PAX 2010: Warren Spector Keynote

[Dooly95]

snip

It's pretty much this.

You can be a bitter bastard about it and complain that nothing is ever going to be the same - and hold on to your old ideals, but really, all you do is stay in denial. The world changes, the 'fads' change, and there's nothing that you can really do about it.

Having said that, it's hard to accept those that have scorned the material as fans of it, and to think that the future of games will be a simple point-and-click game dependent on the network of people you know - it is scary indeed.

One has to just hope that like the indie movements in both music and movies, there will be people that stay with the games that we know.

 

[rembrandtqeinstein]

Spector is a god and I worship him as one.

I don't have a problem with casual gamers or even shovelware. The more people playing games, any game, the bigger the market is.

But I do have a problem with Zynga scamming and spamming. They are scammers and spammers first and game developers second. And I wish someone would release an open source version of Farmville and put them out of business.

Actual picture of Zynga employees:

 

[cerebus23]

music is a mirror for "nerds" passions, how many people only listen to obscure bands, and when they get popular suddenly they are complaining. granted often when bands get popular its because they do in fact go more mainstream, see metallica for a prime example. that used to make record out of a garage and had 10 15 minute songs and no mtv for us we too underground and cool, then the dam broke they made a mtv video, they toured on their record that became bigger because of that video and then their songs got shorter perfect for mtv videos and radio play.

some bands resist these trends and become popular on their own talent. tool and primus would be two bands that i would pick that do music they way they want to do it and became popular because of that not because they changed the way they did things. does not stop some fans from grumbling but most hardcore fans still support them because they are in fact the same band even at the peak of their popularity as they were when they started just with more fans.

but mainstream is often interchangable with lowest common denominator that is also a basic fact. whats cheap, whats easy, and what sells. from tv to movies to pop music often what is wildly popular is pretty trashy, and what challenges things is often running the ragged edge of cancellation.

yea games are mainstream yea your grandmother and sister may be playing farmville, but that is a great because they are spending less time nagging you about your cod habit or your wow playtime. when people enjoy a game any game they gain understanding of what you see in the game you play.

but this just means that publishers know what sells, take less risks, pump out the same stuff over and over because it makes sense. the golden age of gaming has to be wary of becoming the bloated mediocre age of gaming.

just the way the comic boon lead to an over glut of the comic shelves with a ton of stuff that was not worth putting on paper. or the way movies exploded and now most of hollywood churns out utter crap. or reality tv exploded and tv lineups were so filled with the stuff because it was cheap to make easy to produce you did not have to pay stars big bucks to act.

games are doubly in danger of falling into a black hole of lameness simply due to the fact that games are so expensive to make. thank god for the handful of publishers that do take risks every now and again, and the smaller game makers that make smaller but good games.

piracy certianly does not help the cause of the gaming industry, when pirates cost you dollars on your sure sell and big ticket games, it makes publishers and game makers even less willing to take chances on something that is not a sure hit. they need the bank from the games that are sellers if they going to invest in something a bit riskier.

so basically in the end i think he should have gone on to talk about the dangers of going mainstream about the challenges the gaming industry as a whole faces. and borrow some ideas form extra credits like having a miramax division at mega publishers where smaller game designers get a chance to take risks for much smaller budgets. under the wing of a big publisher that stays out of the mix and lets these designers work as long as they are producing stuff in a reasonable amount of time.

 

[Archon]

I love Warren Spector, but I (sadly) disagree with him on this keynote. Spector said that "we need to embrace mainstreamers who love what we love, not fear them." I do embrace mainstreamers who love what I love.

The problem is that the mainstreamers Warren is talking about DON'T love what I love. I don't geek out over games just because they are games. I geek out over games because they are about things I love - fantasy, science fiction, military history, adventure. I also geek out over other products that are about these things, like fantasy movies, science fiction books, and comics. I do not geek out about, say, indie drama movies, romance novels, and political cartoons, even though they share the mediums of things I do geek out about.

Warren is fundamentally confusing the medium (games) with the culture (escapism/speculative fiction/geek). "Geek culture" hasn't achieved a victory because the mainstream plays games. All that's happened is that mainstream culture has co-opted our favorite medium to deploy in support of *its* culture.

There might be incidental benefits if through exposure to gaming, the mainstream is exposed to cultural content that it otherwise wouldn't have been (Halo, CoD), but it's more likely that we are looking at a future where the AAA games are the equivalent of chic-lit bestsellers, while the sci-fi/fantasy/action games that we love are relegated to the back of the bookstore in the genre section. And that DOES suck.