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Through
the Ages, Man has used his imagination to create fabulous wonders
and the most hideous nightmares. These nightmares and wonders have
stayed with us right up to the present day, all of them have become
more real the longer they’ve gone on, some to the point at which
we can’t live without them, money for instance, but everything
that you see around you was at some point just one man’s crazy
idea. It seems that now we have accomplished so much we are
starting to slow down again, our ideas seem to be funnelled in one
direction - so it almost seems like that instead of man using his
imagination to solve his problems, there is now gro ups of people
using their imagination to solve the problems - they have
established - man has.
This
is something I can see happening in the games industry at the
moment. The virtual
world, created by one man’s crazy idea, has evolved to satisfy a
market instead of the individual. I’m sure that when games first
came about they were made for each individual that contributed to
them, each person had their own “wouldn’t that be cool” idea.
Now it seems that there are only a few game developers out there
who don’t have to have a market in mind when creating a game,
limiting what ideas that the members of the team can add and
therefore how the entire game can develop. The groups of people
delegating how a game should come out by way of large statistical
information analysis give the game designers a skewed
interpretation of what the game market want, making them produce
large quantities of games to fill genres that are “a hole in
the market” which will only exist whilst they are busy
pushing the games for other genres.
This
statistical information is also used to produce massive marketing
campaigns targeting the few random individuals who fit the sum of
the parts, making many people who would take an interest in the
game stop short because the game doesn’t look like it’s
designed for them, a silly idea really; but then what isn’t
designed for someone nowadays?
Maybe
a solution is for the games designers to put out a simple plea to
the general public to send in any ideas, keeping the games market
as a forerunner in the mass public domain and ending the fear of
low sales turnover. Although how would anyone fairly be able to say
which idea gets the money put into it and how much, also how an
earth would the Publishing and Rights legalities work?
Another
idea of course is putting in the option of full customisation with
the designers giving the user the basic blocks of every game in one
package and allowing them to make their world as they see fit,
maybe only worthy for the fervent gamers willing to put in hours of
work, but with the option of letting a friend play it, anyone would
be tempted to part with cash for the joy of having your own entire
game, menu screens, story, characters and all.
Whichever
direction the games developers try, one of these or one of the
thousand other possibilities, the need is the same.
To bring the user controlled environment back into the users
control, gaming isn’t the industry bureaucracy was made for.
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