Evolution and Revolution: The Changing Face of Gaming
When I started playing video games, a wide-eyed child fascinated with the concept of taking the moving pictures on the television and telling them what to do with my NES controller, the core ideas behind gaming were simple and concrete; you’d move Mario to the right because that was the only damn direction to go, you`d jump on top of enemies for points, and it ended with you fighting some inscrutable boss creature. Essentially the idea of distinct levels, a lives system, and points, hoo boy were there points to accumulate.
This was in many ways the original archetype of video gaming, the arcade-styled tropes of having a game session start when you turned the machine on and finish when you hit “power”. Though I’m aware I’m painting the games of the Atari and NES era in incredibly broad strokes, I feel like this style of gaming was the de-facto standard for video games throughout the eighties.
There were changes and gradual evolutions made to this formula, as design standards elevated and game programmers made up and implemented newer and crazier ideas. Case in point, the original Super Mario Bros placed against the pinnacle of the NES era, Super Mario Bros 3; though if you squinted your eyes and turned your head a little bit both these games could look largely similar, it’s obvious that the original concept had evolved substantially.
Jump on stuff for points: the definition of video games
Like all paradigms, though, shit eventually goes and done gets shifted on the public’s respective asses. Hence the idea of revolutions in gaming. Though there are almost certainly far more than the couple I’m going to try to chronicle here, there have been a number of watershed moments in the history of video games that stand out as a clear revolution in how we think about video games, and using little more than my disgusting knowledge of video game history I’m going to try and take us through a few of these moments in a series of articles called “The Changing Face of Gaming”.
Today’s first topic, one which pushed me forward and inspired me to start looking into and writing this nonsense, is the revolution we currently see ourselves in the eye of today: casual and mobile gaming. It’s no secret that without even really meaning to Apple and the iPhone have changed the landscape of video gaming. Even moreso than the Nintendo Wii and all the hullabaloo it created, Apple’s system of cheap, easy to download games have caused people to question some of the most entrenched foundations of video games: Should games cost 40-60 dollars? Do we really need development studios with staffs in the triple digits spending hundreds of millions making a new AAA title when a couple of dudes with a basement and a bachelors in computer science can create a kitchy idea involving infuriated avians and make exponentially more money?
They may look stupid, but these birds may as well CRAP GOLD
To be fair I am in no way arguing that AAA video game titles are going to go the way of the dinosaur any time soon. I love my Halos and Gears of Wars as much as if not more than the next person, but the pure cold numbers being shown by the profitability of companies such as Popcap (makers of Plants Versus Zombies, which had you killing zombies with the use of smiling, oft-suicidal vegetation) and Zynga (makers of Farmville, where you…I dunno, planted crops and harassed your facebook friends? I guess?) must have a number of game producers, or at the very least their shareholders, wondering if there’s a way to grab onto this train and cling to it for all it’s worth.
And if you start looking at the potential long-term effects of what casual gaming could have on the face of video games, look no further than the apparent hardware stagnation of current consoles. The Xbox 360 and PS3 came out six years ago, practically a century in console lifespan terms, and there still hasn’t been any real discussion of the next hardware drop, other than vague unsubstantiated hints of top men connecting wires in the bowels of Microsoft and Sony’s black ops hardware design skunk works. True the Wii’s successor the Wii-U is dropping at some point next year, but at this point I don’t even know what to make of Nintendo’s hardware decisions so I’m just choosing to ignore them for the time being.
NO SERIOUSLY NINTENDO, WHAT IS THIS? I WOULD HONESTLY LIKE TO KNOW
One could argue, certainly not prove mind you but definitely argue, that with the rising wave of casual games crashing down upon the public, and their focus less on graphical sheen and hardware capacity than pick-up-and-play kitschy fun there has become less and less of an impetus for hardware developers to push out something new and more powerful, which in turn has given us this era of games where everything looks the same degree of decent. It feels like the gaming world is slowly but surely starting to shift away from games founded upon the newest and strongest hardware, back to a point where things don’t need to look beautiful, they just need to be entertaining.
Which may not even be a bad thing! Hell, I remember spending years of my life discussing how the best games ever made were for the Super Nintendo, and the rush to graphical realism made games a less entertaining experience. But at the same time when I think of games I want to play I envision the sweeping epic, the hours-long journey of larger-than-life characters saving the world, and you just can’t get that from casual gaming or a mobile touch screen. At least not yet, I suppose.
It’s just strange and ominous for this crusty, cynical 20-something to see the seismic shifts already occurring in gaming right now, and looking at the potential hypothetical futures. If games are no longer as intrinsically tied to powerful hardware, then (and we’re going full William Gibson, future-punk here folks) it’s not hard to imagine that with so much media going “to the cloud” these days, with services such as spotify or netflix streaming, than, christ, there could come a day in the relatively near future where everything we play runs instantly on a cheap, simple piece of technology, with the game’s themselves even likely being free thanks to the invention of freeplay video games.
Though I think that’s the topic for a future article.
