As you know, I don’t think video-games have been going through the best of times lately. The rise of production costs, coupled with the massification of casual gaming and the consequent entrenching of the hardcore base – which now seems to live on military action games almost exclusively – has led to a degradation of the creative influxes of the medium. Rarer and rarer are the days where I get to see a new game that is, let’s put it bluntly, an actual new game, and not some remake/sequel/rehash of a classic franchise. It isn’t all bad though, as retro and indie games have found a great new habitat in downloadable services, which still allows some hidden gem to rise up once in a while.

But I have been wondering what does the picture look like from the other side of the mirror. What do journalists, designers and producers think? Thankfully, it appears that Gamespot heard my cries of help, and decided to give me the answer, or at least part of it. They did a state of the art piece, by interviewing the top four American executives of the industry (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo and EA), and their own editorial staff, by asking “what’s wrong”, “what’s right”, and “how is it going to look in five years time”. The answers are enlightening, though probably not because of their actual substance, but for the ways in which they end up mirroring why things have gotten as bad as they are. I won’t analyze every sentence of this feature, but I will comment on some of the more interesting statements.

When it comes to the executive side, I was baffled by one answer to the “what is wrong with the industry” question, and it came from Microsoft’s own Phil Spencer (general manager of Microsoft Game Studios). He answers that what is wrong, is the absence of creativity in designing new games, with designers “following tried-and-true, existing formulas and not trying to challenge themselves with every release”. This is true, but coming from whom it does, it lacks any substantial value, as I don’t see Microsoft pushing the envelope as much as his statement would lead you believe. “Halo 3”, “Fable II” and “Gears of War” aren’t that different from “Halo 2”, “Fable” and “Kill Switch”… so while complaining on lack of creativity is all fine and dandy, it wouldn’t hurt if his actions could back up his words. In all honesty I think he just said what everybody has been saying ever since games are around, without even thinking about whether or not he was contributing to the trend he criticized. Or maybe he really thinks Microsoft’s games are innovative and groundbreaking, in which case, you can see how deluded and out of touch executives can be, when it comes to creativity in artistic mediums. Side note on executive’s equation of creativity: “creativity is proportional to sales figures”… or something along that note.

In terms of “what is right”, and “what’s it going to look like” the greatest problem of the industry becomes fully apparent in all answers. In one way or the other, all the four head-honchos love the fact that the market has opened up to casual gaming. I can understand executives being all Colgate smile happy about making huge piles of money with small, low-budget, easy to produce games, that don’t have to be innovative or creative. But the sad fact is that the casual market has really low standards of quality, even when compared to the hard-core games market (which was pretty lousy as it was). The result is that this massive wave of childish game-like applications – the “Cooking Mama’s”, the “Brain Training’s”, the “Wii Sports” – are  becoming the de facto standard of the industry, as they generate higher revenues with smaller risks, and a lesser need for quality control.

Now, like any other gamer, I love the fact that games have finally become a mass market. It’s great that we have opened up such a closed medium to all sects of society and age groups, meaning that games no longer have to be a modern social stigma for those who play them. But this sudden opening has to be regarded as a challenge for creativity and improvement, and not as some quick way of making money. Because these games are presenting the medium to these new found audiences in its more infantile facet, instead of using this opening as a way to captivate new gamers into more complex, creative and challenging notions of what a video-game can be. And if that doesn’t happen in the near future, this ‘casual gaming’ trend can potentially set back the medium another decade or even more. Casual, mainstream and mass-market – that’s the future, I agree with the executives there, but it’s a future that needs to be shifted into the right direction, and without oversight of niche markets that may want a little more than just waggling controllers and interactive fitness programs.

[Continues on the next Wave Foam Article]