The only thing that makes me sad about video games today is the lack of splitscreen, sure co-op is becoming more popular and I approve of that lol. But I feel there's great loss between over the net and sitting next to someone, most of the time you could just be fighting bots for all the difference it makes.
I understand the resources it takes but that just comes off as lazy deving.
Competing in the same room as friends is far more fun, infact why be interested in fighting or racing games at all without them.
Come to think of it you could say my lack of interest in most AAA games correlates to the depth of human interaction in their multiplayer lol.
But I fear that's entirely too hypocritical and genre based as I could never ignore shadow of the colossus or Okami and any number of todays indie gems.
Once games can provide a musical experience that lives up to, say, Bach's violin concertos, be sure to notify me; until that time.
That time is right now. Actually it's been possible for a while now. How? You put Bach's violin concerto's into a game. That's what I mean with games being all other media wrapped in one. You can put any other media in a game, but not the other way around Can you make portal as a boardgame? No, you'd have to change the rules. Can you make Monopoly a videogame? It's already been done on several devices.
Like .. someone .. said, games allow us to create a completely new universe with different physical rules. Boardgames and the like are severely limited by the turnbased (usually) nature of it, they are a far too abstract representation. Games can give a much stronger feeling of being in the place. They're not the end-all-be-all though, I'll explain in a few paragraphs.
Dear Esther is lauded as one of the nicest things to come out last year, and it's not much more than a movie or a book. You can pretty much only progress through the story or not progress (play and pause, read or not read) but the idea of controlling the character makes it more powerful. Interaction is required.
One might argue though, that currently the interaction is taking a big backseat to story and visuals. But those are merely on highschool-level, because nobody in games is really that interested in writing, and nobody in writing is really that interested in games {example: Jennifer Hepler's "skip gameplay" button).
What does that leave us with? The backseat mechanics. Shooters have become trite experiences, aside those new to games. RPG and such the same - this might explain why you're more into boardgames, too, because those are a new, fresh medium to your brains.
I think that the industry is indeed as 'young' as we'd like to believe it, and even MORE so than we realize. It's immature, though. Extra Credits ran a bit of a story on that this week. We're trying too hard to play catch-up and that's exactly what hampers it. Why? Because trying to imitate movies is contrary to a game's defining characteristic: player interaction.
Anyway, about how games are a young medium.
It is important to keep in mind is that videogames are a radical departure from traditional entertainment which have slowly evolved. First there were the mouth-to-mouth stories which evolved into both theatre and writing. Movies was simply theatre put on camera (well, right after we got over the initial shock of HOLY SHIT MOVING PICTURES - which were in fact precursed by things like a zo
It has not so much to do with "the games" or the "creators" than the expansion of the market to your average piece of shit consumer who also likes jersey shore, affliction clothing, and anything else that will help them blend into the mass consumer culture. When I was younger it was the kids that got beat up in high school, that played d&d and read comics that we're gamers. They had the majority voice of where games were going and what games were made because they were the target demographic, they were the focus test group. Now since gaming has risen to a billion dollar industry the target demographic is the vast majority of consumers, who are generally boring, uninteresting, people with shallow personalities. The games will directly reflect who the consumers are. This is also apparent with pop music, the majority of music is about fucking, or getting fucked up, or going to a club to get fucked up and maybe fuck later. Those same douchebags that blast that shitty music in their car are the same ones who are buying the majority of games. I think indie games are the place to find anything truly new, the best that can happen is you will see things from indie games slowly trickle into mainstream games.
Wow, well said Sam!. That was summed up very well and is probably the best example of how consumerism works by far. I'd go so far to add that those same kids that got picked on only define what the majority consumer consensus regards as "the current trend" nowadays.
Hehe Snader, I beg to differ! Portal sure could have been made in 1975. Not the first person 3D version of it of course, but a 2D "adaptation" could very well be done on such ancient hardware with all the spirit intact.
So, indeed, the portal concept took 30 years to emerge Now imagine how crazy our current games would be if such a mind bending game had been released 30 or 20 years ago ...
I'm with you on the idea of the positive effects of stagnation. Touchscreens are cool for a certain category of games but I am convinced that tight and original gamepad and mouse+kb experiences can still be invented. I guess it's a matter of following the studios and teams who made original titles in the past : Treasure, Valve, Clover, and so on...
A few striking ones from the recent and the far past (mostly taking the exemple of tigh response time and accuracy here)
But that is what this is all about, everyone has different perspectives and experiences, not all will have a global encompassing view of it all. We had great games before 3d games, we certainly had great games after 3d too.
I think people are shocked by seeing 10 times the amount of shitty games out today, but fail to realize that there's 10 times as many good games out there too, it wasn't that we got more shitty games, it was that we got more games overall.
Pior, Portal could've easily been done in 2d, but so could've racing games, yet I know you do realize the importance a third dimension does for these game.:)
If one thinks that games have stagnated and that they've become more boring, then he isn't looking far enough, there's more games than the triple-a shooter genre.
And the moment you call out "stagnation and boredom!" one completely deny all the actual games that have come out and revolutionized games. Look at the good things about gaming, don't focus on the bad. Look at the different tastes in games people have.
I myself am a big dos game fan, and I could very much with facts state that the industry has been stagnant since 95, since that's the last time we got a revolutionary game such as XCOM, but that would mean me forgoing all the fantastic games we got between '95 and '12, I don't want to live in such a world.
I think the problem is that if you're making an AAA title with millions of dollars, you don't take any risks. You take a theme and setting that you know sells well, and use genre typical gameplay mechanics that everyone is familiar with. Customers are skeptical of anything they don't know - you risk selling less copies of your game, even though your new ideas might have been great.
Indie games seem to be the more innovative and often more fun. The reason is that these small businesses cannot compete with the bigger companies in the industry.They are forced to take risks and be innovative, and target markets that bigger companies won't bother with. Since they work with much smaller budgets, they don't need to sell as many copies of their games as well.
Oh dear, Snader. I don't want to dominate this thread, so feel free to take it to PM if that seems more suitable to you.
- On the point of Bach's violin concertos: it doesn't work that way, give it a try. I once played An der schönen blauen Donau on the background of TF2, which seemed like a fun thing. But in the heat of the action, your mind is occupied with other things; I didn't notice the music in the background at all during the most tense moments - and Strauss, for all his worth, is no Bach. Some music can only be fully appreciated when you devote your full attention to it. You may also notice that film and games don't lend themselves too well to music with lyrics either.
- On Dear Esther and games: I don't consider DE to be a game, myself, going by the Salen and Zimmerman (2004) definition of "A system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome." A definition that works for most video games, but also for board games or sports; the ἀγών of Huizinga (1938 ). It does not, however, work for Dear Esther or a large amount of visual novels, which are often defined as games.
I see their position as similar to that of the social sciences a century ago; the natural sciences were breaking grounds and areas of study such as psychology, sociology and history were very eager to be like them and be classified as science too (rather than an art, which is the domain of filthy Bohémiens). That led to a lot of bad pseudo-scientific studies in those areas, and it's only after we accepted a difference between natural and social sciences that the latter have really come onto their own. With non-rule based digital interactivity, it's the same. They desperately want to be called video games, because those are popular and the way of the future. People (Robert Briscoe included, until he noticed the error of his ways) demanded agonal interactivity, even when it does no good. It's silly to classify everything that is interactive as a game.
It's also from this definition of game that I argue that games can't be art. Games are sets of rules. Rules can be understood, art can only be interpreted. It's the difference between Wilhelm Dilthey's erklären and verstehen (again, the sciences). A computer can be programmed to play the perfect game of Portal, but a computer will never even remotely get a grip on Hamlet. You can staple music or videos or graphics onto them, but that doesn't make it an artful thing in itself. Farmville with Mozart's Requiem isn't a piece of art about death, it's still a game about mindlessly adding stuff and waiting. It's like painting that Mona Lisa on your car; it may be a very artful car, but that doesn't make the act of driving it an art. If games are serious about being games, their meaning has to come through play, rule-based interaction.
So if I make that very sharp distinction between game and attached things, what are games about? Very few things. A game is generally about how a more skillful player will win. Have skills, be succesful. Have no skills and you'll get no content, until you develop skills. Some games may have interesting hoops, but it's always jumping through hoops. That's a very poor exploration of the human condition, isn't it? The very oldest piece of literature that we know of, the Epic of Gilgamesh, already deconstructs that.
So is meaning in games really a viable route? Is it just zero-sum games that are shallow?
It seems to me that a lot of people here are asking for clever new hoops to jump through. Personally, I'm a bit tired of the jumping altogether when I can also create art or do research.
- On the technical side of things: I agree with you, Snader, that technology doesn't do game design any good. I just don't see why you only apply that to touch screens and motion controls; I'd argue computers in general are so capable with their ability to add graphics, sound, cutscenes, 3D motion, otherwordly physics and all that that the game aspect has gotten lost. Mechanically, aren't chess and diplomacy more beautiful than Portal?
I think the market is saturated with uninspired ideas, but there's enough gems in there to keep me happy and stimulated as a gamer. I don't need obscure or "thought provoking" experiences to enjoy a videogame. If I'm playing a game that I feel I've played before and am getting a bit bored with it (for instance I skipped Black Ops because I've had my fill of that high adrenaline heavily scripted experiences the series puts out, but I still think they have their place in the universal catalogue of games.) There's been a number of games recently that I've enjoyed, having scratched an itch I had as a gamer.
I can tell what is boring, though: People posting drive-by snooty comments in this thread on the topic. If you're going to participate, then participate.
So I took the time out to ask all my nieces and nephews in my rather large extended family this question and some of their friends. The age group ranges from about 10ish up to 18ish.
The answer was a resounding no pretty much all-round, its all still new to them, theres a ton of choices, and game stores still feel like candy land every time they go inside. The only comments that even approached boredom was regarding FPS from some of the older boys - no matter what the franchise - it was starting to get repetitive, but *still* not boring they will still buy and play the next Call of Duty, But I guess its only a matter of time. They are playing everything from Disgaea to Monster Hunter, Uncharted to Kirby, Pokemon to Assassins Creed, Gran Tourismo and GTA, the lego series of games, and stuff like singstar etc. (there was no mention of indy games.... or games like journey, mostly big name / marketed stuff )
I think theres something to be said about this, Some of us around here are getting on a bit, and probably been playing games since the mid-late 80's and early 90's and were probably at the point now where weve seen enough of these 'on the rails' shooters, linear rpg's or what have you.
But from a new younger generation of gamers perspective, Its quite possible they disagree and there's more generations to cater to than *just* us tired grumpy old gamers looking for that new magical experience, or fond re-imagining of an old gaming experience. (The Indy / small / casual game dev arena is where I look to scratch these itches) So what does a developer do?
A side note, I feel its totally relevant to this topic and its something that Ive been thinking about for a long time now. I intend this in no way to be derogatory to the people and studios I've worked with so far but I feel as though the contributions I've made to games in my career so far have all been to relatively... safe games. Regardless of how big the budget and how famous the brand name, and despite what marketing would have me believe, from my perspective its been nothing revolutionary, nothing groundbreaking, nothing daring. (Im bias to the art-side of things, and could very well be ignorant to the technical whizbangery of some of the games Ive worked on)
Its all been pretty safe, stay within the box kind of game development, essentially copies of other successful IP's with some tweaks. Success built off the successes (or failures) of the real soldiers who put it all on the line to forge the path. So do I now accept responsibility for being part of the creation for these 'boring' games? What can, or will I do about it? The answer is not as easy as it seems.
I am realizing its wreaking havoc on my conscience more and more, like a chokehold in a claustrophobic environment to my creative self, and I'm willing to bet there are more people than just me who feel that way. I'm guessing, but I think most of us passionate gamers & game developers built our creativity from the early teenage years by reading and writing about cool stories while plotting maps in our math books, writing little game ideas for our English exams, or drawing badass heroes all over our book covers.
We continued that process until we got good enough in our respective fields to be hired, only for *probably most* of us then to be pigeonholed to continually do what we got good at for essentially clone games for mass consumption, for years and years. Before we know it, weve made a career out of it and forgot about that creative person that we all used to be in favor of the comfort (or out of understandable necessity) that a paycheck brings.
We tell ourselves we do it for experience, or to get our name out there, but where do you draw the line? Do you move around and absorb what you can from as many companies as possible in 10 years? Do you stay at one company for 25 years in hope you will one day be in a position to create an entire world / game / IP?
How and when do you decide to hop off the wagon and 'express your creativity'? Will you EVER be financially able to hop off the wagon?
I personally do want to be a part of something that resonates or connects people together on a different level, but at the same time, Im still trying to become a good artist and therein lies the dilemma. Once upon a time, I knew which of those things was more important to me, now Im pretty certain I was wrong, and I feel pretty goofy about that, I can only attempt to make good on that moving forward an hopefully do my bit towards making 'un-boring' games.
Once games can provide a musical experience that lives up to, say, Bach's violin concertos, be sure to notify me; until that time, I'm going to hold the opinion that distractions by video and interactivity, and the necessity to loop aren't doing musical aspects any favours. Similarly with its other elements.
Well that certainly makes it difficult to put forward my argument, as you've made it clear that you've made up your mind on the issue. The point that I was trying to make is that games and play are different experiences which can be supplemented by other concepts introduced to us through other media.
Will game music hold up to Bach's Violin Concertos? The answer is neither yes or no as for a start it's completely subjective. Second the media and purpose behind its creation and play are completely different. While I certainly enjoy just listening to game music, it's primarily made to create atmospheric and emotional cues when interacting with a game. Bach's Concertos are simply music, to be experienced as simply as listening. It's a different experience entirely, you don't 'play with' Bach's music, you listen to it. As soon as you ask people to interact the experience and the value someone attaches to it changes.
Do you think there's any video game out there that will outlive chess? I'm not sure if adding stuff is the way forward.
Do you think that any novel or short story will outlast the Bible? Probably not but we still currently appreciate the writings of Shakespeare and continue to enjoy and spread myth outdated by record. How long something lives is not a great indicator of its value but its prominence. Adding things may or may not be the way forward, in fact the problem with this prediction at all and using Chess as an example is that nobody can tell when hallmarks have been built. Nobody in the days of Chess' inception did claim that this game to be perfect and will outlast all others and if they did they would be boasting.
Plenty of things have interaction. Like this conversation! I like conversations better than games, because they're not about winning and they don't have to be understood by computers.
Conversations and indeed a great deal of interactive pursuits are aspects of play. This conversation to anybody not posting is just words on the screen and they exist regardless of the viewers involvement. Hopefully you would agree that taking part, interacting, in this conversation is a better or even different experience to simply reading it. That's how interactivity and play changes experience and why games can not simply be compared to other media on a 1-1 basis.
Also conversation can easily become argument where winning tends to actually be the goal. While it's also fine to dislike negotiating with a computer, that's simply a matter for course that a medium has trappings within it's format. For instance somebody could like conversations but hate writing because it's simply so irritating to negotiate with paper, glyphs and punctuation.
That idea gets sillier every year. When movies were as old as video games are now, they already had Metropolis, All quiet on the Western front, Double indemnity, Casablanca, the Wizard of Oz, and their Citizen Kane, Citizen Kane.
I don't understand your point. I would consider there to be plenty of games in the industry's past that represent forward thinking, art movement, progression of style, theme, ideals of play, represent excellent use of other media, advance production and many more of the things classic film were attributed to doing for their industry at that time.
Not only that but at the time all those classic were made:
Many people didn't care about the value of those films.
They would not be recognised until many years later.
There was plenty of terrible, clich
Replies
I understand the resources it takes but that just comes off as lazy deving.
Competing in the same room as friends is far more fun, infact why be interested in fighting or racing games at all without them.
Come to think of it you could say my lack of interest in most AAA games correlates to the depth of human interaction in their multiplayer lol.
But I fear that's entirely too hypocritical and genre based as I could never ignore shadow of the colossus or Okami and any number of todays indie gems.
That time is right now. Actually it's been possible for a while now. How? You put Bach's violin concerto's into a game. That's what I mean with games being all other media wrapped in one. You can put any other media in a game, but not the other way around Can you make portal as a boardgame? No, you'd have to change the rules. Can you make Monopoly a videogame? It's already been done on several devices.
Like .. someone .. said, games allow us to create a completely new universe with different physical rules. Boardgames and the like are severely limited by the turnbased (usually) nature of it, they are a far too abstract representation. Games can give a much stronger feeling of being in the place. They're not the end-all-be-all though, I'll explain in a few paragraphs.
Dear Esther is lauded as one of the nicest things to come out last year, and it's not much more than a movie or a book. You can pretty much only progress through the story or not progress (play and pause, read or not read) but the idea of controlling the character makes it more powerful. Interaction is required.
One might argue though, that currently the interaction is taking a big backseat to story and visuals. But those are merely on highschool-level, because nobody in games is really that interested in writing, and nobody in writing is really that interested in games {example: Jennifer Hepler's "skip gameplay" button).
What does that leave us with? The backseat mechanics. Shooters have become trite experiences, aside those new to games. RPG and such the same - this might explain why you're more into boardgames, too, because those are a new, fresh medium to your brains.
I think that the industry is indeed as 'young' as we'd like to believe it, and even MORE so than we realize. It's immature, though. Extra Credits ran a bit of a story on that this week. We're trying too hard to play catch-up and that's exactly what hampers it. Why? Because trying to imitate movies is contrary to a game's defining characteristic: player interaction.
Anyway, about how games are a young medium.
It is important to keep in mind is that videogames are a radical departure from traditional entertainment which have slowly evolved. First there were the mouth-to-mouth stories which evolved into both theatre and writing. Movies was simply theatre put on camera (well, right after we got over the initial shock of HOLY SHIT MOVING PICTURES - which were in fact precursed by things like a zo
Wow, well said Sam!. That was summed up very well and is probably the best example of how consumerism works by far. I'd go so far to add that those same kids that got picked on only define what the majority consumer consensus regards as "the current trend" nowadays.
http://portal.wecreatestuff.com/
So, indeed, the portal concept took 30 years to emerge
I'm with you on the idea of the positive effects of stagnation. Touchscreens are cool for a certain category of games but I am convinced that tight and original gamepad and mouse+kb experiences can still be invented. I guess it's a matter of following the studios and teams who made original titles in the past : Treasure, Valve, Clover, and so on...
A few striking ones from the recent and the far past (mostly taking the exemple of tigh response time and accuracy here)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAEfJBkONaA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FpigqfcvlM&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CCmt8Q_ASI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAUqRyPlnQ4&feature=relmfu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snaionoxjos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4EFNWe4mCc
So many to mention!!
:P
In their own minds, yes.
But that is what this is all about, everyone has different perspectives and experiences, not all will have a global encompassing view of it all. We had great games before 3d games, we certainly had great games after 3d too.
I think people are shocked by seeing 10 times the amount of shitty games out today, but fail to realize that there's 10 times as many good games out there too, it wasn't that we got more shitty games, it was that we got more games overall.
Pior, Portal could've easily been done in 2d, but so could've racing games, yet I know you do realize the importance a third dimension does for these game.:)
If one thinks that games have stagnated and that they've become more boring, then he isn't looking far enough, there's more games than the triple-a shooter genre.
And the moment you call out "stagnation and boredom!" one completely deny all the actual games that have come out and revolutionized games. Look at the good things about gaming, don't focus on the bad. Look at the different tastes in games people have.
I myself am a big dos game fan, and I could very much with facts state that the industry has been stagnant since 95, since that's the last time we got a revolutionary game such as XCOM, but that would mean me forgoing all the fantastic games we got between '95 and '12, I don't want to live in such a world.
Indie games seem to be the more innovative and often more fun. The reason is that these small businesses cannot compete with the bigger companies in the industry.They are forced to take risks and be innovative, and target markets that bigger companies won't bother with. Since they work with much smaller budgets, they don't need to sell as many copies of their games as well.
- On the point of Bach's violin concertos: it doesn't work that way, give it a try. I once played An der schönen blauen Donau on the background of TF2, which seemed like a fun thing. But in the heat of the action, your mind is occupied with other things; I didn't notice the music in the background at all during the most tense moments - and Strauss, for all his worth, is no Bach. Some music can only be fully appreciated when you devote your full attention to it. You may also notice that film and games don't lend themselves too well to music with lyrics either.
- On Dear Esther and games: I don't consider DE to be a game, myself, going by the Salen and Zimmerman (2004) definition of "A system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome." A definition that works for most video games, but also for board games or sports; the ἀγών of Huizinga (1938 ). It does not, however, work for Dear Esther or a large amount of visual novels, which are often defined as games.
I see their position as similar to that of the social sciences a century ago; the natural sciences were breaking grounds and areas of study such as psychology, sociology and history were very eager to be like them and be classified as science too (rather than an art, which is the domain of filthy Bohémiens). That led to a lot of bad pseudo-scientific studies in those areas, and it's only after we accepted a difference between natural and social sciences that the latter have really come onto their own. With non-rule based digital interactivity, it's the same. They desperately want to be called video games, because those are popular and the way of the future. People (Robert Briscoe included, until he noticed the error of his ways) demanded agonal interactivity, even when it does no good. It's silly to classify everything that is interactive as a game.
It's also from this definition of game that I argue that games can't be art. Games are sets of rules. Rules can be understood, art can only be interpreted. It's the difference between Wilhelm Dilthey's erklären and verstehen (again, the sciences). A computer can be programmed to play the perfect game of Portal, but a computer will never even remotely get a grip on Hamlet. You can staple music or videos or graphics onto them, but that doesn't make it an artful thing in itself. Farmville with Mozart's Requiem isn't a piece of art about death, it's still a game about mindlessly adding stuff and waiting. It's like painting that Mona Lisa on your car; it may be a very artful car, but that doesn't make the act of driving it an art. If games are serious about being games, their meaning has to come through play, rule-based interaction.
So if I make that very sharp distinction between game and attached things, what are games about? Very few things. A game is generally about how a more skillful player will win. Have skills, be succesful. Have no skills and you'll get no content, until you develop skills. Some games may have interesting hoops, but it's always jumping through hoops. That's a very poor exploration of the human condition, isn't it? The very oldest piece of literature that we know of, the Epic of Gilgamesh, already deconstructs that.
So is meaning in games really a viable route? Is it just zero-sum games that are shallow?
It seems to me that a lot of people here are asking for clever new hoops to jump through. Personally, I'm a bit tired of the jumping altogether when I can also create art or do research.
- On the technical side of things: I agree with you, Snader, that technology doesn't do game design any good. I just don't see why you only apply that to touch screens and motion controls; I'd argue computers in general are so capable with their ability to add graphics, sound, cutscenes, 3D motion, otherwordly physics and all that that the game aspect has gotten lost. Mechanically, aren't chess and diplomacy more beautiful than Portal?
I can tell what is boring, though: People posting drive-by snooty comments in this thread on the topic. If you're going to participate, then participate.
The answer was a resounding no pretty much all-round, its all still new to them, theres a ton of choices, and game stores still feel like candy land every time they go inside. The only comments that even approached boredom was regarding FPS from some of the older boys - no matter what the franchise - it was starting to get repetitive, but *still* not boring they will still buy and play the next Call of Duty, But I guess its only a matter of time. They are playing everything from Disgaea to Monster Hunter, Uncharted to Kirby, Pokemon to Assassins Creed, Gran Tourismo and GTA, the lego series of games, and stuff like singstar etc. (there was no mention of indy games.... or games like journey, mostly big name / marketed stuff )
I think theres something to be said about this, Some of us around here are getting on a bit, and probably been playing games since the mid-late 80's and early 90's and were probably at the point now where weve seen enough of these 'on the rails' shooters, linear rpg's or what have you.
But from a new younger generation of gamers perspective, Its quite possible they disagree and there's more generations to cater to than *just* us tired grumpy old gamers looking for that new magical experience, or fond re-imagining of an old gaming experience. (The Indy / small / casual game dev arena is where I look to scratch these itches) So what does a developer do?
A side note, I feel its totally relevant to this topic and its something that Ive been thinking about for a long time now. I intend this in no way to be derogatory to the people and studios I've worked with so far but I feel as though the contributions I've made to games in my career so far have all been to relatively... safe games. Regardless of how big the budget and how famous the brand name, and despite what marketing would have me believe, from my perspective its been nothing revolutionary, nothing groundbreaking, nothing daring. (Im bias to the art-side of things, and could very well be ignorant to the technical whizbangery of some of the games Ive worked on)
Its all been pretty safe, stay within the box kind of game development, essentially copies of other successful IP's with some tweaks. Success built off the successes (or failures) of the real soldiers who put it all on the line to forge the path. So do I now accept responsibility for being part of the creation for these 'boring' games? What can, or will I do about it? The answer is not as easy as it seems.
I am realizing its wreaking havoc on my conscience more and more, like a chokehold in a claustrophobic environment to my creative self, and I'm willing to bet there are more people than just me who feel that way. I'm guessing, but I think most of us passionate gamers & game developers built our creativity from the early teenage years by reading and writing about cool stories while plotting maps in our math books, writing little game ideas for our English exams, or drawing badass heroes all over our book covers.
We continued that process until we got good enough in our respective fields to be hired, only for *probably most* of us then to be pigeonholed to continually do what we got good at for essentially clone games for mass consumption, for years and years. Before we know it, weve made a career out of it and forgot about that creative person that we all used to be in favor of the comfort (or out of understandable necessity) that a paycheck brings.
We tell ourselves we do it for experience, or to get our name out there, but where do you draw the line? Do you move around and absorb what you can from as many companies as possible in 10 years? Do you stay at one company for 25 years in hope you will one day be in a position to create an entire world / game / IP?
How and when do you decide to hop off the wagon and 'express your creativity'? Will you EVER be financially able to hop off the wagon?
I personally do want to be a part of something that resonates or connects people together on a different level, but at the same time, Im still trying to become a good artist and therein lies the dilemma. Once upon a time, I knew which of those things was more important to me, now Im pretty certain I was wrong, and I feel pretty goofy about that, I can only attempt to make good on that moving forward an hopefully do my bit towards making 'un-boring' games.
Will game music hold up to Bach's Violin Concertos? The answer is neither yes or no as for a start it's completely subjective. Second the media and purpose behind its creation and play are completely different. While I certainly enjoy just listening to game music, it's primarily made to create atmospheric and emotional cues when interacting with a game. Bach's Concertos are simply music, to be experienced as simply as listening. It's a different experience entirely, you don't 'play with' Bach's music, you listen to it. As soon as you ask people to interact the experience and the value someone attaches to it changes.
Do you think that any novel or short story will outlast the Bible? Probably not but we still currently appreciate the writings of Shakespeare and continue to enjoy and spread myth outdated by record. How long something lives is not a great indicator of its value but its prominence. Adding things may or may not be the way forward, in fact the problem with this prediction at all and using Chess as an example is that nobody can tell when hallmarks have been built. Nobody in the days of Chess' inception did claim that this game to be perfect and will outlast all others and if they did they would be boasting.
Conversations and indeed a great deal of interactive pursuits are aspects of play. This conversation to anybody not posting is just words on the screen and they exist regardless of the viewers involvement. Hopefully you would agree that taking part, interacting, in this conversation is a better or even different experience to simply reading it. That's how interactivity and play changes experience and why games can not simply be compared to other media on a 1-1 basis.
Also conversation can easily become argument where winning tends to actually be the goal. While it's also fine to dislike negotiating with a computer, that's simply a matter for course that a medium has trappings within it's format. For instance somebody could like conversations but hate writing because it's simply so irritating to negotiate with paper, glyphs and punctuation.
I don't understand your point. I would consider there to be plenty of games in the industry's past that represent forward thinking, art movement, progression of style, theme, ideals of play, represent excellent use of other media, advance production and many more of the things classic film were attributed to doing for their industry at that time.
Not only that but at the time all those classic were made:
Many people didn't care about the value of those films.
They would not be recognised until many years later.
There was plenty of terrible, clich