Game (Community) Development

I keep tossing these ideas back and forth through the cobwebbed recesses of my brain. That is, I had been tossing them back and forth, until recently when I reached an impasse with myself. To break the tie, I sent the questions out into the wider virtual world to ferment and grow and change until I could get a handle on them again. Roger R over at The InGame Asylum was kind enough to mould them back into a form I feel I can contend with and this is the very rant-y result of my latest round of mental pong.

The questions are simple. What do we, as gamers, as a community want in multiplayer games – in any games really? What kinds of things need to happen to take gaming to the next level? What does that even mean….the next level? What does that look like?  Unfortunately for my hyper obsessive brain simple answers usually have complex bloody answers.

Before we can really think about what we want, we have to take a good long look at where we’re at. Unfortunately with the exception of a handful of engaging properties, most games now rely on fancier graphics or bigger guns to capture the players’ attention.  Novelty is an important factor but it fades so quickly. It’s a great way to lure people in but what happens after that? Player loyalty and game depth go hand in hand but depth can be costly. Our expectations in terms of graphics have been exponentially increased over the years - impacting game file size, production costs and development time. And as much as I complain about load screens and the increasing cost of games I am not willing to give an inch when it comes to how my games look.  I’m probably not alone in that - but MUDs had zippo in terms of graphics and they were beloved. The novelty of interacting and competing with other human brains was a big part of that but I think it was the long term possibilities inherent in that process that kept people coming back.

We have a basic human need to socialize – to interact with the world and be accepted. To be praised. We want to prove ourselves. MUDs let kids all over the world do that. (Well…a lot of the world anyway, but I digress.) As they played with and against one another they learned, adopted and shared new strategies and developed relationships that were meaningful to them – they developed communities.

Now, the thing about communities is that they can be such fragile things.

But if you have interests in common and enough common goals, and a little bit of commitment, they can also be really strong – powerful even. On the flip side, if they become rigid and too bogged down in tradition they often break. And that’s what I see happening here and now. We have too many rules about how things should be, a template that developers are loathe to stray too far from and a gaming community with too many divergent interests to be satisfied easily.

Video games, like comics and pen and paper RPGs, was once considered the exclusive domain of “nerds” - a group largely composed of teenage boys and young men who were social outcasts either by choice or by necessity – sometimes both I suppose.   They were, on the surface at least, a largely homogenous group and social scientists out there have probably written reams of papers on the reasons for this. (If they haven’t, they should.) But whatever the reasons, whatever the process involved in the development of these communities, because of this homogeneity they were easily satisfied as a group. I suppose the fact that the media was new and therefore interesting and lacking strict expectations was part of that.

Things have changed. These days when you log into an online game or a check out a nerdly forum you can make no reasonable assumptions about the real live person you are interacting with. The release of the feature film X-men in 2000 made it clear that the realm of geek was being invaded. The worldwide gross of the film according to one source was over 296 million. That’s…..a lot. Whole swathes of regular folks went to see that movie - and the movie wasn’t even that good. It’s not just comics being absorbed into popular culture, in the last decade it seems more movies are based on video games than not – Resident Evil, Lara Croft, Silent Hill, Hitman, Max Payne – they’re all video game properties.

And all blockbuster hits. 

Nerds are the new cool. Signs of the changing size and composition of gaming communities are everywhere. Bioware has recently announced a change in their marketing strategy for the soon to be released Mass Effect 3. After a rabid fan base made their desires clear, the company will include “FemShep” in the ME3 packaging and advertising scheme because all those female gamers out there want to feel included, they want to be engaged. Family gaming is a concept tossed around regularly. Families play video games together. Many of the folks I’ve met in PUGs are middle aged men and women but some are barely teenagers. As it turns out, anyone could be the brains behind that next mysterious avatar with whom you interact. We simply can’t assume anything anymore. So why, when our community demographic has changed so much, are games stagnating so badly? Why are we not making use of the wider audience to create more opportunities for increased input, brainstorming and collaboration? Why aren’t we making better games? Where’s the progress?

Oh there are hints of brilliance here and a smattering of innovation there. But the reality is that now that the gaming industry has gotten tangled up in the heady thrill of pop culture it’s no longer about the community. It’s no longer about a passion for games or art or story. It’s about profit, which is a common theme in a lot of facets of modern life. Games are largely made with the lowest common denominator in mind, appealing to the largest chunk of gamers so that the highest profits possible can be achieved. Grab an old game change some textures, add a new ‘advanced’ weapon, change the HUD and voila…we have a marketable $70 product.

Okay, it’s not exactly that simple, some companies genuinely try to create something new. They try to make something new and interesting. But they usually fail. And there are lots of excuses for that failure. We’ve all heard them. Maybe, as gamers, we need to reclaim our community. Maybe if we had a better handle on who we are as a group and what we collectively need we could somehow convey that to game developers. Maybe they would even listen. Hell we can develop our own games if it comes right down to it. This is the age of the internet. Everyone can learn anything with enough patience and a home computer. If a comparably small group of social outcasts playing text based games over the ARPAnet several decades ago could lead to the modern day paradigm of gaming who knows what we could accomplish as a broader, better connected, more informed community of gamers.

Just a thought.