By Erin Reynolds - June 27, 2005

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The stagnation of an industry

What is the true nature of a video game? Think about it. I have. I have pondered long and hard. I have even asked around among friends. Some have stated that it is simply a device that allows a person to manipulate images on a television or computer monitor. In that case, could Microsoft Word be a video game? Another view held that a video game is an electronic device meant to provide a prescribed challenge offering ephemeral amusement to the user. Sounds pretty useless and self-indulgent, for who wants to waste a lot of time on a regular basis with toys that sound like the design structure of a psych experiment with lab rats. Conversely, there are some who cynically believe that video games are only money-making boredom-killers at best, and at worst are foreign sponsored plots to rot the brains of Americans.

Then there is the belief that this interactive medium is in fact a unique and fascinating art form with unlimited potential. Video games undeniably have enormous and expanding potential to entertain.  They also can appeal to human imagination and emotion – as does cinema and literature. Yet millions of complacent consumers and commercially minded game developers and publishers are, perhaps inadvertently, hindering video games from actualizing this potential. The industry for the most part has been unimaginatively rehashing the successful games of the late eighties and early nineties for the past decade or so. New technologies have been only superficially implemented – keeping gamers relatively interested but not fully engaged. Simply put, things have stagnated. In order to rise above the current plateau some truly unique games need to be created or video games will cease to truly progress, their potential will never be realized, and eventually their cultural presence and popularity will fade and perhaps die.

When the gaming industry was taking its first baby steps every move forward involved a revolutionary innovation. As game consoles entered into more American homes, games such as “Super Mario Bros.” and “The Legend of Zelda” were for most people their first experience with digitally projecting themselves into a cartoon-like fantasy world of adventure. Gaming was new, exciting, and unlike anything else anyone had experienced up until then. Several decades later, video games have secured themselves into the mainstream of personal entertainment and as a result have become much less of a novelty. In the process, hundreds, perhaps thousands of titles have been created for the defined genres of gaming. Some of the primary genres are considered to be the shooter, the RPG, the action platformer, the puzzle game, the strategy game, and racers. Each game within a genre presents a slight stylistic, functional, or storyline mutation compared to their progenitors, yet these collective siblings retain distinctive and obvious game-play characteristics through the lineage. These main genres are popular for a reason – they are undeniably providing adequate entertainment for many gamers. It is unrealistic to expect every new game release to recreate or redefine a genre, yet at present almost every successful game on the market is a derivative of the innovations of the early 90’s, 80’s, and even the late 70’s. We are talking about serious in-breeding risks here. Simply because the status-quo conventions of standard games have been established and are successfully in practice today does not excuse developers to rely on tried and true formulas that are increasingly tired and worn. There is a responsibility to create, explore, and develop this fantastic art form to its fullest expression. Dynamism and creative risk-taking need to be reintroduced. Boundaries must be pushed. After all, the innovations of today are going to become the conventions of tomorrow.

As game publishers continue to sacrifice creative vision and become more self-limiting by depending on the release of ‘refurbished’ games adhering to the tested cake-mix formulas for marketing success, the games being put on store shelves become increasingly redundant and boring. The phenomenon is analogous to the plethora of nearly identical ‘recipes’ that permeate romance novels, the lowest common denominator in the world of books. They are always just more of the same, and never achieve artistic significance in the realm of literature. They may be popular, but they are utterly lacking in innovation and tediously dull in their ongoing use of overworked, overused themes. Only truly artistic endeavors in video gaming (as in literature) can ultimately bring to fruition greater expression and enrichment within the art form. Developers need to push back the edges and to explore new approaches with enlightened visions. Practice may make perfect, but one can only squeeze so much juice out of an orange.

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1: The stagnation of an industry 2: Revolutionary games are the saving grace 3: Conclusion