Why have video games become so boring?
If you haven’t played COD4 yet (if not, why not?), then this post contains minor spoilers.
Recently I have found myself becoming increasingly bored with video games. Often I will find myself firing up my console, and just not wanting to play any of my games. Now the reason is not that all the games released are low quality, in fact it’s far from it. It is the simple fact that all the games released in the past year (except a few, more on those later) lack a certain quality. It is this unique aspect of a game that separates it from other games. Now this ‘quality’ is not graphics or sound or whatever, it is something quite different, but I can’t pinpoint what it is. Hmm…this is quite hard to explain…
Let me give you an example. Take Call of Duty 4. Now everybody agrees that COD4 is technically a good game. It has good graphics and sound, the online and perk system is great, now while these certainly contribute to it, these are not the things that make the game special. There are two levels in the game, where you do practically nothing. They’re almost like cutscenes, but from a first person perspective. However, despite this, these are my two favourite levels in the game. The first of these levels is where you see yourself (President Yasir Al-Fulani) assassinated. You are shoved into a car and driven through a city, before being shot in the head. It wont come through in text, but when your watching it, it is so absorbing - you feel much more sympathetic towards the character, and feel much more against the killer. The second level is when you wake up after a nuclear weapon has been activated. You crawl out from your crashed helicopter, only to find a destroyed city, with debris flying everywhere. Amazing.
Technical aspects and how fun the game is definitely contribute to whether the game memorable or not, but there is also something else.
Despite what I’ve said, I don’t think the ‘quality’ that is missing from so many games is the ability to emotionally involve a player. No, that’s not it. It’s just that most of the recently released video games aren’t special. Take Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 for example. It’s an ok game, but there’s nothing special about it. Again, Burnout Paradise, it pretty fun, but it’s not special, I’m not going to remember it as one of my favourite games of all time. So many games that are released now are just so uninspiring. That’s it! Uninspiring. See if you can think of a game released in the past year, that you can honestly say is inspiring, or really special. If I had to, I’d probably go with Call of Duty 4 and maybe Bully: Scholarship Edition. The only game that I can say has truly inspired me if Portal. Three games isn’t a lot. I’ve bought all the big releases this year and some small ones, but I’m still bored. There is only one reason I can think of - that gaming has become a bit stagnant lately. There were very few new franchises or series launched, and most of the big hits were sequels (Call of Duty 4, Halo 3 etc.), if you look on the horizon all I can see is more sequels like MGS4, GTA4, Fallout 3. These will all be great quality games, and I’m sure everyone will enjoy them. I mean, games can still be a hell of a lot of fun, even if they aren’t inspiring - I know I’ve enjoyed laying a lot of games this past year. Now before you all think I’m crazy I know I’m not alone in this view. I’ve spoken to a couple of people on Xbox Live that agree with me and I’m sure there must be others. Don’t get me wrong, I love gaming and I’ve really enjoyed a lot of the games this year, but just feel they could have been better. I read about games, buy games, write about games, but recently I really am loosing faith in them. Strange. Come on video game industry, show us something amazing! Maybe this year will reignite my passion for my hobby.
Note: I know this all sounds a bit weird: ‘How can a guy have lots of fun playing games, but still be disappointed with them?’. Well before you all yell ‘hypocrisy!’, just because a game isn’t special or inspiring, doesn’t mean it isn’t a hell of a lot of fun.
UPDATE: I saw a really good comment on N4G about this article from a user called ‘Breakfast’. I think it summed up what I’m trying to say really well. Here it is:
‘Theres nothing unique about some of the games that come out today. They just take a concept that has been done before, make it there own, and add some new features.’
EDIT: added in a mention of Portal
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April 13th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
what about Bioshock and the Orange Box (TF2 & Portal) ??
April 13th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
I do believe that you’ve missed the entire point of your argument. You say that you haven’t been inspired yet you don’t mention any of the games that most critics and myself would say do just that. Portal is exactly what you say hasn’t been released in the last year.
If you look at other mediums like Film, Television, and Music, can’t you say the same as you mentioned? The real reason for what you say is boredom comes down to one simple conclusion. Out of control expectations. No matter what’s released your going to still feel uninspired, because we are all in a cycle of constantly looking over our shoulder for what’s next around the corner to blow us away while over looking whats already there.
The sequel rut you allude to is largely true, but you fail to mention new franchises like Mass Effect and Assassins Creed. Bioshock to is failed to be mentioned. While still not perfect in anyway, they do carve out their own place in the sand that wasn’t previously there. Just ask yourself what other mediums don’t have this problem then you realize that there isn’t a problem with videogames, but a problem that over arcs all mediums as most creativity gets snuffed out because it isn’t a “blockbuster”.
April 13th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Well thanks a lot for ruining CoD4 for me by containing a huge spoiler, yet not mentioning any risk of spoilers in the article. Stopped reading the article after that spoiler.
April 13th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
@thewhileeffect
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You said: that I didn’t mention any games that inspired me.
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Heres the quote right here:
‘See if you can think of a game released in the past year, that you can honestly say is inspiring, or really special. If I had to, I’d probably go with Call of Duty 4 and maybe Bully: Scholarship Edition’
.
I said that Call of Duty 4 and Bully: Scholarship edition inspired me.
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That said, I’m sorry I overlooked Portal. I’ll add that in now.
April 13th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
@dd
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Those are hardly huge spoilers, and they certainly don’t ruin the game.
April 13th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
@ Eoco:
I meant outside of what you mentioned, but that’s fine. You mentioned two and I should have included that.
April 13th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
@thewhileeffect
I don’t see why Film, Music and TV are relevant. I’m sure the same thing applies to those industries, but I don’t know enough about them to say that it is. This post was about boredom in video games, not music, tv and film.
April 13th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
What about Little Big Planet? I rest my case
April 13th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
I completely agree with u, eoco. you said you turn ur console on and you dont want to play any of the games… im in the same boat… lol, i find them all boaring after a while. but i have to admit i played cod 4 , four times, which means i finished the game’s storyline and i started from the begining again, 4 times.
April 13th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Bioshock is a follow up on System Shock and System Shock 2
April 13th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
@ McCartney
Bioshock is a follow up on System Shock and System Shock 2
April 13th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
@ Eoco
Those other mediums are very relevant as those are very likely to be what you’d do instead of playing a videogame. I know your post was specific to videogames, so I thought I’d bring it up. This topic is very large in scope and it would be a little silly for me not to, but I do like that your trying to address this even though I can’t say the same for myself.
April 13th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
thanks. I’ll bear the other mediums in mind, but I wont post about them as I don’t know enough about them.
April 13th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
I feel very much the same about games being boring. True, every now and then there still happens something interesting, but a lot of games these days are utterly boring and especially even those that receive very high ratings in the press.
I think at least for me the main reason is rather simple: lack of story and character. Fighting in a game becomes pointless when you don’t know what you are fighting for, it becomes mechanical, run, shoot, run, shoot, repeat forever till the game is over. I need something that gives the world in which I play meaning and depths. I want to know who I am going to kill and why and in a lot of games that just isn’t the case. The story becomes a filler that is inserted in between levels but has rather little relevance to the actual game.
If the story and characters are good it doesn’t really matter much for me if the game does anything new or even if its technical execution contains flaws, those issues become completly secondary.
This main issue aside there is however another very important one, the lack of freedom you have in a game. By this I don’t mean that every game has to have a huge free roaming world, but simple that a game must give you enough room to actually play in the world and interact with it in a meaningful way. I want to decide where I have to go and I don’t want to be forced by the level design into a specific direction. The reason for that is not so much the freedom, but that a forced path through a level removes the need to understand. In many games I don’t have to understand what I am doing, I can switch my mind off and just run through it, the level design will guide my way without my actually thinking about it and this is quite terrible. It might remove the frustration of getting stuck, it however also removes the enjoyment of understanding,in short a game with to much of a forced level design becomes dull. It of course gets worse then this, some games not only guide your path a little to much, they also make it impossible to actually reason about the game world in a prober way, endless respawning enemies, invisible walls and such pretty much destroy every last bit of immersion that might have been there.
Overall I think what got lost over the years in games is the feel for a world or a universe. Many games just don’t feel like a world that wants to be explored any more but instead like a concatenation of well-tested and well known gamedesign-elemnets that you already have seen in the last dozens of games, it simply isn’t interesting to explore that, that you already know all to well.
April 13th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
@grumbel
When I first started writing this article I started thinking. My initial idea as to why I was bored with these games was the same as yours: lack of any meaningful story. In my opinion story is the second most important aspect of a game (gameplay comes first). However, i changed the direction of the article for one simple reason. If lack of story was my main concern I alienate a lot of other genres such as racing and rhythm games.
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That said I was very tempted to blame this boredom purely on story, and I still do to some extent. R6 Vegas 2 has an appalling story and it felt meaningless when I completed it.
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I haven’t played many games where I really cared about the story, so my expectations are quite low and even so todays games bore me!
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Your idea about freedom in games is interesting, but I don’t find that affects me too much.
April 13th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
When it comes to racing games and such “lack of story” doesn’t seem to fit as an argument. However “story” doesn’t just have to mean a prescripted story by an author, but “story” is also what you experience in a game as a player.
When I for example look at Burnout or AceCombat I am pretty much instantly bored because after 5 minutes I feel as having explored everything the game has to offer. Dozens of cars have crashed and equally many enemy planes have hit the ground. There is simply far to many things happening far to quickly. There is no feel of accomplishment, because everything you can do, can be accomplished in the first few minutes. You can of course still beat levels, buy new cars and whatever, but the basic gameplay itself just lacks depths.
In the ‘good old days’ on the other side I might have spend days just practicing to securely land a plane or make it through the pit with my car with crashing into something. Today you often go into auto-pilot as soon as you are near the runway or the pit and everything happen automatically.
The story of how you made an dramatic emergency landing with your wreaked plane after a hard mission will simply not happen when the game already flashes a “Mission Accomplished” over the screen the second you have hit your target. This is especially frustrating because today we have the hardware to actually make that emergency landing look right, we have physics engine, particle effects and all that stuff.
As you said, a game as to inspire, has to give you something to reflect on, has to let you experience something new and unexpected. When none of that happens the game turns into a roller coaster ride, it might still look cool, it might still shake you, but you could sleep through the whole thing and still reach the end, because it doesn’t require any real involvement of you.
April 13th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
I’ve been wondering if there will be a time, when people get finally fed up with all these FPS/TPS, which all you do is aim and shoot.
Ever since we have the 3D technology, game play became similar and repetitive…
Someone need to come up with different approach to 3D games, otherwise more and more gamers starts to feel bored…
April 13th, 2008 at 11:43 pm
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April 14th, 2008 at 1:46 am
There are two problems, at least for me personally, that limit my enthusiasm for modern games:
1) Most ideas have already been tried and many of them have already been perfected. I can’t really think of improvements for many of my old favorites, like Robotron: 2084, Doom (1993), Wipeout XL and others.
Now genres and techniques are well-worn and familiar, a lingo has developed around them, and institutions have formed.
2) Video games were most interesting, I thought, when they were so different from other media. In the 90s, CD-ROMs, high-def audio and photorealistic graphics started to become the norm, and video games no longer seemed so unique as a medium. The inherent fantasy appeal that was found in even the most serious simulations (because the graphics didn’t look real) was lost. Personally I used to enjoy games not just for their imagination, but for the imaginative process that the player brought to it: he had to fill in the blanks, so to speak, where primitive graphics and sounds wouldn’t do, and this experience is gone now.
I also think games have gotten too complicated in their controls and, in general, too big budget. But that’s not important because in the future all game companies will have combined together into some omnicorp, and all IPs will also have combined, so that like Solid Snake, Mario, Doom Guy, Dante, Voodoo Vince and whoever will all be morphed into one perfect hero, and basically this super company will just release one game a year, another sequel in the same nameless series, which after a time will stop even numbering itself, and everyone will be happy then because also video game journalism will cease to serve a point since everyone will already know what to buy.
April 14th, 2008 at 4:54 am
ok here is what is wrong. It that all the games now are trying to do too much, instead they should focus on certain aspect, either novel or just special part of the game. He mentioned portal which is the perfect example, it focused on using the portal to your advantage and didn’t get sucked into power ups or a large assortment of guns. The problem is multiplied by the vast number of games have taken much of the believable ideas, not to say that there are not more ideas out there just that it’s getting harder to come up with new ones. Games now are trying to do everything, all the guns and weapons, instead of focusing on perfecting a few. It can even be a nice story concept, take God of War for example, Greek mythology taken with a slight twist, as many could tell it was basically Prince of Persia (only with sweet chain swords) but it concentrated on having a different story and created a world you could understand and get lost in.
You can’t forget that now graphics and sound are required to be much better than they used to be, but you shouldn’t sacrifice game play for graphics.
The problem, that thing that is missing in a lot of games, is focus. Look at the games through the ages that have really changed the gaming world, Space invaders, Pac Man, Mario, Punch out, DOOM, Golden Eye, FFVII, GTAIII, Wii Sports and others (there are so many, and so many that I haven’t played these are a few of my favorite), what made them so special wasn’t that they had the best graphics (some did) it was that they had a certain aspect that was truly completed. They didn’t try to do everything possible but they let you be the one that was perfect.
April 14th, 2008 at 5:05 am
i have to agree with Eoco i too have been feeling alot less interested in games because as you say they are missing something and yes i agree again it is inspiration. i do hope game makers realise this too and soon.
April 14th, 2008 at 5:06 am
It’s funny you mentioned COD4 because I just past the nuclear scene you mention in your article.
Little background … I recently treated myself a new laptop to replace my dilapidated old desktop. Being a gamer for a very long time, I got a gaming laptop that I configured with max specs to play games like Bioshock, Crysis, and COD4; yes, I love FPS games. I haven’t finished all of them but here’s my quick two cents for all three games: I can’t get over the hyper realism. The graphics and sound are great, but what caught my attention was the AI. The computer opponent is getting better and smarter with every new game that emerges. The story lines may not be revolutionary, but honestly what can be added? To criticize a lack of story in games is like criticizing cars for only having 4 wheels and the ability to move only the ground.
To me, it is the execution of the game that is revolutionary at this point. It’s little things like the nuclear scene in COD4. It’s the battle suit in Crysis. It’s the ambience in Bioshock. It’s the team tactics in FEAR.
All true works of art were never truly appreciated in their own time. Two years from now, we’ll be comparing the boring games of 2010 with the awesome games of 2007.
April 14th, 2008 at 5:18 am
It’s simple. You’re getting old. All of this stuff is inspiring when you yourself are easily inspired, but those days are gone and they are never coming back - for you, that is.
The next generation of kids will eventually look back at these times, and eulogize them just as we do earlier, simpler times. It’s the circle of life and you just need to take a step back to realize it.
April 14th, 2008 at 5:22 am
Maybe it’s a case of too much video gaming.
April 14th, 2008 at 5:33 am
so stop living in your well, go out and check out games in other markets, countries, medium, etc.
April 14th, 2008 at 5:37 am
I believe that the generic rehashing of games and game concepts are the reasons for our lack of excitement for some games. I don’t know your gaming roots but PC gaming is mine and true gaming experiences , ones that keep you coming back for the fun that it gives you almost ALWAYS relies on multiplayer and interaction with the people there.
I SUGGEST you try games like DOTA (lets call it a mod, go buy the game WC3:FT and you will understand :D) or other custom maps from the same root.
Not to shoot down consoles or such but they HARDLY give you the level of interaction you can get from playing games on the PC typing and yelling or even having a good time. I do regret to say that the people are as varied as the ones on xbox live, but in this place there are at least a good semblance of mannered and charming people to meet.
Move away from the FPS genre (and most of the 360’s games) really. Its not the best place to enlightened or excited for, in essence they pump out graphics you suck it up ;D– so to speak.
The truth of the matter is all things get boring after playing them multiple times, but its the interaction with others that keeps it interesting. I myself am a RTS fan… (I’ll remain true to my SC and WC3 roots where they have provided the BEST gaming experiences ever and I STILL play AND enjoy them (as such they have also been some of the largest influences in my life (as well as mario))) and have played ages on that. Its not the game that keeps me coming its all the new stuff that people make up (user made content to play: Tower defense (yes it came from here), RPGs (yes they mimic them here to a lovely extent), and other assortments of minigames (uther party… mario party rip off but fun :P) and maze maps… (hell there’s even math master if you wanna look hard enough)) and the people there.
Console gaming has been in a downhill ever since the xbox came out. Really, the only thing has has given me a sparkle of excitement was the announcement of the wii :D I’d love to explore its full capabilities…one day :D
April 14th, 2008 at 5:39 am
I believe people are taking this article out of context.
And i would have to agree that games are getting boring now.
Thanks for the article Eoco
April 14th, 2008 at 5:42 am
Your problem isn’t with games, it’s with gamers. Innovative and experimental is not what sells. Your asking game makers to take an extreme risk: to likely lose money in favor of potential critical acclaim. There is a reason popular culture exists, except it or go out and make games yourself. Quit whinin.
April 14th, 2008 at 5:48 am
I think game developers and gamers are focusing too much in realistic graphics this kind of makes the game world dull as it starts to look more and more what it would look like if we just went for a walk outside.
long story short: unquie art direction combined with the things grumbel and Matthew Dickinson outlined will definately give a breath of fresh air to the gaming experience.
April 14th, 2008 at 6:07 am
yup, same ideas and concepts over and over and over and over, i can’t even play any shooting games any more, i’m just sick of them…
the real problem is that the game developers are not on drugs…
i think a pound of weed and couple bongs would be a good starting point for any team making a new game
April 14th, 2008 at 6:34 am
You should try RED ORCHESTRA - you wouldn’t be dissapointed with the complexities and raw visceral excitement playing it online. - It is the best PC game I have ever played - WWII Germans versus Russians with REAL PHYSICS and iron sights on the guns.
(instead of the lame screen centered crosshairs that make other shooters look so fakey)
Tank battles that can have fifty tanks at a time smashing their way across the battlefield (you should HEAR the armor piercing tank shells scream past your position in battle) 3d sound - smoke - haze -artillery strikes - satchel charges - snipers - submachinegun battles in staircases with hundreds of spent cases all over the piles of bodies! - Smoke grenades - antitank cannon - Panzerfausts (like a bazooka)
You can download it from STEAM for a measley $20! Its like buying a classic muscle car for the price of a Hyundai.
Hell, I play it and I’m in my forties! -My son is 15 (a skater) and gasps at the physics in play during a full blown battle (Let’s say you snipe a guy in a bunker -you’ll paint the wall behind him with the guys blood and you can see it through the scope) I know , I know, some other WWII games are fun too - but none of them are this COOL.
There is a learning curve on this one - so it never gets old. I learn new tactics every time I play.
One last thing - the TRACERS from the machine guns can be quite beautiful. If you open up on a halftrack or tank they will ricochet off all over the place - kicking up dirt - even wounding nearby personnel - and you should see the fireballs from the exploding armored vehicles. Quite fascinating - like being in a WWII movie. Trust me - this one is different - and better.
April 14th, 2008 at 6:41 am
[...] Bin druch Zufall auf folgenden Post gestossen: opiniondebug.com [...]
April 14th, 2008 at 7:04 am
What about Psychonauts?
I absolutely loved that one…
April 14th, 2008 at 7:43 am
I completely agree with u that games have become boring somehow. I am playing Assassin’s Creed for PC and I don’t feel like firing it up.
I just dont know wat is the reason. Not uninspiring i guess.
I think the reason is that sometime in the middle of gaming era we all played some games forcefully without enjoying it, just 2 finish them, and those games disappointed us really bad, unconsciously and permanently. Now when v get a new game 2 play, that disappointment bugs us constantly from inside. To overcome that disappointment, a game has 2 b amazingly good (e.g Portal) for us to feel better. But still over all that disappointment doesnt go away :(
Some people have referred some good games above in the comments. But my inner disappointment tells me “Ahh, yet another game some1 is referring, no wonder it will be crap”
April 14th, 2008 at 10:55 am
ico,indigo prophecy,dreamfall series.you get the point
April 14th, 2008 at 11:10 am
hey listen,one problem is that it would seem some creators lack vision,and originality.take ico for example. innovation of a pair/duo as demonstrated in ico was fantastic and different.so much so,that i strongly believe our beloved hideo kojima used it briefly in mgs2 in a segment involving raiden.games rarely capture me anymore.it could be becacuse im 35 and getting older,or it could be something else.i dont feel captured as much any more.
April 14th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
@Nello: The “getting old” argument pops up in almost every discussion that focuses around the “good old time”, however I think it is wrong. For some people getting old might be the problem, but on the other side games have changed, they changed a lot over the years and not necessarily for the better.
I started with the C64 and the Amiga and while of course not all games back then were awesome, the range of genres was much bigger then it was today. There where tons of games that you couldn’t even properly fit in a genre. Things like “Ports of Call” or “Nuclear War” for example or games like “It Came from the Desert”.
Today on the other side the genres are extremely well defined, with many games not only trying to fit into a genre, but cloning specific gameplay of another games. So you don’t end up just having a few to many “open world games”, but you end up having “GTA3 clones” or not just a shooter but “Gears of War” look alike.
In the last years I have moved more and more away from todays games and focused more on past games, not for nostalgia reasons, I play the games for the first time in my live, but simply because I like those games more. Watching the intro of Star Control 2 gives me the inspiration that is missing in todays games, seeing the fully destructible environments of a XCom:UFO is a pretty main blowing experience compared to todays solid levels and watching the B-movie style acting in a Gabriel Knight 2 is just plain good old fun, FMV just don’t exist today any more (except C&C3).
Now of course my view of the past might be a bit twisted, since I only end up picking the games I really like, but on the other side I have looked through everything that was released in the last generation of consoles and found only very little that I actually cared about. The last generation was pretty much the first where I had played *all* the games that interested me. On the other side in the past there was always a ton of games where I just didn’t found the time to play them all. Today there is maybe a single game a year that has this special quality that I miss, in the past on the other side LucasArts alone did release more then that.
April 14th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
@evoLverR: Psychonauts is a double edged sword for me. For one thing, the character design, story design, setting and such are just mindblowingly awesome, on the other side the whole gameplay was pretty much “Meh” and gives me so many bad memory and reasons why you should never let ‘action elements’ into your adventure games (a fact that is just all to well known in the adventure community). It just doesn’t work, it doesn’t even work when the game isn’t an adventure any more. And this is the problem I have with Psychonauts, it never really found its rhythm, in parts it felt like an adventure games, in other parts it felt like a jump’n run and in other like a classic action adventure, it never really felt whole and more often then not like many things could have been done better.
I still did enjoy it a lot due to its art style, characters, story and such, but I think I would have preferred it when they would have moved it more into the adventure direction and less in the third-class-frustration-annoying platformer one.
Psychonauts was good, maybe even great, but not the game where you love each and every piece of it.
April 14th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
I, too, suffer from the same game malaise… I’ve wanted, so badly, to play a truly good game for the last couple months and I’ve been unable to get my fix. I’ve bought all the big names - but none of them have caught my attention.
However, I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed Mass Effect. That game brought enough new ideas to the table that it was fun - potentially close to inspiring, but not quite there.
Part of me wonders if Peter, in the comments, is right: just too much games. Maybe…
But I’ve played BioShock and while so many people loved it, I got tired of it. I’ve played COD4 and it was a similar situation. I played Assassin’s Creed and it got old after the first assassination (though, really, it has tired gameplay). The list goes on and on…
And I’m a person who defines himself as loving video games. They are such a huge part of my life, it’s what everyone knows me by. Yet still, I grow weary.
But you point out the 2 levels in COD4 as being the best in the game - I whole heartedly agree. Those levels provided a new experience, something fantastic that I wouldn’t ever be able to witness in real life (and come back from, anyway). It stirred up emotions, reactions, I felt like jumping up and showing my fiance how cool it was, but I couldn’t because I was just too engaged in what was happening.
I’ve shot people in games before. I’ve played COD games and this new one plays just like the old ones. It’s even missing mechanics that I appreciate in other shooters, like cover mechanics… the gameplay was a chore, in comparison to those couple, fresh levels.
Another brilliant experience was when I got the helm of the spaceship in Mass Effect. Sure, the constant load screens sucked, but I felt like I was exploring the universe, it was really quite cool.
So why do our games have to be 95% status quo with 5% gimmick? I guess it’s both risky and hard to come up with something truly new.
It’s rare when a “gimmick” becomes an integral part of the gameplay. I’d say that Gears of War is a good example of when this can work extremely well…
But then there’s games like Red Faction or Omikron, when the gimmick becomes a distraction from a vanilla experience.
So, this could grow into a very in depth discussion on game design, but basically, I think that games are becoming boring because the industry is too hyper-focused on the details, rather than the big picture. Truly good games with fresh experiences (Portal, for instance) are rare, because it takes developing an entire experience around a core innovation, rather than just taking the tried and true and injecting something new that will hopefully revitalize the beast.
Just some ramblings…
April 14th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Are videogames getting boring???…
I caught this story by Eoco over at OpinionDebug about how the author feels that videogames are not inspiring and that the author is starting to become bored with them. In some ways, I can agree that some games are getting boring, just a…
April 29th, 2008 at 1:55 am
It’s just like the movie industry (why not, more money goes into games than any movie); first you do the ’safe’ game (read: guaranteed cash cow) then you do the ‘art’ game (read: potentially revolutionary).
Lots of devs follow the Microsoft model of always ‘playing it safe’, some tread the path less travelled by - if you want more paradigm shifting games, support the devs that make them.
It’s simple really: vote with your wallet. If revolutionary games keep making the big $$$, they’ll become the norm. But people (as a group) are hesitant to embrace change.