The Revolution Will Not Be Consolized

If some vocal members of the video game enthusiast press and development communities are to be believed, our beloved medium is in a sorry state. One cannot escape the laments over the dearth of thematic variety and maturity in today’s games. This is a very strange thing: not only is the medium arriving at a place where a broader palette of themes may be explored, but it’s been there for quite some time. Recent productions like Dear Esther, The Path, and Jason Rohrer’s various games are just a few of the games that are boldly exploring new territory, both with the content of their narratives and with how that content is delivered through gameplay.

Why then is such wailing and gnashing of teeth still so frequently heard? The answer is that most game journalists are looking in the wrong places for the maturation they seek. Mainstream triple-A console games dominate the attention of the specialist press.

Perhaps it’s understandable that people still look to the mainstream to break new thematic ground. There was a time, back in the dim, distant past of the ’80s and ’90s, when the industry was young and the brightest minds in gaming were still fresh and inexperienced. Patterns of financial success had not yet been established, meaning that wild ideas and staggeringly ambitious projects could get funding then that they never would now. This was true nowhere more than on the PC, where the lack of a platform owner to control content and exact licensing fees gave developers more freedom, both financially and creatively.

Jason Rohrer’s Between

But in the past decade, budgets for the triple-A games that make up the mainstream have risen astronomically. Making such games now carries major financial risk, driving risk-averse publishers to avoid funding games that deviate from successful formula. As a result the mainstream is something of a cesspool of juvenile power fantasies and recycled gameplay. Another consequence has been that most major publishers have shifted their focus for major titles to the consoles, where there is a larger body of players and piracy is less of a problem.

Meanwhile, the PC continued to foster a myriad of different forms of independent development. As the attention of the major publishers drifted, the various independent game communities, surrounding everything from Interactive Fiction to mod-making for existing engines, remained strong. The short cycles and low-to-non-existent costs of independent game development continued to make the PC the perfect place for people with or without prior development experience to create their own worlds and stories and share them with others. This was the ideal place for those with ideas too wild for the mainstream game industry to pursue their passion, and pursue it they did.

Today, the typical game journalist got into gaming when they were a child in the late ’80s or early ’90s, enthralled by the early output of what eventually became today’s few major publishers. Their own inexperience coupled with the variety of games available in the time before genres became locked down made the world of games seem endlessly novel and exciting. When these people grew up and decided to make paying work out of their hobby by writing about it, by-and-large their attention was devoted to mainstream games.

Paul Eres’s Fedora Spade

Which is why, even as some of the output of the independent community has begun to gain recognition for using the medium to new ends, so many out there expect the real change to come from big-budget titles, and are either ignorant of what’s going on underground, or don’t see it as important change. Even some developers have joined in, including, ironically, The Path’s Michaël Samyn, who wrote that “The medium of videogames… intimacy, interactivity, non-linearity and emergence offer us the tool of choice for communicating about very complicated and fascinating contemporary issues. But instead video games today are simplistic, deal with stale subjects, treat the players like morons and offer no emotional or intellectual depth, in favour of attempting to please your ego on some caveman level at every turn.” And so the moaning persists. But it may not persist for much longer.

The PC’s advantages as an open platform aren’t going anywhere, and while the arrival of digital distribution platforms on consoles has made smaller, more experimental titles like Jonathan Blow’s Braid economically defensible, the networks that exist for the distribution of such titles remain tightly controlled as well as costly to use. And since the major publishers have lots to spend on advertising, they’ll tend to get the most media attention.

Terry Cavanagh’s Judith

The modern action game as a collection of genres is roughly equivalent to the summer blockbuster in the movie industry. Both are characterized by massive budgets, ever-shinier visuals, and a focus on providing visceral excitement. It would be a sad thing if the summer blockbuster were to disappear altogether. Just as sad, though, would be a film industry dedicated entirely to action films. That’s what the mainstream game industry is like now, and that’s the cause of the consternation in the press. What is wanted is variety, rather than a different kind of uniformity. But while our mainstream faire may be too uniform, the independent scene is healthy, vigorous, and exciting – and predominantly PC. It’s only a matter of time before those looking for the medium’s future take notice.

Some are already beginning to do so, bringing the PC’s independent game scene closer to the consciousness of other journalists and players. More and more people are playing these games, and as some of the areas pioneered by single-A games prove successful, the major publishers will begin to explore those areas as well. They won’t be able to afford not to; the success of new kinds of games will almost certainly be with new kinds of gamers, opening up new demographics in ways that Nintendo has not even attempted. New popular genres will arise, and we’ll wind up with a much larger variety of games being produced by the mainstream publishers. And occasionally, as happens even now, they’ll inadvertently put out something truly noteworthy.

Meanwhile, the bedroom coders and armchair designers of the world will quietly continue to plug away at their PCs, turning their dreams into small, precious realities. They’ll be pushing the boundaries of what video games are capable of, and those who choose to pay attention will get to watch the future being born.