The Gamer’s Quagmire #52: Pets, Guns, and Magic Wands
Everything you wanted to know about gaming, and less.
by Jamison DeLorenzo
If you ever want a truly enigmatic experience, at this point you just may need a video game vacation. It does sound quite cliché, but it does a great job at soothing the body, the mind, and the soul. The gaming aspect about such a trip is always interesting (otherwise, why are would you ever plan one?), but the best part is invariably a discussion about the gaming itself. If you have a good group of people who can philosophize about this for several hours, you have yourself a winner.Replaying the week in my head this morning while on the way to work (maybe daydreaming along with cell phones need to be outlawed in cars- can we do that?) forced me to link two concepts that I originally thought were completely unrelated. Think about the success of the current consoles and health of the PC gaming market. Nintendo struck a chord with the Wii that tons of people did not expect, and that is the way in which we interact with video games. No, I am not referring to smashing a controller against a wall when the CPU defeats you.
People like to point to the PC gaming market as the place where all the best cutting edge games go, but is that really true? If you think purely about graphical achievements then you would be right on because looking at the video arms race, even just with a small reference window of this past year, you will see a gigantic leap in video card power… processing power and power consumption (remember, puns are our friends). Perhaps we have gone too far with the 2 PCIe slot graphic cards that you can easily use to bludgeon someone to death. Aside from pure power, the last real innovation the PC gaming market brought to the table was the online RPG.
Consoles have been the stage for the biggest innovations within the last several years in gaming. Look at the success of the EyeToy, Wiimote, DS, and the DDR pad. The world’s most successful games have largely been the result of a combination of any of these innovations, and that is discounting the Guiter Hero guitar (I cannot think of a quick catchy name for it, hence its earlier omission). It is true that there are games that just work on their own steam, such as a blockbuster console release like Halo, but the way I see it the truth of the matter is that gamers are tired of the dual analog and the keyboard/mouse.
If you don’t believe that the interaction is the latest big idea in gaming then you are missing out on some important things. First you should look at the stock price of Nintendo over the last year. If you are one of those ‘numbers are boring’ people or just don’t feel like doing the research then all you need to know is that your investment would have tripled in the past year. This is far more than just Nintendo getting lucky at the race track.
I am in the camp of people that need some graphical innovation, so shiny things do easily distract me. Unfortunately, cost of development is a big barrier for many companies that want to make a lot of successful games. This was easy when the gaming industry was just getting started because all you had was one button, a joystick, and 8-bit graphics. Games like Tetris don’t succeed because of graphics- they succeed because they are easy to understand and play.
So what did Sony and Microsoft miss this time around? Multimedia and online play do have a market, so they have put very good systems together (minus alarming hardware issues). Video game consoles in the home was new to everyone in the 80’s, and when games have one button and a joystick everyone can get in on the action. Bring a controller with 10+ buttons in front of your parents now and many of them will be scared away. Did you really thought DDR and the Wii were successful because the games were good? Seriously?
This has been the argument from the Sony and Microsoft fanbots almost since the consoles were first announced and to an extent it still happens today. Look at the games that were coming out in the 80’s and honestly tell me how games with such a simple notion could ever succeed today. Adventure was a horribly cheesy game, but the technology was so new that people had a unique experience playing it. What is very strange is that the dragons guarding the keys in the game still scare me.
Fast forward to today. Look at the stylus and the DS. After two years of struggling, Nintendo has finally found the games that sell the system. What, did you think Nintendogs sold because it was a deep and interesting game? Part of the reason for the game’s success is because of the previous success of Tamagotchi, but it is also one of the first video game translations of it. DDR is a sweeping success because everyone understands dancing to music. Girls will generally run away screaming from complicated controllers (almost as though you are trying to solicit a date), but throw down a pad where you can dance to modern music and they’ll have fun all day long. Put a guitar in the hands of people who are not used to it and they will be entertained for hours on end. Put a light gun in someone’s hand and they will be happy to shoot at anything that pops onto the screen. Put a magic wand in front of someone and they will do whatever they can (including embedding it in the TV, but that isn’t recommended).
The next time you catch yourself defending your PC for gaming because your graphics are always better or your keyboard and mouse will never be beaten you need to ask yourself when you became a dinosaur. Gaming innovation is now in the hands of new controllers, and any developer that does not seriously take this into consideration is going to endanger themselves with possible extinction.
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December 11, 2006
The Gamer’s Quagmire #36: The More (Gaming) You Know
Everything you wanted to know about gaming, and less.
by Jamison DeLorenzo
In the time honored tradition of the year-in-review articles that are being tossed around (‘tis the season, etc etc, blah blah, bah hum bug) I began avoiding such articles in a vain attempt to stick with something fresh this week. Lo and behold there was a very fascinating report this year that proved to be one of the most interesting reads of the year. NIMF, or the National Instititute of the Media and Family, has effectively been the Yin to my Yang in that they almost always take the opposite side of the violence and video game coin.When they recently sent out their report about their observations of the gaming industry for 2006 I greeted it with the usual apathy and continued on with playing Final Fantasy (one of the few holiday traditions worth savoring along with sleeping in, drinking egg nog, trying to avoid arguments over dinner, and whining about presents). As you would expect something about the article caught my eye- otherwise why bother writing about it? There were hints of the gaming industry being given good grades and the family being given bad grades.
Did I wake up in some fairy tale dream world? I checked to see if Gran Turismo 4 had online play. I looked for interesting PSP games. I scoured my basement for my SNES Final Fantasy cartridges. Sadly all of these awful aspects of my gaming life hadn’t changed, so maybe one of my biggest complaints about how society looks at video games might actually be changing without requiring me to sign over some more of my organs. I read their report and walked away feeling relatively good about what people see in the gaming industry and what some of the real problems surrounding video games might be.
For me the problem always boils down to education. Idiocy is borne out of ignorance no matter what subject we are talking about. I feel this is especially true with video games because this is a novel concept to most people older than my generation. Even though I played Atari 2600 games with my parents for several years an industry driven purely by technology has greatly surpassed them. I never played a golf video game with my dad before but I have played many a round with him for a long time. The last video game I played with him was Street Fighter II, so imagine the surprise showing him Tiger Woods 2007 for the first time.
Without the willingness to learn more about subjects we lose touch with what is going on the world. This is not meant to blame or accuse, but to make you think about how tough it is for people to look at video games without being scared because of how quickly the industry is changing. We all can’t be experts on everything and that’s okay, but once you start imposing laws based on ignorance, well, you start to annoy me.
And so I write.
The major point I took away from last year’s report was that the video game industry was incredibly irresponsible and needed to make severe changes. In the wake of what was going on with GTA it was marginally understandable why people believed that, but ignorance to this day still makes people blame Rockstar for that catastrophe. I confess that I never did read the entire report from last year, so I cannot speak of how things are different this time around, but what I can tell you is that if parents pay any attention at all to this report then good things are on the horizon.
Even before the report dives into the specifics of what NIMF observed this year they talk about parents being far too ignorant when it comes to what their kids are playing and how often they play. I had rules on video games back in my school days too, even when it came to studying for subjects I was already getting straight A’s in. It seemed unfair then and it seems unfair now, but when you are asked to study your material, especially during the high school years, you should do it.
Finding the proper amount of time to play video game is always tricky. The best example is that you really can’t eat as much as you did in high school 15 years later and still expect to stay in shape, especially when you are no longer playing basketball or tennis 6 days a week. I hardly think video games are the main cause of health issues in America (visit a casino and get back to me) so it’s hard to talk about that aspect of the report. I’ll leave you to your own devices in deciding what to think about health and video games (I won’t condone DDR, but it is something to think about).
The report focuses on the one aspect of gaming I have felt for a long time has been largely overlooked by many people- how parents monitor their gaming children and what they know about video games in general. I’ve been praying for other people to figure this out for a long time. Television commercials are the biggest giveaway as to what’s going on in this country. It is very hard to avoid ads dealing with talking to kids about sex, smoking or drugs. To me this is scary- parents should not need reminders to talk to their children. Just taking into account the number of ads on television it makes me think parents are watching television instead of spending time with their kids. Is it so unreasonable to think that kids spend too much time in front of a television because their parents are doing the same exact thing?
Continuing with the knowledge side of gaming, what parents know about the games their kids play is also something that is severely lacking. It pains me to say this but I spend enough time in video game stores to overhear multiple conversations between parents, clerk, and kids about potential video game purchases. While it does not appear to happen nearly as often as in the past, clerks are still willing to skew the truths about games to parents in order to make a sale. Having never worked in retail I do not know this, but if video game store clerks work on commission this needs to stop immediately.
It pains me to say this even more, but video game clerks need a brush up on their education as well. No, I don’t expect Rhodes scholars to be working at my local EB store, but the situation needs to improve dramatically. Just yesterday a clerk actually had to ask a superior if Rainbow Six: Las Vegas had been released. If you don’t even know what you’re selling how can you honestly have a job? I feel there should have been some payment for the half hour I spent in the store due to the number of questions I wound up answering for people. I already felt that parental education needed to improve when it came to gaming, but now I’m also forced to believe that the retailers need more knowledge about their own business.
In case you have noticed a common thread in these ramblings, namely education, then you know mostly everything you need to know about what I read. I don’t want to bore anyone to death here about everything that’s written, but if you want to know more about what people see in the video game world rummaging through the whole report is time well spent. A lot of different surveys and observations all point to two major themes- parents need more education about gaming and so do the retailers. The gaming industry is doing what it can, but until its customers became more enlightened then the media will keep attacking the gaming industry whenever it can. It’s as I said earlier- idiocy is borne out of ignorance.
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