My good friend in Montreal recently attended the New Frontiers in Gaming conference, and blogged about it here. This is my response to his post, and my thoughts on the issues they discussed.
First of all, I’ve written before about how much the Nintendo Wii has been making huge waves among developers and consumers alike. Nintendo has been a rebel since the early days of the first E3 in 1995 when they announced the cartridge-holding N64, as opposed to SEGA and Sony’s consoles that would use optical discs. The present success of the Wii is a little bit ironic, seeing as how its capabilities are lacking next to its competitors. My friend Peter Rockwell is skeptical about the worth of the Wii’s peculiarities.
“…the emphasis of the Wii is not on total immersion with the screen but on enjoying the interactions and gestures that we use with it. A game’s setting is no longer that dangerous alien planet but in our living room, bedroom, basement, or wherever the Wii’s sensor bar is facing.
It’s exactly because of this that the Wii feels like a step back for gaming in my eyes. With its primitive Mii characters and lack of story / setting / atmosphere in games like Wii Sports, Warioware or even Super Mario Galaxy, the industry needs to recover from, well, innovation. I play games when I want to escape my own world, not participate in it.“
I disagree with the notion of it being a “step back for gaming” – at least, not in such a broad sense as the statement implies. While I take the point that watching your fellow players try to blow up a balloon in Smooth Moves is not so immersive, this is just one small perk of the system, and a very situational feature. What I’m saying is, I don’t think the gestures have shown to be the Wii’s “emphasis” at all – although, I am speaking from limited personal experience. The big cheese among the Wii game lineup in my mind is Super Smash Bros: Brawl, which takes almost no advantage of the Wiimote’s capability.
I agree that the simplistic and often story-less Wii games are a big departure from the trends embodied by grand cinematic games like Mass Effect, Halo and Crysis. And, as someone who’s very interested in the rise and potential applications of VR, I’m in full support of the genre. That said, I don’t think games like this represent what the entire medium ought to consist of; escapism isn’t everything. I don’t think that the Wii having a different focus spells regression for the medium; in fact, storytelling hasn’t yet proven to be something games excel at, especially standing next to veteran media like books and film. In Everything Bad is Good for You, Stephen Johnson argues that games’ greatest potential strength is still largely untapped – that strength being their reward systems’ ability to tax our cognitive faculties in ways other media rarely do. (Working through complex problems, making immediate decisions and long term plans, etc.) If Johnson is right, then we probably only need to worry about the ultra-silly Wii games maintaining an appropriate level of mind-engagement, and so far I think they’re doing just fine.
Ultimately it would be nice to see these two sides of gaming merge, and I think we are already seeing it with highly-rated blockbusters released within the last year – Mass Effect, Halo 3 and so on. Perhaps Nintendo is the martyr who has figuratively dumbed themselves down in order to get a larger chunk of the mainstream into gaming in the first place.
Anyway, moving on:
The lead level-designer on Far Cry 2 discussed predictability in games, promoting game design where players construct their own experiences instead of being force-fed it.
This is a very relevant subject that has also come up in my writings, in the same post I linked above. In the comments, Ian pointed out that the ability to customize gameplay/GUI brings remediation into the hands of gamers (ie. consumers – the public masses) which creates an interesting bottom-up model for change. What immediately springs to my mind is how this coincides with the open source revolution that’s taking place with computer software. Examples like this, combined with theories like WIRED’s Chris Anderson’s “Free” vision, are what make me feel so optimistic about a future for media practices that are vastly more democratic than what we’ve grown up with.
“Phil Fish…was hilariously scathing of the games industry for its lack of artistic innovation. Basically, with the growing cost of creating a triple-A title game developers won’t risk the money on an untested game mechanic or new IP.”
Yeah, what can we really say about this? As I’ve said, I don’t think content is the be-all and end-all of games. Even so, it’ll continue to evolve when it’s good and ready, and when we have significant advancement in technology that will allow us to express things that weren’t possible before.
On:culture 
Leave a comment