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Gamasutra interview post-GDCOnlineOctober 28th, 2011 |
The normally vivacious Leigh Alexander was an a contemplative mood as she posed questions to me in an hourlong interview right after GDC Online. We talked about how games are changing with mobile and social coming along and making sessions shorter and arguably less classically immersive; and how we ourselves are drifting away from the big games, as players.
I wish more of the interview fit in the format of a Gamasutra article, because it was a great, quiet little discussion.
“Another way to think of it is, we always said games would be the art form of the 21st century: Gamers will all grow up and take over the world, and we’re at that moment now,” he continues. “It’s all come true — but the dragons and the robots didn’t come with us, they stayed behind.”
Yet in plenty of ways this loss isn’t even about social games, Koster believes. “We’re losing some of our most cherished things — and honestly, we already had. The more big business we got, the more that got replaced by women in too-little clothes, or guys that all look the same and have bullet-heads and everybody’s dressed in green and brown.”
In light of the increasingly risk-averse and market-researched nature of traditional games, the increasing size of the mainstream audience has been something of a boon. “If you’d asked someone in 1998 whether there could be hit games about cooking, fashion design… a guy running over roofs, [as in Canabalt], still there’s an element of a broader frame of reference, a broader aesthetic there.”
And while he himself is a big science fiction fan, Koster says that a wider frame of reference is “incredibly exciting” for games that can be about all kinds of things now, beyond the expected. “We lose something, but we gain something that is potentially bigger,” he reflects.
– Gamasutra – News – Raph Koster Talks Loss, Opportunity For Games In The Social Media Age.
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Not all but some. That’s a fair assessment, Yukon. Others are using their celebrity to give support. Arlo, David Crosby, Graham Nash and others. Who knows about the money being donated?
The hard problem for the OWSers is as we speak a schedule of behavioral cultural programming is being launched much like the one that elected Barack Obama. It is a technique that any savvy gamer knows works and even how to do. Trouble is it takes a lot of money to do it with mainstream media. Not so much when using fast cheap deep songs, youtube, cardboard signs, etc. And it has to be done transparently and in their faces. Gets a little risky if you are starting or in the middle of acquiring a fortune. Not so much if you have one or don’t need one. Good shoes and strong legs, walk to DC, talk loud, gather a crowd. Old school but it works. You have to ask yourself what is worth having the world you were told was yours, the one your grandfathers fought and died for before my generation let it slip away in a purple haze, back.
And can you keep it? Some believe direct action gets direct results. Positive reinforcement is the tool of al Bari, the evolver.
You can have a summer of love anytime you have friends come spring time. Come fall, you better have a means to stay warm in the winter.
Yeah…where are they now? Looking out the windows on Wall Street.
One of these lifetimes, we ought have a “Summer of Love” moment at a time when I’m neither too young nor too old to take full advantage of it.
Len, as far as gaming goes the old saying “A fool and his money are soon parted” comes to mind. And in my opinion, we have created a social foolishness phenomenon that’s been bumped to new scales by the new age of computers and communication. But every action has a reaction. The pendulum is swinging back the other way. It just doesn’t happen overnight.
Gamers are waking up to a world where cardboard signs are battling glossy web pages and winning. We waited decades to see if this generation would wake up and move out and they reply with Guy Fawkes masks and waiting it out in the snow in Zucotti Park, using skills to convert exercise bicycles to charge batteries. My son says “the overeducated underemployed”.
It seems strange how few of their cultural heros have stepped up. They seem to be oblivious to it all entralled by their own self promotion. It usually works the other away around but it says something about the commitment to the money to be made in the face of a collapse of opportunities for all. In that I am disappointed. Who is out there cheering them up and on? Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger for crying out loud.
Gamers are weird: the psychos of the web and the wimps on the street. Steve Jobs is a saint. Dennis Ritchie who? Disappointing. Meanwhile the old folkies are working overtime: fast deep and cheap. A zeitgeist of cardboard prophecy and write like hell, record and release mistakes and all. Frequency over amplitude. Trying to get the dream back.
I don’t know, len. I don’t know if it’s marketeering gone wild, or if I’m just getting set in my ways as my beard grows grayer.
I do know that I was geek when geek wasn’t cool, and I’ll be geek when I’m laid to rest (I ought to make them bury me in full Star Fleet style, just for kicks).
I’ll answer the folk or glam dilemma if I get a new axe for Christmas (bass, not battle, though I’d be happy to find a twin-bladed troll shaver under the tree).
A friend of mine also noticed the decline in Sci-Fi (aka, Siffy) as it tries to engage the gamer demographic with it’s programming. She commented dryly “chicks in tank tops with guns”.
It seems the gamers take over the world just as it takes a Thelma and Louise suicide dive in style and slo-mo. The zeitgeist has taken another turn and into the streets which makes it a little hard to take the gamers seriously at this precise moment where the streets of Oakland go flash bang in meat space and the orc hordes shut down a real time port. Dragon redeeming? Really?
Hey Yukon, wasn’t that what they said about the VRMLers, that is, a hobbyist klatsch? Art or craft? Money or expression? Folk or glam rock? The wheel turns faster but the car is still stuck in the ditch.
Ah well, where are those elf ears?
I’m beginning to think that we may see the MMORPG as we know it become the realm of the hobbyist, created by and for a relatively small body of hardcore enthusiasts.
I’m also beginning to think this is a good thing. If we can unhitch development from the “get rich quick” mentality of the marketeers, that provides us much greater latitude to experiment, make some mistakes, make some breakthroughs, and reinvigorate immersive virtual worlds.
And when the rest of the world gets bored with dogpaddling in the shallow end of the pool (no offense), we’ll be ready.