The problem here isn't just reviewers and developers: it's the American publishing market as well. Games cost a whole lot to make, and publishers need a product to be reasonably successful in order to break even. American publishers are, for the most part, not willing to take risks on games that deviate from formulas that have already proven profitable. There are a few notable exceptions, but for the most part publishers are more interested in how similar your game will be to the top-ten titles than how original it will be. If you are an independent game developer looking for a publisher to finance your game, you are pretty much required to present your idea in terms of existing (and profitable) products. "It's like GTA3, but in space!"

Japanese publishers seem less narrow minded when it comes to new ideas for games. Consider the plethora of crazy games from the country. Games like Seaman, Vib Ribbon, Dance Dance Revolution, Mr. Mosquito, and Parappa the Rapper would have had an extraordinarily difficult time finding funding in the States.

If we want to see innovative games, we have to support innovative developers. Publishers will fund games they feel have broad market potential.

waka

excellent point. yes, we have to also support independent game developers, experimental game developers, and so on. it's exciting actually to think that as the mainstream game publishing worlds gets larger and more rigid, perhaps a true counter-culture indie movement will develop along the lines of the film or music industry models...

While indie games might be possible (and, to a certain extent, already exist on PCs as shareware and freeware), the closed nature of console hardware is a problem for independent developers.

What the market needs to do is accept games that are not carbon copies of other successful games. This does happen to some extent already, as Grand Theft Auto 3 demonstrates. However, the current state of the market is such that a company can publish crap like Konami's Frogger for PS2 or Bruce Lee for XBox and people will still buy it. Perhaps more intelligent reviews of games would help turn this around, but without publisher support I doubt we'll see any resurgence of innovative game designs in the near future.

Perhaps the best we can hope for is "alternative" game publishers like Fresh Games (http://www.playfresh.com/). Their marketing strategy is to import unique and innovative games, but whether or not they will be successful or not remains to be seen.

waka

i think the point about games being really expensive to make is important. there can be masses of indie film and music and especially print because those media can be created cheaply, with little training (4-track, Xerox, etc.).

fans of underground music, film, and print tend to forgive or even prefer a certain lack of technical quality. any opinions on whether the same would hold true for games? would people play lo-fi, badly lit, semi-broken, or obviously simple games if they were avant-garde? would "the market" support games equivalent in size to an EP, a short, or a chapbook?

alternately, can there be tools that give a would-be game designer enough control to make a strange new game without being so technical that production gets slow, skilled, and expensive?

This is a good point. There is some drive within the industry to move toward an environment where games are judged by their content and game play, not their graphical bells and whistles. Most notable is probably the Independent Games Festival that occurs each year at the Game Developer's Conference. This festival highlights independent and hobby game developers, and gives them great opportunities to meet industry heavyweights. Furthermore, the judges of this contest are industry insiders, and in the past have typically selected games that are the most interesting and fun, rather than those that are most graphically or technically outstanding. Last year, a game called Bad Milk, which is essentially a point-and-click adventure a'la 1994, won all sorts of awards for its unique design.

Another game from last year's conference, Pencil Whipped, did not (at least, as far as I can remember) win any awards, but fits your description of an "indie game" pretty closely. It's a first person shooter that uses pencil scribbles as its art motif. Pretty neat.

The official Independent Games Festival page is here: http://www.igf.com/

waka

This is a good point. There is some drive within the industry to move toward an environment where games are judged by their content and game play, not their graphical bells and whistles. Most notable is probably the Independent Games Festival that occurs each year at the Game Developer's Conference. This festival highlights independent and hobby game developers, and gives them great opportunities to meet industry heavyweights. Furthermore, the judges of this contest are industry insiders, and in the past have typically selected games that are the most interesting and fun, rather than those that are most graphically or technically outstanding. Last year, a game called Bad Milk, which is essentially a point-and-click adventure a'la 1994, won all sorts of awards for its unique design.

Another game from last year's conference, Pencil Whipped, did not (at least, as far as I can remember) win any awards, but fits your description of an "indie game" pretty closely. It's a first person shooter that uses pencil scribbles as its art motif. Pretty neat.

The official Independent Games Festival page is here: http://www.igf.com/

waka

Well, saying console games aren't innovative is like saying TV doesn't have the same edge as film.

Unfortunately, consoles (and console games, obviously) are sold to what I like to refer to as the "lowest common denomenator" (which we'll refer to from here on out as the LCD). They aren't people who own a PC, or if they do, the PC is typically just an email getter. I know there's a lot of the "hardcore" out there (like me, like anyone probably reading this site) who own at least one of every system, three PCs and a laptop, but hardcore gamers don't make up the majority of the 35 million installed base units for the PS2. The LCDs do. So you have the opportunity to sell either high-brow or low-brow games to people who are the rough equivalent of knuckle-draggers of the gaming consumer world. (Please note: I'm not bagging on consoles or console gamers here. Just the LCDs). And believe it or not, except for a few select *small* companies, such as Epic and id, console sales are *way* higher than PC sales.

What this means as a game developer/publisher is that if you want to make the most money possible for your product, it had better be aimed at those 25 million LCDs out there who bought a PS2 instead of a Dreamcast because they bought the hype. Unfortunately, this industry weighs heavily on the dollar made, and not nearly as heavily on the minds blown with innovative content.

The best way I've seen to get the chance to make an incredible game in the gaming industry is the same way as the film industry: work your way up. Work on a bunch of games that make you feel like you're selling your soul, and eventually, you might make enough contacts and enough waves that someone (or a company with a lot of money who wants to make a satellite company) will throw some cash at you and say "make us a game!"

However, you're playing with someone else's money now, so good luck getting them to buy into that killer ap you've been dreaming of. They probably were expecting you to show them Doom 5.

I think you've summed up the industry very succinctly. I think that publishers are simply too timid to risk their dough on game developers who have yet to be "proven." This narrow-mindedness prevents the game industry (in America, anyhow) from broadening its audience. Every once and a while, a respected developer will release something that is unique and innovative, and usually it will sell like hot cakes (the Sims, GTA3, Myst, etc). Even the LCDs are starved for innovative games.

The Japanese market, in contrast, strikes me as a bit more flexible. It seems obvious that the range of game players is wider in Japan than it is in the States, and it seems that there are a lot more niche products: dating sims, train driving sims, roommate sims, etc. I am not sure if the market is more flexible because the audience is wider, or if the audience is wider because the market is more flexible. I suppose one could probably argue that the general acceptance of manga-esque media in Japan affects the game industry. If publishing houses in the States were similarly willing to invest in smaller, unique games, we might have a more diverse market.

I think that there is hope for the American market, however. Graphics are quickly approaching a point where they will no longer become a main selling point. I think that when this happens, the playing field will be a bit more level, and developers will be forced to innovate in other areas to succeed.

waka

Yeah, Japan has a wider acceptance of *everything* it seems. I don't know if it comes from their over/undersexed culture, or what, but they accept everything from animation to videogames as a viable adult (and I don't mean p0rn) entertainment medium. For some reason videogames and animation still have a "for kids only" stigma (and I blame marketing and the baby-boomer generation, for the most part [which is pretty much an oxy-moron, as most marketing departments are run by baby-boomers and have baby-boomer expectations]).

I'm hoping that enough imports from Japan keep selling well, and hopefully that will open publisher/developer's eyes here in the states. But unfortunately, there are a lot of average or mediocre games from Japan that sold well in Japan because they're a sequel or manga tie-in, which when imported here flop. This makes marketing/importers wary, because when it boils down to it, the people in charge of importing games for American publishers just don't really have a handle on what's good and what isn't.

Well, now here we have some innovators -- "modders" -- that are being welcomed by a few game manufacturers.

"Modders" breathe new life into video games

Modders extend the life of games, by re-programming and meddling with the code. This only pertains to PC games right now, but wouldn't it be great if console developers gave away some kind of mechanism that would allow players to tweak game code and experiment with it?

I remember hooking up a Game Genie to my Nintendo and Game Boy units, entering in random codes to see what would happen. I actually came up with one for Dr. Mario (the code was 'SAPLIN') that made an old game more interesting to me. It made two of the three colors identical. They were still different pills, but there was no way to tell until they happened to clear. Okay, well it may have been a little to random, but I loved it.

Anyway, I'd love to see indie Playstation CDs being passed around with funky sound and graphics, and with innovative game play. Hell, I'd even try to make on of my own.

Mods certainly are giving some PC games extended lives. FPSs in particular seem to have created a whole community of players willing to create custom game content and mechanics.

Consoles, however, remain pretty proprietary. Though there have been efforts to create homebrew games on just about every system available, the task is not easy. The most prolific system (that I am aware of, anyway) has been the Dreamcast, as its security systems are rudimentary and its hardware similar to a PC. A good starting place for Dreamcast hacking information and software is DC Emulation.

Sony's release of Linux for PS2 will no doubt spark a lot of homebrew work, though it may be too expensive for the average player to get into (Net Yaroze comes to mind).

However, there are some console developers who are trying to work user-generated content into their games. Masaya Matsuura, creator of Parappa the Rapper and Vib Ribbon (a game that can create levels from audio CDs), is currently working on a title called Mojib Ribbon that allows players to generate raps from their text files that they create.

With the addition of hard drives in consoles, one of the big problems with user-created content on consoles has been solved. When broadband internet access is readily available to consoles, problems with distribution will also be solved. I am sure that we'll see more console games that allow customization in the near future, but I am not sure that it will approach the PC side any time soon.

waka