This is a short excerpt from a full cover article from UK designer Kelly, on the Game Industry addiction to technology. The article should put all your wildest dreams for 2005 into sound perspective!!!
Gamasutra.com's new year's Soapbox is a must-have!
Do not go further: Read the full article, please go to: http://www.gamasutra.com
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Soapbox: Technoholism - A 12-step Recovery Plan
Technology is great, isn't it?
In our industry, technology has driven massive progress and financial returns, the likes of which were undreamt of 20 years ago. From 'rumble packs' and EyeToy-s to 3DFX cards and analog pads, we are blessed with the fruits of a golden age of, well, stuff. We have come to rely on technology. We await new formats, new capabilities and new toys with something approaching high;
But there is a dark side to techno-love. We have come forward leaps and bounds in hardware, but the software lacks far behind. The industry, especially in the console and handheld sectors, remains immature and hardware-led. Games are now much more expensive to develop. Geometric cost rises are not matched by equally geometric rises in sales.
Creative game content is not evolving, and release schedules increasingly carry the whiff of déjà vu.
The industry is becoming more the equivalent of an electronic comics industry rather than the usurper of film that it aspires to be. Technology, bizarrely, is now part of the problem rather than the solution. We rely on greater and greater hits, trying to achieve better-than-photo realism through ever-more complicated graphics technology, massive physics systems, and ever more complicated consoles. Yet while we seek these new electro-thrills, we seem increasingly oblivious to our own atrophy, to the arguably failing state of the games we produce, and to our own future.
We are technoholics.
What are we addicted to?
- We are addicted to new toys. Who doesn't want to play with new hardware and software?
- We're addicted to a business model that values hardware over software
- We are addicted to trusting that new technology somehow magically translates into new money
- Mostly, we're addicted to the ability of new technology to anaesthetize fear of the future.
Technology has become the catch-all solution. Technoholism is a downward spiral. The rate of return for increasing investment thins from one generation to the next. The faster turnover cycle between console generations leads to market fragmentation. The pay-offs in terms of the games themselves are now lackluster. The media and the customers are increasingly cynical about over-inflated promises.
Costs are spiraling. Most developers are not having much success in bringing costs under control, and they know that the situation is only going to get worse. In the UK, over a hundred development studios, big and small, have gone out of business in the last three years. The next round will cull nearly everyone else.
Yet all is not lost. Addiction can be beaten and sanity restored, if we learn to recognize the problem, admit that there is a problem, and then take steps to re-affirm the decision to mend our ways. So, throwing taste and caution to the wind, how better to solve our problems than with a 12-step program?
Skip to Step 11:
Step Eleven: We accept that games will never be perfect
No matter how far we go down the road of technology, though it may take us over the edge into oblivion, games will never be perfect. There is no technology that will create the perfect self-generated storytelling experience, nor the perfectly animated human. There is no technology that will recreate the world in its entirety in game form, or if there is it is wildly beyond the games industry's ability.
This is an entertainment industry, not a science project. We are artists, not researchers, and we are here to entertain people, maybe touch them with our creations. We can do this with the tools that we have today. As the tools become more widely understood, the costs involved decrease.
The film industry has evolved to the point where, with straightforward technology that hasn't changed that much (CGI excepted) over the decades, they have evolved the ability to create grand visions. Movies will never be perfect, and neither will games. But that's not the point.
The point is that perfection is not a sensible goal. It is an immature goal in many ways, like the wish to draw the perfect circle, write the perfect novel or sing the perfect note. Perfectionism is the addict's way of not dealing with the world as it is and not engaging with the world as it is. You can carry on tweaking and refining that game engine forever and ever and it will never be perfect.
What we must learn, as new, responsible, recovering technoholics, is that the imperfect is as good as it's going to get, and so we must learn to write novels rather than endlessly tinkering with the first one. We can pour money and endless hours of frustration down the drain of technology if we like, but all we will end up with are pink slips and bankruptcy. And quite possibly a huge sense of disappointment and disillusionment.
In order to do this, we must learn to become decisive.
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