game girl advance: Tim Burke on the Futures of Games

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March 18, 2003

Tim Burke on the Futures of Games

The End of an Age in Computer Gaming

Something has to be done. Computer and video games should be the 21st Century's revolutionary cultural form. Their creative energies should match their gargantuan revenues. But as games become bigger business, their imaginative horizons are falling rapidly. In the end, that will bad for both the business of gaming and the experience of it.

More great writing by Tim on his website.

Posted by jane at March 18, 2003 12:05 PM | TrackBack

Comments

Tim's piece is, in my opinion, fairly off the mark.

This is just wrong:

Many gamers understand far better than game designers what makes a good game. If you sort the signal from the noise (lots of it) on such boards, you'll often find a surprising number of gamers who not only hone in on the structural and aesthetic shortcomings of a particular game with deadly and rapid accuracy, but who suggest a variety of quite reasonable and feasible improvements and changes to address those shortcomings.

He then goes on to describe how a massively multiplayer product was improved by user feedback, and that "they simply did not understand their own game as well as the people who played it."

It's the kind of wishful thinking on the part of players that also betrays how little people really understand what good game design is. It also shows how few people (including, alas, many designers) are aware of the elements that a good designer brings to their project.

It's easy to point fingers at a product from the outside and critique it, but it ignores that game development is fundamentally a process. Choices are made over the life of the project, and they are deeply effected by time, talent, technology, and budget. A good designer must be constantly aware of all these things at all times, and be able to respond to them at a moment's notice.

Everybody who develops games loves games. Nobody intentionally sets out to make a bad one. There is no lack of "good ideas", and the technology is stabilizing.

Games are becoming more polarized mostly because there is no system in place that rewards creativity, either commercially or within the industry.

Posted by: Andrew Mayer on March 19, 2003 01:06 PM

Well, a decent amount of what I had to say, Andrew, concerns the fact that the heuristics for recruiting and rewarding creativity are badly attenuated within the industry.

Nobody sets out to make a bad game, sure. On the other hand, there are game designers who just aren't very good at what they do, or who are highly, intensely limited in their ability to imagine what a computer game could be. Somebody (more than one) simply screwed the pooch at Quicksilver with Master of Orion 3, for example. There's just some fundamentally bad ideas there, at a very root level, that predate any of the practical constraints that that development team faced once they got into the process of making the game a reality.

I agree that's less important than the systematic constraints, some of them entirely matter-of-fact, such as time and money, that come into the actual process of game design.

I really do think that many gamers have a good sense of how particular games could be better, and at least sometimes, their critiques center on imminently practical possibilities. Yes, sometimes they also want the sun, moon and stars. MMOG players especially get frustrated rather absurdly when the game they're focusing on doesn't essentially simulate a completely realized fantasy life, when it isn't Stephenson's Metaverse.

In what respect is the technology of gaming stable? ATI and nVidia continue pushing their card upgrades even as the cards themselves are starting to radiate heat like the surface of Venus, developers are still dealing with a tangle of hardware and drivers that produces inevitable howls of anguish with each new release from populations of people who can't get the game to work, and so on. I don't grok this: stable how? Unless we're talking about consoles, and even there it's pretty hard to tell for sure whether we'll be playing on anything besides the PS2 and the XBox in a year's time.

Above all, however, I really think that there are limited horizons of creative vision within the games industry at the moment. It may be that every developer is sitting on a shitload of absolutely fabulous ideas that the practical constraints of the industry are preventing them from enacting. Maybe. But I think it also has something to do with the fairly limited social wellsprings that developers and programmers come from, that they're just not as intellectually or imaginatively diverse a group of creators as novelists or film directors or actors at the moment.

Posted by: Timothy Burke on March 19, 2003 06:28 PM

Well, a decent amount of what I had to say, Andrew, concerns the fact that the heuristics for recruiting and rewarding creativity are badly attenuated within the industry.

I'll agree with that. It's so bad that it's coming close to driving me out of an industry that I've sacrificed a great deal for over the last decade. My success seems to count for little or nothing. Every job search is like starting from scratch because few people understand what a designer really does.

Somebody (more than one) simply screwed the pooch at Quicksilver with Master of Orion 3, for example.

Here's some good evidence that that was a failure of process, and not design, although it agrees with your point above.

I really do think that many gamers have a good sense of how particular games could be better, and at least sometimes, their critiques center on imminently practical possibilities.

I adore the players and feedback is important. I'm a big fan of focus testing. But one of the skills of a designer is parsing what they really want from what they say they want. No fault of theirs, but their understanding and critique of the gaming experience is usually a far cry from what it takes to make a good game better. A fundamental aspect of design is artfully frustrating your user, and getting them to love you for it...

In what respect is the technology of gaming stable?

Over the last ten years programmers are writing to engines (Quake, Ureal, etc.) and/or SDKs (mostly Direct X), rather then the hardware. That's a huge jump forward in stability. It's up to the hardware to conform to those standards and not the other way around.

Above all, however, I really think that there are limited horizons of creative vision within the games industry at the moment. It may be that every developer is sitting on a shitload of absolutely fabulous ideas that the practical constraints of the industry are preventing them from enacting. Maybe.

It goes back to your central point, the industry has a blind spot on design. Any designer worth his/her salt can design a game around any subject. I tell people if you can't have an amazing game idea every day you shouldn't even bother being a designer.

But I think it also has something to do with the fairly limited social wellsprings that developers and programmers come from, that they're just not as intellectually or imaginatively diverse a group of creators as novelists or film directors or actors at the moment.

To be honest I think you're just overanalyzing here. I know designers who, in their spare time, are musicians playwrights, artists, etc. etc. There's plenty of diversity, it's just not rewarded. Posted by: Andrew Mayer on March 20, 2003 11:52 PM