7)"Dumb and Dumber"

Why do games treat me as stupid? Even if we accept that keys and doors are a pathetic expression of the term 'Puzzle', would it be too much for certain keys to fit certain doors without needing the doors and keys color coded? Even in this instance we can probably press F1 (at least we could, if games developers standardised such things. Do you programmers REALLY not know that F1 summons help?) and have some painfully slow audio telling us "To open the red door, you will need the red key...".

The problem of being given too much help in a game is a real and gameplay-defeating one. of course I could turn-off DS9:The Fallen's auto-aim feature to make it more difficult, but why tempt me by putting it there in the first place?

One of the games I remember as defining computer gaming as a kid was a game called Hacker. Hacker had no manual, no instructions, it started up with the words "Please log in", with no clues and no help. The game drove you mad, but was addictive and rewarding. At later stages, the game would ask you questions in foreign languages. No F1, no help, just work out the answers. Sure, you had to work hard at that game, but things you don't work hard at are simply not rewarding. There is a lesson here for modern game designers.

8)"Multiple Death animations"

What is so entertaining about death? Even putting aside the gore element and the perverse interest some game playing kids have in the realism with which bits of their victims catapult across the screen, death, from a game design POV is the crudest and most basic dynamic.

Thief proved to any who would doubt it, that sneaking past the guards is more rewarding than shooting them. Sadly very few games have taken the idea to their hearts? You would think games designers were desperately trying to push the barrier even further, but no, here comes a Klingon guard, (I know this, because like baddies everywhere he has the courtesy to yell "stop! intruder" at me before he shoots) I suppose I should shoot him with my phaser rifle... Sadly many first person shooters resemble tech demos wrapped around sub-pacman gameplay.

9)Blockbuster mania

Everywhere on the web and the media the tale is told of how 'Modern games cost a fortune to make' and 'Development costs are spiralling out of control' And like most myths that are constantly repeated, these views are never questioned. These days a super fast computer with lots of RAM and enough Hard drive space for gigabytes of art assets can be bought for under a thousand dollars. The latest compilers and 3D graphics packages do everything but make coffee, and instead of writing custom video drivers we have DirectX and OpenGL, and even better, ready-to-use engines that do a huge portion of the work for us. So why aren't games cheaper to make? and thus why isn't there more choice?

The answer seems obvious looking at new games, they have technologies we never dreamed of many years ago, lip-synching, realistic shadows, bump mapping, Newtonion physics etc. The extra development effort required for these extras pushes games budgets up there with the new Star Wars movie. The problem is, as more money is spent on the games, the projects suffer from diminishing returns. If the budget doubles, the playability and review score doesn't double, and most publishers keep piling in the dollars long after this milestone is passed. If game X cost x million dollars, game y MUST spend twice as much. The problem is, there are no publishers bucking the trend, so the 'perceived wisdom' becomes that you HAVE to spend that amount of money to get a hit. Games that buck the trend like Rollercoaster Tycoon are quickly forgotten as publishers queue up to spend millions on hours of Full Motion Video. These days, any belief that all a game needs is talent and creativity are swept aside in favour of the all-encompassing belief that games just need lots of money, another reason why games are dumbed down to appeal to the largest demographic.

10)"I used to sell cars but..."

The best games are made by games players. This may seem obvious, but the industry has forgotten it. You can never really understand an audience if you aren't part of it. The success of the videogames industry has sucked in the money-men who talk about 'product' instead of games. These people never played games as a kid, they never gasped when they first saw Space-Invaders or Doom or Quake2. They believe they can understand the games players by having focus groups and testing the feedback with open betas. It's people like this that suggest we install the game in an "Eidos" subdirectory. Why would I vaguely do this? maybe I should keep my books organised on bookshleves according to publisher too? Sounds stupid doesn't it... except to marketing people.

Some of the best gameplay ideas are coming from the Mod scene, which is to be expected as by definition all mod teams are made of hardcore gamers. In many ways the mod scene is the new bedroom hacking, an essential part of the industry if it is to take in new ideas and new talent. Mod developers tweak the Unreal and Quake engines to do amazing things, but are still limited by the design at the core of these products. Bedroom hackers (like myself) are kept out of the market by the perpetuation of the myth that only multimillion dollar games (almost invariably in 3D) will sell. Statistical evidence that this is a lie (Budget hit Deer Hunter, or 2D successes like Rollercoaster Tycoon) is quietly swept aside.

There is a distinct generation of game developers around the age of Peter Molyneux, Sid Meier, Richard garriot. Sadly, it looks like the next generation is being locked out, their seats taken by the money men and accountants.

11)"The taming of the web"

The internet was supposed to be the ultimate leveller. Suddenly you didn't need a high street store, you could compete with multinationals on an equal playing field. A game could be made in a bedroom in Kansas, and purchased on-line from a customer in Hong Kong. The bug publishers (music, games, books...) would all be swept aside by a new explosion on small independents doing it for themselves...

It didn't happen. The initial wave of fan-run websites started getting too many hits and were bought up by the big multinationals. Search engines that had originally treated all men as equals started offering a premium service that charged people for an immediate listing. Ever tried getting a shareware web site listed on Yahoo? The big publishers make sure a constant stream of identical looking screenshots are fed to the big name websites, every one of which focuses on the same 10 games. Meanwhile the budget publishers, the independent developers, and the true original games are squeezed out. Looking for news on that new indie sci-fi strategy game? sorry, no joy, but we have the same 64 new screenshots of Tomb raider XXVII on our site today!

12)"If we want to be more like this industry..."

The popular claim that "game budgets are going up and up " sits happily alongside those that start with "If we want to be taken seriously like the film industry..." or "If we want to attract the same kind of audience as the music business...". This problem is related to number 10), but basically... THIS IS THE GAMES INDUSTRY. Try reading the fourth word again. The word is GAMES, which, in any thesaurus will lead you to the words 'fun' and 'interactive'. Games are not movies, and never will be, unless they are morphed into hours of tediously acted and scripted FMV. And games won't become books either, the whole notion of interactivity tears to shreds any chance of novel-style scripting. From the music business, the industry is rapidly adopting the kind of disreputable employment contracts and marketing-driven content that has given us the modern pop charts. The music biz is happiest with fewer bands and fewer hits. Just like in games, music has high fixed costs and trivial marginal costs. The end result is a small variety of dumbed-down generic elevator music. Sounds like the games charts to me.

Conclusion

So what's the answer? Am I suggesting a return to bedroom hacking, games that fit on a floppy and 2D sprites? Not exactly, but a creativly-driven, rather than demographics-driven industry would be nice, games that fit on a single CD (at max.) would be nicer still, and a wider tolerance of budget and even low-tech (isometric games DO sell... AOE2 anybody?) would be even nicer. There will always be a good reason to spend mega bucks on a bleeding edge games blockbuster, and I will probably buy some of them, but the danger is that the blockbusters become the only boxes on the shelves. I'm in no danger of losing my interest in games, I was hooked when I first played Pong, and still am. I just think the industry is making some big mistakes and it's time to put fingers-to-keyboard to say so.

Cliff Harris
Indie Game Developer
www.positech.co.uk