All Tomorrow’s Genres

Have inflated development costs, the stretch for mass market appeal and increased consumer expectations killed genre innovation? In the second article for Play’s Lost Diablog, we say yes. Hit the jump to find out why.

In a recent review of Eternal Daughter, Play This Thing editor the99th wrote, “ED is part of a vein in indie games that tries to innovative [sic] in fiction, rather than rules.” What’s striking about this comment is that it quite reasonably sums up the current state of modern commercial video games: a limited number of rulesets governing everything from viewing perspective to player actions in to which companies breathe life with their own stories, characters and political agendas.

Take, for example, BioShock; a fairly derivative first person shooter in which the real spice comes from the well written narrative. While the story isn’t wholly original, the angle you view it from is; in this game, you are the Manchurian Candidate. In fact, in every first person shooter since Doom you have been the Manchurian Candidate but Bioshock is the first game to point at you and say, “Wake up, you’re under control. LOOK AT THE QUEEN OF DIAMONDS.” As a direct result of the relationship between the story and the gameplay, the player’s feelings are manipulated in a way that hasn’t been done before. Understand that it’s not the gameplay that has altered the perceptions of the player but rather the story.

So, here’s a hypothesis: we’ve reached a point in video games’ growth where the genres are pretty much set in stone. The real innovation moving forward will be in the art of storytelling within the confines of those genres. Is this conceivable? Dragging up the age old comparison with films and television – as flawed as it may be – seems to corroborate the idea. In fact, all art and media seems to plateaux on a seemingly fixed number of recognisable genres/mediums after a given number of years.

But are we already at that stage with video games? Arguably yes, for two reasons: Firstly in order to market games in a way that the general public will understand there has to be a solid set of genres. Why? Because people need to know what something is like before they pay money for it: “Well, in this game you sort of twist the left anologue stick to rotate the blob’s uh, lets call it a face. This sets off a chain reaction of explosions that, when timed correctly, gives you a high score” isn’t exactly the hard sell. “Shooter with mutants” or “Space combat with giant fennel” – now that’s easy money.

Secondly, the increasing use of middleware development tools means that developers are forgoing the opportunity to create their own engines in favor of content generation. Burgeoning development costs and ever-inflated consumer expectations (as a result of the financially-important marketing and PR involved in selling games) mean game development is now highly reliant on a service infrastructure; contract specialist members of staff, third-party middleware and even fully formed game engines. This increasing reliance on such a service model shows that video game development is beginning to mature into a more stable and adaptable industry. Now game development teams no longer have to budget for developing their own engine if they no longer wish to, nor any difficult or unfamiliar facet of that engine if they so choose. The myriad of middleware bolt-ons now available has seen to that, the library of which is rapidly increasing.

2 years ago, when the launch of new consoles was just in the offing, lagre numbers of game development houses decided to close up shop as far as content was concerned and focus solely on developing and licensing tools and platforms instead. Today, as a result of this, it’s now possible to pick up and build a complete MMO – including customer billing as well as all the fun front-end stuff – without touching a scrap of code. Similarly, the unprecedented uptake of the Unreal Engine 3 technology for numerous titles by dozens of developers shows that this service model is one that is working out well for the games industry.

Of course, there are bound to be teething problems as the games industry struggles to mass-adapt to a service-based infrastructure. But this is the way other production-intensive industries (notably film, music and television) went years ago in order to remain profitable and still survive.

All of this means that developers are now free but simultaneously constrained at the same time; they can concentrate largely on telling the story they want to share with people, bring their characters to life and fully realise the worlds in which they live but must also be aware of the relative limits to their creativity according to which off-the-shelf technology they’ve chosen. Of course, these capabilities can be extended in-house, but nothing is limitless. Except megatextures.

So, have we seen the death of new and innovative genres emerging in the future? For the most part, yes. That’s not to say we won’t see some fantastic variations of any popular genre you care to think of. Which, in turn, will continue to breed and cross-populate the massive raft of sub-genres we all currently enjoy.