Video games Evolution and Devolution
People frequently have trouble understanding the term "tradeoff", sure enough it's easy enough to comprehend as exchange but in today's corporate parlance it is meant as exchange of 1 commodity as a price for another. I was playing Final Fantasy's Dissidia on the good old PSP yesterday when I marveled at the game's replay value, yes I've spent over 50 hours onto it already, that is what this entire topic is centered on.
Normally if you look at the oldest games like Mario and Dave, that they had one thing unanimously common, addiction to it. Not that I am propagating obsession towards anything, financial firms what the existing paradigm of gaming has drop to; a commodity. I've always been a gamer, I'll not deny that which is exactly what my contention with gaming today is. The first games had lots of things that hooked people up but most of all it was concerning the level of engagement that the ball player had with the overall game environment or the "world" of the overall game. And this engagement has little related to the 3D graphics or the extensive options available.
Let us check out the progression; first it had been the advent of the easy arcade type games that have been phenomenal to a particular point. Kept players hooked and introduced a complete new boom of media in to the world. popularwin was where literally every child was begging for the Atari systems and your Pentium II and III machines had Sega and NeoGeo emulators installed (mine still has both installed by the way) and action elements were about difficult commands mixed in with clever sequences. Take this forward a little further and the same two systems incorporated decent mixed stories and continuity in the games improve the media capabilities being explored in both avenues. The fighting game series KOF can be an ardent testament compared to that and from there came the further boom of turn based strategy and role playing games which became akin to "user controlled novels" on computers. This adaptability of both game-play and media could be called because the turning curve of the gaming industry.
Because this was where a large amount of business heads realized that the games could be used to simulate a lot of things, pretty much everything so the potential as a business commodity was obvious even after that. The progress after that was about enhancing the visual effects of the game, the additives were obvious the visuals needed more work so in came the influx of investment in gaming studios and the push for 3d graphics into gaming. That apex could be called because the secondary curve because once that was established, the potential for business gain via games became second to almost none. Hollywood movies will tell you the story of boom and fall unfailingly but games have the replay factor attached to them regardless of their audience size that guarantees reward.
Which replay factor was cashed in next. Most of us can see the online capabilities being offered by games which as also paved way to players just purchasing the next powerup or update online. The concept of "buying all" is where we are able to point and say that gaming has devolved. So at a spot where gaming was fun with added complexity like Baldur's Gate, Ys, Metal Gear Solid, the games went on to are more about commodity value.
The biggest element in all this is mobile gaming of course and here I point at the smartphone games which are purely centered on time killing. The problem occurs when the most the smartphone gamers aren't regular gamers but more so there to just kill time. So when you give a game like Subway Surfers online buying advantages for the "normal" people, some degree of competition envelopes between the console/PC games and the phone games. The niches are different, the categories are different, and the size differs. A game like Temple Run can't be in comparison to Farcry 3 but ultimately when the games become about money then these exact things sidetrack and mix in.
