More on game design

I was thinking about forming some sort of game design blog where game theorists and like-minded people could all weigh in about the direction games should take and new methods that developers could use to turn the medium into something more sophisticated and respectable. It's a topic I tackle myself quite a bit, but it's been hard finding these like-minded people, so what I thought I would do is accumulate a collection of game design theories I have myself and build a small compendium that I can show to others who might be interested. Once I have support, I might continue further down this line of thinking and form the game design blog and perhaps further support for a more active approach, but before I get ahead of myself, I'm just going to stick with throwing any ideas I have on this blog in the meantime.

Two huge problems with the game industry today is lack of artistic achievement and numerous cliches and tropes. Yes, I'm aware of all sorts of artistic achievements in video games, but they're few and far between, and they generally have a long ways to go despite their achievement to being regarded as a serious medium. Sony for example, made huge leaps with ICO and Shadow of the Collosus, not to mention Capcom's Okami, Jonathon Blow's Braid, and Nintendo's Wind Waker. These would all probably be considered aesthetically pleasing to anybody considering their hardware limitations, but that therein lies the problem.

Film for example, doesn't use technology to produce it's art, it simply captures the living world and the film helps us understand it from a certain perspective. Paintings and drawings don't use technology either (at least not in the digital sense) but they use tools to help convey the image and the emotions the artist tries to depict. Games however, rely on technology and a programming language to convey its art, it's mathematical by nature, the art is limited by the restrictions set by the game's engine, and the artist is usually not left with much to work with except pasting a bunch of sprites and models together hoping that the engine's particle system can help liven it up a little bit.

In this regard, games have a long ways to go before a plethora of game development designs are more well known. People re-iterating gritty space marines or campy cartoons isn't going to help the video game as an artform nor do it any justice, therefore right now more than ever it is important to recognize artistic advancement in the genre.

For example, why not deconstruct the whole idea of an engine and have a game operate outside normal rules? Why not have the game take place in an oil-painting, seemingly two dimensional but given a third dimensional element as perspective is added to the picture, changing scenes and content and the player intuitively finds out how to control the changing perspective shifts. Sounds like a good idea to me, but the problem is technological limitations, something like this would be difficult to do inside a game engine, and yet art students create linear versions of this type of thing all the time. Maybe we just need a little push to help wrap our minds on how to turn this into a dynamic and interactive experience, maybe all we really need is the artistry and the rest will work itself out.

Come to think of it, stagnancy of perspective is a problem in a lot of games. So many games have you follow the same perspective of usually the same character that developers drastically limit their artistic and story-related parameters. The difficulties in creating an engine usually cause developers to stick to one idea and hopefully the game mechanic can draw the experience out to 20 - 40 hours of gameplay, regardless of whether that entire time is spent doing something even remotely interesting. I think the entire concept of video-games should be consistently re-invented, I think more development teams need to tell the current rules to screw themselves so that they can have some breathing space to try something that defies convention.

Seems hard to believe that people are running out of ideas, and yet it seems that everybody's new idea is to take a generic FPS and add a new twist to it, like having it take place in Egypt or something. Whatever.