What If Game Design Hasn’t Progressed In 30 Years?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 2, 2010
Matt Barton proposes an interesting thought experiment over at Armchair Arcade:
Some Thoughts Towards a Non-Linear Game History
His not-quite-so-preposterous idea: What if game design hasn’t truly progressed since 1980, merely changed fashion? If you could somehow make yourself blind to the technological / graphical improvements, has game design really advanced in thirty years?
I’d contend that it has, but maybe not as much as we’d like to imagine. In a lot of ways, modern games are getting simpler than they were 10+ years ago – closer to their old-time roots. They do have a few more trappings – layers of complexity – that usually actually add to the experience. Like being able to purchase upgrades, RPG-style. And we can afford a lot more detail that was too expensive for 32K way back then. But again, that’s a case of something we couldn’t do, not something we didn’t know to do.
Looking at RPGs – I’m not going to argue that Ultima IV was the apex of RPG design. Or even Ultima VII. There wasn’t anything those games did that modern games really haven’t. It’s just that they somehow managed to present it in such a way that at least my imagination was kicked into high gear and filled in the missing details much better than any technology could today. So while the underlying technology may be much more sophisticated and capable, I don’t know that that core design has really progressed. Some days, I’m certain it has regressed.
A lot of game design today is simply dealing with the problems of complexity caused by – surprise – that same technology that solved so many problems of yesteryear. Like where and how to position the 3D camera.
So much of what we frequently call “evolution” in game design has really not been anything other than following the path of least resistance and following the current trends as best as we can figure them. When those trends change, so will game design. And they will.
So have we advanced? Yeah, I say we have. But not that far.
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Brian \'Psychochild\' Green said,
The problem is that imagination is a scarce resource. In the good ol’ days of gaming, it was mostly the domain of geeks who had a surplus of imagination. We could easily take a look at a 16×16 2-frame animated icon and see a brave sword-swinging Paladin instead. Unfortunately, not everyone has such a vivid imagination.
My theory is that gaming has gotten wider acceptance and as the gaming population has gotten older, we’ve started to lose some of that imagination. The focus on graphics has been because a lot more people see that simple icon as simply an ugly icon, not what it tries to represent; good graphics makes it easier for people with less imagination to get engrossed in a game.
Unfortunately, that leaves those of us with more imagination with less options. One was to view this is as game design stagnating, especially compared to things like graphical presentation. As graphics draw more people in, they’re still amused by the same basic types of gameplay the rest of us have already played to death. And, if the majority of game players are those with lesser ability to lose themselves in their imagination, then the game design possibilities are limited to what will appeal to that group if you’re looking to get the widest audience possible.
This is one reason why I’m interested in the indie side of things. I want to make games for people with imaginations, and that necessarily limits my audience. That’s fine, the mainstream game industry will take care of them just fine. 🙂
My thoughts.
Justin Alexander said,
I think there is a subtle difference: The Ultima games were pushing the technology in every way possible in order to create a living, breathing world that we could explore. I think that players can sense that, understand the limitations of the technology, and willingly perform the closure to perform the next step — to fill in the blanks.
OTOH, when a modern mainstream RPG offers the exact same gameplay that Ultima VII offered 20 years ago, the same sense of necessary closure doesn’t exist: I know that the modern designers have the technology to give me more than that, but they didn’t. Ergo, this must be all that they wanted to show me.
And I’m being generous here. The vast majority of mainstream RPGs still don’t offer the depth of gameplay or the pervasive game world that Ultima VII did.
The last time I really felt a game straining to push the technology as far as it would go in order to show me a living, breathing world was Deus Ex.
Of course, to a large extent, modern RPGs aren’t trying to do what Ultima VII did: Origin created worlds. Mainstream RPGs these days create epic stories.
Rampant Coyote said,
I appreciate you guys trying to help explain this for me. As I’m still trying to get my head around the “why’s” of this. Because a solid faction system in an RPG is definitely superior to the simplified virtues of U4. In all measurable ways, many modern games can and should be everything U4 or U7 or Fallout or whatever was to us back when. Yet they still come short, in spite of (I think) some pretty major efforts on the part of the developers to do just that.
Maybe the imagination thing does have a significant role to play. I remember back at SingleTrac, the veterans of Evans & Southerland – who had enjoyed a career in “serious” simulation (which is what I do now as a day job) – commented on how the customer issues increased as their graphics quality increased. They were befuddled by this, as the customers seemed much happier with the more cartoony, unrealistic graphics.
But I guess it’s an “uncanny valley” kinda thing. The player / user projects their own assumptions and imagination into the more abstract scene. But the more representative scene doesn’t demand this, and the customers would instead feel thrown off by the differences between the imagery and reality. They’d complain that the taxiway lights weren’t the right shade of blue, etc.
Maybe we’ve hit on something here. We talk about “Show, don’t tell.” An important principle in linear entertainment. But could “invite” be a more critical principle still for interactive media? Are modern games so focused on “showing” that they fail to “invite” the player to engage their imagination and contribute to the story? Are the games, effectively, treating the player like a passive audience and saying, “Sit down, shut up, watch this cool presentation and I’ll tell you when to press the buttons to make it do nifty stuff.”
Going back to linear media – I remember reading a collection of essays on writing horror. One of the principles the writer explained in an essay was the importance of engaging the player’s imagination. DON’T show them everything, he stressed. Hint. Hide. Tease. Because the reader’s imagination will horrify them far more than anything you could put on the page.
Yeah, I know, I’m getting kinda highfalutin and abstract here. But this is giving me something to think about.
tfernando said,
I tried to post over there, but kept getting service unavailable errors. (And I apologize if this was better placed on my blog than as a comment on yours, esp as your comments are trending in a different direction.)
Dr. Barton’s article seemed to me to be saying that differences in gameplay are essentially a matter of style, and are never a matter of function.
I actually think that much of Dr. Barton’s article is a reaction to something I haven’t often seen expressed. Namely: “once you apply it to games people insist that we have a linear progression–games from 1980 are vastly inferior to games from 1990, and those are vastly inferior to games from 2000.”
When people talk about games as art, even mainstream games people mention the 1998 Planescape:Torment. When we talk about immersion we talk about the modern DF alongside our Nethacks. The commercial plane flight sim guys still play MSFS 2002 and 2004 alongside MSFS X. The sub guys, even the ones not fussed by DRM, kept playing SH3 after SH5’s release. Heck many fantasy MMOs launched after WoW, but it’s still going strong. As players we don’t shift to the latest and greatest as soon as it comes out, we find what we like. Players are capable of deciding that what’s on offer now isn’t as good as what was offered before, and they make that decision all the time.
Dr. Barton’s idea that clothing can not be more advanced is wrong. The introduction of the nomex fire resistant garment in 1967 means that when looking at a fireman or pilot from the 1950s and looking at one today, we -can- say that the modern one is more advanced. At a closer to skin level, the introduction of the sports bra in 1977, the replacement of wool with polypropelene in thermal underwear, and lycra compression shorts introduced sometime after 1959 all represent advances in clothing technology which allowed greater performance in utilitarian roles. Focusing only on style misses the portion of clothing which is not decorative but functional.
Games are supposed to be fun, but that fun comes both from operation (function) and ‘style’. I’d be very surprised if there was available outside the military a node-based dynamic campaign system similar to Falcon 3.0. Previous (and contemporary!) similar games that I’m familiar with had scripted campaigns, or campaigns which did not directly make changes to the content of randomly generated missions. (RB1 and Gunship 2000 had the later type of campagin). F3.0’s campaign represented an advancement in the genre made possible by increases in computing technology. Eastern Front couldn’t have been done on the 2600, the idea that F3.0 could have- even stylistically in the abstract is absurd.
Even mature fields grow from technological progress… many consider the electric guitar to be a different instrument than the acoustic guitar (as the piano is different from a harpsicord), despite being played the same way.
“It’s rather like car companies; they need you to buy the new model, so they pretend that it’s somehow way more advanced than last year’s. Yet there is still something very cool about a ’66 Corvette. ”
There is something neat about a ’66 Corvette, but to suggest that anti-lock brakes, air bags, fuel injection, (for most people) automatic transmission, emission controls, and heck a higher top speed and better acceleration don’t make the ’10 vette a better car in most roles is silly. Unless you’re backing out to a long view which considers all methods of transporting [things] from A to B to be the fungible, there are concrete differences. And there are probably roles and situations where the ’66 vette makes more sense.
What’s sparking my reaction I think, is Dr. Bartons call in conclusion #5 for developers to turn away from originality. (‘A focus on style and fashion opens up many wonderful opportunities for development without requiring “originality.”‘) This coupled with his apparent misread of the games industry as a whole (in conclusion #3 he states “You can make a new NES-style game for browser-based play on modern PCs, for instance.” as if I could go to any flash arcade and not find 400 such games) and his inability to understand that the early 80s consoles and computers were a hotbed of inovation (Again #5, “There is something refreshing about seriously looking at Atari 2600 or Commodore 64 games […]” as if the systems were at all comparable. The 2600 could not duplicate ever most games played on the C64- it had all of 128 bytes (not kB) of RAM, and hardware support for all of -two- sprites. To get compelling gameplay out of that, the A2600 programmers had to do all kinds of truly radical, cutting edge (for the time) stuff (multiplexing the sprites, halfscreen renders, mirroring levels, etc)… the very stuff Dr. Barton asks us to turn away from!) make me think that Dr. Barton is wrong.
I believe that innovation is important. I think it occurs both in indie space, and in AAA space. I think that for me personally as a (hobbyist) developer, not at least sometimes striving to get the most I personally can out of a technology that I use (whether OpenGL, flash, unity or whatever) is the path to irrelevance. Comfort kills. Style is important, but function is too.
I’m very sorry for running on so long. Mostly sorry. A little anyways. 🙂
-TF
Xenovore said,
Quote: “…Are the games, effectively, treating the player like a passive audience and saying, “Sit down, shut up, watch this cool presentation and I’ll tell you when to press the buttons to make it do nifty stuff.”
Unfortunately, many modern games essentially work like this; and many gamers (of the console playing type primarily) seem to like it just fine, so games get dumber and dumber by the year. But they get prettier, so that makes up for it. =P
Brian 'Psychochild' Green said,
But could “invite” be a more critical principle still for interactive media? Are modern games so focused on “showing” that they fail to “invite” the player to engage their imagination and contribute to the story?
I think this might exactly be the problem. The conventional wisdom is that if players have to flounder around at all to “find the fun”, then they’ll ignore your game and hate you forever. So, we run the risk of turning games much more linear, as you said.
I really like the way you put this. Very insightful.
Psychochild’s Blog » Startling insight about interactivity said,
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Startling insight about interactivity said,
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virtualGameBase.com » Startling insight about interactivity said,
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