nerdpride said:
You think this is an amazing showcase of technology? The content is improving, but always one step behind graphics and storytelling used for movies. At least movies don't cost 60 bucks. Gameplay is available for cheap, if that's what you really wanted.
I think it's perfectly justifiable for these people to say that gamers are a bunch of dolts who make their industry by getting ripped off.
I'm not certain that I entirely agree. Movies have much more elaborate Computer-Generated Images (or whatever the favorite term for it is now) in some senses -- particularly that they look more realistic. That is partly due to the much larger budgets, but also because film images don't have to do nearly as many things as the programs that control what you see in the games. Film images have a very limited set of parameters, especially as the "camera" isn't meant to interact with the "world," nor do the objects and characters themselves necessarily have to interact with each other. Advances in things like physics modeling and on-the-fly procedural content creation probably (and I have no hard data here) owe more to the game industry than the film industry.
Also, film images can take hours or days to process and resolve. A computer (or often, super-computer) will sit there and chug away at thousands of image components forever. The time it takes doesn't really matter, though, since eventually you'll end up with a series of still images that run together into a film. It will always be the same film, and it can be shown an unlimited number of times without having to go through the processing again. Computer games, on the other hand, have are having to make new images constantly and quickly, using less available processing power. Thus, game images have traditionally been less sophisticated, but at the same time, many of the advances in efficiency come from and directly benefit games over film.
Now, if you want to talk about narrative content and cost, that's another thing altogether. If all you're looking for is a story, then the average few minutes of actual narrative content in a $50 or $60 game is a bad deal next to the hour or so you'll get out of a $10 movie. Most gamers are looking for more than just story, however: they're looking for interactivity. Films are (to the anguish of many producers) an interactive medium, in that audiences make up their own opinions and mini-narratives about what is being shown on the screen, sometimes in direct opposition to what the creators intended. Again, though, this is only going to be an hour or so of interaction, and on a fairly limited scale. Games, on the other hand, can do so over three, four, even ten hours of gameplay! True, a lot of the longer games have a lot of filler and grinding that's a pain, but as long as a gamer is immersed in the world, an interactive experience is being had. And this interactivity takes many forms: a gamer will make choices in many games about clothing, accessories, weapons, cars, etc to create their own character; a gamer may imagine events hinted at but not explained onscreen (the recent article here about Half-Life 2 is a good example); or a gamer may try to break the rules of the world and perform actions completely contrary to the story or intent of the game! These are all valid interactive experiences that can be had from most games on the market. Again, this doesn't work for all games equally (just as it doesn't work for all movies equally) but the idea that a game might provide six times the interactive content isn't outside the range of possibility.
So sure, games are expensive, and they aren't as pretty as CGI movies. But to say that gamers are "dolts" who get "ripped off" by the industry is simply ignoring a good portion of why they play, and what they get out of it.
