Games are getting better

I read a lot of complaints about the state of the game industry only producing bad sequels, and no good games any more. And I don't think that is true. In fact gamers nowadays have it so good, they don't even know any more how bad it used to be.

My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81, back in 1981, a quarter of a century ago. That computer had 1 kilobyte of RAM, extendable to 16 kilobyte. And there was a version of Space Invaders running on it, in black and white, 64 x 48 pixel resolution. The ZX81 also played chess, text adventures, and other games, many of them text-based, or with very primitive graphics.

My next computer was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. So now I had 48 kB of RAM, and 15-color 256x192 graphics, making a lot more complicated games possible. There were even the first jump-and-run games, like the famous Manic Miner. But gameplay was horrible, you couldn't save your game, and you had only 3 lives. When you lose your last life, or you turn off the computer, you have to start from the first level again. The levels being rather hard, I ended up using a cheat for infinite lives and leaving the computer turned on, so I could finally see all the levels. The Spectrum also ran a version of Elite, using primitive vector graphics. I didn't play no role-playing games on the Spectrum yet, but there was a text adventure named The Hobbit, based on Tolkien's book, which showed some basic graphics, but was still based on a text parser. So if you saw a boat and typed "board boat", you'd get a message that this wasn't possible, until you found out by trial and error that the correct command was "enter boat".

A few years later I got a Commodore Amiga 2000, the first machine which actually looked like a desktop computer of today. Its graphics were far superior to the PCs of that time, with up to 4096 colors at 640 x 256 resolution, and a "blitter" enabling fast movement of sprites. On the Amiga I played my first computer role-playing games, like The Bard's Tale, or the first "3D real time" RPG, Dungeon Master. But it wasn't real 3D, you couldn't move the camera around yet, you just had first-person view and could only turn in 90° angles, and move square by square. There were strategy games like Empire, which were my first multiplayer experience. Multiplayer meaning several players taking turns "hotseat" on the same computer.

After the Amiga I bought my first PC, and I'm still mainly playing PC games. But PC games also have come a long way. You only need to look at the different versions of Civilization to see how far we have come. I remember playing PC games in 4-color CGA, with horrible magenta and cyan tones. And it isn't only the graphics. With the typical RAM of a PC having grown from 640 kilobyte to 1 or more Gigabyte, games have become a lot more complex too. And they have become a lot more user-friendly over the last 25 years.

But what has happened is that the market for video games has grown enormously. There are now far more games produced every year than before. That automatically results in two things: Not every game is highly original any more, and some games are better than others. It is not that games developers have somehow lost the ability to produce original games, it is only that the number of games being thrown onto the market has depassed the number of new ideas. Instead of 10 new games being released having 5 new ideas, we now have 100 new games being released having 10 new ideas. The percentage of original games is decreasing, but not the total number of them.

And with several games of the same genre available, people start comparing them with each other. Is Dungeon and Dragons Online a bad game? Compared to World of Warcraft, probably. Compared to the old The Bard's Tale it is revolutionary and far superior. You could say that the rising tide lifts all boats, even the junk games of 2006 that get a "4 out of 10" rating in a PC games magazine or review website are much better than most of the games I grew up with. Which is why everybody is playing today's games, and very few people still play Sinclair Spectrum games on an emulator. Everybody who was there at the time will agree that let's say Elite was one of the best games ever, but nobody wants to play it any more. Because it was great only compared to the other games of that time, not compared to what is on offer now.

And I do think that this will continue. The games of 2010 will be better than today's games, and not only in graphics. Following Sturgeon's Law, 90% of the games of 2010 will be crap, compared to the other 10%, although still beating most games of the year 2000. And with the video games market having grown further, 10% of it will still be quite a lot of games. There are already more good games out there than I have the time to play, especially if some of them (like WoW), have the ability to entertain me for a thousand hours and more. And while the doomsayers will always be around, I think we can look into a bright gaming future.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:39 AM Permanent Link