What game design is all about today
Sunday 28 September 2008 at 12:58 pmThe games industry has experienced a lot of change in the last years.
Games are not the same anymore. The main reason for that is that they're targeted at a completely different field of users.
Today the most important aspect of game design is simplicity. What i mean? Well, in the old days you had to read a manual or go trough a giant tutorial to understand how to play a game. Some games (think of Unreal) didn't even have an intro put a text printed to the console.
Just think of today's games. "Causual Gaming" is the new big thing. On the wii youve a simple stick that you flip around maybe one or two buttons to press and it's fun. A lot of people play it and by a lot i mean that it gained a big part of the market share in the last year.
From the beginning of humanity on people were lazy. We don't like to do stuff we have to concentrate for. We don't like having to make up solutions ourselves. So why not make games as easy to play as possible? You've one generic way to play RTS games, one for shooters and so on.
Of course this can mean something bad too. You start to actually have to do the same thing in every of the games you play. At some point it could get boring or not special anymore.
Not special? A game like Crysis costing 15 million euros is just a generic game? What the fuck, dude!
So to finish up this post. Game Design of today is the art to combine both, simplicity and uniqueness.