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A
lot of people ask me where I think the games industry is going from
here. After a couple of moments deliberation I tell them what the
industry has told us, it’s  gonna
get bigger and faster, with more data on the disk, more graphical
wow factor and many more enemies/objects on screen. So these people
wander away, happy in the thought that the future’s already been
sorted for them. Then I sit back down, look around me at the
thousands of games on offer and begin to think maybe, just maybe,
when our fore-fathers first started lining up their little bits of
code, creating the virtual Adam and Eve, their idea of what would
come of it just isn’t what we’ve made of it.
Fact:
Everything in the virtual world is a divergence, even in the
conceptual sense, of the real world. Everything - it has to be -
otherwise each game would have a different set of physical,
chemical and biological laws depending on the designers mood at the
time, thus making it pointless. Each game is already hard enough
when you’re trying to figure out the limitations from the real
world it has been given. Countless times have I seen a new gamer
sitting, shouting at a screen, “why can’t I knock the wall
down!” or even, “why am I dying?” It’s because many people
fail to understand how non-ideate gaming is. It’s all just a very
simple representation of a huge complexity that could happen. The
only thing in games at the moment that resembles th e
real world is the environment they’re built in, the one thing
that gives the user the feeling of a reality taking place.
When
the first games were designed there were only a few potentially
modifiable blocks of animation, each of these were animated to the
best level that the individual system could master and then rules
were added to them to give a sense of reality, say for instance;
the animation of a sword hitting an enemy - doesn’t matter how
well or badly animated it is, without the rule of three hits kills
that enemy the animation’s useless. It was then left up to the
imagination of the player to incorporate these animations/rules
into their own version of reality, to understand that the animation
showing a sword going through someone is just a representation of a
thousand different possible outcomes of that movement, now we have
the potential to animate many of thousands of polygons at once, and
we do - to great effect as well, it’s just we still need the
rules there to make it real.
It
seems like we’re still playing Dungeons And Dragons. The
game designer is the dungeon master; he makes the world you’re in
and controls the limitations of what you can and can’t do. The
basics of what’s happening is in front of you, the character
sheets and the dice rolls, but the actual reality of the game, what
you believe to be happening, is all in your imagination. It’s
this point of view that I feel is taking gaming far, far away from
what the God’s of game design were thinking of. You play as the
person with the character sheets and the dice, not as the person
who is in the game.
Now
when we only had a few blocks of animation to play with I can
understand why people would ask you to use your imagination a
little. But now we have a few thousand million to play with there
shouldn’t be a need to represent things anymore. Why do we need a
rocket launcher to hit us in the face to represent pain, when in
real life a scratch or bruise is plenty enough to make us shout
expletives? I feel we really need address how we view the make up
of our virtual world we have made. Making the games for the
third-person is all well and good but by doing so we limit the
possibilities there are whilst creating it, and totally constrict
the users input and enjoyment by doing so. Does this feel like the
future of gaming to you?
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