Overlap

It's easy to talk about movies with your friends.  Seems like we've all seen the same movies, more or less. 

Things break down with novels.  In my creative writing workshops and classes, overlap is marginal.  You'll have one Salinger fan, one Cormac McCarthy fan, one Don DeLillo fan, one Jane Smiley fan, Stephen King, Erica Jong, and few of these people like each other's tastes, and yet somehow we're expected to be able to provide useful criticism of each other's work.  You're supposed to analyze the piece on its own terms for what it is trying to be, but what you really get is blind men and elephant syndrome, where each one critiquing has their own idea of what fiction is supposed to be.

I suppose this is because it takes longer to read a novel than watch a movie;  plus,  there are more novels than movies.

There are more movies than videogames, but you still have the time problem.  It takes much longer to play a videogame than to watch a movie. 

Which leads to this kind of conversation at work all the time:

"This feature sucks."
"Really?  It's a lot like a feature in Devil May Cry, God of War, Ninja Gaiden..."
"I haven't played those.  I've played Onimusha, though."
"Er...I haven't played that one."

In fact, the only game that I can almost guarantee everyone's played is GTA - and we've usually played different GTA's. 

So how do we find common ground?  How do we avoid the blind men and the elephant problem; where we all think videogames are something different?

Comments

[Fran]

other barriers for games include the fact that
- movies can be consumed fairly passively whereas games require work to keep content flowing
- games cost at least 2-3 times as much as movies/novels

I don't think it matters much though. Think of art critique, where content can be consumed in a second and can be entirely reproduced in a book or webpage. There are few art enthusiasts who haven't seen a Picasso, Warhol, etc. And yet they think art should all be something different.

[babylona]

[this may get long. apologies in advance.]

You've hit on something of a bugaboo for me personally. It drives me nuts that there isn't at least some level of interface standardization for console games in particular, but games in general as well. I don't mean not allowing users to customize interfaces, which I think is critically important, but at least providing some standards and/or guidelines for what goes where, usability & ergonomics (both of which are astoundingly lacking in console games), and means and mechanisms of customization.

I admit I'm an odd example. I have extraordinarily strong muscle memory (long boring neurological story short, muscles learn repetitive actions at least as much as the brain; in some people this is more prevalent, in others, less) which has several effects: it takes me a VERY long time to learn a new input control pattern, and if that input control pattern is for the same device as another pattern it will *replace* the old one; once I have learned a pattern I am very fast, but it takes so long I don't usually find it worth it to overcome the learning curve; nigh-debilitating carpal and other RSI-related problems forbids most games for me. I've basically given up on console games in large part because of the input problems which I see as directly related to whatever control system is present in the software - the first question I ask my boyfriend when he starts playing a new console game is "how hard is it to control?" Most of the interfaces suck, most of them completely ignore one another, and most of them fail to take things like RSI - a common problem in video game audience members - into consideration. I was thrilled when Soul Caliber II came out, I'd loved the first one. I couldn't play longer than five minutes without being in absolute agony, and for hours afterwards. It was very depressing.

I think that if there was some level of input standardization, both of the hardware and the software, we'd see developers able to concentrate on how best to support the game's mechanics using those standardized devices and interface guidelines. Not only that, but it would ease cross-platform development and porting efforts. Why there is no body like the W3C for games is absolutely beyond me, especially since there is a large intersection of computing devices between those supported by the W3C and video game systems.

[Darius Yound]

Babylona, I've found that playing game downloads very effective after playing a game that has taken me a while to "beat." Mainly because like you, I have a hard time shaking off muscle memory.

[Scott B]

I think that this problem is largely due to the absence of any worthwhile game design vocabulary. How can we easily relate things that are similiar in games without proper ways to describe them?Right now, the reason we have converstions like the one you described is due to the fact that there are simply too few sufficient terms to describe the universal mechanisms gamers already know. Even if the designer is aware of these underlying concepts, it's no use if the rest of his team can't communicate/understand game mechanics when deconstructed as well. I think there are a number of people interested in solving this problem (Doug Church comes to mind off hand), but I think it will take a while before anything is truely adopted for practical use inside a development studio.

[Apar]

one solution is to create an entry level system if you want to work in this industry you have to have played such and such games in such and such genres...now who will come up with the list?

[Jonas Antonsson]

I totally agree with Scott B. The Gaming Industry needs to standardize terms and meaning. It is even hard to describe different types of game development concepts (I've hit this wall several times while blogging).

So someone (who has the time and the experience) should become the "GOF" of Game Development. We need someone who can specify Game Design Patterns, Game Design Concepts and Game Design Architecture.

J#

[raigan]

the more standardized things get, the more easile componentized crap will be mass produced, assembled, and churned out by rote from robotic slave-driven teams.

aside from schools of though/aesthetic/"movements", there isn't a standard set of tools to break down art.. why do we think games should have one?

simply because they're made with technology doesn't mean they need to be seen simply as nothing more than an engineering exersize.

anyway.. the solution is to make sure game developers are functionally literate in games. it's just as ridiculous for someone who doesn't have a broad gaming experience to be making games as it is for an author to only read occasionally.

[Ian]

On a related note, sometimes I find it hard even to refer to game's I've *played*, because I forget a lot of the details. If there's a great moment 30 hours into a game, I'm never going to re-play the game just to see it again.

I think what gamers need is a Tivo-like system, that would allow you to record your play experiences and watch highlights of them later. And then if you wanted to refer to a game, you could should someone exactly what you meant, without asking them to play through to the 30-hour mark.

--ian