Games: evolution and return
People often have trouble understanding the word “compensation”, of course it’s easy enough to understand as exchange, but in today’s corporate parlance it’s understood as exchanging one commodity as a cost for another. Yesterday I was playing Final Fantasy Dissidia on the old PSP when I was amazed at the replay value of the game, yes I’ve already spent over 50 hours on it which is what this whole topic is about.
Normally, if you look at older games like Mario and Dave, they unanimously had one thing in common, addiction to them. Not that I’m spreading the obsession for nothing, though, this is what the current gaming paradigm has been reduced to; A comfort. I have always been a gamer, I will not deny it and this is exactly what my dispute with today’s games is. The early games had a lot of things that got people hooked, but mostly it was about the level of engagement the player had with the game environment or the “world” of the game. And this compromise has little to do with 3D graphics or the extensive options available.
Let’s take a look at the progression; First there was the advent of simple arcade type games which were phenomenal up to a point. It kept gamers hooked and introduced a new media boom to the world. This was where literally every kid was begging for Atari systems and their Pentium II and III machines had both Sega and NeoGeo emulators installed (mine still has both installed by the way) and the game elements consisted of difficult commands mixed with scripts. smart. Take this a bit further and the same two systems incorporated decent mixed storylines and continuity into the games enhance the capabilities of the media being explored on both tracks. The KOF series of fighting games is a fervent testimonial to this, and from there came the further rise of turn-based strategy and role-playing games that became something akin to “user-controlled novels” on computers. This adaptability of both the game and the media can be called the inflection curve of the gaming industry.
Because this was where many entrepreneurs realized that games could be used to simulate many things, almost everything, so the potential as a commercial product was obvious even from that point on. Progress from then on was focused on improving the game’s visual effects, additives were obvious, visuals needed more work, thus came the influx of investment in game studios and the push for 3D graphics in games. . That apex can be called the secondary curve because once it was established, the potential for trading gains through gaming became insurmountable. Hollywood movies will tell you the story of the rise and fall without fail, but games have the replay factor attached to them, regardless of audience size, which is guaranteed to pay off.
And this replay factor was charged below. We can all see the online capabilities offered by the games that also paved the way for players to simply buy the next booster or upgrade online. The concept of “buy all” is where we can point and say that the game has evolved. So at a point where games were fun with added complexity like Baldur’s Gate, Ys, Metal Gear Solid, games became more about commodity value.
The biggest factor in all of this is mobile gaming, of course, and here I’m pointing to smartphone games that focus solely on killing time. The problem occurs when most of the smartphone gamers are not regular gamers but are just there to kill time. So when you give a game like Subway Surfers online shopping advantages for “normal” people, there’s some level of competition between console/PC games and phone games. The niches are different, the categories are different, and the size is different. A game like Temple Run can’t be compared to Farcry 3, but ultimately when games turn to money, these things get sidetracked and mixed up.
Today you have fantastic game elements that are being added, furnished and perfected. Complexity is a given and with that, some features fit well while others don’t. What is adverse to the gaming paradigm in general is the holistic approach to sales that often engages them in many things from the gaming side. Ultimately, when games are more focused on buying rather than playing, the whole reason to play a game is removed.