I don’t think editors care about this kind of thing at all, Brad. In fact, I don’t even think most of the readers care. They’re as unknowledgeable as many of the writers.
I used to think knowing a lot of the history of games on all platforms back to the dawn of this industry was an asset of mine. I’d go out of my way to play lots of games to be in the know. But really, nobody cares.
I’m pretty burned out on the whole game journalism thing. Everyone talks a good game, but ultimately just don’t give a shit about getting people that have a clue. It’s really all who you know and who you’re buddies with that gets you the gigs.
And now that the magazines are gone, even less people give a shit than ever did before.
So - Tom is rigorous and has great credibility, Bruce is extremely knowledgeable in the area of strategy games (and he’s a brain surgeon on top of that) ---- and I’m old? LOL! ;)
JUST BECAUSE you and I are the only ones here who played Odysseus: The Complete Adventure on the Apple II doesn’t mean that we’re old, Brad.
Well - maybe it does. I saw your “real age” on Facebook. ;)
Well - maybe it does. I saw your “real age” on Facebook. ;)
I’m 180 years young! :)
I used to think knowing a lot of the history of games on all platforms back to the dawn of this industry was an asset of mine. I’d go out of my way to play lots of games to be in the know. But really, nobody cares.
I’m pretty burned out on the whole game journalism thing. Everyone talks a good game, but ultimately just don’t give a shit about getting people that have a clue. It’s really all who you know and who you’re buddies with that gets you the gigs
For what it’s worth, I think it should be an asset. From a reviewer point of view, it lets the reviewer see if an idea has been tried before and executed better. Certainly a movie reviewer would be expected to have some historical knowledge on movies.
Like Jeff mentioned, he and I could discuss how I ripped off (er was inspired) the battle “dialog” from an Apple II game and put it into Galactic Civilizations for the invasion dialog. Maybe you’re right and nobody cares about where concepts come from but as a lover of games, I think there are a lot of people who, like me, do care about this stuff because we love it so much.
At the end of the day, I make games because I really like doing it. It’s fun to make them and funner to play them. It would pain me to find out that reviewers don’t share that same view because it’s such a missed opportunity. I’ve always felt so lucky to be able to make a living doing something I enjoy so much.
Yeah, perhaps because I’ve been playing PC games forever, as Brad noted ;) , I do think it makes a difference if a reviewer has some perspective of gaming history. If a movie reviewer understands that The Magnificent Seven is a western remake of The Seven Samurai, it doesn’t change whether it’s a good movie or not but I do think it helps the reviewer in his/her perspective of the movie. I cringe when I see a reviewer gush over some feature as being “revolutionary” when it is something that was done (and done better) years ago in some classic game. To use the old game that us old farts use so often as a reference, unless you’ve played the original Xcom, you can’t really understand how so many of the subsequent Xcom clones fall flat. When I review flight sims, I have a standard for the role-playing aspect that can suck a player in and make them care about their flight partners rather than use them as bogey fodder and that makes a sim so much more compelling. To this day, I feel that Oleg’s sims feel sterile compared with the old Red Baron 3D and the old Falcon 3. Falcon 3’s developers “got it” - that making you care about what happens to the pilots flying with you adds another dimension of immersion and and can provide a layer of passion for the game, and they did that, way back then, by letting you rename the other pilots and even put in your own photos of the other pilots. Suddenly, instead of your wingman being “Ace” it was your brother or best friend, with a photo of them popping up when you reviewed the status of other pilots. Flight sim developers got so caught up in technical veracity that they lost the human element.
I agree Jeff. And I think part of the concern being brought up is the evolution of our “industry” from its origins as an “enthusiast” community industry into generic big business where the only concern is optimizing net revenue.
Both extremes are problematic. Early on, when it was largely “enthusiast press” it was bad news for the game developer if the reviewer wasn’t already enthusiastic about the game. But the reviewer typically knew their stuff but they weren’t what would be considered professional journalists in the sense they are in other industries.
But at the opposite extreme, which is where we’re heading, it’s cheaper just to hire some blogger to review a game regardless of how much familiarity they might have with the genre and so a lot of people who really knew our industry end up leaving.
I apologize if anything I’m writing is incoherent or taken the wrong way as I’m in the middle of crunch mode and Qt3 is my primary outlet these days between compiles and testing. But I guess the point I’m trying to make is that our industry is moving away from making cool things to making products that are purely about optimizing profit.
Yeah (and I’m also using QT3 as a 3 minute break between studying for my two day intensive interview Thursday and Friday! ;) ) there certainly is a difference in the market today. The console gamer who appears to be dominating the marketing plans these days is surely a very different demographic than the PC gamer. I’m just guessing, but I suspect the PC gamer has more of an audience for the perspective we’re talking about, while the console gamer is less interested in such things and more interested in how well the controls work and how cool the game is - perhaps just because there isn’t the history there yet.
My suspicion is that the vast majority of game-review readers don’t value expert opinions in quite the same way, say, movie-goers or music-lovers turn to Ebert or Rolling Stone* for their insights. I think that’s at least partly due to videogames being a less mature medium (both in terms of age & content) than other media, partly due to the “NOW NOW NOW” news cycle, where alacrity is considered more important than accuracy or insight, at least when it comes to drumming up readers. But regardless of the reasons, if there’s little demand in their audience for experts, why would gaming websites & publications go out of their way to recruit old hands? I suspect expert opinions only matter to gaming grognards, not the dabblers or the young’uns.
*No clue who does reputable music reviews these days, so substitute Expert Music Review Person of your choice.
I suspect that’s a false dichotomy - or at least, it presumes that all PC gamers fit within a particularly convenient niche as long as you ignore the Bejeweled and Sims and “casual” WoW crowds and so forth.
Um…what? Consoles have been around as game machines as long or longer than PCs. There most certainly is history, and it’s far more relevant to the mainstream reader than PC game history will ever be because so many more people were involved in it, via arcades, Atari consoles, Nintendo, etc.
I understand where you’re coming from, Dave, but do you think today’s XBox 360 or Wii gamers trace their gaming history back to the Atari and Pong? I’m honestly ignorant of the demographics in the current console consumer market, but I just guess the proliferation of the millions of console gamers today, by the math, means that most of them never once played Asteroids or care about it.
And yeah, I do have a picture of PC gamers today as an older demo than console gamers, and thus the type of who are more likely to be interested in whether a feature is a tribute to the “Achtung!” that used to make me jump when an SS officer walked in a door in Castle Wolfenstein (the 2D original.) But I admit I’ve been pretty much out of the gaming writing gig for a couple of years or so.
(By the way - this thread made me cringe, because I remember an article I wrote years ago, that Tom and Mark were gracious enough to publish on QT3, titled “Why gaming writing sucks” or some such, and all through the article I misused the “its” and “it’s” forms. Appropriately horribly embarrassing. ;) )
It isn’t that nobody cares, it’s that the people who do care make up a much smaller portion of a growing gamer population. It sometimes feels like games are becoming a mass-market commodity, where availability is so high that the only way consumers can distinguish between titles is by the branding. I mean, just look at all of the Bejeweled knock-offs.
By the same token, though, do you think the average WoW player knows a thing about the history of MMORPGs - or cares? Once gaming hit a certain level of mainstream success, the unwashed masses flooded our party - hasn’t been the same since.
[Actually, we had a thread not long ago about the average age of gamers, among other things.]
I think it’s fairly simple… far more people trace gaming back to Pac-Man, Pong, Asteroids, etc. than to the likes of Castle Wolfenstein. Unless your school had an Apple II, you were lucky to have played that. The sheer volume of arcade machines and Atari 2600 units sold give that a much larger potential population of fans that would like to be informed how new games meet up with the old ones.
You interpreted the millions of console gamers today as being made up of people that don’t know Asteroids. I think that’s backwards. The Xbox 360 and PS3 markets are driven by long-time gamers. Look at the recent success of Street Fighter IV as an example of that. Many of these people have come from PC and console backgrounds and know these old games very well (and by old I mean anywhere from about ten to thirty years ago). The Wii has found an audience among pretty much everyone, including those who left videogames behind a long time ago but probably stood in front of a Pac-Man or Space Invaders machine somewhere along the way and are now finally intrigued enough by motion controls to come back.
I think the history of gaming is written mostly by consoles and arcades with PC gaming a very small niche where far fewer games crossed over to where people know them today. You’re far more likely to get some nods of “Oh yeah!” from the likes of Mario, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man or even Pong than you are from X-Com. There’s also a much greater respect for the classic games among the console gamers than there is among PC gamers. PC gamers tend to throw out the old so fast that you wonder if it ever existed in the first place. I think that’s really frustrating…
That makes sense in some ways. But I would argue that the evolution of electronic gaming went from the arcades to the home arcade machines to the PC, before the recent explosion of the home consoles. Now, remember that I’m talking about from the 70s through the 80s, 90s, and 00s. We had a Playstation and a Nintendo game system, but it seems to me that the market was extremely PC (and by PC, I mean Apple, TRS-80, Commodore, Amiga, then IBM PC) oriented and dominated. Sierra, EA, etc. were all making games for the PCs and that’s where most of the action was for years.
I’m trying to remember the first E3 at which I recall the consoles taking over - i.e. the first one where the PC felt like the poor country cousin. Anyone?
But I may have a very skewed view, and may be related to my experience - I purchased one of the first Apple IIs, had friends with Northstars and TRS-80s and Commodore PETs - so in addition to all the little handhelp electronic games and the Atari on which we played pong, I was a first hand witness to the birth of gaming on the PCs. Perhaps watching PC gaming devolop from arcade clones in Ziploc bags (most of the first PC games were Pac Man and Asteroids and eventually Zaxxon clones!) to original ideas and to today has given me too much of a PC focused POV.
All that said (yeah, I’d rather type this stuff than get back to studying, LOL!) I thing gaming evolved from the arcades to the PC and now back to the consoles again, in terms of the majority of gamers at any given time, and certainly in terms of the focus and development of game technology.
If by “recent explosion” you mean “starting with the NES over 25 years ago*” then I might agree with you. There was a lull in console games in North America between the video game crash of `83 and the NES taking off in popularity a couple years later, during which time you might be able to argue PC games eclipsed consoles here. But the NES sold ~60M worldwide, including 34M in the Americas. The popularity of any given console has varied considerably since then, but in general the console industry has been steadily growing. It’s hard to argue credibly that consoles haven’t been a major industry driver - both economically and in terms of game design - for the last quarter-century.
*The NES aka Famicom came out in Japan in 83; it hit the US in 85.
EDIT: I will say I think PC gaming was more hobbyist- / enthusiast-focused during the 80s and early 90s, while consoles were more mainstream / youth-oriented back then. There was also a geographic & cultural divide: PC game developers were concentrated in the West, while Japan was focused on console development.
Wow… I think you’re definitely right that your view is skewed by your past.
The NES is a landmark entertainment device. It single handedly revived videogames in the US. It still has the best selling game of all-time (Super Mario Bros. 3… over 40 million sold… though Wii Sports is apparently close to surpassing it) and shapes a much larger segment of gaming’s past than any other single console before PlayStation.
The 16-bit era was more evenly split between SEGA and Nintendo, but was still far more influential among the general populace than any PC of the time. PlayStation, PlayStation 2, these are iconic among the general gaming populace today with many of the “kids” growing up with them, not PCs.
The PC has always been something with a very hardcore very niche audience that stuck by it through thick and thin. Everyone else dabbled, mainly because PCs were always so expensive by comparison. The only real computers that broke through were those from Commodore or the Sinclair Spectrum, and even then mainly in Europe. Atari and Commodore computers were also the domain of the rich.
I’m not sure why you think there’s suddenly been an “explosion of home consoles”. Atari, Nintendo, SEGA/Nintendo, Sony/Nintendo… these were all massive generations of machines with much larger numbers of players than PC gaming by huge volumes. PC gaming hit a very nice high around 1998 with Half-Life, but it was still such a small piece of the pie compared to console gaming. Consoles pretty much killed arcades, not PCs.
Finally, sales numbers back all this up. The sheer volume of multi-million selling console games dwarfs all of PC gaming. Only Blizzard and the Sims really stand out from PCs.
Now, if you want to talk about technology, then there are arguments on both sides whether you want to discuss those in silicon or those in control methods.
Anyway, yeah, your time in PC gaming has skewed your view quite a bit. :)
I guess it’s like taking a popper followed immediately by a quaalude. Or something. Come on, you fucking stellar drug addict copy editors, get it right!
