Gaming as a Business

For the most part, gaming is an industry that is taking itself too
seriously.

If The Escapist is any indication, Gaming at the Margins, by
Warren Spector, the amount of money poured into gaming related
studies, advertising and profitablity is a small porthole into the gaming
industries hull. It's only going to carry so much garbage and we must
remember that there are other means of transportation.

Warren goes on to mention that with all the interest in gaming, good and bad, we may end up the last generation to play games, such as other
generations and their radio shows. The various reasons range from cookie
cutter gaming production, crap "blockbuster" movie tie-in games, and tired
old storylines.

I can agree with that, for sure. Nintendo seems to be the only console maker completely aware of this problem. But looking at the sales numbers, it doesn't seem that the rest of the population has a problem with NFL
2k15 or Black, a game which I seem to have fallen in love with, but only
because of minute differences in gameplay.

I don't believe that we have any crossroads to gaming approaching, as
Warren suggests. And this is what I mean by taking gaming too seriously as
a business (which I know it is). Milton Bradley did not worry about
cultural, gender, online, or regional issues when they made Monopoly. They
made a game that everyone could play. The rules are infinetly expandable.
The game play is timeless.

The last crossroads that is mentioned is content. It is the most important
aspect of gaming to gamers, which is the most important aspect to
developers and manufacturers. Content is king. But the problem is that the
people who make games like to think that content always means features and
graphics. I'd like to think that it means stories and gameplay. Halo was a
fantastic story, but had awful level design.

I almost want to think of video games as a chapter in gaming history in a
book that will never end. Card games, children's games, board games, RPG
games, trading card games...all are part of a genre of entertainment.
Video games have a limit in what that can accomplish: what the creator can
accomplish. Creators can accomplish only given tasks because of the world
in which they live. They need food, clothing, housing, and sex. All of
things are almost exclusive obtained through money. And chances are, since
the money being paid must come out of the money that the game earns, you
run into a cycle of faster and more complicated games to produce more
money. The problem here is that most people don't have the ideas to make
the games, so they rely more heavily on the features and graphics, and not
the stories and dthe gameplay.

Just my opinion.