Made a new Gamasutra article: The danger of letting the gaming industry curate its own history

[Sranchammer]

This thread is outdated. When will you reboot

 

[felipepepe]

I stole some of Tigranes speech skills and added a small update to the text:

PS: As clarification, I'm not trying to arrogantly set a minimum knowledge level for gamers, journalists or designers. Our history is already vast, it's impossible to know everything. However, while perhaps not all book critics will read Hamlet, or not all movie critics will watch City Lights, they know that they should try it sometime, that it could be interesting. There's an unspoken pressure to know the classics.That is healthy, pursue of knowledge should definitely be promoted.

And that is missing in the gaming industry. As a friend expertly put it, if you don't have this kind of normative force, then there only remains one normative force - which is the marketing, that wants to just tell you to watch/play/read its latest thing. There's no countervailing force to the 'new new new'.

I hope that helps to drive the point home.

 

[Dexter]

Dexter, you might be our resident expert on misogyny and misandry, but you come across as quite the retard with your posts in this thread. The design differences between the first two games and Skyrim is so radical they are pretty much in different genres. The inclusion of a quest compass and free teleport fast travel made a world of difference and had many very noticable effects. Shiiieet, if I had the time I could probably write a very long article about how the series changed with each iteration and an analysis of what came of those changes. You'd be surprised how different they are, even if you didn't like any of them.

Except they're both more conceptual than actual changes that can even be disabled with ease, here fixed it for you:

 

[felipepepe]

Sounds like you never actually played those games Dexter. Disable the quest compass in Skyrim and you can't do shit, the game doesn't tell you where to go. Players had to create a fucking mod that rewrites all quest dialog & journal entries so you can play without the quest compass.

 

[Jick Magger]

Skyrim is playable without the quest compass in the same way that Deus Ex: Human Revolution is playable without the item highlighting. You can do it, but you're unnecessarily handicapping yourself since the game was clearly not designed around that mechanic not being present.

 

[TheGreatOne]

keep up the good work. Though I'm afraid it might be in vain, I doubt Gamasutra has that many readers (based on the outdated look of the site as well as the fact that your article only has 1 comment, the previous had maybe 15-20 tops). Kotaku or some other similar shithole would reach a wider audience. But I think that the best place to get your voice heard is on youtube, provided you can get a following. But you'd need to be some one who speaks english natively. Too bad that the ratio between popamolers, core gamers who don't give a shit about classic gaming, people who want games to be taken seriously but are only interested in SJW hipster shit and people who wants games to be taken seriously and loathe modern gaming is about 9000:980:19:1

I've come to the conclusion myself that it's just easier to try to ignore the outside world than to fight the decline and popamolers. Those who are worthy of salvation will find their way to us.

 

[Cosmo]

Publishing this article in Gamasutra is more futile than trying to convince Young Earth Creationists they are wrong.

It's never pointless to state the truth. First you owe it to yourself, then like a message in a bottle it might reach someone, however unlikely it may seem at first.

 

[Ranselknulf]

Progressivism in the game industry - Newer is always better, older is always shit.

Libruls in a nutshell.

 

[TheGreatOne]

Btw it's ironic that you used Elder Scrolls as an example as even here on codex and amongst PC master race circles Morrowind is revered even though many haven't played Daggerfall because of graphics, UI, it's too hard to get into, "it's outdated" etc. Yet the same people bemoan how Oblivion and Skyrim dumbed down the game. http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=9453 Morrowind: 7 Daggerfall: 35 (below Gothic, NWN, Witcher, Alpha Protocol and Dragon Age Origins)

 

[Jaedar]

Someone should just tweet the article with #gamergate, then it will get views

 

[Infinitron]

The funny thing is when the gaming industry practices what it preaches: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization:_Beyond_Earth#Development

In designing the tech web, the Beyond Earth team began by going to the Wikipedia article on Alpha Centauri

Can't actually play it I guess, it's too outdated

This is pretty misleading. Here's what they actually did (or said they did): "That's where the reading list came in. The first thing we did was go on Wikipedia to the Alpha Centauri webpage, and it has the books that Brian Reynolds and his team read, so we read those, and that was our starting point. And we read a lot more, and got a survey of all the weird things we could do and the weird places we could go, and the tech web really reflects that." In other words, they didn't go to Wikipedia in lieu of playing Alpha Centauri, they went there to get at the game's "Appendix N." That is entirely the right approach: you don't imitate a derivative work, you go to the font and drink deeply.

That said, it is a pretty hilarious quote when snipped.

But Alpha Centauri is a game their own company developed. Even if they weren't actually going to play the game to get at that information, you'd think they have access to some kind of design documentation detailing all this stuff and more.

That's what scares me the most about the attitude described by felipe's article. Companies that gleefully immolate their own institutional memory, and thus make themselves unrecognizable to their fans within years.

 

[MrBuzzKill]

The majority of people who play games just play them for fun and don't care about things like "gaming history", "true RPGs", etc.

 

[LeStryfe79]

felipepepe , did you call the students Newfags?

 

[MrBuzzKill]

Come to think of it, I'd find it EXTREMELY weird if people started playing old games all of a sudden. It's never going to happen

 

[LESS T_T]

felipepepe It's funny that Allan Alcorn, the creator of Pong, commented about the preservation of gaming history in yesterday's article: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-02-11-everybody-thinks-theyre-a-historian-alcorn

Somewhat related point:

Alcorn took particular issue with some of the historical reporting he's seen, saying it's "a little disturbing" to see people shift narratives away from actual events. He pointed to the recently Kickstarted documentary World 1-1, saying it did an excellent job of interviewing pioneers like himself and Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, but questioned the filmmakers' decision to include their recollections alongside those who were passing along stories second- or third-hand.

"It just really griped me to hear this guy telling about what it was like at Andy Capp's Tavern when we put the first Pong machine in there," Alcorn said. "He wasn't even alive at the time. I was. Nolan was. We were there, and we were telling the story. But this guy starts to move the story off, like why? And I was like, 'Wait a second, this is how history gets made.'"

 

[Kem0sabe]

Ironic that brother none would much later promote underhanded PR stunts at inxile with fake screenshots of wasteland 2.

Anyways, great piece Felipe.

I don't see any irony. BN didn't complain about faked screenshots and Fargo can't stop talking about how good old games were.

The (p)reviews were unanimously impressive, generally a sign of a durably classic or alternatively a good game that'll wow you out of your pants the few times you play it. I can't claim my personal experience playing through Oblivion matched up with what I had read in the previews or reviews. More importantly, there's something odd that's been going on more recently, concerning this title.

They talked about how Wasteland 2 was going to be bestest reactive crpg, the showed doctored screenshots that had little to do with reality, including the hilarious Robot scorpion fight... its a case of "previews" not aligning with reality.

 

[Hobo Elf]

and whether the compass that was available from the first game has a current quest indicator or not (which can be disabled via mods anyway) is kind of a very small superficial change.

This is a non-argument. Removing the compass via mods doesn't improve exploration at all, but it does make the game worse. The dialogue and world design in Skyrim is written and crafted in a way that it assumes that you have the quest compass. What this means is that no one actually gives you any verbal cues or instructions where to go as well as there being less easily identifiable land marks that you can use as reference points when hiking into new territories. People hate the compass, but its removal isn't going to magically fix everything, because the design philosophies that walk hand-in-hand with the compass go deeper than simply being a pointer on your GPS. And it's these lazy design philosophies that people actually hate. At least people who understand what they are talking about and not just raging like a faggot

 

[felipepepe]

Btw it's ironic that you used Elder Scrolls as an example as even here on codex and amongst PC master race circles Morrowind is revered even though many haven't played Daggerfall because of graphics, UI, it's too hard to get into, "it's outdated" etc. Yet the same people bemoan how Oblivion and Skyrim dumbed down the game. http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=9453 Morrowind: 7 Daggerfall: 35 (below Gothic, NWN, Witcher, Alpha Protocol and Dragon Age Origins)

Uh, the fact that Daggerfall got #35 should speak for itself. People are clearly aware of it, it's just that Morrowind is the superior game in their opinion.

felipepepe It's funny that Allan Alcorn, the creator of Pong, commented about the preservation of gaming history in yesterday's article: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-02-11-everybody-thinks-theyre-a-historian-alcorn

I think that worst than that is how no one checks anything. How Richard Garriott can sit down, tell his story about how he invented RPGs, MMOs, game boxes and everything and no one will check it.

 

[Dexter]

People hate the compass, but its removal isn't going to magically fix everything, because the design philosophies that walk hand-in-hand with the compass go deeper than simply being a pointer on your GPS. And it's these lazy design philosophies that people actually hate. At least people who understand what they are talking about and not just raging like a faggot

I have seen the light of your argument and repent, what boils down to an overlay over the compass that's probably a few lines of code at the most: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=8787 and a slight change in dialogue by boringass NPC #183 that says boring procedurally generated randomized cave #76 is found to the NorthWest instead of "marked on your map" truly is the culmination of 20 years change in the series of "backstory-less prisoner wakes up in a dungeon, gets rescued and gets to horseback-ride through Blandistan killing things for a few dozen hours" games despite many other features and mechanics remaining almost identical.

 

[Morkar Left]

Nice article!

I think it's not always necesarry to know about all the old games but it's a way of broaden your horizon and therefore your creativity and what's possible in a game. I just stumbled again over the Magic Candle and I'm still amazed how well designed it was with providing gameplay in aspects designers of today don't even bother anymore to get included in an rpg.

I'm glad in Germany there are still gaming journalists who played and tested games like the goldbox rpgs back in the time when they were released. I'm not saying or assuming that they are the better reviewers by default because of this but it's always nice to hear a guy who has some context he can rely on.

 

[Hobo Elf]

People hate the compass, but its removal isn't going to magically fix everything, because the design philosophies that walk hand-in-hand with the compass go deeper than simply being a pointer on your GPS. And it's these lazy design philosophies that people actually hate. At least people who understand what they are talking about and not just raging like a faggot

I have seen the light of your argument and repent, what boils down to an overlay over the compass that's probably a few lines of code at the most: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=8787 and a slight change in dialogue by boringass NPC #183 that says boring procedurally generated randomized cave #76 is found to the NorthWest instead of "marked on your map" truly is the culmination of 20 years change in the series of "backstory-less prisoner wakes up in a dungeon, gets rescued and gets to horseback-ride through Blandistan killing things for a few dozen hours" games despite many other features and mechanics remaining almost identical.

And now you have to do the same throughout the whole game for each and every quest. If you were blessed with a brain you'll realize that instead of wasting your time fixing Bethesdas crapsack game you'll instead go ahead and make your own.

 

[mondblut]

I stole some of Tigranes speech skills and added a small update to the text:

PS: As clarification, I'm not trying to arrogantly set a minimum knowledge level for gamers, journalists or designers.

But you should have.

I hope that helps to drive the point home.

On the contrary, it bends the point over. Wasn't inclusive enough for homosutra without a disclaimer?

 

[mondblut]

But Alpha Centauri is a game their own company developed. Even if they weren't actually going to play the game to get at that information, you'd think they have access to some kind of design documentation detailing all this stuff and more.

Are you aware that 15 years is an awful lot of time?

And "own company" doesn't mean shit. It's just a sticker over an office door. The people inside could, and probably have, been replaced thrice over. Have fun digging through terabytes of sourcecode, psd and word/excel docs scattered over hundreds of arvid tapes ok, let's be generous, 650mb cd roms.

 

[Infinitron]

*shrug* We still have access to PS:T's vision document and it's perfectly readable.

 

[m_s0]

When I confronted them about that, they were somewhat embarrassed, but also claimed that those were old games, that had dated badly and were outclassed by newer releases. Now, let's stop here for a moment.

Fucking mindless drones. That's essentially like going to film school and refusing to watch anything that's not widescreen, in color and made in the last couple of years. You'd think an answer like that would result in everyone getting flunked, kicked out and banned for life from studying anything game-related. Effective immediately, no discussion

This fucking industry pisses me off so goddamn much.