@shindig: Question, since graphics have been so good for so long, and the processes for creating those graphics has only gotten easier (still hard but easier), why haven't we seen an explosion in the other areas of games like gameplay and story?
Maybe it's a stupid question because i can't give examples of what games should be doing, that's why i'm not a game designer, maybe like a movie franchise gaming has already had its origin story and now everything is sequelitis :P.
Edit: I didn't know how to explain that thought, like is it even possible to innovate on "story and gameplay", but i'll use Vampire Survivors (rightly) winning a Bafta for best game as an example of where we're at.
If I could do a dumb thing, and compare my time doing music criticism and artist interviews from 2009 to roughly 2014 to the current state of not just game criticism but game playing...the apparent ease of creation from the outside has created expectations among the generic player that can't help but raise the floor to a point where it nearly meets the ceiling. And while that sounds like perfection in the immediate, it ignores that the ceiling doesn't get to rise. The foundation, the walls, the floor all take so long to match audience expectations that, if the financial stakes for creators have risen similarly exponentially, it's more important to meet the baseline than reestablish the skyline.
Which is why I totally understand longtime game critics increasingly gravitating towards either the indie rock acts of the gaming world or the big games that sacrifice those more generic pleasures like graphics and an array of button presses that make the thing you expect to happen happen for environments full of surprises and interactions that enhance those surprises. When I was writing about music, I quickly gravitated towards hip-hop and R&B because, especially in that era, it felt like those artists were telling personal stories with their music while many of the rock and pop bands were, as I risk being too flip about it, wearing hats they thought other people looked cool in.
While I'm weak as hell for what some would consider a mostly rinse and repeat formula out of Sony's first party studios, I recognize why those games foment that feeling in people despite their success. Because at my most honest I'd agree that they aren't trying to be anything other than exactingly great in a way consumers have come to expect, and yet for nearly a decade now they've also represented for millions of people the peak of what games can offer. Those idiots like us who choose to ignore all the Match 3, physics puzzle and casino mobile games that actually drive the profit of the industry, anyway. So when it comes to a game like Season that tries to "do a thing", the same publication can both ponder why it bothered being a game at release before responding to its failure by claiming it's actually one of the year's best games. Different writers, yes, but assuming editors still clock hours a strangely incomprehensive point of view.
While it terrified me to the point I eagerly scrambled out of the critical field (and increasingly admire those who still put in the work), music solved this problem by blowing up the dams and flooding all the tributaries. Movies and TV may be facing a viewership problem on nearly all fronts, but the one thing they'll always have is human faces speaking recognizable languages, or at least flashing recognizable expressions. From silent films to Boots Riley's I'm a Virgo series on Amazon Prime, against all odds photography can inherently upend capitalism because it deals from a deck stuck in the real, no matter how surreal it gets. A photo doesn't have to be fun to look at, even if it's a 2 hour flipbook on a screen the size of a modest house.
But games do, mostly, for most people, need to be fun. Yet they get more expensive, and the group of people who work on them expand at a rate most comparable to the silicon chips that power the art they create...which inevitably dilutes most of that art, because if you want to be really solipsistic about the whole thing, if the guy making sure the jump button works can't put diapers on his baby, the guy ain't making the jump button work.
This is where I feel like I need to say, again, that I'm a simpleton that really, really loves where AAA games as a whole are at right now. I struggle with the new brand of Zelda because I've gotta pretend to have fun in order to have fun (because I always hated Legos) and Minecraft (or, to keep it Giant Bomb, Garry's Mod) might always be the scariest thing that presents as nothing more than a silly toy because I'm not clever enough to make it be more than the game full of cubes you bash with a stick. And those things I'm unequipped to fully engage, or reckon, or even come to terms with, do prove that the design of games can grow in the same ways that studios grow in size and processors grow in computing power.
It just seems there's a hell of a lot of people out there like me that want to run and jump and press square until the health bar goes down, then do it again with another club/sword/laser/dialogue option.
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