The video games industry simultaneously parallels precedes and succeeds other media industries. Video games are still enjoying AAA super blockbuster status. Landmark games such as GTA4 cost ＄100 million to make and has grossed 1.3billion at the end of the last financial year. Even annual releases such as Call of Duty have seen their last release make that amount in a single fiscal cycle! Few movies can boast that. Yes, guff like Avatar made 2.7billion but how much of that was forced purchases of plastic migraine spectacles? There is also time investment, on average Gta4 sees 40 hours of use, Cod 9 hours offline yet 62 online. That is value for money and an emotional connection which movies dream of.
Yet the industry also manages to have a huge and vibrant indie scene. Similarly to the music industry, there are bedroom developers constantly producing and pushing boundaries creatively, organically innovating as musicians and artists do. However, services like Valve’s Steam and Kickstarter, and to a lesser extent X-Box Live Arcade (XBLA) and Playstation Network (PSN), have provided a level of support and exposure which is the envy of the creative industries.
The biggest indie hits of recent times include Super Meat Boy – which was also the subject of the 2012 Documentary ‘Indie Game: The Movie’, ‘creativity tool’ Minecraft and the viciously difficult Trials HD.
Whilst the big blockbuster games have generally concentrated on shooting at people in a variety of green and brown locations there has also been a strong focus on story driven, multiple mechanic games such as the Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed or GTA series’. Vast, living worlds have been opened up to us. Games created by teams of hundreds, sometimes thousand, few true Hollywood budgets. Companies such as Rockstar could be said to have single handedly placed video games within the ‘art’ arena by truly changing them from products to experiences.
How can the indie developers compete with this kind of commercial muscle? We have seen the strangle hold the big studios and blockbuster movies have on our cinema screens in recent decades. However, Super Meat Boy took just 18 months to reach 1 million sales. The game tells the story of Meat Boy, a boy with no skin, and his quest t be reunited with his beloved Bandage Girl, a girl made of bandages but to do so he must make his way through 300 levels of precision jumping and platforming puzzles a la 1983’s defining Super Mario Brothers.
This may seem a flippant novelty yet the games’ sales attest to their playability. It has a single game mechanic and does it perfectly. Trials HD was another huge hit focused on a single mechanic. In this case you must get your motocross bike over a series of increasingly difficult obstacles much like the 80’s TV show Kick Start. It is fiendishly difficult.
We now have two generations of people who have grown up with video games as a home entertainment staple either in the form of consoles or a pc. Yet these two generations experienced very different games during their youth. No-one born in after 1975 will forget first playing Super Mario Brothers 3 or Streetfighter 2 on the SNES or Sonic on the Megadrive. Those consoles are infact the medium’s fourth incarnation and, whilst there is no denying the impact of Pac-Man, Asteroids or Elite, it was in that fourth generation that games began to take the form we know today.
Those late 80’s and 90’s children will have had a different experience. Consoles had seen a quantum leap in technology. The Sony Playstaion was launched in 1994 and would become the dominant force in consoles until the end of the decade. Games were much deeper now featuring better graphics and multiple features and mechanics in a single game. Many of the biggest IP’s we know today started then; Resident Evil – in particular RE2 – were remarkable experiences at the time, Metal Gear Solid took cinematic grandiosity and narrative to its heart. The scene featuring a telepathic boss is one of my personal gaming highlights of all time. The enemy, ‘Psycho Mantis’ could predict and avoid all of your attacks, turn the screen black as if changing the channel and read your memory card commenting on other games you’d played…unless that is, you unplugged the controller from port one and put it into port two. Frankly, genius.
The question of who is buying these indie games is a valid one. Is it just the first generation of gamers who are nostalgic for the skill focused frustration inducing games of their youth? Are the second generation finding something new there despite the low res. graphics and lack of storyline? It is a question which only time will answer.
So far I’ve only talked about console games but the biggest and most exciting things have been happening on the PC and, here, they are not so new. Whilst console gamers were looking at their selection of 6th generation machines and wondering if someone was intentionally making them so ugly, PC gamers were experiencing a depth and immersion with which the consoles were only just being able to cope with. It was a tradition inherited from the Amiga which, when combined with X-Copy, gave gamers access to hundreds of titles and new concepts. A very brief scan of the internet will show you how enduringly loved titles such as UFO, Civilisation, Syndicate, Dungeon Keeper, Fallout, Diablo and one of the most influential titles of all time Halflife are.
Steam uses a system called Greenlight to vet which indie games will be sold through the platform. The current crop is being voted on at the moment and it offers a broad cross-section of developments. There are, of course, innumerable multiplayer shooters in the mode of the globally popular Team Fortress and Counterstrike games and as just as many fantasy rpgs. But these genres have been prominent, along with the management Sims, since the early 90’s – Doom and Sim City spring instantly to mind.
So if we take the Greenlight submissions as an indicator of the indie scene what does it tell us? There is a lot of interest in producing and consuming these products, that is abundantly clear simply from the numbers of games listed and the level of traffic on their comment sections. A lot of clones or ‘homages’ turn up. Clearly, the gamer community wants titles like Wipeout and Dungeon Keeper back as they were but with better graphics. There is also a big focus on open ended Rogue-like games and old fashioned turn based strategy games. Cthulu also appears…a lot.
The Steam community reserves its ire, and there is a lot of ire, especially for Flash games, iOS ports and disturbing Japanese style dating games often set in high schools populated by a mix of giant eyed young girls, chronically anxious boys and demonic tentacle monsters with questionable views on personal space.
There are some very odd games available which illustrates the indie’s creative freedom and juxtaposes the arbitrary and polished mainstream titles with their array of muscular, square jawed heroes and short brown hair. Some like Legend of the Knightwasher are clearly deliberately odd – a washing machine which is sent back through time, gains sentience and goes on to become the mightiest knight in the realm. Or Dusty’s Revenge with its kung fu rabbit protagonist.
Many are ‘simulators’ be it managing a call centre in Smooth Operators, a prison in Prison Architect or you own mental illness in Depression Quest there is one for everybody…in theory at least. However the PC market has a variety of titles which see you farm, drive public transport or even hgv’s in real time. Games have always boasted the USP of being able to place you into a reality or role outside of your usual realm of experience. It’s the Total Recall syndrome; we want to be the freedom fighter, the super hero or even the anti hero with out real risk but vicariously driving slowly along European highways or up and down your field in a tractor at 5mph, seriously?
Will Wright’s Sim series had seen people taking control of cities, ant colonies, skyscrapers and the planet’s biosphere but it was the Sims which first showed the world that a branch of the gaming community wanted to come home from work and do the same things with their digital Sims. It could be argued that this trend started with 1984’s Paperboy but my paper-round was never so dangerous and I would have certainly got in trouble for breaking that many windows.
Mobile and ‘casual’ gaming have shown the market that there is a new group of gamers out there content to ply games without any risk or challenge. The insidious but hugely popular Farmville is an example – there is no peril, goal or obstacle. These are software toys which can never be won or lost.
If anything, most indie games show the opposite trends. They are getting more and more difficult. As the mainstream offers regenerating health-bars and infinite retries more and more indie titles offer permadeath. The mainstream will probably reach photorealism with the next generation of consoles, expected in Q3 this year, but many indie games often offer low res visuals and in some cases have gone all the way back to 8 bit. Others, like BallPoint Universe, have come up with creative solutions to the issue.
The graphics question is an interesting one. Do they really matter to the gamer? Current indie game sales would suggest not but a large portion of those buy the games have grown up with such graphics. Is it just nostalgia that will pass or is it really all about the gameplay?
As the major consoles reach photo-realism, what will this mean for gameplay? Combined with Oculus Rift could future could games cause PTSD? At what point does our brain start thinking its real?
The next generation of consoles could well see the industry plateau for a long time. Extra memory can be added externally and extra functionality downloaded with patches. This would mean great things for developers as history has shown us that the longer a generation lasts the better the games are. Now Valve are looking at launching their own ‘Steambox’ called Piston to bring PC games to you TV. This is the move that should really be worrying the big two. Steam’s marketplace has a vast turnover in comparison to either the Sony or Microsoft setups and has a very active community due to its careful curation and constant special offers.
Regardless, whilst people are developing not just great traditional games but interesting new IP’s and mechanics it shows the industries vibrancy. Platforms such as steam do offer a great outlet and exposure to some games there are hundreds more out there if you look for them. There are exciting esoteric projects like Soundself, loving reboots like War for the Overworld and many potential new IP’s for franchise.
Overall, there is much more happening of interest and consequence on Steam, Xbla and innumerable little websites than you’ll find in the next installment of Call of MedalField.
Copyright 2012
