Doub_Unit4_Zimmerman
For starters, does anyone in the class feel there is “dissatisfaction with the current state of the game-story?” He keeps saying that we need to get some things strait if we are to move on to better games and storytelling, but I’m not sure there is a problem. Sure, there is always room for improvement and I’m not going to argue that, but I don’t feel we are in a gaming funk. I’ll admit that the gaming industry has been holding on tightly to the folks in the movie industry, but that is because both industries are eager to capitalize on each others successes.
Maybe it is just me, but I think Zimmerman is trying to get people to think there is a problem with current games so that he can make a few dimes providing answers to questions that he is rising. He did provide some needed definitions so that we can get some focus on the topic at hand.
posted by Anonymous @ 2:47 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
I think that the story elements in games are better than ever, but it never hurts to explore the new opportunities for storytelling in this new medium. I read an interview with John Romero (or maybe Carmack, whatever) when Id was developing the engine for Doom 3. Everybody was going nuts because he was raising the bar yet again for hardware-rendered CG realism. He speculated that eventually graphics will plateu, and other elements will drive development. Fifteen years ago, he was drawing little pixel Nazis in Wolfenstein. Now he's writing dynamic light shaders on par with Anthony Apodoca. His team is making characters with 3-d facial expressions with nearly the geometric complexity of Shrek. I think that story will become more and more important as Moore's law starts to have less of an effect on games.
Games have been the biggest driving force on the hardware market. Nvidia, ATI, Intel, AMD, Alienware, and several other hardware companies have subsisted largely on the sales of platform gaming peripheral hardware. Every time a new crop of games comes out with the hot new engine from Id or Valve, or some new card-specific rendering method (ie- nvidia's CG language), the hardware companies put out the new $300 hardware upgrades. These high-end upgrades aren't all used for video editing boxes.
At some point this will slow down. It won't be any time soon, but hardware is expensive and the average gamer isn't getting any richer. Console systems rarely if ever have hardware upgrades (the N64 had one). Is it any wonder that console games outsell PC games by such a wide margin? Eventually the console model of cheaper hardware with no compatability issues will win out over expensive PCs with technical issues and software patches as a rule rather than an exception. This is when story will become more important.
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