It’s weird how it’s polarized: in one hand, mobile and social games succeeding at abusing players with psychological exploits, on the other hand AAA games that developers want to think as pieces of art that can’t be dissected on why they fail to make an impact.
Gamasutra’s huge philosophical article from last week generated 156 comments. Ian Bogost pretty much argues that to expand the medium, we should just do whatever we want in games, experiment etc. He somewhat opposes Raph Koster and Daniel Cook, who think that there are methods, systems, things that we can grab and tighten up in the game design process, leading to a road map to follow for success and long term viability.
Useless debate. Daniel and Raph are arguing that in the real world of making games for a living, you don’t go for single-player story-driven games because it’s extremely hard to do something good as it’s unnatural for games to be formatted this way and furthermore, people play more multiplayer games anywa. It’s in the blood of what games are. Ian argues that there shouldn’t be “a way” to make games. These statements are not mutually exclusive.
It’s just a matter of absolute or non-absolute and that annoys me a little bit because it’s debating for nothing. I think it pushes a lot of game developers out of design discussions, creating some kind of elitism that is not good for the game development community.
I feel more connected to Daniel and Raph stances. Gamasutra people are usually making a living, or trying to by making and designing games. Arguing that it’s totally fine to do what you want, like a huge single-player story-driven game is a very wrong message.
Again, if you don’t want to make a living, please do exactly what you want to do. I guess you can get any risk you want. But if you need to make some bucks, sustain yourself with your work, you will study markets, smell trends and try to minimize risks, at least a little bit. Multiplayer games with short play sessions etc. Today it seems to be the way to go. It doesn’t mean you want to exploit people. There are games out there which despite using “trends”, are respectful to players, like Realm of the Mad God.
Heavy Rain/Alan Wake are good examples of what is pretty much impossible today: being supported by a gigantic corporation like Sony or MS to do a game like these. These games failed at so many levels. High production value hiding game design shallowness. L.A. Noire is the last one in the series and didn’t do well. It doesn’t mean there’s no market or demand for that kind of games, it means for developers that it’s highly risky or suicidal to go this way. But I’m sure a lot more can be done with these story-driven games, starting by much better, stronger stories and characters (Heavy Rain’s Madison /o\).
Debating on the design front of what to do is really useless. We know we’re free to do whatever we want but we also want to kind of make money too, don’t we? Indies as big publishers (even more so, years of development to cover first).
And yet people get butt hurt with Raph’s views that single player games are doomed, despite having him explaining that he just looks around and doesn’t condemn or embrace the trend. They fear that he’s probably right so they say he’s almost insane.
People, just make your game and prove him wrong by making a single player game with as much impact socially and culturally than games like Go or WoW if you like challenges. I mean, it’s never been as opened as it is today to make games. I think Jon Blow might be able to pull a nice one off with The Witness.
It’s so tiring and exciting at the same time.