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I
feel the need, at this point in time, to express my reasoning for
why I really got into the games industry, and what I saw in the
future of the marketplace as it now stands. It seems that
everything the British games press release is about the ambitions
of gaming as a whole only based on personal  preference and ideals,
kind of like politics, everyone’s aiming for an absolute state
but within totally different types of rules and structure and as
you can all see, we end up getting to a kind of unified mess. With
many larger, more, well known companies, packaging and re-packaging
software make-ups that they know work and they know will appeal to
a large audience. Then the smaller companies almost copying this
because they don’t want to lose a lot of money producing a
product that hasn’t been through a tried and tested supporting
market. Until you just get a repeating machine churning out
“good” game after “good” game, all good, but not
idealistic.
Now as I have said before, I have had the odd dabble with
the old D20’s, going through the trying process of creating my
perfect avatar and trying to make him survive in someone else’s
made up world. Within this world there are rules and structure but
because they allow for every possibility the only limitation is
your mind. Take for example the idea that whilst playing a Dungeons
& Dragons role-play game, someone wants to do a back-flip
in the air to try and catch the chandeliers above him between his
legs, it would be a pointless exercise, but because of the
structure within the role-playing environment, they could do
probability dice rolls against his already decided stats - the
better his needed stats the more likely he is t o do it - and,
provided a little lucks on his side, he’ll perform the most
spectacular back-flip you could possibly imagine.
That’s a major problem with the state of the games
industry. Developers know games that encourage people to use
their imagination sell well, but they seem to just turn a blind eye
to it. The evidence is right there in front of them, look at any
big game; Half-Life 2, Grand Theft Auto, The Sims,
even the SmackDown! series, all massive sellers, all with
features that allow the use of the imagination. Half-Life 2 has
amazing AI and the ability to use your environment to your
advantage; you are invited to use a large amount of your
imagination to complete the tasks. Grand Theft Auto just
invites you to run around a pre-constructed playpen using your
imagination as you see fit and The Sims not only invites you
to use your imagination, but also bond with your character. The
evidence is blatant even throughout earlier games, take Frontier
for instance, a massively popular game with totally open-ended
gameplay and even though it was released on the Commodore64 and the
Atari-ST, I still have people coming to tell me how revolutionary
they think it is.
From the outside I really saw the games industry as a world
that had lots of amazing concepts, but not the graphical capability
to show them as an alternate real-life. Now, especially with the
case of the Next-Gen, we do have the capabilities to show enough
“reality” to not make people use their imagination to believe
what’s happening. Why don’t we instead, try to let them use
their imagination to enhance the gameplay, not just in the sense  of
Grand Theft Auto, where you can run wherever you like, but
more like the Dungeons & Dragons games of old, where you
can do whatever you like.
We just need the games developers to use their
imagination when producing games. We don’t need a game pre-made
for us, a set of rules and a environment to play the game in is all
we really want, not a route to take whilst constantly trying to
overcome the obstacles thought up for us by the benevolent game
designer. There are enough obstacles in the “real-life” to keep
us more than occupied, why not use them to increase the challenge
level and leave the completion of the tasks up to the user.
This is the reason I joined the games industry and the
objectives I see progressing the industry in the future. The
increase of user input and the need of imagination while
de-complicating the internal structure of the game, it’s
something that will take a lot of time and work, but once complete
will allow anyone to pick up a game and immediately enjoy it,
without having to re-learn how to play games beforehand.
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