Here.

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Excerpt: There are adult games out there. Sports games appeal to all ages. Chess and fishing games bore most kids. And many PC games ("Civilization"; the new "Black & White") are complicated and strategic enough to bewilder most tykes and intrigue many adults. But there's a missing niche. Console games (for PlayStation 2, Dreamcast, N64) boast great game play, requiring eye-hand coordination and providing an immersive, physical environment. PC games lack action but excel in concepts and complexity. Why can't we have the best of both worlds? It won't happen until we recognize games' capacity for real art. Current designers come from programming backgrounds, so millions of dollars in development costs produce a beautifully rendered world full of farting scarecrows. Meanwhile, the nerds behind strategy-based PC games lack the drive or ability to design a responsive, explorable, 3-D environment or characters that move the way you want them to. Here's one suggestion for improving adult video games: Interactivity could be the most powerful artistic tool we have, yet no one does anything with it. The pieces are all in place: The money's there (games now outgross movies), the audience is ready for something new (older gamers now resort to emulations of retro games just to find something fun to play), and the technical foundations have been laid. Will anyone create a beautiful, complex, engrossing video game for adults—a treat for the mind and the reflexes? If not, steel yourself for more peeing squirrels.

I thought it was an interesting article, but it didn't provide anything even approaching a serious consideration of solutions. So I'm posting it here (hopefully it's not a repost). What do you think? There was a related article on why video games aren't funny, which seemed to boil down to the same issues, or at least types of issues. So what do you think?

I think a game with farting scarecrows would be awesome.

Holding Conker's Bad Fur Day up as an example of a 'mature' adult game and then berating it for being stuffed full of crude humor is just plain silly. Its blatently just your regular 3d platformer wrapped up in immature swearing and visual gags. Not that theres anything wrong with that, I just didn't find it actually fun.

Getting more to the point of the article:

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Console games (for PlayStation 2, Dreamcast, N64) boast great game play, requiring eye-hand coordination and providing an immersive, physical environment. PC games lack action but excel in concepts and complexity. Why can't we have the best of both worlds?

Because, by and large, we don't want both worlds at the same time. The type of gamer (or, the current mood of a gamer) typically wants to focus on one style of game at any given time (sometimes *because* they're not very good at the other styles). I play a mean game of UT, yet am terrible at most RTS games. Should I therefore be forces to play at a style that I'm not very good at in-between my FPS fix?

Equally, some styles are mutually exclusive. Most wartime stratergy games require advanced planned (eg. civ) adding in something that requires quick reflexes (say, realtime battles) can break the balance - after all, when you can win the battles based on your ninja reflexes, why bother with the careful planning?

Not that different styles can't be combines, in fact they already have been sucessfully blended multiple times. Games like Deus Ex, Theif, BattleZone, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicals and Phantasy Star Online (to name but a few) are all games which "have the best of both worlds".

In short, I think the writer is horribly wrong and not been playing a wide enough set of games. Hell, the blanked comment about "all console games are quick action, all PC slow and strategic" should be a tip off that the writer hasn't been doing his homework.

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Original post by OrangyTangIn short, I think the writer is horribly wrong and not been playing a wide enough set of games. Hell, the blanked comment about "all console games are quick action, all PC slow and strategic" should be a tip off that the writer hasn't been doing his homework.

I was going to say the same thing. His comments about what console games and PC games are like are overly stereotyping, and untrue.

Thanks for the article Oluseyi but I have to say this was one of the most poorly written, overly generalized pieces on games I've seen since the "videogames cause violence" screeds. To the author I ask, just what exactly is mature? Let's take movies as our standard: For example, is the gothic horror of Aliens mature? If yes, then if you take the exact same concept and put it into a game, is that game now mature? If so, then just about every serious first person shooter out there is mature, and that covers a huge swath of the gaming industry.

Is the content of World War II mature? If so, there are countless turn-based, real-time and FPS games that are then also mature.

If murder and killing isn't mature subject matter the you have to wonder why the author didn't take on adventure games. Has he even heard of them?

This line:

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And many PC games ("Civilization"; the new "Black & White") are complicated and strategic enough to bewilder most tykes and intrigue many adults. But there's a missing niche. Console games (for PlayStation 2, Dreamcast, N64) boast great game play, requiring eye-hand coordination and providing an immersive, physical environment. PC games lack action but excel in concepts and complexity. Why can't we have the best of both worlds?

leads me to believe that the writer doesn't know jack about PC or console gaming as both types appear on both platforms. But the real gem is this misguided scrawl:

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It won't happen until we recognize games' capacity for real art. Current designers come from programming backgrounds, so millions of dollars in development costs produce a beautifully rendered world full of farting scarecrows.

As one of the many people on this board and probably thousands of people out there who have labored to distill complex social actions into numerical systems and workable gameplay, this is an insult. Only a person ridiculously ignorant of the sheer difficulty inherent in such an endeavor could have the nerve to whine about it being the programmer's fault.


And to this

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Meanwhile, the nerds behind strategy-based PC games lack the drive or ability to design a responsive, explorable, 3-D environment or characters that move the way you want them to.

I have to say: Really now? So exactly how much work is it to get thousands of autonomous AI entities to react and adapt to their environment? Where are the bottlenecks? What are the resource constraints? What are the core engineering problems?

But of course, you know all you need to know when you read these lines:

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Interactivity could be the most powerful artistic tool we have, yet no one does anything with it.

As Greg Costikyan once wrote, a light switch is interactive. I flip it on, I flip it off. Big deal. If the author is asking for a responsive system that responds to minute changes, he'll just have to hold his breath until several dozen games try (as Morrowind: Oblivion claims to be doing) and very likely fail.

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The pieces are all in place: The money's there (games now outgross movies),

... and as anyone who has ever tried to secure funding knows, it's just laying out in the gutter waiting to be picked up, right?

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the audience is ready for something new (older gamers now resort to emulations of retro games just to find something fun to play),

Even if I believed this (show me the data), I would again say big deal. You don't take a risk with your millions unless you know you can gain an edge.

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and the technical foundations have been laid.

No they haven't. The guy doesn't know what he's talking about.

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It would have been very interesting to ask how we appeal to a wider audience, or how we support deep emotional content with gameplay rather than cutscenes. Picking out one game for its immature humor and then generalizing it to the rest of the industry is just simply inept. It reminds me of all those English papers I had to write an hour before the deadline: Overly generalized, filled with slipshod reasoning, thrown together just to make the minimum word count.

I guess if I got A's for all of those this guy deserves to be published. [rolleyes]

I like the way that RTS games are made by nerds... obviously FPS games are made by rock stars like John Romero? [rolleyes]

I think the article *is* interesting, if way off base, simply because it shows how someone not in the industry sees games. Sadly, it's based almost entirely on one game (which incidentally sounds pretty cool). Has he ever played games such as Max Payne? GTA?

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Original post by OrangyTang after all, when you can win the battles based on your ninja reflexes, why bother with the careful planning?

I just had to laugh when I read that.

Unlike most of you, I see a genuine point in the article. Of course it is rife with generalizations and miscues, but it also makes valid points from a certain perspective.

I am not a gamer. Not because I don't like games, but because I find the contemporary selection of games embody conventions that I can't come to terms with. I despise RPGs because there's a lack of role-playing with them and an excess of statistical/numerical obsession. I don't play reflex games on my PC because the keyboard is an awkward device (some of you disagree, but it's really mouselook you're enamored of). In short, hundreds of games are released every year to critical and popular acclaim that I find to be entirely unplayable.

For that simple reason, I'm more favorably inclined toward external perspectives that are critical of gaming. For me, and people like me, there's something very wrong. And the fact that all the responses so far have been dismissive on the basis of "this guy knows nothing about game development" (he's not supposed to; he's a writer, writing as a consumer) is, to me, symptomatic of the problem: insularity.

[As an aside, the comments on the misapplication of "mature" are just... obtuse. There's a "Mature" ESRB rating for games, which is the usage here. There is no ambiguity.]

Essentially, the article asked why we didn't have smart, clever, strategic adult (in the sense of "not kiddie") games that also required good reflexes. All the rest is beside the point. I hadn't fully thought it through when I posted the thread earlier; the nature of the responses have helped me focus on the essentials.

My mistake. I'll be careful not to post material that asks admittedly naive questions ever again. I mean, we don't want that, do we?

"Essentially, the article asked why we didn't have smart, clever, strategic adult (in the sense of "not kiddie") games that also required good reflexes."

The audience of a game is the intersection of the parts, not the union. If you make a strategy game that requires twitch reflexes, you reduce your audience to people who like/excel at both.

Smart + Adult + Strategy + Reflex/Action likely reduces the number of potential buyers to less than profitable margins (if in fact there are not games out there that meet your desired style).

If course, it is also possible that this is a unique, unexploited market that publishers have ignored. I have a high degree of faith in publishers abilities to make money though, so I am a bit skeptical of this.

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Original post by Oluseyi Unlike most of you, I see a genuine point in the article. Of course it is rife with generalizations and miscues, but it also makes valid points from a certain perspective. I am not a gamer. Not because I don't like games, but because I find the contemporary selection of games embody conventions that I can't come to terms with. I despise RPGs because there's a lack of role-playing with them and an excess of statistical/numerical obsession. I don't play reflex games on my PC because the keyboard is an awkward device (some of you disagree, but it's really mouselook you're enamored of). In short, hundreds of games are released every year to critical and popular acclaim that I find to be entirely unplayable. For that simple reason, I'm more favorably inclined toward external perspectives that are critical of gaming. For me, and people like me, there's something very wrong. And the fact that all the responses so far have been dismissive on the basis of "this guy knows nothing about game development" (he's not supposed to; he's a writer, writing as a consumer) is, to me, symptomatic of the problem: insularity. [As an aside, the comments on the misapplication of "mature" are just... obtuse. There's a "Mature" ESRB rating for games, which is the usage here. There is no ambiguity.] Essentially, the article asked why we didn't have smart, clever, strategic adult (in the sense of "not kiddie") games that also required good reflexes. All the rest is beside the point. I hadn't fully thought it through when I posted the thread earlier; the nature of the responses have helped me focus on the essentials. My mistake. I'll be careful not to post material that asks admittedly naive questions ever again. I mean, we don't want that, do we?

Not one single game title captures what you want? How about past titles?

I don't think there's a computer game out that allows REAL role-playing ala Dungeons and Dragons. And even in that game, back when I was into it, almost no one "role-played". We hung out and acted like ourselves and played the game. No one talked funny or actually pretended to be a wizard. If they did they probably wouldn't have been invited back. You only see that behavior at Gen Con or other things. Almost no one who plays want's to actually pretend to BE a warrior or a wizard, they just want to play their toon really well and have a good time. By making a game that is specifically focused on the role-playing aspect (for real) you are zeroing in on a market of, perhaps, thousands. Not enough to make a title.