Part of what makes gaming such a special medium is that gamers have such a strong emotional bond with games that they love. Companies like Nintendo and Sega have understood that and continue to push out titles with characters that have been established for decades now, but are beloved by fans. If there is a game featuring Mario or Sonic on the market, there is a good chance that they know how well that game will do and can be sure that it will be some form of success. A big trend over the last few years in gaming has been companies looking to be innovators in how we play games, which there is nothing wrong with, but shouldn’t they be focused on the games before the way we play them?
This problem spans through multiple parts of the game industry and cannot really be isolated to one kind of producer or another. Of course, the big ones are the console makers, as they are the trendsetters in the industry and whatever hardware they introduce to the market will dictate what kind of games are produced and how game developers look to utilize the hardware. Nintendo made the big leap with the Wii by foregoing a regular controller and instead including the Wiimote (also known as Wii Remote) motion controller with a few buttons on it. The Wiimote was both a marvelous innovation and a bane to the gaming world at the same time. Some truly innovative games came from Nintendo, but early Wii games by third party developers lacked any real magic and instead were just games with some “waggle” functions added in for no real reason.
Of course Sony and Microsoft followed suit with their own motion control gadgets for their respective systems, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, with neither one gaining as much traction as they’d like due to them not being included early on with the console and just being seen as an optional peripheral. To this day there are not many actual good games available for either one, as off the top of my head I can only think of The Gunstringer for the Kinect.
Like I said, it is not just the hardware companies who are responsible for this, though, as game developers try to one-up each other in the innovation department all of the time, to mixed results. FMVs (Full Motion Videos) — a form of cutscene — were something that developers really didn’t start using on consoles until the Sony PlayStation was released, using a CD format that could store more than a cartridge and allowed them to add more features like FMVs, CD quality audio and more. Initially seen as an innovation for storytelling, it quickly became a lazy way for game developers to push a story forward and removed control from the players’ hands to do so. It wasn’t long before we saw games like Metal Gear Solid 2 where the amount of time players spent watching FMVs outnumbered the actual gameplay time.
There are a lot of other innovations in gaming that have been introduced and have been both good things and bad things, depending on the usage, stuff like Quick Timer Events, celebrity voice actors, using big name screenplay writers and of course, everyone’s favorite; DLC. The point here is that the videogame arms race is a bit ridiculous and can really hurt the quality of games. I’m all for innovation in gaming, but every year there are more and more games that get hyped up for how realistic they’ll be, for how amazing the storytelling will be, for how immersive they are and while some live up to the mark, some fall very short of it. With the Wii U being released and the next generation of Xbox and PlayStation just around the bend, maybe it would be a good idea for game companies to go back to the drawing board and focus on games that are not only reaching for the stars, but remembering their basics and being fun.
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