01 May 2007 0845H

On videogames that don’t suck

Some of the readers of this blog play video games, I am assured. Among my squaddies, with whom I have fought seven online global conflicts and been killed thousands of times, not much has changed over the last 10 years, except that video games have become more directly social, to be played with others simultaneously, cooperatively towards a common objective, over very long distances, and have now replaced arcade units and the home computer as a dedicated entertainment console.

Video games have always been generally subject to the same rules that govern highly-produced creative artifacts such as books, films, and songs: most of them will be reasonably good, certainly more so than what had come before, but not as good as what will come after, and all are subject to the same waves of innovation and stagnation and other vicissitudes that every other industry experiences, with wild occasional successes, some bright moments, some dim ones, and some miserable failures. Like everything else.

So given this historical view, it’s telling in the wake of the success of the Nintendo Wii and the spectacular non-event of the PS3 that led to the downfall of Ken Kutaragi at Sony, who has become a professional dead-horse-flogger, that we are not on the cusp of a disruptive wave of innovation. Not when this BusinessWeek podcast with David Perry, a video game industry veteran, tells us that it takes $30M to launch an MMORPG in the US, $10M in China. Technology and graphics, as usual, do not convert gamers, only games do: we’ve seen it time and again, Intellivision, Coleco Adam, all of Sega’s consoles, and now the PS3. There’s just no wave of quick, iterative innovation happening. It’s all slow, going for the big knockout instead of iterative quick wins. I think Hong Kong films before ‘97. I think the golden age of radio, television, videogames. I think of the web back in 1997-2000. That kind of innovation where there are lots of people throwing ideas and effort and iterating quickly. The cynic in me tells me that it probably is happening but is obscured by the big shadow of knockout hits.

There was a little talk about Web 3.0 in the webcast too, which Perry defines as “getting computers to use the web themselves on your behalf.” Not much beyond that. It would be interesting to have agents roaming the web on your behalf, or constructs, who could pass a Turing test and do things for you, separate of yourself, possibly do things as you, autonomously, which opens up all kinds of scariness.

I am heading out to Detroit. Catch ya in a bit.

Permanent link to On videogames that don’t suck

Filed under Geekery, Technology

Be the first to respond to "On videogames that don’t suck"

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

No responses yet.

And now it's your turn.

Fire your weapon, soldier. Just be careful of friendly fire. NAME & EMAIL required.

Your response