

Dear Videogame Industry, Please Stop Making Games - bensummers
http://uk.gamespy.com/articles/106/1067470p1.html

======
ZeroGravitas
This may be humour but he's getting to the heart of something big.

Why don't we just watch all the amazing films and TV shows of the past? Why do
we listen to music that's in the charts when we've got over 5 decades of
complete genius waiting to be listened to?

Because fundamentally these are social acts. We like listening to the music
that others are listening to, to define ourselves by the films we like in
common with others. It's the same with games.

~~~
Tichy
I think there is still some progress in the arts.

~~~
LucaDuval
I believe that you can hope to find innovation in the arts but I doubt that
you'll find any progress.

Joyce is not better than Shakespeare and Prince is not better than Mozart.

This is even truer for painting, would anybody say that we are doing better
than the Altamira cave painters?

(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Altamira,_bison.jpg>)

~~~
jerf
Dropping an undefined "better" into a post like that is a bit unfair, since it
is basically tautological most ways you could mean that. I'm going to guess
you would agree that there is no objective "better", in which case it's
totally just defining yourself the win.

I will say this; I have a _clear preference_ for some modern stuff over the
older stuff. The biggest one is modern TV vs. older TV; going back to 1960 or
1970 and trying to watch TV for me is simply infuriating; it's all so damned
_slow_. Actually running it 30% faster (as in, watching it literally sped up
30%) helps quite a bit.

~~~
LucaDuval
I didn't explained myself well then.

My point is that, in my opinion, there is no progress in art exactly for the
reason you have just given that there is no objective "better" to measure
progress with.

About TV..., if you are talking about TV shows I wouldn't consider them art at
all.

~~~
jerf
"if you are talking about TV shows I wouldn't consider them art at all."

Also tautological depending on your definition of "art". The definition I
favor doesn't disqualify something for the medium it is in, but it certainly
isn't the only relevant definition.

~~~
LucaDuval
Every time somebody express an opinion somebody else can call it a tautology
if he decides that the speaker is willing to tweak the definition as he likes.

To point it out is pleonastic.

The following sentence is tautological.

The previous sentence is tautological and pleonastic.

~~~
jerf
I am sensitized to it on the issue of art. The word is in the class of words
that are content free and should _never_ be used without at least some cursory
stab at which of the virtually infinite definitions you actually _mean_.

"TV isn't art" carries a lot of connotation, but no actual denotation. I
object to just lobbing the connotation into a conversation and acting as if
something has actually been established.

------
mwexler
You guys are all focusing on his complaint of "too many games". If you notice,
he's pointing out that they are actually too full of content for him to
complete before the next shiny object grabs his attention.

Yes, we rate "playtime" as one of our attributes of quality. "For $50, I
better get more than 1 hour of playtime out of an RPG or other exploration
game" is a common concern; vs. replayability or addictiveness of the casual
gaming world.

But just like Blaise Pascal's quote
(<http://www.famousquotes.com/show.php?_id=1045873>) “I didn't have time to
write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead," (no, it's not Mark
Twain), if we had games that took some of the time of adding just one more
world or level and instead enhanced aspects of the main game, aka judicious
editing, well, perhaps we'd be able to experience more of the game, and even
feel a sense of completion. We'd have less stuff to conquer, but perhaps the
conquering could be more subtle, have more ways to solve, have more realism,
better characters, more complex motivations, whatever.

In playing some of these games he mentions as the good ones, I experienced
meaningless quests (my friends called them "bolt ons"), busy-work, farming,
all sorts of things that didn't move the story forward, or involved repetitive
labor. They weren't puzzles, they were just grunt work. These could have been
edited out and the effort spent elsewhere, reducing "time to complete" but
making a good game even better.

So, if a game needs lots of time to complete a vast and compelling story, or
it's a subscription game that needs more content, so be it. But instead of a
game requiring as much work as, well, my job, perhaps a game that gave more
enjoyment but also allowed me to feel a sense of completion would be a popular
game.

Look, sometimes I love a 500 page book or a 3 hr movie or watching a
miniseries or season in one sitting; we all do. But we don't want them all the
time. Perhaps we should hold games accountable not on "hours to complete" but
on "satisfaction felt upon completion, given that the game should take more
than 1 hour". This puts the emphasis on immersion, storytelling, interaction
and not so much on "cram more junk in".

As an aside, if we complete more games and feel more satisfied when we do, we
will buy more games. Sounds like a win for both sides.

~~~
dkimball
Preach it, brother! :) That's exactly what's been driving me off from gaming
-- vast quantities of filler that just pad out the total play time.

I'd have to add something else: the propensity for filler, especially "filler
quests" in RPGs, degrades the quality of the main game. I really enjoyed
_Knights of the Old Republic_ and _Jade Empire_, but their storytelling --
especially _Jade Empire_'s -- was a large step back from _Final Fantasy 4_ or
_Final Fantasy 6_; neither of the Square RPGs had the hero wandering off to
close a dam and kill an inn full of cannibals as opposed to progressing the
story and/or interacting interestingly with the other major characters.

I believe the genre that you're looking for, and that I am, is called
"hardcasual" -- short, high-quality, high-content games, not casual games at
all but completely free of filler, aimed at people with lives and jobs but
still a keen interest in games. (For total time to play, expect 3 hours at the
low end, 10 hours at the high end -- and note, you can fit a _large_ story
into ten filler-less hours.)

Unfortunately, hardcasual games appear to be rare; in particular, the
mainstream games industry doesn't touch them...

------
sjsivak
Drucker's problem is that he is trying to enjoy the "kitchen sink" of the game
industry. This is like saying you enjoy cooking as your hobby and then you try
to learn the best culinary techniques of French, Spanish, Italian, Thai, and
Creole. You can't expect to become a master and experience everything in all
of these areas.

My Advice: Pick the platform or genre you enjoy the most and focus on those
games. You will never get to sample them all.

~~~
nickelplate
You can easily get overwhelmed even if you stick to a few genres or platforms.
I own Fallout 3, Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2, and I am pretty confident that
I will not come close to fully exploring them before the next great RPG is
released.

~~~
sjsivak
True, but if you were also trying to play Left 4 Dead 2, Modern Warfare 2 and
Bioshock 2 you would be in a worse spot.

Even if you just focused on a single game like World of Warcraft, there is
enough content and stuff to do that you would probably use up all your leisure
time.

I have a monstrous backlog of games I feel I should play, sitting right next
to the pile of books I should read and movies I should watch. Sadly, I have
accepted the fact that I will never be able to get through them all.

~~~
nickelplate
It is pretty hard to focus on a single game or genre though. There are days
when you just feel like playing something else.

~~~
ryanelkins
I'm pretty sure this qualifies as blasphemy against WoW.

In all serious though, if you want to truly get into the endgame of WoW, you
generally don't have alot of time for other games (this is of course depending
on how much time you have for gaming in general). Blizzard has definitely made
it easy to spend the majority of that time in their world.

~~~
zach
And PopCap has helped by repackaging two of their games as WoW add-ons so you
can, you know, play while you play:

<http://www3.popcap.com/promos/wow/>

------
Tichy
How do people learn about new games these days? For some reason I stopped
reading the online game mags a while ago, and now to start again seems a bit
overwhelming. Would be nice to only hear about the real must-play games.

~~~
timwiseman
ArsTechnica tends to have very good reviews and I get the vast majority of my
gaming news from them (the rest is from friends I know in person.) But that
works for me because I am a long time reader and know that their tastes in
game are similar to mine. If your tastes skew far differently they may not be
a good source. Also, it helps that I read their technical content anyway so I
see the gaming news in the course of what I am doing anyway.

In general, the best place to possibly get good reviews is to have friends
with similar tastes as you and ask them what they like. Not only will you get
recommendations you know are good, you will have someone to talk about the
games with/play multiplayer with.

And despite the fact they will be dated, don't forget some of the classics.
Planescape Torment and Quest for Glory V were fantastic. Even with dated
graphics they stand up well to many modern games, at least to someone with my
taste in RPG games.

------
jsz0
As someone who gets intensely bored with even the best video games after an
hour or less I'm really amazed anyone would have the time to play that many
games and expect to actually complete each one in its entirety. Video gaming
has that weird addictive drive to it for some people that I do not think is
healthy. You might like good wine but you don't drink wine 8 hours a day. You
don't obsessively consume every good bottle of wine you own. You don't sit
around stressing out about not consuming and finishing enough wine. If you do
these things you're not a wine lover; you're an alcoholic.

I think rabid video game fans should consider this point strongly. Part of
having good taste is being selective because it's impossible to consume
everything. Are these all good games? Maybe but you have a finite amount of
time in your life. You need to plan accordingly. It may include making tough
choices like playing video game X instead of video game Y but you'll survive
and your life won't be significantly worse off no matter what choice you make.

~~~
pmichaud
Your point is well taken, but here's another perspective, from a person who
consumes a moderate amount of games, and actually produces games as well.

I see every new game as a chance to be inspired by the artistry that goes into
them. Of course there is plenty of crap out there, but an increasing number of
games are undeniably amazing works of art. I want to experience as much of
that wonder as I can. I want to see every mind blowing painting. I want to
hear all amazing the music the world has to offer. Games are no different for
me.

------
dkimball
Please tell me that this isn't the general consensus. Of the games he depicts
on the first page, the only vaguely interesting one from where I sit is
Demon's Souls; in my experience it's rare to get even one good game a year.
There's even the theory that the extremely low quality of present-day games is
a driving force behind piracy, too -- although if so, it's obviously not the
only one.

------
listic
Wow, he's complaining that there are too many good games, not too few. Now
that's refreshing! Is he serious? After all, Drucker is a comedian and I can
sometimes be dense on humour.

I was really surprised to hear that the number of games increased from say 15
years ago. Surely, the industry grew very much, but I thought costs and
complexity of game development more than offset this, so I expected the number
of games to decrease. Does anyone have numbers on that?

Also, I thought it became customary to say that newer games are not what they
used to be (and the grass back when we were younger, but still). So I see
Drucker's article as an opposition to the general notion of gloom and doom in
the game industry, though again I am not sure how serious he is.

------
slmbrhrt
Two factors are causing my video game backlog to shrink at an increasing pace:
I'm not interested in most new games that come out, and I no longer feel
compelled to finish a game to the end when I play it--I put it away when I
feel the margin of return on time spent versus enjoyment has reached a
plateau. For some games, this second point is emphasized because there is no
end, like LittleBigPlanet or your MMO of choice.

As jsz0 said above, good taste is about being selective. I think part of good
taste is also knowing when you've had enough and when you've cleared your
plate do not always occur at the same time.

------
coderdude
An odd post from a Website that depends on many games being released per year
to give people a reason to go back there.

~~~
bensummers
There's probably some quirky British humour going on there, and actually acts
to remind people to visit more to keep up with the huge amount of stuff being
released.

As a non-game player, I was under the impression that there was only one or
two big games released a year, based on the adverts I see on the tube. It's
quite amazing how my internet is so different from a gamer's.

~~~
coderdude
Good point. I hadn't thought of it from that point of view. The article is
certainly more effective as a hint to visit more often, than a cry to the
gaming industry. Come to think of it, they did publish this under the humor
section.

~~~
TomasSedovic
Yet, at least in my situation it was spot-on.

------
lutorm
This is why I'm still playing Civ IV from 2006 as my video game
entertainment...

------
gamble
Honestly, if Swift had published "A Modest Proposal" on a blog, he'd have been
hammered in the comments for ignoring that French children are obviously
tastier.

------
leej
he's saying they're making too many very good games that he has no time to
properly enjoy any one of them.

~~~
crpatino
Yeah... that's what Homer Simpson said about Tee-Vee :| ... :| ... :| ... :D
>:)

