Link: Nikkei on the state of gaming

July 01, 2009, 01:33 PM

by ollie, via Nikkei -
[permalink]

A few weeks ago IGDA Japan head Kiyoshi Shin posted an article on Nikkei's IT Plus site, covering events at E3. Nothing massively noteworthy of that I suppose, except his coverage was refreshingly insightful.

His main point was that a lot of games are opting for visual proficiency over functional development. He mentioned the demo of Assassin's Creed 2 as being aesthetically sumptuous but functionally very simplistic, in the sense that whilst you have Venice recreated in stunning detail you can't do much within it bar kill people. Now, he hasn't played the game but I can see where he's coming from in regards to how the first game played (as it was a beautiful looking piece of technology but functionally quite monotonous).

The problem with this approach of course is that you end up with ever increasing budgets and an increasingly massive workforce, whilst the games remain functionally quite limited and standardised. He also makes a pretty cutting appraisal on the narrowness of genres available now and the depressingly propensity for turning games into franchises, as this is obviously a cost saving endeavour in the face of spiralling finances on the graphical end of the spectrum.

What really struck me about all this was that this was a Japanese piece published on a very mainstream online publication that stated a very important issue that the Western gaming press, in their orgy of banal Tweets, managed to conveniently miss; that these massive graphically focused budgets are forcing a functional restriction and an unnatural standardisation on gaming. Admittedly, we've had lots of coverage about the rising cost of games development but no-one has really mentioned the veritable elephant-in-the-room - that games aren't functionally going anywhere as a result of all of this.