It's odd, but for people who spend their time having fun, gamers are rarely a happy lot. Give them a press release, they'll tell you a series is ruined. Give them a beta, they'll whine that it's buggy. Give them nothing (a la Valve), they'll probably boycott you.
Most of these complaints are fairly self-contradictory. But often we hit the same notes time and time again:, with the same specific rants: gaming has become commercialized, games have become clones - originality is dead, no-one breaks genres. Everywhere on the internet, it's venom for Sony and the 'casual gamer'; post after post, we rant about the 'Gears of War effect'. By the sounds of it, gaming is doomed, and we all know the reason: the mass production of videogames.
But do we? Could homebrew, as opposed to commercial development, maybe be reborn? Could the future 'inevitable' future of copycat games be less a threat than we think? In fact, could some of that future - a world of mostly cloned, commercialized, genre-defined games, even be... a reason to be cheerful?
Reason One: Homebrew is not dead
Games = bedrooms. For years they were written there, for years they were played there. That's just how it was, back in the time of School Daze and Elite. Teenagers on BBC Micros, their brothers on Spectrums, and soon on Amigas.
How did it come to this? A world of faceless corporates, nameless studios run by investment bankers. A relentless, impersonal, inhuman machine, pushing out game after game like a sausage machine. How could that tie - the power of grassroots enthusiasm - get snuffed out? Wasn't it too powerful a force?
Of course it was! Amateur design is alive and kicking - you just didn't notice it. Homebrew isn't about the occasional individual knocking out a Tetris clone on C++. No. It's about organized teams with dedicated roles, months of effort and co-ordinated production. Even the abundance of less ambitious projects - such as modifications, or even custom models - all prove how much input the ordinary gamer can have on his interest, beyond passive player. In fact, on occasion, homebrew produce shakes the world just as much as commercial output. Counter-Strike - one of the most widely played first person shooters on the planet - started as a homebrew Half-Life modification.
The truth is, with a wealth of graphical and level design suites out there, a variety of available engines to exploit as platforms, and the internet phenomenon, developing and distributing your own games is now easier than it has ever been before. Amateurs no longer have to code from scratch, individually polishing their software, without prior awareness of hardware issues, bugs and glitches. That work, providing the bare bones of the title, has already been done for them, with the meat of design and game mechanics left to the amateur. And with the net, designers from around the world can work together, before releasing their games to a billion-strong potential audience.
Reason Two: Episodics are not the future
Do you remember the hype surrounding the last generation of consoles? With broadband, it was predicted, the age of downloadable content was upon us. For some, this promised the advent of games produced in smaller, cheaper units, offsetting the expensive risks in playing an entirely new game (if the game proved unappealing, after all, there would be no obligation to buy the second chapter). Further, it promised to make our hobby cheaper by removing overhead costs. But for others, episodics were a threat. Might gamers now have to pay through the nose to complete a title and its story? Would the availability of episodic release tempt developers into releasing half-finished games to meet production deadlines, on the understanding that downloadable patches might be released at some later date? Worse, could a game suddenly shift away from a platform or a certain PC specification standard, leaving fans high and dry?
But despite a few high profile examples of episodic production (Half-Life 2 comes first to mind), episodic content never became the norm of game release. Why? For a start, to rush the development of a game engine and then spend a period of fourteen months or so releasing dated products does not make for sound marketing. Valve themselves have had to revise the Source engine in order to keep their product competitive, after all.
As a model, the episodic release system is not an attractive means of doing business. It means creating a game engine, tweaking it to remain at least reasonably stable, then releasing a short chapter at a low price. This generates only a little return, whilst the developers must now create further content, and release it on an inferior platform some time after the foundation was shipped - in which time, better engines and competitors have chipped away at the potential audience. Episodic production sounds as though it offers tremendous flexibility, but it obliges a longer advertising run (costly!) and it also allows customers to move away. Old fans may lose interest in an increasingly dated platform, whilst new consumers of games must choose to purchase the first episode *and* the new iteration, at considerable cost, in order to buy a game that simply isn't as attractive as competing products. This is a real threat when a developer chooses the episodic model - and considering the millions of pounds it takes to create a videogame and the core 'platform', or engine, that risk is potentially disastrous. To choose an episodic model often means spending millions on the polishing of software, yet deferring the full return on that investment for another twelve months - a model that brings great risks, yet precious few rewards.
Reason Three: Clones will flourish - and that's a Good Thing.
If there's one thing decried more than anything throughout forums and the gaming community at large, it is the ostensible lack of originality in videogame design. Whether the specific matter is the reissue of fundamentally similar games, the practice of releasing sequels, or even the cross-title use of similar sounds and texture libraries, nothing seems to gall more than the practice of building upon previous models, technique and media.
But must this habit always be harmful to videogames? In practice, re-using prior models allows for the selection of gameplay elements whose worthiness have been proven by empirical evidence, allowing trial and error to improve design - possibly having a far greater contribution here than abstract, unpracticed theory ever could have. Besides, re-using older designs can actually allow innovation to flourish. How? New ideas can only reach their full potential when embedded in fundamentally sound games. The alternative means that, at best, good ideas are ignored through the low quality of the gameplay that surrounds them, at worst, the ideas themselves function ineffectively through the host game's flaws.
Let me try and offer simple examples: imagine a new strategy game or RPG crippled by poor artificial intelligence. It doesn't matter how polished and well thought out a new battle system is, without a challenging A.I. no play session will ever reach its full potential, with gamers exploring and experiencing the subtle nuances of a particular play mechanic. This, in itself, reduces useful feedback from the fanbase relating to the further refinement of the system. Or, to give another illustration: imagine a new peripheral-based game marred by the designer's disregard for classic level design rules. To radically redesign a game from the ground up can often actually cripple innovations and deter investment in similar titles.
'Cloning' need not refer exclusively to game design, but also to the sharing of resources more generally: code, textures, and sounds. Whilst these practices supposedly promise, to critics, a future of games identical even in appearance, there remains a case to be made in favour of cross-title media sharing. Engines, graphics, and the like, can be tweaked by re-implementation, of course, but my real point is less this than the necessity of the practice in the context of today's powerful gaming platforms. The massive expansions in computing power mean that even, say, the texture of a wall contains a sheer mass of data, the product of hours of careful editing and composition. To create such media from scratch would be immensely time (and money) consuming for most production companies, and as these costs would be inevitably be passed onto the consumer, with little tangible improvement in actual gameplay experience, to decry resource-sharing as wholly bad for the industry would be a little short sighted.
Besides, as gamers we seem to have picked up an unhealthy habit of worshipping 'originality'. Why? There's an argument out there that originality has only been attractive in the last few hundred years, that the attraction of intellectual and social independence has simply grown with bourgeois capitalism, and its emphasis on diminished communal responsibility and consensus, on enhanced personal independence. In other words, we love originality because our economic conditions and place in history impose this ideal on us, rather than because this judgement is based on realistic observation. I don't know if this is true, nor is this the place to discuss it, but there remains something apparently arbitrary about the way people today hail originality almost for its own sake.
Let's take a frank look at Rez. Lauded as the pinnacle of design and gameplay experience by some, Rez was for others at best a one-trick pony, at worst a repetitive, simplistic shooter. There is no real room here to review Rez (though I can hear the axes being whetted already), and I don't hope to convert its (mighty) fanbase, let's just agree it did some things better than others. Whilst the general concept of blending music and digital interaction was a strong one, the implementation translated into an impressive, but perhaps shallow gaming experience. In other words, games can be original, but fall because pursuing the new means refusing to take useful cues and elements from pre-existing games.
Reason Four: Genres will stand - and that's a Good Thing, too.
Yes. You read correctly. Genres and generic games are good.
As you've probably noticed, I've some faith in the theory that there is much to be said for 'cross-title development'; that is, design choices not being undertaken only during the development of individual games, but in the way that titles may influence and be reworked by others. Genres, of course, play a part in this phenomenon, and the evolution of a genre as a whole probably illustrates the idea of 'cross title development' most clearly.
Besides, generic games foster an opportunity for players to develop skills across games - at the very least, to practice these techniques in new, interesting settings, or to re-apply them in previously unthought of ways. And as problem-solving demands new puzzles, not the replaying of older games (you can't practice by re-writing an old crossword, after all), sometimes sequels and generic reiterations are entirely necessary.Not only that, but developing a skill that stands outside the confines of a single title - sniping in a First Person Shooter, for example, can be a source of enormous pride. It's far harder to feel pride developing skills that apply to a single game - it's hard to shake the feeling that perhaps your talents only count for the very specific circumstances of a single title - and besides which, it's far easier to find others to compete against when a technique applies to a large body of games.
Not only that, but genres contribute to the social side of gaming - they provide communities to exist whose shared interests are based on more than the fact they simply use leisure software, communities afforded a talking point by the genre in question. Without certain styles of games, social interaction between gamers would be made very difficult. The only two talking points would either be the fact that these two people generally play games (vague), or they both enjoy one particular title (unlikely). Not only that, but much as musical genres attract groups who share similar ideals, values, experiences and interests outside the music, genres to an extent also tend to attract those who share more than just an affinity for a specific sort of software.
Further, genres help guide consumers, offering additional evidence that a piece of software will meet a player's expectations and desires, providing as convincing a proof as even the strongest critical acclaim. That is not an exaggeration, by any means. I myself find it difficult to buy a new game without a glance at the title's genre: it guarantees a mass of gameplay conventions and specifics, conveying in a single category more than any lengthy prose description I might find in a review. And when forty, perhaps fifty pounds is at stake, that guarantee is important.
Of course, an objection might be made that generic games, because they so resemble their peers, lose their capacity to really challenge us. There's some truth to this, but there remains a case to be made that games can be simple, familiar, even repetitive, yet still be enjoyable. After a long day's work, switching off and having a blast can be just what the doctor ordered.
Is that really so terrible?
