Results tagged “state of the industry” from Softcore Gamer

I apologize for my absence. Grad school has been keeping me somewhat busy.

I'm on break, now - home for the holidays - and still recovering from the semester, but hoping to make some substantive entries before the next few weeks are past. This is not one of them, however. Today, I merely want to link you to a story that made me smile. Hopefully, it will do the same for you.

Perhaps you heard, a couple weeks back, about the data released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project? I'm talking about the study showing that more than half of American adults play video games. Culture is sometimes slow to shift, but it's only a matter of time.

Last week, RJ Layton posted a scathing editorial on the relationship between movies and games - not about the generally terrible results of making movies based on games or games based on movies, but rather about the use of cut-scenes, full-motion video, and non-interactive segments in game design, as well as the apparent cinephilic mentality of game designers. The post has already generated quite a bit of discussion: a response from Jamie Antonisse, a follow-up in which RJ speaks to a specific example of this phenomenon, and my own bizarre romp through rhetorical fallacy. As entertaining as it was to draw analogies to body image and substance abuse into the conversation, I feel like I have more serious things to add. A lot of them, actually, and maybe I'll get to some more of them eventually, but today I'm going to concentrate on one important point: emotion.

RJ and Jamie both bring up emotion, its role in storytelling, and its devilishly cinematic associations. I'd like to focus a little more closely on this complex relationship between emotion, film, and games. RJ seems to be of the opinion that a game which focuses on story and emotion, or at least one that markets itself around those terms, is likely to have hold cinematic qualities in esteem; in his words, "controllers with no player holding them, some pretty music, and a close-up of the a character’s face." Which isn't to say that games are devoid of admirable content with emotional significance. RJ illustrates this point with exemplars like the sense of triumph that comes with beating Punch-Out!! or the sense of pride that comes with managing urban growth in SimCity. Jamie echoes this by describing sadness and bemusement as "filmic" emotions, which are better expressed in movies than games, in contrast to other emotions like triumph and frustration, which are better expressed in games than movies.

I think, as far as the exploration of emotion in games goes, Jamie strikes gold with this point, but he doesn't delve as far into it as I'd like. I would similarly organize emotions around two categories, passive (or filmic) and agency-based. Passive emotions are a response to some external stimulus. Agency-based emotions, alternatively, are a response to first-party actions. Passive emotions cover a broad range and include simple emotions like joy, sorrow, and horror; relational emotions like love and jealousy are more complex passive emotions. Agency-based emotions include triumph, remorse, and pride. These emotions imply a previous action on the part of the person experiencing the emotion.

In crafting a narrative experience, cinema can utilize the whole extensive range of passive emotions. It's no surprise that movies have become adept at using these emotions to tell stories. After all, storytelling in film - or at least the contemporary incarnation of the medium - is based entirely around building emotion to a cathartic point. But no matter how a movie presents its story, it is still an instance of a passive medium, and as such it's limited by the distinction between emotions. The narrative of the film has no direct access to any of the agency-based emotions.

Let me stay on this for just a moment, because even though it follows logically, I think it might be a controversial point. Jamie mentions, in his post, feeling a sense of triumph in the movie Return of the King. I'm making the claim that a movie cannot make the audience feel triumph, because the feeling of triumph implies an action - specifically, a successful attempt at overcoming an obstacle - as the basis for the emotion. A movie cannot truly inspire an agency-based emotion, but it can use character identification to simulate it. Return of the King, like any good movie, makes the audience identify with one or more characters as, through the course of the story, the characters experience emotions. In this case, the character portrayed in the movie makes a successful attempt to overcome an obstacle, and experiences triumph in response to this action. The audience, if they are identifying with the character, does not feel triumph directly but does feel joy in sympathy with the character's triumph.

Identification is a device that the film industry uses - very effectively - to trick the audience into thinking they are experiencing an agency-based emotion. But in every case, the audience's feeling is once-removed from the emotion in question. The absolute best that a movie can hope for is that the audience becomes so deeply immersed in the film and sympathizes so deeply with a character that they literally forget that they are removed from the action on-screen. If this ever happens, it is exceedingly rare; and if it were to happen, it would involve some sort of hypnosis or delusional psychosis or other strange psychology that I'm not comfortable with. The point is that, in any reasonable example, the experience of a sympathetic response isn't the same as the actual emotion on which it's based.

Access to a complete range of emotions is one of the greatest advantages games, as a medium, have over cinema. Games can inspire any of the passive emotions that movies do by telling a story in a traditional, cinematic sort of fashion. But games have an extended emotional repertoire, and some of the agency-based emotions that are exclusive to the medium pack a serious punch. Triumph, as has been frequently mentioned, is common in games. Shame is used in Guitar Hero through the boos and jeers of the audience before the player fails a song. Honor and remorse are employed by Bioshock in its touted rescue/harvest mechanic. Humility is a component of the excellent work of interactive fiction, The Baron (on which I will spend more time in the future). Frustration is part of the emotional range of any of the multitude of games that are purposefully difficult.

My personal favorite example of agency-based emotion, because it effected me so strongly when I experienced it, is the use of regret and self-loathing in KOTOR, when the player feels compelled by his or her allegiance to the dark side to betray two of the protagonist's companions. This experience demonstrated to me that the power of effectively-used agency-based emotions can absolutely dwarf that of passive emotions. At the moment, the video game industry has not matured to the point that these emotions are being used to their full potential. But story in games is being continually explored and expanded, both by independent game designers and mainstream games. The effect that interactivity has on emotion will be developed and refined until games regularly deliver the same level of emotional narrative that cinema is used to. At which point, the ability to tap directly into the full set of agency-based emotions will give interactive media greater affective power than passive media has ever had.

This is an intervention. As someone who loves games, I'm very concerned about the medium's unhealthy relationship with cinema.

I'm not the only one who sees a problem. Others have spoken out, time and again, and voiced their support. But it's a big problem, and one that must be faced, so I'll say my piece as well.

I understand how it happened. Games were young and impressionable; movies were older and popular. Popularity is hard to resist. Games looked at film and film seemed glamorous. And, well, pretty. Movies were entering the age of special effects, after all, and had practically reinvented spectacle. They had a tendency to show off a bit. Games, on the other hand, hadn't undergone the same technological development that cinema had. As a graphical medium, they were, at best, plain. And they knew it.

So games harbored the desire to be as pretty, as popular, and as well-respected as movies - and more, on some level: they wanted to be movies. This aspiration guided their development. They adopted the language and mannerisms of film - incorporating lens flares and other artificial camera effects, for example, and relying on non-interactive sequences to support the narrative. They frequently referred to their stories as "cinematic," using the term as a blanket affirmative. And they fixated on their appearance, often to the point of neglecting other important characteristics like story, accessibility, or artificial intelligence.

Movies can hardly take great exception to their younger sibling's emulation, even if the games industry's recent success has been a source of some small jealousy. Imitation, after all, is the sincerest form of flattery. But it's clear to me that this attitude has passed well beyond the bounds of a healthy respect, or even an infatuation, and into the realm of dangerous obsession. Games are being produced in which the story is conveyed entirely in non-interactive sequences, and bears no relationship to gameplay. Some of these games go so far as to use cut-scenes as incentives, to reward players for enduring long, boring, or repetitive bouts of interactivity. Worse still, many games have taken to limiting their emotional range to correspond with that of film, severely inhibiting the impact they have on players. All of this comes at the expense of natural, interactivity-based design decisions, which are habitually suppressed. These impulses are only allowed to bubble to the surface in private, experimental settings, and never where they might be exposed to a larger audience.

This preoccupation with movies is starting to have adverse effects on the health of the industry. Games seem to have forgotten that the things that make them different are the same things that make them special. Perhaps what's called for here for is a period of rehabilitation, cut off from the injurious influence of cinema. It sounds extreme, I know, but the situation is desperate, and the only way it can be resolved is for the games industry to learn to trust its own strengths, rather than depending on film for support. It would mean reevaluating all the assumptions that have been made over the years, and replacing the myriad design conventions that favor cinematic qualities over interactive ones. This would certainly be a difficult process, but one that would ultimately be of benefit to the medium.

In the end, it's my sincere hope that the games industry has the wisdom to admit that it has a problem, and the strength of will to overcome it and establish a healthy relationship with movies. Videogames are still a young medium, and it would break my heart if they missed out on all the experiences they can have by using cinema responsibly. But it must be understood that the current behavior has got to stop.

On a personal note: Games, you never had to put yourself through this. You don't have to deny yourself and try so hard to be like cinema. You were always my favorite, just the way you are.

I'd like to quickly draw your attention to an article by costik over at Play This Thing about a game called SpaceStationSim. I haven't had a chance to play the game, but the article's point about how the life sim has pretty much failed to develop as a genre caught my attention. It's true. Since the Sims was released in 2000 some of its design elements have found their way into other games in other genres, but the past seven years have produced very little in direct competition with that series. As costik mentions, Playboy Mansion is one counter example. I'd suggest that the Animal Crossing series contains something along much the same lines, although arguably it is not the focal point of the game. And The Movies certainly took a cue from The Sims, but at heart it is still, apparently like SpaceStationSim, a tycoon game.

So what's the deal? After the success of The Sims, why haven't other designers rushed to create new games in the same vein? Is the industry biased against this genre for some reason? Or is it not a genre at all, but just an unusually successful niche game? Is The Sims really such a tour-de-force that there's nothing left to be done to explore or expand the space it inhabits? Or, alternatively, have social-creative MMOs like Second Life exceeded The Sims in all of its unique qualities, effectively subsuming the genre? I have very little experience with The Sims, so in all honesty I can't answer that question; in all honesty, in fact, I have no answers for any of these questions. I suspect, however, that we will see more out of this genre in the future, and for whatever reason it is simply slow to grow into its own.

The Softcore Gamer blog is something I've been wanting to start for a while now. I got the idea when I realized that the games industry is broken.

Many people will acknowledge it, even if they love games and have trouble describing precisely what's wrong. I'm not claiming that I have a solution to the problem, or even that I can fully illuminate the problem. But I do have some ideas, and I'd like to share them with you.

The gamer has evolved over the past twenty-five years, and the industry as a whole has struggled to keep up. The population of gamers in the United States is greater than it's ever been before. The mean age of gamers is increasing, the number of gamers over 50 is increasing, and the number of women playing games is increasing. But at the same time, soaring development costs have led to shorter games, reduced emphasis on story and gameplay, and a zero-tolerance attitude toward failure that necessitates a minimization of risk.

These hi-def, low-risk games are targeted toward the "core gamer" demographic. Core gamers are typically young and male. They want action, they want violence, and they want competition. They play a lot of first-person shooters and sports titles, and they've demonstrated that they don't mind repetitive content. They're willing to pay a high premium for incremental advances in graphics and interface. They also grow up to be game designers.

This is the audience that the games industry is courting, as well it should. The core gamer demographic is a lucrative market. But where's the long tail of video games? The current culture, which tends to invest heavily in proven franchises or genres, discourages the production of lower-cost niche titles or unconventional games that are unlikely to capture the core gamer demographic.

According to the ESA, 38% of gamers are women. But that figure is misleading. If you limit yourself to mainstream games - games targeted to core gamers, with high production quality and wide release on physical media - the percentage of female gamers decreases significantly. On the other hand, if you look to the major players in the industry - well-known design teams, console manufacturers publishing first-party titles, and publishers with a long history in games - and examine the number of games they release outside the mainstream, the figure is similarly low.

This doesn't apply just to women, but to any group that finds itself primarily outside the core gamer demographic. The people who are serious about making games aren't making games for us.

In the follow-up, I'll talk about what it means to be a softcore gamer, and what significance it has to the games industry. I'll also mention some of the industry's current trends away from a traditional core gamer audience, and how that may impact the industry in the future.