I'd agree that a lot of video-games rarely have a real, original or compelling storyline, but I think this is because studios are too busy trying to fight their way into a cluttered arena with "the same old stuff" BUT with a "unique mechanic". Shooters, got a grav gun? Look how cool it looks! Let's everybody have grav gun! Grav gun? Why have a grav gun when we can use this setting over here and call it the Force! What's this, Resident Evil 4? Over-the-shoulder cam? Immersion is at a high! Controls are bit clunky, story is a bit meh, but still... awesome! Its selling point is its new take on a players view of the world! What if we used this system, speed it up a bit, and try to retain the twitch gameplay of shooters? Gears of War! Woah! Brain wave! We'll have a cover system! Our selling point will be the cover system!

What's this? A third-person twitch shooter with a cover system? Let's add a weapon that morphs the terrain, and creates cover! Our selling point will be a cover system that's slightly different! What's this? A cover-based twitch shooter, with morphing terrain? Let's add AI team-mates and squad-based missions in which you give the orders, while taking cover, and morphing terrain, and twitch shooting, and occasionally using a grav gun! Awesome! Our selling point will be that we have everything all the best-selling games have! Woah! Zombie movies are making money, let's add zombies! Everybody's selling point is having zombies!

(Alterantive to all this is the "real" path. How can we make it even more real than the real they achieved in that game?)

Wait, what are we forgetting? Oh yeah, original characters, stories, and mind-blowing settings. Shouldn't we put some thought into a character, and story, instead of building an entire game and a central character around a mechanic (every mechanic ever created)? Bleh! Screw that jive! We've got a cover system and a grav gun!

A lot seem to ignore the fact the games selling well, are selling well because they offer more than a new mechanic. They make players care about stuff. I think BioShock did well because it pretty much used an existing, fine-tuned genre and instead of thinking too much about that, they instead concentrated on story, and world, if the shooter elements are working like they should and how they have in every good shooter that ever was... then all they really have to deliver is a plot, and a reason for the player to give half a poo.

You know what in my O is missing from all of these cool gameplay gimmicks and mechanics though? Player input. Studios are putting so much into the game, on a plate, filling every gap, even if only with crud from the backside of a camel, that players are left to either like it, or hate it. There's no room for the player. That's why I think games like, hate to say but come on, 100,000,000+ units shipped over ten years or so... The Sims... and games like Fallout 3/New Vegas do so well bleeding well. Because no matter who encounter who they have their own take on the game. Very few players meet and say, I dunno, "I used weapon X with armour X and I did mission X, Y, Z but got completely caned at destination Alpha!" And another goes, "Me too! Exactly my experience!" If they did it'd be like they'd entered an alternate universe and the only thing to do would be to marry one another. Their brains could be scientifically proven to be absolutely identical in every way, they almost share neural pathways, and they have EVERYTHING in common. lol

If a story isn't good enough to have a big reveal, it shouldn't be written, if you're writing something that has a big revealing super-twist, then at least have a story good enough to get the player involved, interested, able to give a crap that the reveal revealed something. "Luke, I am your father." Has been done to death, but it can still be done well, done amazingly well, if the journey to it is full of giving a crud. Players have to care for more than the nice controls and cover system. If those things and the controls behind them are done properly players aren't thinking about them, when they're not thinking about them their skill steps in and the game locks horns with them in the form of bad guys and puzzles, if their skill is up to it they're not thinking about anything beyond the 'why' of it all. They're concerned about why they're bothering to kick ass or solve puzzles... if the reasons for doing that gets lost somewhere between the controls and challenge, they really don't give a frack and are left wondering why they're even playing the game. :dry:

This. Once you keep in mind that most people just wouldn't care, it at least makes sense that mainstream does not care for "intelligence" (just besides the world as a whole making much more sense). Most games are as much "art" as the common slasher/western/comedy movie. Entertainment is an art, too, but you should usually look for depth off the beaten path.

:laugh:

Theres decent games out there with stories to question yourself and the world around you. Just search a bit deeper than just looking through the popular titles. The broader the audience the company tries to pleases the simpler it becomes. Because they try to please everyone they focus on things that a wide majority can appreciate like explosions, six, and killing monsters.

Because who deosn't love those things. And due to their focus on more broader aspects they deter from things that are much more indepth to understand and unique.

Well, video games are more about fun than story telling, and most of them that have stories are action games. Lets take my new favorite game bulletstorm, its story is ok for an action movie, guy gets revenge and fights all over the top and stuff, not really artistic, but i cared enough to play through the game and see the ending. Most of the time the story is just that, a framing device for missions.

Maybe your playing games for the wrong reason, they're about having fun, the story comes second. Doesn't mean the story is bad, rdr is as good as most westerns ive seen.

*does it seem that rockstar is making some of the best stories in the gaming industry right now, i mean with la noir coming out and all

If you don't like them, don't play them. There was crap in 1998, and there's crap today. But the good stuff from 1998 is still fun, and no one is forcing me to buy the crap from today.

I don't buy many games, because most are mediocre.
Their value is also subjective, and we all see people mentioning games on these forums and wonder why the heck anyone would want to play that.

Thank you for the post.
I'd like to clear out that I'm not one of those people who do not consider games art (I guess the subtitle was an overstatement, I felt like sounding like I was writing a manifesto LOL), but I dare say the ratio of good to bad material in video games is smaller than in literature and film. Surely, the only reason can't be because games are viewed as a pastime - so is the TV and Kindle. I use my spare time either to relax my brain or stimulate it via some interesting material, but so far I have never encountered a game that could perform the latter, and I've played most of the games on your list (and I do agree they're among the few shining examples that save the gaming industry some face, but none of them provided me with insight or moments of pure brilliance). No matter how "advanced" or "experimental" the game was, the storytelling skills were at best like some Joss Whedon knock-off. I love my moments of Grim Fandango or Planescape as much as the next guy, but none of the epiphanies they've provided me with could be compared to some of my favorite moments in film.

Don't get me wrong, the purpose of game-making is not to imitate any other forms of art, but to exploit one thing it could excel at, especially with future technological process - introducing new ideas, conventions, stories, whatever by using the previously unknown level of immersion.

First and foremost, I play a game because it's fun. Interestingly enough, this is the same mindset of the vast majority of people who play video games. And the vast majority of people who play video games are, I imagine, people with lives. People who have jobs to do, families to take care of, school to go to, studying to do. They are not unintelligent people, but they are busy people. Take "casual" games, for instance, such as Bejeweled, Peggle, or Farmville. Why are these games so popular? To put it simply, most people are working hard, solving problems, thinking hard all day. No, that does not apply to everyone, but it applies to a lot of people. They don't want to come home, sit at their computer or their gaming console, and spend even more time dealing with moral dilemmas, deep, philosophical storylines, and admiring the inspiring and emotional characters and storytelling. They want to plant some virtual corn and shoot some colored bubbles, and just relax.

I, personally, wouldn't want to play a game like Dragon Age where I am the peasant boy who helps out in the war against the Darkspawn by making sure all of the soldiers have a good hot meal. What fun is that? Maybe as a casual game it would be. But no, it is a lot more fun to be the last of the Grey Wardens (which you are not, in fact), it is more fun to have a sword, immeasureable strength, to overcome impossible odds and change the world with your own armor-clad hands. Now that's an adventure, that's what a game should be, living out an impossible fantasy and being something you could never be in real life.

And yet, it deals with moral dilemmas too, and "intelligent" situations.

Deus Ex is another game that deals with philosophical, ethical, moral, and controversial matters. It is based off of true conspiracy theories and it's storyline is plausible, and sometimes a bit too close to reality. I would call it an intelligent game, as well.

Civilization IV, creating an empire from clubs to guns, reasearching social and political theories and ideals, making scientific breakthroughs, etc. another game I'd call intelligent.

How much more "intelligent" do these games need to be? When would it meet your standard? If no game exists that meets your standard, perhaps you should lower your standards and spend some time enjoying these games.

Because the education system is going down. So are kids abilities to solve puzzles. Thus leading to mindless shooters.

indie developers are leading the way. the only people that think dead space was scary are console players who never got to play amnesia. dead space had more programmers and a much bigger budget, but cant even compare to amnesia or the penumbra games. mount and blade came along and showed the big developers how medieval combat should be.

as for the "im an uber soldier/ninja/mage" mentality, that is mostly because of people who want to be the center of the games universe. i had more fun playing a regular guy in the battlefront games and dark forces before i became an uber jedi with smackdown powers. in team base RPGs like dragon age i usually make a thief character because they are useful. ill let another npc be the meat shield or the magic caster.

i dont get the appeal of becoming far more powerful than everything else in the game because there is no challenge in that. maybe some people svck at video games so badly that they need their characters to be uberpowerful. maybe they are living vicariously through their characters cause they themselves havent accomplished much.......who knows.

my biggest problem isnt necessarily the plots......its the gameplay. games get easier and more simple to play as time goes on. i laugh out loud when i see someone post a youtube video bragging about their "leet" skills in CoD. they wouldnt last ten seconds in counterstrike or any of the other games that dont let you regen health by hiding behind something or give you massive amount of aim assist or magically slow down time in singleplayer.

just once i want a developer to make games a challenge again and to have "warning: if you are stupid and or lazy, dont bother trying this game cause you will fail" as their slogan.

Art doesn't sell.

Also David Lynch svcks.

Every single video game on the planet can be art, so let's get over ourselves.

Video game plots and premises are primarily shaped and molded around game mechanics and gameplay concepts. If you do it the other way around things can get rather restrictive and ultimately end up hurting the game itself. Wouldn't hurt to deviate a bit from the "save the world" premises though, you could probably still get a good game centered around something more down-to-earth and personal, and get something climatic from it even if it doesn't revolve around stopping the big bad from destroying the world.

And given the very social nature of MMOs I'd argue there is plenty you can learn from them. Especially when it comes to group management and interaction.

For some odd reason, i actually find Black Ops to be intelligent. Why? Because it displays the US Special Operation Units in a way we "common folk" can understand. Black Operations don't mean you go in like a Ninja, and knife every guy you see, they are operations conducted by Special Operations with more intel then the average solider, so lets say there is a US army op, and they call in SOG (Studies and Observations Group), who have more intel on the operation.

This question is pretty elementary. Welcome to business 101, aka how to drive enormous profits. Sell something to a fraction of the market, you make a fraction of the profits. You make it easily accessible to all ages 6 through 80 and you've just expanded your potential revenue 6-80fold.

Edit: also smart people know how uTorrent works, the dumb do not.

:sadvaultboy: Yeah.

I think the main reason you don't see high art in gaming is because the medium went from inception to widespread commercialization so quickly. Even movies had several decades to form before they started the decline. Literature, music, poetry, sculpture, painting, and other forms of art have had LONG amounts of time to mature and become rooted and respected in our society.

Particularly interesting, I think is comparing fashion as art to video games as art. Fashion comes from clothing, which is a necessity. Video games are not. This means that fashion does not actually get copy protection of any sort (all companies can really to is trademark a logo and paste that onto the clothes, making them look terrible and defeating the purpose). Oddly, this has lead to a state where the industry is constantly and rapidly evolving and changing. Compare this to video games, where one success is copied (in terms of game mechanics) by everyone else, and yet no one feels the need to innovate. The reason? Fashion designers want to be artists. Game designers do not. And the ones that do will never get a chance because the industry is dictated by giant corporations, and the consumers are to dimwitted and easily pleased to raise the bar higher and demand something of quality. What a damn shame.

tl;dr: Fashion Industry > Videogame Industry; they actually care, and their customers actually care. Too bad videogame connoisseurs don't.

The DLC thing you said about BioWare isn't true.
It's EA that forced BioWare to remove content from their games and release them as DLC.
EA takes out some content of the games they publish and give them to people who bought a copy as free DLC after they create an EA account.
They do that to prevent gamers from buying used games,and it's their tactic.
It's something that happens with most of the games EA publish no matter who developed them.

Anyway,I disagree that the game industry is focused at teenagers.
I think it's the opposite. There are so many games with violence or drugs and sixual content that are for older gamers,that youngers doesn't have games for their age.
That's why you see 13 year olds playing games that are for the ages of 17+ or 18+
The industry is focused to two ages,one being kids (3 to 10) and the other one being advlts (17-Infinity).
You will just see Mickey Mouse games that are for people 3 and older to play, and gory games that are for older people.
People who are at the ages of 10 to 17 doesn't get enough games for their age so they either play games for youngers or for elders.

About the "chosen one" story:
This concept works.
There are many people who play games to escape from real life situations.
So there has to be something they don't like,and they want to forget it by playing games.
When the game tells them that they are the chosen super heroes they didn't knew,well those people feel good.
They feel like they are of some importance,because the game affects their mentality.
I mean let's say that you play some deathmatch and you kill everybody and when the round ends you are the one with the most kills.
You feel good because you won and you think that since others couldn't go to first place,that it's some skill you have that helped you won and since you understand that,it makes you feel better.
There are lots of escapists trying to find that moment of joy where the game rewards them to feel they are good for something.
And what is a better way to do that other than being the chosen from the thousands to become a hero and save the world and the whole universe ? :whistling:
There are many people who want that.
They want to feel important and unique and because they can't in real life,they play games to get that same kind of feeling.
I don't say that all who play games are like that,but there are people like that and are quite many.
That's why games like that have success.

That's why games become easier and dumber nowdays.
They are easier so escapists can feel that they are even more powerfull when they play them,and so they can more easily complete them and get the feeling they want.
And who needs more such kind of positive feedback that comes out from a game than people who doesn't get that feedback from real life ?
There are people with agoraphobia (feeling anxiety or terror when with other people) and people that perhaps their brains work slower and they have less I.Q.,and those people are overwhelmed by real life and interacting with other people and seek for things to pass their time that doesn't require other people.
One might be reading books all the time,one might listening to music all the time and some might want to play games all the time.
Unfortunately lot's of people have such kind of problems.
All these people who seek things to do that can do by themselves without having the fear of someone watching them and perhaps telling them harsh things,are a possible consumer base for the game industry.
And the developers see that and try to make their games more appealing to those people.

But of course there are people who play games casually,and just want to have fun,and doesn't get in gaming for escapism but just to kill some of their time while having fun.
And of course there are people who would like a game that doesn't make them chosen super heroes,and people who would like a more difficult or complex game.
But games that doesn't put the gamer at a "chosen super hero" archetype or are somewhat harder or more complex aren't that popular.
Take for example S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky,a game that came out at 2008.
It had nice graphics for its time,and unlikely most FPSs that puts you in place of someone with unique super human abilities like Halo or Crysis or Duke Nukem it placed you to JUST a mercenary and the game's difficulty was hard,and it had some features that other fpss didn't had e.g. (customisable armor and guns,trade and exploration) and reviewers unleashed a huge ball of lava upon it to burn it.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/271-S-T-A-L-K-E-R-Clear-Sky
Most media didn't even refered to it like it never existed,and I wouldn't be suprized if that's the first time you hear about that game too.

And this is how it goes...
Games that puts you in the role of some chosen badass with super abilities,that are easy to beat and streamlined get praise while games that puts you in the role of just some ordinary human without super abilities and are hard and perhaps ask you to do something more than "kill all enemies" are regarded as bad games.

It didn't help that that game was released in a state that makes Bethesda look like a shining example of QA... Still, my favorite S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (Haven't found the time to really play Call of Pripyat yet).

I keep seeing this gaming is dumbing down comment everywhere, but personally i like modern games much better than the C64 and NES games i played as a kid. Maybe i'm just dumbing down along with the games

After going back and playing a bunch of nes and snes games earlier, I can safely say that developers back then just plain hated their customers and wanted them to suffer.
I'm with you, modern games is where it's at. Aside from a few shining gems from that era.

Games back then were short due to limits of technology, they had to make up for it by insane difficulty. Still, i enjoyed playing Battletoads

so they can make the users feel smarter!

I blame Call of Duty <_<

But I COMPLETELY agree with the OP on this. It seems to me devs. are getting lazy and making multiplayer frag fests that are half baked to begin with. Not much testing seems to go into games now. And finding a well balanced multiplayer game seems impossible. Battlefield BC 2 is alright, but has some issues. It's the most balanced FPS multiplayer I've played as of lately.

Single player is about the same. Honestly, I don't see why people obsess over Mass Effect or Dragon Age. I found the combat which is a good chunk of those games, to be repetitive. And a great story can't save repetitive gameplay. Dragon Age was the most repetitive, a lot button mashing when playing as the Warrior.

And on average most single player games are just to linear and way too short. It seems like there's only a few games I even want to try, most of which have replay value or at least a decent story that's not a complete cliche.

There's so much room for devs. to be expanding storylines and giving players more freedom and choice in how they do things. Whether it be how you complete a level, or make a decision at the climix of the game.

Don't even get me started on DLC. Expansions use to be somewhat of an afterthought. And they didn't come out for sometimes a year after the game did. They use to expand games not just add another 2-4 hours.

Now DLC is announced before the game is even released. Godspeed DA2.

No such thing. The limit was cost in media and time. Many games shipped on multiple disks (each disk dropped the profit some, per sale. Do enough content, and your game wouldn't break even; you'd start losing money for each sale).

I was mainly talking about consoles of the time there. Only so much data a NES cartridge could contain.