Evolutionary and Revolutionary

thought i’d make a point about tom armitage’s recent talk. my comments as spewed out in joystiq comments.

i feel like the matter is really ‘evolution’ vs. ‘revolution.’ and, by revolution, i’m not talking about the nintendo console. i’m talking about a sudden and divergent sea change to a product.

the revolution controller counts for sure as a ‘revolution.’

that being said, the games industry as a whole is very, very evolutionary. sure, lots (well. relative ‘lots’ of course.) of games are revolutionary, but the entire industry is this slow moving ship in the night.

when did the fps genre break? how long before it became a fairly representative in the industry? how long before that started to evolve? system shock? thief?

what i’m talking about, i guess, is that controller design needs to be evolutionary for sufficiently wide support in the game industry as a whole. if you break that rule, you end up with something like nunchaku.

no. it’s not hardware design that’s stifling the industry. (warning! more symptom/cause crap ahead)

hardware interface design is merely a symptom of the bigger issue of mainstreaming games. in order to get down to the lowest common denominator 2 big factors come into play.

1) hardware that can work for the largest number of games/genres possible.

2) slow evolutionary changes to interface hardware simply for the sake of usability standards.

no. mainstreaming video games is what is causing all of the crap in development. do people complain about how most of the music out there is crap? yes. do people complain about how most movies are crap? yes. do people complain about how most stuff on tv is crap? yes.

mainstreaming media requires evolution and not revolution as a whole. revolutionary concepts slowly creep into the mainstream conciousness, but not at any ‘reasonable’ clip.

it’s joe q. public simultaneously killing video games and giving life to video games. just like any other major form of entertainment media out there.

m3mnoch.

~ by m3mnoch on March 13, 2006.