I was reading an article about the future of the video game industry, and at one point it said something like “as the video game industry has matured and become more mainstream”. Now from a business perspective this is true. From a creative perspective this is not necessarily the case. I would say that right now the focus of the game industry in general is “let’s make games that lots of people will be able to have fun with so that we can make a lot of money” and guess what, that’s what the industry focus was right at the start. The alternative would be “let’s make games that are really interesting” or “let’s make games that are really deep and challenging”. Let me be the first one to tell you that challenging games are not fun at all.

I could go on with this all day but let me sum up where I’m going this way: Relative to what you can actually do in the games available for them, the Sony PS3 is a “next generation” video game console, the Nintendo Wii isn’t even a first generation console. I mean seriously some of the shit they have you do in Nintendo Wii games is the same stuff they were doing in the 1980s with their Game and Watch series. To be a little more generous, the “wii sports” package is pretty much the same gameplay wise as the old NES/famicom sports titles, maybe even worse in some cases. The only differences are graphics that are a bit sharper and more sophisticated motion sensing capabilities.

So saying, what would I consider maturation for video games? I think that games need to focus more on letting you control stories and less on showing you stories that you get the most minimal of input into. In other words free-form everything. Action, plot, endings, expansions, and especially controls. Games continually fall back to limiting you artificially. Like not being able to jump/climb in RPGs when and where you want to but instead only in fixed areas or sometimes not at all. Similarly you are not allowed to interact with everything in the game world. There are three reasons for this, to control the way you progress through the game, system/media limitations, and the fact that a single studio doesn’t have the time, effort or resources to code shoveling and pencil sharpening into FPS games. Somewhere along the line when deciding which direction to head in with a game they do actually have to prioritize “well do we want people to have a bunch of guns and blow stuff up or do we want them to have a handwriting interface?”. So, I think that the fewer the limitations the more the industry would mature. Right now more than anything the two biggest obstacles are media limitations and controllers. Ah well part of the controller thing might actually be the limitations of humans in the first place. I mean at the most you only expect people to be able to move their ten fingers and to only be capable of so much action at a time. Whatever else changes that isn’t going to. I’ve heard speculation that eventually game controls will just be a variety of sensors. Not even virtual reality, that too is too limiting. But things like monitoring the motion of your eyes to make selections and change displays and having each little wiggle of an appendage being a different command. Walking in real life to walk in a video game isn’t playing, it’s walking. Shifting your pinkie and having your on screen avatar start walking as a few sideways motions of your opposite ring finger start singling out destinations while the side to side motion of your eyes shifts the on-screen display… That is playing a game.

So that’s what I’m saying, that’s the direction games need to be headed in to mature. That’s playing a video game.  Dancing games, music games, sports games, those are all just pale imitations. But adventure games? Platformers? Shooters? Now those are video games. Dammit. Fuck.