Like many other Xbox live users with few spare gamer points in their pockets I spent most of the weekend pouring over the latest bit of eye candy-cum game-art Braid and came away from the experience with a largely positive impression. It’s a beautiful piece of work and it’s sold amazingly well for a game so at odds with mainstream game marketing (although not well enough to spare us the occasional livejournal-esque whine from unfortunately named game creator Jonathan Blow)
Before the game decided it was time to start melting my brain with a furious barrage of time fuckery I initially mistook the game for a Mario clone filtered through a Monet painting, a concept that filled me with pretentious art-wanker glee. I was actually just a little bit disappointed when the whole ‘Sands of Time’ style stuff kicked in, but not much. It was these first few minutes of arse-on-head baddie stomping that got me thinking about how we treat the games that are so important to our history and what we’re leaving behind for the generations that may not innately understand our love for plumbers and oddly colored hedgehogs.
Braid. Gorgeous. Go play it.
As any technology evolves it becomes increasingly user friendly, even if the complexity of that technology is growing exponentially. Game design tools are no exception. When the PC turned from the very definition of avarice into something remotely affordable the public’s demand for the tools to create our own game content began popping up on crude message boards the world over. Developers began supplying aspiring game creators with a game’s source code, then a simple level editor and then when the amateur game creator’s demanded even more, developers starting releasing the very tools used to create their games to the public. Some developers even saw a market for products with game production specifically in mind and they’ve been a staple of PC software ever since. With these tools and with no training or instruction save what they could scrounge off the internet amateur games designers have created not only extra content but they’ve made game modifications that grew to ecclipse the original game completely. It’s not hard to imagine then that sometime in the future we’re going to see a Video game creation suite so robust and user friendly it completely revolutionizes the industry. The Macromedia FLASH of game design.
While every game fan out of their early teens is crying out for something new and creative FLASH based games are taking the internet by storm. These games although lacking the budget and manpower of full fledged releases are way ahead in terms of originality, creativity and downright good design.
That’s right. A format designed originally for developing porn ads and informing people they can win an IPod if they punch a monkey in the face three times is home to more original, clever and downright great games than any of the three gaming consoles combined. Why? Because FLASH takes away the biggest barrier to entry in the game development market. The need for programming knowledge.
A first person shooter from the future.
Although hardly straightforward game development in FLASH is a breeze compared to the complexities of a language such as C++. By taking away the programming barrier you remove a problem that dogs the development process. Current game development plays out more like a game of Chinese whispers with the design staff passing on information to the programmers who then have to pass it on to the game engine. How much of the message is lost when it’s passed along from designer to programmer and so forth? How much of an idea do we lose when an idea is ‘translated’ by someone who might not understand it? Wouldn’t it be better if the designer could pass on the message to the computer directly?
That’s what a user friendly game development format would offer. The chance for artists to deliver a game without it being filtered through the minds of other people.
This shift in the development process would spill over into the amateur community as well. Anyone with a computer and an idea could pick up a copy of this game creation suite and compete on level footing with a well funded development team. The quality of the game will be decided not by who has the most expensive technology or who head hunts the best programmers but by whose design is better. It’d be a battle of ideas instead of money.
In this picture you can see how the EA designer on the left has beaten the amateur designer on the right.
I believe we’d end up with a Games community as opposed to a Games industry. With set up costs being so low perhaps the community could take a few steps away from the profit orientated movie like market it currently inhabits and perhaps takes a cue (heh) from the theatre. I’d like to see a games market where the classic games that shaped gaming history are treat and cared for as publicly owned pieces of art rather than corporate assets to be strip mined and slung on a lunch box every few years. This is all sounding a bit ‘Red Dawn’ I know and I’m sure the marketers and lawyers most developers keep in their respective dungeons would start flagelating themselves in public before letting this happen but I would like for any game creator to be free and able to make his own version of Super Mario or his own Pacman. He should be able to take Tomb Raider and reinvent it, remake it, make it relevant or make it irrelevant, he should be able to take an idea and add a little bit of himself to it. Just like a theatre director would with Shakespeare. Games could be art if we just started treating them as such.
“To Pac or not to Pac. That is the question.
Waka Waka Waka”
Developers would be free to re imagine a license as they saw fit so while some people may love the classic version of Silent Hill 2 others may enjoy the absurdist take where James is chased around ‘Disney Hill’ by a terrifying mascot called ‘Goofy Head’. Didn’t like Grand Theft Auto? How about a version that’s set in Feudal Japan? The idea that any one developer knows the only ‘right’ way to do a game is absurd and I think we’d all be better off by trying versions that offer different points of view.
Rockstar’s 2023 take on ‘The Legend of Zelda’ did not sit well with fans of the classic.
Not only would this offer a greater degree of choice, female gamers for example might appreciate Gears of War more if it had an all female cast, but it could also allow developers to create games that raise issues but still remain fun or they could question the very nature of games themselves. How about a game where you spend your time carefully putting gold coins in question marked boxes only to watch helplessly as a maraudering plumber jumps on them?
If want video games to be accepted as a valid art form then we need games that makes us think, make us consider, and above all, challenge us and I don’t think the current market is capable of giving us those games.
If you’re interesting in Braid read a sterling review of it here
