games

Fantasy CRPGs And Distance From The Source

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I love Lord of The Rings.  It really is a classic, awesome and epic and beautiful.  Hell, I actually think Tom Bombadil was awesome, but that’s another story.

Or Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser.  A fantasy road movie, two guys getting into crazy trouble and magic kingdoms underground.

How about Elric?  A buddy story gone terribly wrong among battling gods and falling kingdoms.  Also, hey, god of Jesters.

But what doesn’t feel like fantasy literature is fantasy games.  I don’t say this to diss CRPG fantasy games.  I love a lot of them, I played the first Wizardry, I know Demon’s Winter is one of the most unappreciated fantasy games of the 80’s.  I enjoyed a lot of the Atelier series.  I played a lot of Final Fantasy.  I adore Dragon Quest IX.  It’s just they don’t always feel like the epic literature that inspired them or the genre.

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The Best Laid Plans Of The Gaming Industry

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“What magical scapegoat will game companies point to when no one buys their $70 games on owner-proof, piracy-free systems?”
@ThiefOfHearts

ThiefOfHearts has a point there – a lot of what we’re seeing in the console and game market points to more and more restrictions on games that keep costing a pretty penny.  We can expect no backwards compatibility on the PS4, I’m not particularly confident on the Xbox 720 (or whatever), prices seem to keep going up for AAA titles that are repetitious,  though there’s a few signs of hope game companies don’t want to piss people off.

But in general, in gaming, there’s the sense of wanting to make more limits and more restrictions, at least in the console market, and with some concern in the PC market.  Of course this exists to preserve and expand profits, unless someone in the security divisions of various companies has some weird bet going on how many people they can annoy.

At the same time, with game prices going up and budgets going up, there’s the need to make, well, a lot of money.  As the next generation of consoles at least looks like it’s going to fail to impress, I’m wondering just how much is going to get made. There’s a reason I’m moving to PC.

Are these security changes going to cure the larger market problems?  Well, no.

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Deep Speculation on Gaming. Kind of

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Monday, I’ll have an analysis up at Fan To Pro on CES and disruption of gaming.  Well a rant and analysis.  With bullet points.  Anyway its 1200 words of painful insight and sarcasm.

With all the changes in gaming going on, I’ve asked myself what part it plays in my life.  I enjoy it, I grow from it, etc.  But as so many options come before me, I find myself asking what is it for.

This is actually a question many people are going to have to ask with so many options and so many changing options.  Consumer or producer, what gaming is for is going to have to be asked to spend time, money, insight, and throwing birds at pigs appropriately.

The thing is what gaming is for has changed as the scope has expanded.  There are many “non-gamers” who game.  The DS, the Wii, Facebook games, mobile games, etc. have brought in legions of non-gamers into the gamer space – and these people are gamers.  The sphere has expanded.

But what people want and need out of gaming differs along many axes.  We just don’t think about it very much because we treat gaming as all-too-often monolithic.  Sure, it’s not monolithic, but it’s far less of what it’s not now – if you’ll excuse my terrible contortions of language.

So for myself, with options, I have to ask what I get out of gaming and how, out of many options, to pursue it.

Developers, hardware makers, publishers, are going to have to ask what people want and need, and how to deliver it.  They will be unlikely to cover all markets.

Then of course there’s the question of what happens as the omnipresence of games expands . . . but we’ll see how that goes in the next few years.

What is gaming for?

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.