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11/04. EA to buy Naivity and Innocence in 5 years
I understand that perhaps I haven't chosen the best format for a continuous thread of thought across several posts. If you want to follow it, read backwards. Just make sure you read this post first.
In my deplorable attempts to organise the rediculous amounts of stuff^TM floating around my PC, I labelled the folder for this site "red". Naming has never been something I've enjoyed (unless it's a really awful pun for an article headline, like a man drowning in pudding "getting his just desserts" - that's not funny, that's sad. Imagine his lungs filling with pudding. Worse yet, imagine the autopsy, all swollen and rotten... oozing equally revolting pudding out of various tears in the skin. A morbid image, a terrible death, and a horrifying misappropriation of pudding. It deserves a serious headline: Man drowns in pudding, Pudding kills again or Pudding: Friend or Foe?). I do however enjoy parentheses (a lot). To return to naming this site red, I decided today that it was too red. Or rather, it didn't have enough parts that were not red. The top banner needs some white vector image, but for the life of me I can't think of what the hell should be up there. How do you express cynicism and a jaded nature in a picture? Essentially, I'm kind of in a creative lull, that's not exactly been making me sad as much as it's been peeving me off. See how it comes back to my point about games theory? See how I had a point all along? No? Oh well.
I think this situation is similar to what the games industry is going through right now. It used to be an exciting medium to work with, essentially everything you were doing pioneered the damn thing. One aspect of this was that you couldn't do anything wrong, since nothing had been defined as right yet. This distinguishes games from music or film - these things may have right and wrong, but it is extremely difficult for them to be god awful in such a way that you cannot achieve anything with them. Such as a game that consistently crashes. Or maybe, games just don't have that same variety. In music or film, you'll always have some audience for your crappy art film, no matter how minute. Games don't have that - yet. They're not accepted in mainstream culture enough that anything specific, original or even awkward can find some appreciation somewhere; in fact it seems as though for games to become specific, they'll have to be generic for a while first.
What I'd like to see, and gamers have shown this to be a key concern and basis for buying games is something unique. I understand that it's not easy to just throw everything out of the window and work on a blank slate, with no preconceptions towards what should define a game. We're starting to see some minor alterations on forumalae, as Medal of Duty: Allied Normandy Heroics XXII is no longer selling quite that well, developers are looking to inject it with something new. And by minor alterations, I mean bullet time or something that is, in realistic and relative terms a pretty shallow change. I mean relative in that compared to a game like Katamari Damacy it's absoloutly nothing. Katamari introduces a whole new concept, and what I at first glance thought to be some new goals.
Rolling shit up is cool, fun and it makes for a great game, and really demonstrates the direction we need to go into quite nicely. Unfortunately, I'm still rolling to a time limit, and trying to achieve a score. I've been beating scores and time limits since Mario (I'm sure those born before me will have even older games to mention) - it's hardly something new. Sure it works nicely, just as the convention of lives in a platformer. "Never mind that they are archaic remnants of quarter-drawing principles in the arcades, it still works quite nicely". It does work, but I'd still like to see some new approaches that defy these ancient conventions. For that we need to abandon everything we know about games, and try and approach them from a fresh viewpoint. Nintendo is doing it with the Revolution, trying to establish a new connection with games at the most basic level, which is where the changes need to happen. Think of how much the transition to 3D changed games, love it or loath it the switch created a huge shift in paradigm - allowing brand new types of games (not the least of which was the ever popular FPS).
Going back to the webdesign parallel, when I made my first site I used pictures of Mr. Potatoe Head as the background for my buttons. I'll happily admit that it wasn't quite the glorious stroke of genius I thought it to be at the time, but the reason I did it was not because I had huge cojones but because I didn't know any better. I had no clue regarding any kind of standards or expectations, I just did what I thought might work. That's the approach that needs to be emulated for future games, a complete abolishment of any notions as to what a game should and shouldn't be, like we were a kid again*. But first, we need to ensure that just because these games stink they don't shrivel up and die...
*As an aside, I recently considered why the hell I wanted to make games. When questioned in the past I always referred to the happiness I felt when a few thousand people had downloaded my map (fools), and how overwhelmed I was by the idea that people were playing and enjoying it. I realised lately that probably the most enjoyable thing to observe, that doesn't directly affect me, is kids having a good time. Cheesy as it may be, kids laughing and looking around with a big grin on their face is astoundingly infectuous, and being the one to create that smile on thousands of kids would be pretty amazing. Of course I don't want to just make kids games, I'm primarily interested in making some more profound and unique adult games - but kids games would definitely be interesting. Games may not just be for kids anymore, but they deserve better than some stupid TV show license conversion.
9/04. An Unexpected Continuation
I haven't even touched any of the things I promised not to do, so I'm rather pleased with my self. It's gratifying. I've had a quick look now at some of the problems, most notably the root directory now points to the right file, and it took less than a month for me to notice! I haven't experimented at all, but I think Internet Explorer likes ignoring the distance between the top of a table field and the context, so at least now I have a possible cause for the craziness.
If you've had an argument with me in recent times, you'd probably be aware that I tend to advocate anything with originality or exhibits some unique style and flair in achieving it's goal. I like to apply this to absoloutly anything, although any media is the most obvious target, I've found that you can get a lot more satisfaction out of everyday life if you try and adjust your solutions and actions to try and incorporate some of those ideals. It helps ease that dreary "going through the motions" feeling that I get a lot, and manifests itself in severe and unjustified tiredness. I got up at 4am to watch soccer, but the excitement of it kept me awake in the morning and in the evening, just that dreadful lull in between slowed me down. Returning from some tangents that took me painfully close to mainstream blogging: in video game terms, it's all well and good wailing about publishers not taking risks, and EA churning through their yearly release cycle, but it's been shown that originality can prevail in some form.
When I make some pathetic attempt, in my head, at listing the top 10 games ever I come up with a few thousand, but those that stand out seem to be from a long time ago. I won't deny that this is probably because my memories of the games are better than they would be if I played them now (although LucasArts adventure games prove to be an exception), or that the fact that video games were a new thing to me at the time, or that my mind was younger and more easily entertained and not infernally looking for blasted depth and profound meanings (don't ask), or a dozen other factors - they had a certain spark to them that is all too rare now. I think it's fair to discount those factors as I look to determine where that spark comes from in future posts (an aim, to this website? no way!), since they don't really impact on the fact that it's not there anymore. I want the spark back, all else be damned.
19/03. Heir Apparent
So I've gone through my typical redesign cycle without actually changing the content of the site in between. Sorry? I've also realised that all of these fabled designs, with their infinitely low amount of utilisation, aren't actually available on the site which is a large reason (besides boredom) for me to change them in the first place. Anywho, I'm happy with the basic shape and colours in this design, but I'd like some more intricacy at the top. Also the positioning is broken between individual pages, and Internet Explorer... well let's not go there. But don't worry I'll change and fix these things.
not really.
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