Has video game creation become stagnant? As is so often the case the answer to that question depends on which standard one has in mind when they ask it. As it happens the standard I have in mind is whether the development of the basic elements of gaming--game mechanics, game genres, game graphics--are evolving at rates like those we have seen in the past, or by comparison at a standstill, with it seeming to me fair to compare, for example, the 25-year 2000-2025 period with the equally lengthy preceding 1975-2000 period as at least a starting point for such a judgment.
Where those fundamentals I refer to here are concerned there is no question that there was rapid development in the earlier period. Between the late 1970s and the 1990s we saw gaming go from controllers with a joystick and a single button to the controller of the crosspad-and-eight button Super Nintendo that seems to have basically defined what we use since, and multiplayer gaming (with the Nintendo Entertainment System already having apparatus and games for four-player interaction in the Four Score and the Satellite), and the ability to save our progress rather than have to start all over again when we turn off the console or the computer. This same period also gave us the first quests with beginnings and middles and ends (and side quests too!), the first customizable characters and multi-player parties, the first interactions with non-player characters, the first cut scenes--as well as the first fighting systems (turn-based as well as real-time) and first systems for "leveling up," the first inventories and day/night cycles, the first games that one could play out in more than one way because the player had the range of choice in regard to where they went and what they did requisite for that, with those different courses possibly leading to different endings. This is the period that gave us the platformer (in 3-D as well as 2-D), the role-playing game, the first-person shooter, the martial arts fighting game, the vehicle simulator and the sports simulator in their various forms, the Tetris-style puzzler, the strategy game, the management game, and combinations thereof, like the "action RPG" for which games like the Zelda series and the second Castlevania were such big moments--as well as such novelties as the Dance Dance Revolution-type exercise/music/rhythm game. The same period also saw us go from the graphics of Pong to the graphics of Quake III Arena.
It seems impossible to point to anything like that level of fundamental innovation in the field in the following twenty-five years. New mechanics and new genres have been scarce. Talk about virtual reality all you like, it remains a fairly marginal thing (people had some fun waving the Wii controllers about, but then it was back to the standard seated, button-pushing mode of interaction), while the experimental games the indies make fall far short of being the "game-changers" those pointing to them as proof of the industry's dynamism would have us think they are, however interesting they may individually be as a change of pace. Graphics did get sharper than they were before, but even that improvement hit diminishing returns long ago, as seen in the fuss over "ray tracing" in imagery a far cry from the true photorealism that remains remote. (At a glance you can much more easily tell the difference between the standard of 1975 and 2000 than that of 2000 and 2025--and for that matter, between 2000 and 2010 as against 2010 and 2025.)
Consequently what innovation we have had has been in the use of the inherited modes. Particular elements did become more involved, like interactions with non-player characters, but much more often we saw developments of quantitative rather than qualitative kinds--like having a bigger world to navigate. Indeed, this seems minor next to the changes in the ways in which we access these games, with downloadable content of various kinds that may tweak an old adventure, the shift from the multiplayer of old to online multiplayer, and the mobility we now enjoy in an age in which rather than playing a relatively primitive game on a costly and specialized device such as only the truly dedicated would buy, people have far, far more choice of game on the little computer they now carry everywhere with them as a matter of course. The result is that if there have been changes, for those of a certain generation, whose tastes were formed in an earlier era and can remember the onrush of novelty in gaming itself that (however primitive the form it arrived in may look to the eyes of today's player) blew their minds again and again is behind us. This is all the more in as so much of what comes out is a sequel to something else, the football game fan still playing a Madden NFL game all these decades on, as Mario and Link and Sonic (and on the tier just below them, figures like Lara Croft) headline new adventures--new franchises and new icons just not coming along the way they used to do. As a result they may feel that in gaming, just like everywhere else, the gale of creative destruction is really a dead calm, as they see business devoting more creativity to the marketing of the product than to the product itself, which, however exciting this may be to those to whom the business pages cater, is what the players really care about.
Considering why that is one may see the trend in gaming as analogous to the trend in movies. With a shift to bigger, higher-risk productions in a more fragmented cultural context those who greenlight those productions prefer to exploit old franchises rather than try to launch new ones--the more in as the genres we have are very well-worn by this point, and the technology is not changing very much, and for that matter the whole culture we have with all it suggests for new ways of looking at the world is not changing very much. The result is that alongside the very real crassness and conservatism of those who greenlight what gets made, it is also the case that being really innovative is more of a challenge than it used to be, such that a revolution in video gaming at this relatively late stage of the form's history seems unlikely absent far, far bigger developments in technology, culture, and the world.
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