By Jim Drewes - June 27, 2005

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Conclusion

So what makes a video game entertaining anyway, and how to we keep those elements from becoming stale, and thus unentertaining? It is unfortunate from an intellectual standpoint that the things that make a game entertaining are, much like the movie industry, the things that sell. Blood and gore, gratuitous violence, sex, fast-paced over-the-top action, and raw aesthetic beauty keep video game and movie titles hopping off of the shelves. Half of these things are beneficial because they contribute a great deal to game immersion. With detailed blood and gore, sexy female curves, and visually realistic environments, gamers don’t feel the need to look away from their screens. This obviously keeps them in the game. The remaining elements, fast action and gratuitous violence, can’t be helped. These are the things that get a little smile to creep across the face of gamers as they watch their opponent’s recently fragged body spew out blood as it flies across the screen, like a limp soaked sponge being tossed through the air. Gamers have always worried that this will eventually get tired and boring. After all, big-budget Hollywood has become tired and boring with sequel after sequel of action garbage. But what most critics fail to realize is that it isn’t the action that has become boring. The problem with action movies is that to give the audience a car chase scene or a sword fight scene that hasn’t been done before, budgets are shifted away from acting, writing, and all of the other detailed elements that make a movie good. The same thing goes for the gaming industry. Well designed First Person Shooters are still a pleasure to play, provided that they supply the gamer with something fresh without sacrificing all of the other necessary components. It isn’t the genre that is stagnating the industry, it is the corner cutting that is hurting the development of the gaming industry.

Games like Halo have done more to drive gaming forward than Katamari Damacy will ever do. On almost every level, Halo is just another first person shooter. You walk around, blast away the bad guys, and save the day at the end. But Halo brought advanced physics, open environments, and cinematic gaming into the mainstream. The industry has changed because of “just another first person shooter.” Halo 2 generated more sales in its opening day than any box office hit ever has, which indicates that the first Halo game was found to be incredibly entertaining to millions of gamers. Katamari on the other hand is simply an exploration into a new type of video game. However, inventing a game where you roll ball around a three-dimensional environment will only open the doors to other ball-rolling games. Sure, it might stimulate some creativity in other game designers, but the large changes in gaming theory will still only produce small results.

There really isn’t anything wrong with games that take a different look at interactivity, or who offer a way to be entertained that doesn’t involve voluptuous women shooting rocket launchers, but these experiments don’t actually turn the cogs of the gaming industry. Experimental or “revolutionary” games attempt to throw down the gauntlet and demand change from the industry. Gamers aren’t going to trash their racing titles, GTA clones, or first person shooters just because there are games out there which offer something drastically different. Instead, the greatest changes come from changing one detail in an otherwise redundant game. In short, macro changes seem to produce micro results, whereas micro changes create macro results in the gaming industry.

Read the opposing point of view article, Point: Radically new games drives change in the gaming industry here.

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1: Change comes from refinement, not innovation 2: Debunking the conceptually innovative games 3: Conclusion