Welcome to a dream of what could be
If you haven't checked out the game Cloud, I highly recommend it. This is the tagline to the game:
"Have you ever wanted to fly among the clouds? To see the sky only where birds soar? Welcome to a dream of what could be. Welcome to Cloud."
Gamasutra has a Q&A article with the creators of the game. From the article:
"Compared with films, the emotional experiences that video games encompass lack variety. Although there are thousands of games and a number of defined genres, you can pretty much cover 95% of the mainstream games with adjectives like 'addicting, stimulating, and competitive'. But is 'addiction' all what we want? Does every game have to contain 'competition'.
Mature mediums like film have proven that they can offer a wide range of emotions and content that appeal to a broader audience. We think that games can appeal to a much broader range of emotions and attract very different types of players, too."
Will our industry eventually mature to the level of movies, in the sense that it can appeal to nearly all people, not just "gamers"? I think it can, but getting there may not be easy and may take more time than I'd personally like it too. Obstacles in the path: the generational gap (this will disappear with time), the limited genre of video games that exist within the mainstream consciousness (this will decrease with the disappearance of the generation gap, but can never be eliminated completely in any industry), the current publishing models (limited funding for games outside of the proven successful genres), the PC as the only platform available to independent developers (the next generation of consoles could change this with online distribution straight to the console), and the user experience or interface to the game itself (I think the Revolution controller is a step in the right direction to opening up the video game experience to a larger market.)
Also read "Death to the Game Industry: Long Live Games" by Greg Costikyan.
What are your thoughts?
I originally published this post on 02.04.2006, but when I came to the blog today it seems to have disappeared. Not sure what happened. Luckily I found a cached version on Google Desktop and salvaged it.
"Have you ever wanted to fly among the clouds? To see the sky only where birds soar? Welcome to a dream of what could be. Welcome to Cloud."
Gamasutra has a Q&A article with the creators of the game. From the article:
"Compared with films, the emotional experiences that video games encompass lack variety. Although there are thousands of games and a number of defined genres, you can pretty much cover 95% of the mainstream games with adjectives like 'addicting, stimulating, and competitive'. But is 'addiction' all what we want? Does every game have to contain 'competition'.
Mature mediums like film have proven that they can offer a wide range of emotions and content that appeal to a broader audience. We think that games can appeal to a much broader range of emotions and attract very different types of players, too."
Will our industry eventually mature to the level of movies, in the sense that it can appeal to nearly all people, not just "gamers"? I think it can, but getting there may not be easy and may take more time than I'd personally like it too. Obstacles in the path: the generational gap (this will disappear with time), the limited genre of video games that exist within the mainstream consciousness (this will decrease with the disappearance of the generation gap, but can never be eliminated completely in any industry), the current publishing models (limited funding for games outside of the proven successful genres), the PC as the only platform available to independent developers (the next generation of consoles could change this with online distribution straight to the console), and the user experience or interface to the game itself (I think the Revolution controller is a step in the right direction to opening up the video game experience to a larger market.)
Also read "Death to the Game Industry: Long Live Games" by Greg Costikyan.
What are your thoughts?
I originally published this post on 02.04.2006, but when I came to the blog today it seems to have disappeared. Not sure what happened. Luckily I found a cached version on Google Desktop and salvaged it.
posted by keith @ 12:12 PM
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