karsten's Videogaming Talks: What modern Videogames will always miss

The article text was edited thanks to Kevin's work and now should be easier to understand for english born speakers.

So, i never tought to be so fast in writing this article... i guess i already had it written in my mind since long ago, and i'm honored to be the first posting it since this section renaming. This might be the start of "karsten's Videogaming Talks" it'll be (if enough people will find it interesting) the first of a serie of Talk topic i might make in the future to spread consciousness on changes in videogames market and world or just to make the forums more lively . Please Post as many comments as you want, but also try to keep the topic clean.

by the way, i can understand people finding this read awfully boring but please don't flame it ok?

(the edit starts HERE)

Karsten's video game talks Vol.1
"What modern games will always miss."

Lately I've noticed that I keep coming back to older and older games, as if my tastes cannot
adapt to the "videogaming evolution". I've always been a "nostalgic" kind of gamer, but I've never
dug deep inside that feeeling until now. I started thinking that with so many people interested in
older games (retrogaming), I can't be wrong.

So I started to think of what was wrong in these "modern" games; sure, many suck (same in the past)
or have little innovation or fantasy in them, but the masterpieces seem to always have:

-beautiful colorful graphics
-astonishing doby surround audio and tracks
-voice acted scenes
-online multiplayer
-expansions, sequels, editors to bend the game to your will.
-exotic (idiotic?) control with webcams, add-ons, or a-la-wii

Nothing seems wrong, but what is it that makes everything seem different and not as good as the old games?

I suddenly realized that perfect 3D graphics, with characters almost perfect to the point of being impossible
to tell from reality, perfect sound, music (echoing now from the right, now from behind, you while you walk in the
virtual city, and everything else were giving me a great experience that was missing JUST ONE THING.

I'm not required to use my immagination anymore.

Not at all, not even a little. The robot is perfect in all details, and so is his pilot (that young green haired girl).
The music is perfect, recorded in live perfomance from an orchestra, but I'm just SITTING and PLAYING.
In the old school games, you were imagining your robot as perfect and to tastes YOU HAD MADE OUT.
Same for the young pilot, sure she's green haired, but nothing was forcing you to think that she looked
exactly looking like the classmate next to you.

In all the (older) game situations, you had to imagine; give people voices, facial expressions, feelings, everything.
I could see in my mind the SPRITE called Kefka (from FF6) laughing and poisoning Doma with great delight.
I was imagining the scene: Kefka's voice and laughter, the surroundings, the face of the other soldiers around him,
their dress, smells, everything. This is what videogames have lost (forever?) nowadays. Nothing is left to your
imagination, everything is perfectly detailed, shown, heard.

Videogaming no more exercises of imagination than an interactive film. Everything that you see in modern games
was already imagined for you by someone else; already chewed you, just have to swallow it. This explains why I keep
returning to old SNES classics and similar: I'm the kind of gamer that loves to use his imagination while playing.

Now I can explain why I somehow enjoyed Unlimited Saga even thought it's a damn poor game. It still retained
some charm due to his absence of acted scenes (everything is text) , and even thought there is voice acting,
there's nothing to look at beside the character's still face (so you have to imagine his face, despair, rage). Even a
damn poor game had some attraction to me because it made me use the imagination I had not used for so long.

Will ever modern games allow you to use your immagination like old ones?
Is everything dead, cloaked in wonderful graphics and perfect 3D models?
Will I keep playing snes games until I'm old, and am I the only one feeling like this?

Let me hear your thoughts and ideas, what is YOUR experience?

karsten

 

W00t!
Very nice!

 

I was excited when this topic was created and now even more so, hopefully you will continue this as a series and others will create their own articles.

I completely understand where you`re coming from and if you feel that we are completely being spoon fed games experiences however if you think about the way in which story can unfold in film or any other medium the narrator or creator can leave in or out as much as he or she likes therefore allowing you to use your imagination as you please. But that is just when you`re looking at the narrative.

I think this generation and the hardware that has come about in the last say five years has really given the developers the tools to create new and exciting games with new exciting possibilites(wii control schemes). They must take heed though as every game does not have to angle shoot looking for a new innovative way to present itself (wii control schemes).

All said and done like you, me and most of people over 18 we will always go back to our roots. XBLA etc has brought old games to a new generation of gamers and has made it easier for me to play Bomberman, SOR2 and lots of other titles which will clock more hours on my 360 than the current gen titles will. A lot of games these days lack replayability.

 

i'm glad to hear some comments, and see that at least other 2 people more or less agree with me. At least now i knoe that i'm not alone feeling that videogames without your imagination in are somehow losing part of their soul...

the only thing that surprises me is the total uninterest torward the topic... i guess too many people are playing PES8, Halo 3, COD4 and Assassin's creed right now

 

I mostly agree (especially on the FF6 part), just didn't have anything to add

 

I've always tought that the the difference that I feel, regarding old VS new, is much similar to reading a book VS watching a movie.

Kudos to Karsten!

 

I think so too. I get the very same feeling when I watch a movie and often get disappointed when I see how characters look like compared to what I imagined them to look like when reading the book.

It was a good read Karsten, and I totally agree that todays games are much more realistic and therefore require less imagination. Nowadays we get everything very detailed, no matter if its a view of the countryside or pieces of brain splattering the wall in FPS. Back then we would imagine what the forests look like when walking through the lame green tilesets in Final Fantasy, or imagine how the enemy must look like after we splattered them apart with our BFG9000. Now we get everything spoon fed, in every detail.

I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing.
When thinking back, I never had as much fun again as with the SNES, playing it with my cousin every Sunday, leaving it on because there was no save option! But then again, I still got goosebumps when playing Metal Gear Solid for the first time, because it was so realistic and detailed.

Something is missing in todays games indeed, I'm just not sure if this is it or if I just grew older and gaming just became a distraction from the rest of life. The childish innocence is gone, where all I had to do was go home, say "fuck homework" and totally get soaked into games. Sadly that feeling will never come back. :katamari:

 

It was alright. Try harder with the English grammar as it turned me off a lot when I was reading it.

I do agree with it, but I also think that is what made us want the graphics and technology we have today. I always wanted a 3D Sonic game and we eventually got one that was pretty good.

That's the thing. 3D is still evolving from the 16bit textures we had in the PlayStation days all the way to high resolution textures, higher polygon counts, pixel shading, etc. Making things closer and closer to what we imagined. A lot of the games out there are pretty much the same as they were in the 16bit days. My theory is that we are still in a graphical revolution, and will still be in one for a few more generations (although Wii is by far a true evolution in gameplay). So, we will still continue to see same old gameplay, but shinier graphics than before. The transition from 8bit Atari all the way to 16bit consoles, and even 32bit consoles we saw both graphical and gameplay evolutions. That is why many see those eras as the golden age of videogames. Back then, companies were willing to take risks on gameplay ideas, as well as graphical, but now, not so much as the price has gone up in developing them and making a return on an investment now takes much longer than before.

 

Nice to hear your ideas, Mad.
Actually i too, consider the period from the last games of 8-bit NES up to the first years of saturn/playstation/3do/cd-i/Jaguar/N64 as the "golden Age" of videogames. An incredible time (IMHO) in which so many companies jumped in the gaming business and, believe it or not, each one of them (nevertheless how badly they failed or succeeded) gave something to the Videogaming history, wheter by concept, innovation, or special gameplay. I'm planning to write a future article on this topic when i'll have some extra free time...

What i do not agre with you is about the wii. I don't really see so much of evolution; the controls are not accurate enough and most games would play better or the same with regular PADS... Twilight princess is an example of a game uselessly using the wiimote... also i personally found ridiculous that the wiimote is not calibrated on fixed points... that would have improved the accuracy by 100000 times. But this is another topic and it's better to let it be!


oh, by the way could you address me all the errors i made, please? I'm always wilingly to improve it to express my ideas in a better fashion.

Obviously i'll edit my post afterwards to avoid other people not being turned off by my english

karsten

 

Perfect answer to me (thought the same thing some years ago at dreamcast era)... imagination and abstraction... thats the key.
Too bad i'm busy at the moment... but yeah, great subject!

 

awwww. i hoped to get some feedback from the "forum authorities" too... also i guess that madhatter found the text too bad to be corrected

 

First off, great article, I totally got your point and your point was logical and indeed 'personal'

Now I'm gonna get 'ageist', which I can do, as I'm an 'old git', like it or lump it, this is yet another personal view, just like Karsten expressed.

I've lived through every age of video games and, yes, I will always agree that 'old' games were usually:

1. More difficult to complete.
2. Required you to use your brain.
3. Thought provoking.
4. Time consuming (sometimes in a good way, sometimes not)

However decent 'modern' games (whatever they may be) still allow you to use your imagination.

I'll show a few case in points relating to some of 'todays' modern titles:

Forza 2: I get to drive some of the fastest 'realistic' cars in the world around some of the worlds most demanding and 'realistic' race tracks, I don't have to fill them up with petrol, I don't have to service them, I don't even have to wash and wax 'em! In my imagination I can race damn fast and not have to worry about crashing them. This makes me want to play a game like this again and again. (not forgetting that DLC can enhance this experience)

PGR 4: I can muck about in some of the worlds fastest cars, in my imagination I imagine that I'm pretty good, the adrenaline rush backs this up.

Half-Life: I imagine I'm Gordan Freeman, seriously. The game and its off-shoots is so damn 'deep' it plays on your imagination.

Bioshock: Where do I start? The whole game is a pure endorfin rush, it delves deep into the imagaination at damn near every turn, forget the gfx and sound (if thats possible) the story and scripting is beautiful to play and after all 'play' is all you are doing, its not real-life, it's nowhere near, its a game that could have been made 20 years ago, or tomorrow.


...I've seen numerous old games that have translated perfectly to new H/W, Outrun being an obvious candidate.

Xbox Live Arcade (and it's equivilents) have shown that theres more than enough room and interest for both 'old' and 'new'.

Personally I'll try never to label 'old' and 'new' games as we are all getting older and games will always merely be just games, no more, no less!

 

many thanks for your corrections and suggestions, really. i think that dividing everything in chapters like you suggested will be a great help.
i know that sometimes i ask too much from my english, so any suggestion is really welcome.

by the way, i didn't mean to discredit my work as you stated, but i'm just a kind of man that takes efforts in improving himself, so any correction made on my texts are welcome, and even more your re-write of it. I always try to get better to be able one day to express my idea without any fault in my english.

thanks for your compliments, really. But actually it's difficult for me to compare the "immagination" required in forza 2 or PGR4 or half-life with old times. I mean the effect you had on half-life is a kind of YOU identificating with the main hero.

That is great and actually one of the most important aims for a videogame, but a completely different immagination work. i'm also playing forza 2 but i'm, not immaginating anything about the driver, while i could in the old F-zero...

i mean that at least in MY case better graphics = less immagination work...


lastly i have to agree with you about live arcade games and outrun. maybe there's some hope for a old taste player like me in the future I hope more and more games in the future will manage to keep that much hidden of their main characters.

many thanks to all the people who read this, really.

in the next week i'll write (and check for better quality ) another article on my view on videogames world. If you would like to have me debate some specific topic, feel free to propose me by PM or even better in one of these topics.

thanks,
karsten

 

I'm by no means an old gamer. Truth be told, I don't even play games that much any more. I agree with everything that's been said. I do think, however, that greater graphics gives greater power to the developers to deliver the story that they want to tell.

I don't know how many of you have read Nabokov's Great Readers and Great Writers, but it discusses how a great writer should be able to create for his (or her) audience a world in which everything is there for the reader to explore and derive meaning. A great reader is one who interprets the world through the framework that the author has provided. That means no outside influences such as background of the writers past, or other works. This same exact theory can be applied to video games.

I'm sure we all like the freedom we had in imagining our various fantasies about our favorite games, but we truly weren't experiencing the artist's vision. Writers are confined by vocabulary and intelligence--not the material they have to work with. Artists are limited by skill and imagination--not by the canvas they are working on. What I'm saying is, in an ideal world graphics, sound, everything would be perfect if that is what the designer desires. If they want to take their creation back to 8-bit graphics they should be able to do that, but if they want everything to be photo realistic, that shouldn't be out of the question to them.

It feels sort of weird saying this, but video games aren't created for us (The good ones that is. Madden can lick my nuts). Real video games, real pieces of art are representations of the feelings and philosophies of the artist behind them.

 

nice point, really. but i used to think of a certain kind of videogames (expecially RPGs), a little like "interactive books"; a book that you read but have the chance to alter and move in atwish. In a certain way, keeping up to your example, i was a great reader of videogames

 

^ Spot on, nicely put m8 :clap:

 

this is really an interesting point. more or less true for me since i started with NES but love SNES games the most. might it be because of this that i love so much old style games?

i'd like to hear if it is true for other people in the forum...


if you start gaming with 3d, will you love it more than 2D? and viceversa?

post your experience.

karsten

 

I gotta say, I've really enjoyed reading this thread, even though some of the posts are kinda long... jay slash kay.

The initial article by Karsten was nice and a good read. And I like the fact that there's been some actual intelligent responses for once.

I recently read an article about a "one-console future" and I hope to discuss that soon on the forum. However, I gotta do some searching and make sure it hasn't be discussed before.

Great article Karsten! Keep up the good work!