Games As Art Part III: The State of The Medium

It's good. For all my whining about sellout developers and an increased reliance on graphical fidelity to push massive numbers of units, videogames have never been healthier. This is mainly due to the wondrous tubes of the internet, which have at last given a digital medium a digital home. For years, I bought games at retail outlets. Wal-Mart, BestBuy, Circuit City, CompUsa; even the occaisional EB games saw me purchasing a game. This was the standard for most of the life of videogaming - you go into a store, buy a box, and usually what you got was a CD jewelcase, a manual, and a couple of leaflets begging you to register (did anyone ever fill one of those out?) The thing is, all of those are irrelevant to a digital game - the only thing that matters is the bytes on the disk. There is no "physical product" with a game. What you're buying is a specific arrangement of ones and zeros. So it makes no sense for the primary method of distribution to be constrained by such things. Now don't get me wrong, I loved browsing through a shelf, flipping open the boxes, checking out screenshots, and all the other physical aspects of purchasing from a brick and mortar store. I even loved manuals, especially ones that were flavorful and more than just instruction leaflets. But damn it was bad for gaming. You know why games were usually either wildly successful or terrible flops? It's because there's only so much shelf space in a Wal-Mart for computer games, and the chain is only going to keep buying the large volume sellers. So unless your game was a mega hit, it was off the shelves - and thus, out of circulation - in a matter of weeks. How many movies can you name that have had less than stellar box office performance but strong DVD sales? That sort of backup retail channel didn't exist for games before the internet. Google "System Shock 2" and "sales" and you'll find that the majority of results pegs the game as a flop or "didn't meet sales expectations." You'd think the game lost EA a bunch of money, right? Wrong. The game actually sold moderately well. It made a profit - just not a massive one. The key phrase is "sales expectations." SS2 didn't sell like Half-Life, and EA wanted a Half-Life. All big publishers want to make Halo - flashy and well done, but shallow enough to appeal to the largest demographics possible. So naturally that's what they're going to look for - and try and make. Warren Spector (who was lead for Deus Ex) is often quoted as saying "You don't want to know how many projects I've been told to 'just go make a shooter'. I had one publisher tell me 'you're not allowed to say 'story' any more." Basically, in the world of videogames, all the big boys want to make Summer Blockbusters. The wonderful thing now is that it's ok to let EA crank out me-too sequels and rehashes of sports games, because thanks to the wonderful internet its possible for people to fill those gaps. My favorite example is TaleWorld's Mount & Blade. This game was originally made by a husband and wife duo who wanted a medieval combat sim with realistic horse combat. Now, this is not exactly "Halo," so obviously there weren't any publishers willing to bite. So the couple basically sold the game as it was developed - you paid for the content available, then got free updates up until the game's release. I bought it about 5 years ago for $17, and it was rough, buggy, not pretty to look at- and incredibly fun. Apparently, other people thought so, too, as the game was entirely self-funded (even hiring new staff) up until the year of its release, at which point they gained the attention of Paradox Interactive who produced a boxed release. In true large publisher fashion, they decided that the game's art direction didn't have enough mass appeal, and so changed this: To a much more palatable this: The folks on the forums call this fellow "Frodogorn." This is pretty typical for a major publisher, trying to associate a product with a known seller (in this case, the Lord of the Rings,) in the process removing the very thing that would actually make the game sell (i.e., not being another Lord of The Rings knockoff.) In fact, you're not going to this image anywhere on the developer's website, because I think they're secretly embarased by it. Nonetheless, this is a pretty inspiring tale. A small team makes a living designing a game according to their vision, relying not on publisher handouts with strings attached, but by community members who enjoy the game for what it is. In fact, the only publisher-mandated change that occuured was that atrocious box art, and honestly, some shitty packaging is not that big a deal when your core base bought the game digitally. That's the key - digitally. This entire endeavor was possible because Taleworlds could sell small increments of software without having to mail and print manuals, boxes, cd's, and the like. And the community was so devoted because the internet allowed them to be in close contact with the developers. Having played each major release from .650 to 1.1, I can personally attest to the fact that the developers and players have both benefited from constant contact with each other. Steam and Impulse have allowed small developers to access powerful retail channels. Digital distribution doesn't have shelf space - there's no real difference in costs between hosting 10 games or 1000 apart from bandwidth and storage space, items which both companies already have plenty of. So yea, videogames are going strong. In fact, I'd say that the medium is only now entering its true potential.