/discuss
I only got halfway through this, but:
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The designer behind SWG is castigating the game industry for failing to adapt to what the market wants
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Also claims that gaming is domed because big hits close down their genres to further games – citing as examples WoW (which followed and improved upon huge genre-dominating hit EverQuest) and Civilization IV (do I need to say anything else about that?)
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Also lauds Pong over GTA because the instructions were simpler, which shows us that computer games are becoming more niche-y
Somewhere in there my head asplode, so I haven’t read the rest. Maybe it all comes together.
Yeah, but remember, this is the guy who not that long ago got himself Slashdotted for writing “Are Single Player Games Doomed?” and calling them [SP games] an historical aberration.
Single-player games exist, says Koster, because introverted geeks were making them (and basically making games for themselves). Since, as he claims, “non-participants” are in the minority, your days of single-playing are numbered, you bunch of pantywaist stay-at-home no-life recluses. :)
… /ignore/
How that gets him anything in the gaming industry other than a savage beating is beyond me.
Because:
a) He’s the designer behind Ultima Online, which, for all its sins, broke much ground which other games have yet to follow.
b) He’s articulate, intelligent, and has interesting things to say.
c) SWG was released early, over his objections.
d) SWG had some pretty neat stuff in it, anway.
e) Not everyone is a fanboy who thinks only in terms of “omgomghenerfedmyclass”.
I think this is an incredibly valid point if you look at it from the perspective of games as a medium for everyone rather than will long time gamers get more of the same.
I can’t easily express how surprised I was to find out that my mom is a gamer, so long as the game is easy to pick up and understand. (Hard to master is no obstacle, however easy to play is absolutely necessary.)
This is most definitely something that’s continuously a contention in “mainstream” gaming. (Where “mainstream gaming” paradoxically is generally restricted to a core of niche gamers compared to the real mainstream potential market.)
Even amongst so-called core gamers, look at how much pre-supposed knowledge is already built into certain genres (RTS’s come to mind quickly, as do the few hardcore CRPG’s still being released such as Oblivion. Civ IV is probably a good example here too, really.)
How about “omgipaid$50forthatand$50moreforthewifeandwequitaftertwodays”? Is that whining?
SWG had some ideas that, alas, I don’t expect to see incorporated into MMO’s for another 10 years again, but which were damned solid ideas for building a virtual world. The fact that nobody wanted a virtual world in the Star Wars mythos is perhaps obvious in hindsight, but probably wasn’t going forward. I, personally, liked the idea of music playing, dancing wookies. I liked running through strange star-wars-y planets and collecting resources. When I simply ran out of time for any MMO’s and cancelled, I fully anticipated and looked forward to coming back to SWG and making a bio-engineer who got to explore (and crossbreed) all the varied fauna of the differing star wars worlds.
Unfortunately, the part that had to do with being a “Yahoo, we’re all clear kid! Now blow this thing and let’s get out of here…” space cowboy didn’t come off very well, and there were a lot of folks out there who expected that.
I don’t think that makes Koster a bad designer. I just think perhaps neither he nor anybody else knew how to mesh the two, and certainly the space cowboy bit didn’t end up turning out very well. As I hear it, the game revamp hasn’t either, though, which points to it not simply being a failure of Raph’s there.
When you decide that one game you didn’t enjoy is sufficient reason to “savagely beat” anyone involved with its design…yeah, that’s whining.
Thank God.
All the marketing speak got me all zoned out, so I decided to read through the article tallying all the terms I could find. That was much more fun. So here weeee go!
“vital piece”
-It’s just not a piece anymore, unless it’s vital eh? Are there any pieces that aren’t vital? Or is it “what we’re seeing now is a revitilization of the pieces”
“ecology of content”
-As the content sheds it coat, it lets out a strange keening sound from its anal range. This is the mating call the female content will hear when the snows have melted.
“re-use market”
-Is that where we all bring together our hemp bags to the grocery store and make necklaces out of pumpkin seeds while wearing hats made out of milk cartoons and sing, “This little light of mine?”
“garbage heap of history”
-“And here we have the largest garbage heap in the history of the world,” said the tour guide, pointing at the picture. “Notice how Theodore Rex DX stretches his maw to accomodate the load.”
“friendly neighborhood Gamestop”
-The friendly neighborhood Gamestop? It’s right next to the friendly neighborhood gangbang, if you take a left at the friendly neighborhood rapehole.
“hit-driven media consumption”
-I’m not one for eating Greek chicks hopped up on coke either.
“choke out the variety”
-“Dude, what’s with your apartment? Why all the gaudy setpieces and clashing colors?”
“I told my girlfriend I was going to choke out the variety and well, you know…”
“particular subculture”
-As opposed to a subculture that doesn’t mind seeds in its salad dressing?
“genre king”
-Oh my, the Genre King!
“emphasis on assets”
-Is an ass-et a term for a female character in the game whose only aesthetic value is relentless T&A?
“relationship between the consumer and the producer”
-She winced, sighed and just decided to blurt it out all at once, cutting him off, “I’m in a relationship, George.”
His mouth fell open and he dropped his hands on the dinner table. “With whom?”
She fingered the ring on her finger, “It’s…it’s…the producer of my consumed goods.”
“predictive”
-Being predictive for a moment, I think the porn stars might eventually overwhelm the golfers.
“entire infrastructure”
-That’s like six syllables of nothing! Impressive! Politicians take note!
“Web revolution”
-The spiders are already at our northern borders and I fear our troops near the south may not hold out much longer as the resistance gains force and more dew.
“antiquated notion”
-Are there any other kinds these days? Shall we just dump all the remaining notions into antique shops?
“box models”
-Zounds! The box model cometh!
“locking in subscribers”
-Once you have paid and signed, you will be locked in here from the hours of 8:00 AM to 10:00 PM. Exit will only be allowed with considerable whining. You’ll find the restrooms to the left. We will swallow the key.
“not a sustainable curve”
-If you want to see something that’s really not a sustainable curve, just look at a 40-year-old woman.
“resonate with the mass market”
-“Sir! I think you ought to take a look at the sound waves this thing is making!”
“By god! They’re resonating with the mass market!”
“distribution is in total upheaval”
-“What shall we see?”
“I dunno, Tom Cruise is in Partial Regurgitation.”
“Huh! But look who’s in Total Upheaval!”
“Distribution! Oh I loved Distribution in Complete Vomit!”
“more varied ecology, because the gatekeepers won’t be there”
-Uh oh. What’s ZOOL gonna do now? Does he at least still have a keymaster?
“lots of aggregators and portals”
-“Well then, what’s the culture like on the Planet Zabon?”
“Lots of aggregators and portals, sir!”
-Kitsune
I don’t think this is actually true. There were lots of people who wanted a virtual world in the Star Wars mythos, I’d say.
The problem was that the game wasn’t all there. Too many broken or missing bits. (Of which one was the adventuring, just have fun, “Blow this thing and get out of here!”.)
I suspect that SWG, broken and incomplete as it was, did better than it would have if it’d been a generic EQ/Dikuclone with an equivalent amount of work in it. Because who wants to kill ten rats in the Star Wars mythos, just so they can kill ten banthas and level up for the epic raid fight against Darth Vader?
I’d say that SWG’s failures were in implementation, not in what it reached for.
I’ve already gone on record regarding SWG, so I won’t bother rehashing it here.
I must say that I am surprised by the lack of engagement with the actual content of what I said. Usually Qt3 is a bit better about that.
The slides are posted at http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/ageofdinosaurs.shtml which may help in terms of following the case I am making. But the short form is:
- costs continue to rise dramatically
- but consumer willingness to pay for content continues to fall across all media
- games have increasingly targeted gamers only, except for games made effectively outside the games industry
- games have grown dramatically complex, so much so that it’s very hard-to-impossible for a non-gamer to pick them up
- along with it, there’s now a gamer culture that derides simpler games as “not real games” or “sucky.”
- market research shows that this hardcore gamer culture is a small segment of the overall possible market, both psychographically and in terms of usage patterns
- in the meantime, non-core-gamer games have quietly grown up to account for 35% of the top 100 sellers since Jan 2001
- and more and more non-game industry companies have stepped into the market and done spectacularly
- and digital distribution is rising dramatically, and favors a different gamebuilding model, with less assets, smaller footprint, and simpler gameplay
- and the noise level in the marketplace is very different in that climate, forcing different approaches to relating to players
Illustrative of this, btw, is that despite all the fun made of musicians and dancers in Galaxies:
- CokeMusic.com, which has 2.5m registered users, is essentially the SWG musician system
- three of the top 20 MMOs in Korea this week are about dancing
Of the top MMOs in the West in terms of audience, WoW comes in at #4, behind Runescape, Habbo Hotel, and Gaia Online. On the other end of the spectrum, little web-based online games like Travian or web MMORPGs like Kings of Chaos are posting numbers that are quite respectable, in the 50-70k range, and have plenty of scope for growth. The fact that we don’t think this way is illustrative of the way that the current mindset traps us into thinking that only the AAA games market is “real.”
As far as the single-player game thing, we hashed through that already, but I still stand by it. :)
Raph, have you been paying attention to Miyamoto and Iwata at Nintendo? Because most of what you say is what they’ve been saying for like three years now…
DS and Wii were specifically designed to get games out of this particular rut. DS is wildly successful in Japan and successful here in the US because it addresses these issues and reaches beyond typical games culture and “gamer” games.
What I found interesting about SWG was that, after a really fantastic tutorial level, it quickly becomes obvious that it is a complete and total failure of game design. On some really, really basic levels. I don’t mean the whole “we don’t want to be moisture farmers” thing (which is certainly a problem).
I mean it had an interface that was both ugly and WAY too complicated for neophytes, while not even providing the kind of data that hardcore gamers would want. Excessively long travel not just between major hubs, but to get to ANYTHING useful to do. Big worlds full of lots and lots of nothing special (supposedly to leave room for the gobs of player-created content that would surely immediately flood the game, but really just a huge overreaction to the landgrab that was such a problem in UO).
It’s not just the basic problem of being a Wookie warrior and running away from giant butterflies. It’s that it took you half an hour to get to fighting them and just as long to work out the interface, so running away from giant butterflies was the most exciting thing you did the first day you played it.
And wasn’t SWG actually released way late? I know it was released earlier than the developers wanted, but isn’t that because it was already dramatically behind schedule?
I do find some delicious irony in the designer of SWG praising Pong over GTA for its simplicity. Could it be that Koster looks at SWG and sees failure everywhere we do?
Regardless of whether I agree with him or not, Raph always has an interesting perspective on the industry, and usually gets me to consider it in a different manner than I did before. That’s a lot more than I can say for most people who take time to comment. His ideas deserve more than out-of-hand dismissal simply because you didn’t like SWG.
The problem with SWG wasn’t that specific mechanics of the game itself were bad, just that it was a spectacularly bad use of an established license. If you want to have a virtual world in which musicians and dancers are a big part of the game, make some hip-hop culture MMORPG or something along those lines, don’t shoehorn that shit into a Star Wars game, where the vast majority of players that show up are (rightly) going to want to do Jedi shit or be Han Solo.
Btw it’s not true that the dinosaurs failed to adapt. Some types adapted quite well, thank you. Many fly south every winter.
Overall though I have to agree with this. The constant trend I have seen for a while in “real” gaming is: better graphics, higher requirements, more and more and more. And no real improvement in fundamental gameplay. That can’t last.
Yes, in fact in the talk I specifically cited them a couple of times.