Wargames and Indie Games
Last night, I watched the movie “Wargames” with my ten-year old. She’d heard the classic sound clip of Joshua asking, “Would you like to play a game?” and was curious. I started feeling really old explaining to her about floppy disks, acoustic-coupled modems, wardialing (named after this movie), and the pull-off tabs on cans that were obsolete a good year or two before the movie actually opened. It wasn’t half as strange as trying to explain to her the Cold War and the specter of a full-scale nuclear war which her parents all grew up living with. Of course, she gets to grow up in a world with very real fears of smaller-scale terror.

Besides the nostalgia factor, I found myself amused by the whole hunt for the unreleased games “McGuffin” that launches the story. Now in 2005, there have been some very public attacks where pre-release source-code for highly anticipated games (Halo 2, Half-Life 2) has been stolen. Of course, David Lightner in Wargames only wants said games for his own amusement, and if he has any nefarious plots for distributing them to everyone and their cousin and effectively ruining this new up-and-coming game company it’s not mentioned. After all, he’s supposed to be our sympathetic, misunderstood hero. He just wants to play these games before he can buy them, right?

That sounds kinda like shareware. Except in 2005, it’s a lot harder to even GIVE away free demos of your game on the Internet. It’s a different world now. In fictional David Lightner’s day, with one of these brave new computers with disk drives by IMSAI, even a game as boring as typing in names of cities to watch them get nuked in monocolor low-res graphics could thrill both a nerd and his technologically-challenged athlete girlfriend.

In the beginning of the lifecycle of new gaming hardware (whether it’s the Apple II, Sony Playstation, Nintendo GameBoy, or X-Box 3), ASSUMING it reaches a critical mass of market penetration, you get a nice little honeymoon period where being the first to market gives you a gigantic edge. But when that passes by and the market matures and saturates, you are back to fighting for attention amidst a sea of competition. Kinda like the PC game market is now. That’s part of why publishers are so excited for the release of the next generation of game consoles – it’s not that they are thrilled so much about the technological possibilities; they are looking forward to being able to have a clean slate with little competition from older titles again.

So where does that leave the indies? Besides chasing emerging technologies like mobiles, what can we do? Are we pretty much screwed? I don’t think so. Other industries have managed to survive well enough selling products that don’t have built-in obsolescence and reliance upon technology to provide innovation. There are an unbelievable number of movie and book titles that come out each year, and those have to compete with many past products. Yes, they have their own problems – problems our industry is going to continue facing as we mature. Last night, I watched Wargames – a movie over 20 years old – and the sales of that movie are still competing in a very small way with what was released in just the last 12 months.

But there’s an incredible amount of room to innovate and to create games that are first of a new category. Now, while I love original and unique game ideas, the market has shown that people don’t respond too well to sudden changes. But innovation within a category --- pushing traditional barriers in gameplay, storyline, interactivity, and concept. Where are the romantic comedies, the buddy-cop games, the psychological thrillers, the murder mysteries in computer games? They are proven categories in other media, but we’re mired in the same sci-fi shoot-em-ups and generic Tolkienesque fantasy hack-and-slashers, traditional sports, match-three-bubble-poppers, and historic war strategy ruts. Yes, these are cool and fun genres, and I’m certainly guilty of wallowing in the same comfort zone with my games, but maybe we can stretch ourselves a little.

Labels: Indie Evangelism

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 9:00 PM (Permalink)