director". The problem with "games as movies" is that most games tell a story that would feel amateurish or childish if told as a movie. But also, as one piece in the Atlantic controversially argued [0], games are a different medium than movies; trying to "tell a story" with a game, in the traditional sense, is failing to take advantage of the medium. ---- [0] Note I don't entirely agree with it, but it raises some valid points: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/video-games-stories/524148/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/video...
- 0xcde4c3db 8y ago
  > I'm going to single out David Cage of Quantic Dream as someone who writes embarrassingly bad plots for his videogames (Indigo Prophecy, Heavy Rain), and actually calls himself a "director". To be fair, "director" has been a title in video game credits for 30+ years. Shigeru Miyamoto (or rather "S. Miyahon") is listed as a director on the credit roll of The Legend of Zelda, for example. I don't know how common it is relative to other titles like "designer" or "planner", but in any case Cage isn't breaking any more ground here than he is in his storytelling.
cat199 8y ago
> videogames matured as a narrative medium Did they really? I agree things are more 'cinematic', but text based adventures were arguably just as 'narrative' if not more so, and these are some of the earliest games in existence. Then there were the 'graphical adventure' games like kings quest, etc which were hugely popular, then things like 'tomb raider', and so on. taking these as a lineage, one can say it's really just the presentation that has matured, which one could then say makes the argument a 'technological view'..
- Crespyl 8y ago
  I would argue that Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons or What Remains of Edith Finch are both examples of games that use inherent features of physically playing a game to deliver their stories in a really unique way. I would say that kind of thing, finding ways of using interactivity to tell stories in ways that no other medium can, is an example of the field "maturing". (Beyond just "pass this test of skill or strategy to see the next part of the story, presented in an otherwise conventional manner").

twelvechairs 8y ago

For me the early 90s with the new technology came a lot of experimentation and new kinds of games. For example one of my favourite developers Bullfrog made games like Populous, Syndicate, Magic Carpet, Theme Park, Dungeon Keeper. All radically different game styles and all excellent games. The late 90s and 00s to me was all dominant single games (e.g. Starcraft, Quake, Halflife). A lot of it was about having the latest graphics, with big studios winning. And spinoff games were done with an 'engine', which often made them look/feel/respond similar to the original. You also saw a lot of sequels and series taking over from new game concepts because of this. And most of them were in a few genres (FPS and RTS especially). I agree its a good time now though, we are so flooded with different types of games that you have to do something interesting to get noticed.

coldtea 8y ago

>* For a variety of reasons, in the last decade (or in the last couple), videogames matured as a narrative medium, which is a radical difference from the 90s. One could argue that, from an whole - including artistic - perspective, 2010s are the golden era.* In an era when most mainstream movies are way dumbed down, I doubt games got much more "artistic" and "narrative". (Especially if one considers the text and graphic adventure games in the 80s/90s). At best they got some ersatz narrative qualities, but nothing to write home about.

froasty 8y ago
Agreed. Just look at franchises that were around in the 1990s and compare them to their 2010s counterparts. Almost none of them look good in comparison to their antecedents. Deus Ex -- You play as a cybernetic anti-terrorist operative in a prosaic and cynical vision of the future fueled entirely by the conspiracies of the mid-90s BBS scene. The world is complex, coherent, and fleshed out. You have the illusion that your choices matter. Deus Ex: Human Revolution -- You play as a super bad-ass private security in a neo-Renaissance world populated fueled by the hyperbole surrounding transhumanism. The developers deliberately make it less complex compared to the original for the sake of streamlining, use banal pop culture for their "inspirations," and intentionally design the game so that player choices are irrelevant. [0] It can be boiled down to "We want to make a western Metal Gear Solid." I'll just grab a quote from a random Fallout 3 retrospective here -- "[...] Fallout 1 and 2 were defined by complex storylines, detailed characters and far-reaching consequences to the player's actions. And that these elements are less prominent in FO3, while faster action and stunning visuals have been brought to the forefront." [1] Or a Thief (2014) review: "The three major strengths of past Thief titles - wide open mission design, sound propagation and narrative - are this game’s biggest weaknesses. That is a fundamental problem it cannot hope to overcome." [3] Video games "matured" in the sense that they became more like movies interspersed with interactive segments, but the notion that that made them more artistic is pretty unfounded. --- [0] http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015489/Reimagining-a-Classic-The-Design http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015489/Reimagining-a-Classic-T... [1] https://www.rpgwatch.com/articles/fallout-3-retrospective-218.html https://www.rpgwatch.com/articles/fallout-3-retrospective-21... [2] https://www.pcinvasion.com/thief-pc-review/ https://www.pcinvasion.com/thief-pc-review/
- digi_owl 8y ago
  I think some article in PCGamer back in the day quoted Warren Spector regarding Deus Ex, and its complexities, as him regularly going into his office and sitting down to figuratively bang his head on the desk while asking why they make things so hard on themselves over and over. The decision that the player should be able to win via multiple paths, be it sneaking, gunplay, or something else entirely, really made it a beast to work on. Damn it, there is a whole sub-section of one of the maps were you can encounter mobs you normally only encounter towards the later end of the game. And you do this by following up on a missing person and finding a way into the sewers. That said, i keep coming back to a quote found over at Filfre, where one of the people that worked on the early Lucasarts (still Lucasfilms Games back then) games muses over how game developers have a bad habit of getting distracted by new toys. Meaning that whenever some new hardware came along that allowed more of something, more colors, more sprites, more anything, they would invariably churn out a mass of shallow action games or similar to show of how many sprites or colors they can make the hardware push. Effectively the industry is rolled back by several years of development practice (and i dare say something similar happened with mobile tech when the iPhone released). And it may well be that as we keep having AMD and Nvivida push out new GPUs, that we are stuck in a rut of continually colorful and well rendered but bland games. Never mind that with the gamepad being the more likely input device, many interfaces are hampered (Deus Ex inventory tetris anyone?).

barrkel 8y ago

Modern video games too often have far more linear gameplay, because AAA budgets means assets get wasted if they don't get consumed. See the entire CoD series, for example - tedious to play if you're used to a different kind of game. Many people want a movie-like experience from their game, but that isn't what I played games for. It was more about emergent situations, rather than scripted. That was also what made games replayable - it's very rare for me to want to replay a modern game these days.

alias_neo 8y ago
Can I ask, what does "assets get wasted if they don't get comsumed" mean? Also, I agree with emergent situations, as a gamer, I'd call myself an "explorer" I'll check every nook and cranny, often, with modern games, I end up breaking things because I go places I shouldn't yet, instead of following what the developer expected of me. As for replayability, I agree that it has mostly been lost, but, I don't feel it's a bad thing. I have a backlog of games on various systems to last me several more years, and I continue to buy games at a pace that means it'll sustain for some time to come. Coupled with increasingly less time to game as I get older, I struggle to play some games at all. Fallout 3 and Oblivion were two of my favs, New Vegas and Skyrim sit in their plastic wrap since day one, as I haven't found the time to commit to them. Fallout 4 got some 60 hours of my time compared to Fallout 3 in which I spend over 400 hours. I don't play COD, or similar games, their "experience" is too shallow and linear, and it's easy to just keep them out of my backlog. I want a game with a solid deadline that I can shelve when I'm done and move on in the backlog. The really greats will get a special "shelf" where they'll come back out, or are given to friends with similar taste.
- the_af 8y ago
  > Can I ask, what does "assets get wasted if they don't get comsumed" mean? I think the parent poster means this: that because each "scene" in an AAA game cost a lot to produce, they want every player to experience it. If it was entirely optional, then some players would miss it, and then how can you explain to them why the game was so expensive? So they must see scene; in order to ensure this, the game becomes more linear and with fewer optional missions/situations/paths. Think of it as a big budget movie: they filmed the action-oriented, CGI-ladden scene, so they want you to watch it.

a008t 8y ago

Video games have gone Hollywood. Largely because of improvements in graphics, game budgets have gone way up and studios are afraid to take risks. Hence you get mostly sequels, online cash cows, linear on-rails shooters/cinematic experiences that are easy to sell. Content is expensive to produce so studios are afraid of "wasting" it. Yet I was still discovering hidden things in the original Deus Ex 10 years after I first played it. 1997-2004 I think was the golden age of gaming where technology was good enough that cool things could be made, yet bad enough that small-ish creative studios could compete. Games were popular enough to make it profitable for studios to make them yet not too mainstream to dumb them down for the lowest common denominator. System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill 1-3, Resident Evil 1-3, No One Lives Forever, Age of Empires, Warzone 2100, Mafia 1, Half-Life, Syphon Filter, Parasite Eve - in no particular order; I am sure I am forgetting many many more great titles from that era.

robohoe 8y ago
Maria 1 was the Grand Theft Auto of 2002/03.
- cmyr 8y ago
  Wasn't Vice City was the Grand Theft Auto of 2002/03? ;) More to the original point, the first GTA remains along with Age of Empires one of my all-time favourite games. It's easy to forget in light of the franchise it became what a novel and crazy little game that was.
  - a008t 8y ago
    What I find absolutely fascinating is that there are only 16 years between the release of GTA1 and GTA5. How could such amazing progress have occurred in such a short timeframe? It's unbelievable.
- a008t 8y ago
  GTA3 was actually released roughly at the same time and probably overshadowed Mafia. I think Mafia was the better game overall, though.

wilsonnb2 8y ago

Really? Currently, I think video games are a terrible way to tell a story. Much worse than a book, tv show, or movie. The way games are used as a narrative medium is by shoving movies inside them and forcing you to watch them instead of actually playing the game. Its like going to the movie theater, being handed a book, and told to read the book while we pause the movie between two scenes. Obviously some games are exceptions, but they are few and far between.

Crespyl 8y ago
Games are certainly a different way to tell a story, but I wouldn't say "terrible". > The way games are used as a narrative medium is by shoving movies inside them If that's how a game is presenting its story, then yes; they likely would be better served by simply making a movie. Games are an interactive medium, but that just means that storytelling in games will be different and use different tools than other mediums, while allowing for entirely new kinds of engagement with a story being told. The memorable video game stories in my experience have been those that were engaged, collaborative experiences that I felt physically involved in as a player. The wholly emergent stories from Dwarf Fortress, the dynamically simulated open world with a strong interactive narrative in Star Control II, or the incredible physical connection to the tightly presented stories of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons or What Remains of Edith Finch; these are all different ends of a spectrum of interactive narrative design. The kind of games you mention are certainly terrible examples of storytelling, but to dismiss the medium as being a "terrible way to tell a story" is to miss out on some of the most interesting interactive stories being told.
- wilsonnb2 8y ago
  The reason I say it is a terrible way to tell a story is not because you can't tell a good story in a video game, but because most stories don't benefit from having gameplay elements thrown into them. In fact, I think it takes away from the story because the storyteller loses control over important things like pacing and the person experiencing the story has to constantly switch between story-mode and gameplay-mode. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is pretty much the only game I can think of that does this successfully, and I don't think it's something that can be done with any story. Books and movies, on the other hand, can tell pretty much any story. They are universal, while video games are limited. I believe that to be inherent to the mediums, and not just because we are still learning how to tell stories in video games. Emergent stories are not storytelling and have no bearing on video games effectiveness as a narrative medium. They are stories, yes, but they are not being told. They are being created in real time by the people playing the game, which is quite fun but not storytelling.

the_af 8y ago

Like a sibling comment says, in the 2010s videogames have "gone Hollywood". My perspective is similar to what you say, but actually in the opposite direction: I think videogames in the 90s experimented more and were less focused in graphics, even though of course there were very technical programmers like Carmack. In the 2010s, videogames seemed to think graphics were the most important improvement; but even worse, every game designer thought of himself as an amateur movie director. Unfortunately, most game designers would make terrible directors. I'm going to single out David Cage of Quantic Dream as someone who writes embarrassingly bad plots for his videogames (Indigo Prophecy, Heavy Rain), and actually calls himself a "director". The problem with "games as movies" is that most games tell a story that would feel amateurish or childish if told as a movie. But also, as one piece in the Atlantic controversially argued [0], games are a different medium than movies; trying to "tell a story" with a game, in the traditional sense, is failing to take advantage of the medium. ---- [0] Note I don't entirely agree with it, but it raises some valid points: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/video-games-stories/524148/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/video...

0xcde4c3db 8y ago
> I'm going to single out David Cage of Quantic Dream as someone who writes embarrassingly bad plots for his videogames (Indigo Prophecy, Heavy Rain), and actually calls himself a "director". To be fair, "director" has been a title in video game credits for 30+ years. Shigeru Miyamoto (or rather "S. Miyahon") is listed as a director on the credit roll of The Legend of Zelda, for example. I don't know how common it is relative to other titles like "designer" or "planner", but in any case Cage isn't breaking any more ground here than he is in his storytelling.

cat199 8y ago

> videogames matured as a narrative medium Did they really? I agree things are more 'cinematic', but text based adventures were arguably just as 'narrative' if not more so, and these are some of the earliest games in existence. Then there were the 'graphical adventure' games like kings quest, etc which were hugely popular, then things like 'tomb raider', and so on. taking these as a lineage, one can say it's really just the presentation that has matured, which one could then say makes the argument a 'technological view'..

Crespyl 8y ago
I would argue that Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons or What Remains of Edith Finch are both examples of games that use inherent features of physically playing a game to deliver their stories in a really unique way. I would say that kind of thing, finding ways of using interactivity to tell stories in ways that no other medium can, is an example of the field "maturing". (Beyond just "pass this test of skill or strategy to see the next part of the story, presented in an otherwise conventional manner").