For years now the PC games industry has been in an inexorable arms race. Once it was for higher resolutions, vaguely recognizable faces and bloom guaranteed to win the owner first prize in the village petunia growing competition. Now of course it is for those buzz-words of marketing spiel – edginess, immersion, open-world settings and (gack) emergent gameplay. Developers and publishers have fallen over themselves to declare that their new game alone will revolutionize the medium by letting the player go anywhere (within the set area), engage in fluid and cinematic conversation (along set dialogue trees) and look precisely twice as good as real life (if you have a computer system to rival Lucasfilm). But there is a growing force of gamers who just don’t want that anymore. The hardcore gamers are tired of broken promises and experiences that fall between half a dozen chairs. The casual gamers never wanted something so complicated in the first place.
So what is the answer? If the growing number of ‘old style’ games is anything to go by, it is for some developers to hark back to a simpler age. Over the years a number of oldie first-person shooters have appeared to various levels of success. Serious Sam is an iconic and tongue-in-cheek example where the screen is often filled with screaming alien mechwalkers, animated skeleton beasts and half a dozen more incongruous enemies which the player is tasked with mowing down using a variety of super-sized weapons. Why? Who cares when you have a man-portable canon! More recently Darkest of Days, the new release from new team 8monkey Labs, lets you play as an American civil war era soldier armed with near-future weaponry in various battles throughout human history with only the thinnest of B-movie explanations as to why or how. Games like these prefer to revel in their own sheer unbridled gameness, with no pretention to rationality. We can certainly expect to see more of this to cater to people’s dulled palates – you might want to live of five-star restaurant cuisine sometimes you just gotta have a burger.
In a similar direction but simpler (and some might argue, ‘purer’) style are the mass of indie and flash games that are gaining prominence in gamers’ and the general public’s awareness. Flash-games hosts such as Armor Games and MobyGames are more popular than ever and their developers are making money largely through sponsorship money gathered by the hosts from advertising revenue from the people playing the games.
Thanks to the easy availability of direct download services, independent developers can reach enormous numbers of potential customers and they would not be gathering attention if there were not people who wanted to play their simpler (by necessity as much as by design) games. There is no denying it – smaller, more concentrated experiences are what many people want.
This isn’t to say there is not a place for twenty hour FPS-RPG cross-player games with a development budget of $15 million and an equally priced marketing campaign, but it is clear if current trends continue they are going to be sharing a lot more digital shelf space with the likes of Portal, Peggle and GemQuest.
Chris Fox is an English Computer Games Design student at Staffordshire Uni, dabbling in games commentary and talking too much on the internet. You can find more of his incoherent ramblings at keysakimbo.blogspot.com.
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