Last week, as some know, I finally managed to pick up a copy of the last CGW. After reading all the nostalgia stuff, I flipped over to an interesting article entitled, “Six Million Ways To Die”.
It was a discussion of violence in games, from the viewpoint of the industry being stuck in a rut, churning out endless clones of “see monster-kill same” products. What really caught my attention, however, was something at the end of the article.
David Cage, creator of Indigo Prophecy, related the problems he had shopping around for a publisher. His conversations went something like this:
Cage: Mmm, well, in fact, there is no weapon. The hero does not shoot”.
Publisher: “So how many cars can we drive?”
Cage: “Well, in fact, you cannot drive”.
Publisher: “Then it’s not a game?”
That little exchange really throws light on the thinking of the upper levels of game companies. It isn’t just that the executives see that shooter-type games sell, they can’t imagine a game without some violence in it, period. If it has no weapons or no fast action, it can’t be a game.
With that focus, it’s no surprise that so many shooters are in development or on the shelves. If developers want to sell a game, it has to conform to a very narrow definition. And along with that comes, of course, more pushing the envelope to be attractive both to the publisher and an increasingly-demanding crowd of players.
However, as we’ve discussed before, that crowd tends to be the “young male demographic”, for which action and violence are especially desirable. I found interesting a remark by Andrew Stern, developer of Facade, at the very end.
He recalled enjoying, as a teenager, a game titled Barbarian, where he could cut off his opponents’ heads. That was a big thrill for him at the time. Today, however, he couldn’t play such a game; he’d be bored stiff by the endless “shoot-em-down” action.
So one reason – perhaps the primary one – that there is such a glut of shooters and action/this, action/that games, is more the fault of short-sighted game company executives than anything else.
They see only the one market. It hasn’t occurred to them that the market grows up and looks for something better. Of course, the teenagers of today are replaced by new ones tomorrow, so there is always a group ready for violent games, and the cycle continues.
Yet as time goes on, that pool of “older” gamers continues to grow. And I think a lot of them drop out of gaming, simply because there are few products of interest to them.
Cage believes that anything ground-breaking, in the sense of away from shooters, will come from independent developers. Given the current situation, he’s probably right.
And that’s really too bad, because I have no doubts that there is a big crowd of mature gamers who’d love to see some really good, involving games, that didn’t rely on having the biggest weapon, fastest car, or quickest reaction time.
I believe the only way to break the “shoot-em-down” cycle is for some basically non-violent game to come out and be a surprise hit. It did happen once, with Myst, but that may well have been a fluke, since nothing like that has occurred since.
The game industry, like any other, has a follow-the-leader mentality. What we need now is a new leader.
My first impulse is to mention Spore, which has been getting a lot of hype, hopefully it will be justified.
Nintendo comes to mind second. With the upcoming Wii and the DS, they are introducing different ways of playing games and appealing to people that aren’t really gamers. My wife has really liked Nintendogs, which is more of a pet simulator than anything else. Brain Age and Brain Training are also unique to the system. When she told me that she wanted to get a Wii, I thought they would need to call the medics to apply a defibrillator to bring me out of shock. That’s when what Nintendo is doing was really drove home to me, taking someone who showed just a passing interest in games and now is actually wanting a new system. She isn’t interested in violent games, what piqued her interest were games like Bowling, Tennis, Elebits, and Super Monkey Ball.
YEAH! Go Indie!
I heard it compared at one time (perhaps by Chris Crawford) to the appetite / tolerance of children vs. adults towards sugar. Kids could make entire meals out of sweets, but most adults – while still possessing something of a sweet tooth – would feel their stomache turn at the thought. Over time, our tastes have come to appreciate a wider variety, and more subtle flavors.
But the industry keeps churning out Chocolate Coated Sugar Bombs (the breakfast cereal of choice for Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes), and the public keeps buying.
And it’s rare that a mainstream game bucks this tradition and actually succeeds in the market place. But it happens. One of the most popular games for the PS2 last Christmas? Guitar Hero. By a company that usually showed off it’s stuff in that particularly quiet, empty hall at E3 that people only visited when they had to get away from the flash and the noise.
Even with the heftier price tag (due to the custom controller), it outsold scores of plain-vanilla third-person-shooters that came out at around the same time.
So there’s my silver lining. Oh, yeah. And indies. Go indies!
Don’t forget that after Myst there was a surprise hit called The Sims. The biggest seller ever in the PC market.
Yet I didn’t notice any push by publishers to try to appeal to the untapped market exposed by The Sims (I don’t mean clones). Maybe I missed them? Or did the executives think that people who liked The Sims wouldn’t purchase any other games?
Seems like the game publishers decided it was too chancy to try to capture some of the untapped market and instead went back to shooters, ever-increasing the polygon count and the explicitness of the gore in order to retain the ever-increasingly eye-candy and gore desensitized players.
Scorpia,
Do you remember a company called EPYX? This company released a lot of sports games back in the ’80’s. I never knew what happened to this company.
But even then companies were releasing games not based on violence.
Also, Scorpia, do you remember all of those old great ATARI arcade games? How popular were Pac Man, Ms Pac Man, etc. back then?
The corporations fear risk and killing stuff is safe, time-proven instant gratification. The publishers aren’t concerned if the player gets bored after an hour of playing the game; they just want people to buy it. If blasting Nazi zombies or whatever gives the player an hour or two of visceral joy, then, generally, the bean counters consider it a success. In short, they’re counting on the consumer to have a short attention span, which I suspect most do.
I’m certainly not above this. I played Prey and even though the shooting and gravity tricks got old after a while, there are times when I just want to run and gun; it’s almost a zen-like self-hypnosis with visions exploding evil aliens.
It’s a shame that Indigo Prophecy wasn’t a runaway success; it really moved the adventure game genre into another, more action-oriented direction. Aside from the total nerd meltdown of the plot in the third act and the bizzare necropheliac angle, I really enjoyed the game and I hope to see more from those developers.
It’s not as if anyone has a lock on the industry…whoever thinks there’s a huge market for something that isn’t being made has got his work cut out for him (and his fortune waiting!). Rewrite the song from Gypsy – all you need is the code.
The truth is that there are, and have been for a a long time, plenty of good games that don’t rely on action and violence – as an example, my favorite strategy games (Tropico and Railroad Tycoon II) are minimal-to-no violence. Yes, you can have people shot in Tropico…and it’s almost always a really bad idea. Placating those damn voters is the real horror. Even in Tropico II, which is about pirates, all the actual piracy takes place off-screen.
(The biggest change I always favored, and made, in pencil-and-paper RPG’s was adding large bonuses for accomplishing various goals, or for “good play” in general – precisely because I didn’t like the piles of corpses you had to stack up to advance very far. Sergeant York and the heroes of the Iliad wouldn’t make intermediate level in most of these games. 1st-ed AD&D at least gave you XP for gold, though there again you needed some pretty unearthly amounts after a while…but that is way off topic)
That was a good article in CGW’s last issue. I think it must be hard for an unproven company to get anything really new out there. The Sim’s only got there because of Will Wright and his prior successes. I think it would have been a very different story if the Sim’s was Wright’s first game….
Looking Glass’s Thief games are different take on the FPS game. Here if you Run & Gun, you WILL die. It’s all about stealth and distraction and picking your fights very carefully. But Looking Glass is no more
I’m not a console gamer, but I picked up a PS2 just so I could play Okami by Clover. I’m a sucker for period Japan pieces and the glorious cell shaded style is just icing on the cake. Yes there is violence, but in the 3rd person viewpoint and the “brush stroke” powers don’t make it seem very visceral. Sadly Clover was closed recently as unique games don’t sell very well .
Ultimately, game publishers are very much like movie studio execs. They only do what sells. Thankfully, there is not only an independent film movement, but also an independent game movement. That’s where the “next new idea” is going to come from in my opinion.