Is Advancing Technology an Oxymoron?
Video game play seems to have become an afterthought.
by Chris Andersen, August 1995
It seems that technological advances, far from opening up new avenues of
gaming, have done more to hamstring the creativity of the game designers
then anything in recent memory. I have yet to see a game with live-action
video that couldn't have been just as entertaining, and probably more so,
if it had been done with simple animations.
I'm reminded of a Phil Foglio cartoon done many years ago in Dragon
magazine. He used one of his What's New strips talking about how
computers were revolutionizing role-playing games. (This was back in the
early 80's by the way.) In a sequence of panels he shows a player in front
of a computer being slowly relegated to the role of a bystander as the computer
takes over more and more of the tedious aspects of playing the game.
This was done as a joke, but I think it has a strong ring of truth.
I think consumers are partly to blame for all of this. We keep on demanding
fancier graphics and seamless emulations of reality and the game manufacturers
are responding (much to the delight of the hardware people as well). Yet
game play seems to have become an afterthought.
We've now reached the point where there are five to ten times as many people
involved in putting together the graphics for a "project" then there are
in actually writing the game engine and providing a fun adventure to play
on that engine.
I'm also reminded of a central thesis of Scott McCloud's Understanding
Comics (excellent book by the way, even if you don't read comics yourself):
the closer the graphic image is to reality the more difficult it is for us
to put ourselves into the story. Simplistic animation tends to draw us into
a story much easier because the simple figures require us to fill in the
details ourselves. We spend less time marveling at how "realistic" the graphics
are and more time being involved in the game itself. In this form of art
the reader is a strong participant in the process of telling the story, even
in a medium as rigidly serial as a comic book.
Computer games are not inherently serial. They can be completely free-form,
but only so much as the game is not hamstrung by the process under which
it is created. The more "talent" that becomes involved in the process the
less room there is for the game designers to experiment with sidetracks and
secondary quests. Yet it is those side elements that truly add to the value
of the game.
If I'd wanted to watch a movie I'd go to the theater.
Chris Andersen is a computer
consultant in Portland, Oregon who specializes
in whatever task for which people are willing to pay him money.
