Cool = bad?

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Somewhat of a personal peeve of mine, but isn't it rather apparent that design* to become cool (as in fashionable, trendy, street credible or <current top buzzword>) can, in some cases, actually be counterproductive?

Let's take gaming as an example. I've been a gamer since at least a decade before gaming was declared 'cool'. How and by whom, I don't really care - but it HAS happened. While it certainly makes gaming more tolerable in my immediate social life, it has also ruined the experience.

It's no longer about the game, it's about how 'cool' it is. Companies spend millions on getting the final graphical details down so that their product exceeds or at least matches the 'cool' factor of the carbon copy right on the shelf beside them. How about getting 'just nice' graphics and using the extra millions on story/dialogue writing, alternative paths (replayability) and for heaven's sake, how about some quality control and play balance worth its name?

It's getting so bad at times that I'm actually starting to vote with my wallet: Any product trying to push for the 'cool' factor is to be seen as overpriced, as the effort to achieve 'cool' could have been used for something more reasonable.

Anyone with me?

* = Or rather, designers themselves, depending on how much credence there is to the stereotype that you need to be somewhat of an extrovert lunatic to be able to work as one...

 

Gamers who like story and dialogue are the "snobs" of gaming. They are the equivalent of moviegoers who only watch documentaries, television viewers who only watch PBS, and radio listeners who only listen to NPR.

 

In my opinion, gaming becoming mainstream was inevitable. Most people who are gamers got into gaming at a young age. That gaming is more mainstream now is simply due to gaming now being a 2nd generation industry. When I was a kid, I liked games, but seeing as how I'm 37, in my youth, I was essentially a first generation gamer. My parents didn't have computer or console games when they were growing up - they never got into them. Chances are, if you weren't exposed to gaming by the time you were a teenager, you never got into them.

So there's a clear line of demarcation here - If you were older than a teenager by 1980, chances are you aren't into games, because you weren't exposed to them. However, all those gamers from 1980 now have income to spend - not just for games for themselves, but for their kids. Since they liked games, they'll introduce their kids to games, and this causes a positive feedback loop. As more and more people were exposed to games in their youth, they will expose their future kids to games.

So I think gaming has become "cool" not because of advertising, but simply exposure. There weren't very many adults playing games 30 years ago - it was almost exclusively kids. But now those kids are adults, and are purchasing games for themselves as well as their children. That the industry has exploded to cater to this demand is simply economics at work. That games try to meet or exceed the previous version is a result of computers and consoles becoming faster and faster, with more memory and with declining cost. (I read an article a while back that stated if the price of cars had declined at the same rate that the cost of computers have over the last 30 years that you could purchase a new car for about $300.)

 

It used to be a lot about graphics, but since developers started developing first for consoles and only second for PCs (if at all), the graphics have stagnated a fair bit. Reviewers and gamers alike may praise many of the popular new games for their great graphics, but truth be told when I saw Crysis 2 in action my first reaction was, "Is that it?". It seems to me that the original Crysis looked not much worse and possibly even better in some respects than Crysis 2. And this from a company that used to be renowned for making games with superior graphics that you could use to benchmark your new PC with superduper graphics card and CPU.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, I'm with you in that I wish the game developers would spend less time polishing graphics and more time writing an interesting plot, improve game mechanics, or indeed try to balance the game without resorting to level scaling (the laziest way of 'balancing'). Except that I'm not seeing this actually happening.

Graphics may recieve only a token update for each new game that's churned out, but still game mechanics and even plot get copied pretty much directly from one game to another. I'm with Tal in thinking that this falls into the category of profit maximalisation.

And the general public seems to not care either. Sure, they may complain about it on the internet, but if I see how many people bemoaned the lack of innovation in for instance the CoD series, and yet it still manages to break all previous sales records despite the gameplay, graphics and plot having remained identical for pretty much 4 games (and years) in a row, I'm thinking that those people complaining but still buying are getting what they deserve.

Or to bring it closer to home for the residents of SP, apparently many people here are happy to throw their money at for instance Bioware, even though for the past few years they've seriously dropped the ball a few times. In ME they showed us how adept they were with copy-pasting dungeons, in DA2 they perfected it by creating a game that was essentially just about 7 areas that were shamelessly recycled for everything. And people are still buying it, even praising it, so what incentive do they get out of it to improve their performance for the upcoming games?

Personally, I do vote with my wallet. The only game I bought this year is The Witcher 2. I would've bought Deus Ex: Human Revolution too, but they made it use Steam. And when it comes to DRM I also vote with my wallet.

/edit
And for those wondering - no, I didn't download any games either. I just replay older games. Or don't play at all, that works too.

 

That describes me perfectly

but anyways, the commercialization of gaming really kind of sucks. I would much rather play a 16-bit game like Chrono Trigger than touch a Call of Duty game anyday. I don't even have any new generation consoles, my most used system is the SNES. It's only going to change if people start buying the games with story rather than the games with hyper-real explosions

 

Case in point: Dungeon Siege. (The original from early 00's.)

I just recently found out that the design team deemed it top priority that IN CASE some nutjob modifies the game's character 3d mesh into a female gnome with overgrown mammaries and some nice booty that game's standard armours MUST fit nicely and believably. Instead of putting the energy to, say, make even rudimentary sanity checks on how the game is balanced or like, you know, making sure that archers and mages can actually find some items to wear instead of being forevermore stuck on superawful low STR req items. (Seems like the itemization group didn't get the memo where it states that neither archers nor mages develop very fast in STR.)

 

In terms of RPG or RTS or anything with a plot, I'd rather they worked on the plot instead. It's not that cool to play 20 hour games with great graphics really, although recycled levels (e.g. every planet being the same in Mass Effect 1) are more of a problem (and random dungeons are not the answer). Also, I'm on the verge of looking up indie platformers on a fit of countercultural backlash.

On the other hand, I don't mind the new "cool" trend of cinematic designing.

Oh, and I don't mind easier puzzles and the lack of the only one way to strike in war games, or anything else that makes you reload a lot, read walkthroughs etc. Games are entertainment after all.

 

However, Minecraft surely seems to fit the bill on "content over graphics" category. Respect for that.

But that's gotta be classed "indie production" so far, right?

 

I personally preferred the planets in Mass Effect 1 over the railroaded planet missions in Mass Effect 2. Of course recycled levels are not really good. However, only the basics of the planets in ME 1 were the same. Each one had different things to find, different details hidden. Some more, some less. But they weren't completely the same. I really would like for Mass Effect 3 to be more like ME 1 in that aspect. ME 2 felt short and small in comparison to ME 1, due to lack of exploration. (though I guess they really should improve the Mako controls for console gamers. They really sucked. But on PC, they were perfect).