Parish can write some entertaining editorials. His latest one will strike a chord in many customers (which is what I will refer to ‘gamers’ for now on).
There is something many old school gamers will notice, but it is impossible to illustrate: the feeling of warm and cold in games. Many older games, despite bad graphics and poor sound, can still feel ‘warm’. Newer games, despite better graphics and better sound, strangely can feel ‘cold’.
Many say, “It is nostalgia.” Maybe. But I suspect there is something more. With older games, there were less people working on them. There was more craftsmanship within the gameplay and overall game. Today, there are many more people working on a game. With more cooks in the kitchen, the game comes off as a collaberation rather than a finely work of craftsmanship.
But that may not be the reason why either. For some reason, something beyond money, beyond even talent, there is something within the game that makes it seem warm. Here are some examples:
Pac-Man is a very warm game. Consider all the Pac-Man clones that emerged. They all felt very cold. Why? I don’t know. Donkey Kong, also, was a very warm game. Could it be the cartoony characters? Yet, Asteroids and even the very difficult Defender come across as warm games. How is this possible?
I think the secret behind the Nintendo fans is not that they are fans of Nintendo, they are fans of ‘warm’ games. Nintendo is very consistent in putting out ‘warm’ games. Nintendo games never feel ‘cold’.
Blizzard games also feel very ‘warm’. Games that have cults around them, such as the Ultima series or even the Star Control series, is because they are very, very ‘warm’ games. Very ‘warm’ games are not just games, you can feel the developers put their heart and soul into it. It doesn’t matter if the graphics and technology behind the game are old.
When you look at a drawing made from a five year old, you know it sucks. The kid can’t draw. The kid can’t even color between the lines. Yet, you can feel the ‘warmth’. I know of no other way to describe this.
One of the things that everyone seems to be forgetting, and you will hear me harp much more on this soon, is that gaming is a content business. Software is not a content business. No one senses ‘warmth’ from Microsoft Excel. Excel’s purpose is to do a job. Christensen’s study of the disk industry as it went through many disruptions was all true, but disks are not a content business. They are very much a technology business. Newspapers, who are going the way of the dodo, were disrupted but their biggest problem is not disruption but their content. Newspapers feel very ‘cold’. Bloggers, however, feel very ‘warm’ even though they cannot spell or ramble on like I do.
Movies are a content business. Old movies, with poor special effects, still hold much warmth even if it is the first time you have seen them. Newer movies, with shiny new special effects, can feel very cold.
Some content of Mankind is so overwhelmingly warm, from Beethoven’s symphonies to Shakespeare’s plays, we call it ‘art’ because we have no other name for it. Technology has certainly improved since then, but yet those artists cannot be duplicated in the warmth of their work.
Would you describe Shigeru Miyamoto as a very cold man? You would not. I’m not sure if ‘genius’ is the correct term for someone like Miyamoto, but one thing is for sure, ‘warm’ fits him like a glove. He has a very, very warm presence, and it shows up in his games. Iwata, too, gives me that impression though on a lesser scale.
This warmth shows up even in the hardware. Nintendo and Sega hardware has been so coveted, even placed in quasi-shrines in people’s rooms, because the fan senses a type of warmth. Contrast it with the Sony and Microsoft consoles, while game machines all the same, feel very ‘cold’. Microsoft and Sony aren’t gaming companies. Nintendo and Sega are. It shows.
The love for indie developers is really the love of this ‘warmth’. Indie developers put out some pretty bad stuff, even outrageously bad stuff, but it is OK because their hearts are in it. World of Goo is said to be a very good game. I agree that it has good production values, but I think the game is overrated (maybe I am sick of every freaking indie game being a puzzle game). What World of Goo does very well is that it is a very, very warm game, much more than I’ve seen in quite a while. The reason why people hate ‘shovelware’ is not because it is shovelware but because the games are very cold. It is like those who made the games just didn’t care. When we play such games, we don’t feel anger but a type of sadness because of the void.
Anyone who reads books knows there is ‘warm’ and ‘cold’ authors. The ‘cold’ authors don’t last long or end up doing reference books. Reference books don’t have to be warm. They are more of a tool, they aren’t really in the content business.
Speech givers also come across either warm or cold. Politicians try to fake it, but you can tell when they care about something and when they don’t. In a class, assign the students to give a speech on something and you will hear the coldest speeches ever. Have them give a speech on something they like, such as a speech on themselves, and they become animated, they become stirring, their speeches become warm.
You know where I go to look for the next blockbuster hit (in any content business)? I look at the cult products. Cult products already have warmth (which is why there is a cult in the first place). They are on the verge of breaking out into the mainstream. And often once the game breaks mainstream, more money and more people are added and the sequels end up going cold.
One of the warmest games ever is Super Mario Brothers 3. Yet, when I play New Super Mario Brothers, while all Nintendo games are ‘warm’, I can easily tell NSMB lacks the warmth of its grandaddy titles. Some people call this ‘uninspired’. That label might work. But despite the more capabilities of Mario, the better graphics, the content comes off as cold.
Customers can sense ‘love’ in the content. Money cannot replicate it. Remakes cannot remake it. If you talk about games being ‘warm’ and ‘love’, publishers will look at you as if you have two heads and antlers. But I think that is the problem. Publishers come across as very ‘cold’.
Some people say business is ‘cold’, so let us study ‘art’ instead! But nothing is further from the truth. Business is not about making money, it is about making customers. This requires warmth. All salesmen know this. Consider other ways, other than making customers, there are to make money. Some businesses try to bundle their products (like Microsoft does with Windows. Microsoft’s brand plunged because they are percieved as a very ‘cold’ company). Some try to nickel and dime you. Some try to ban used games *wink*. But only in making and keeping a customer, does business come across as warm. When you think of the stereotype of the Mom and Pop shop, you think of local people who have invested their heart and soul into the company. It comes across as warm while a large mass retailer can come across as ‘cold’. (However, once that happens, the mass retailer is about decline in business. There is a reason why Wal-Mart saturates their stores with yellow happy faces.)
But let me interrupt myself to get on to Parish’s stuff.
And here’s why: 2008 was the year I stopped caring about AAA releases. They’re the grease that keeps the wheels of my job spinning, I realize; if it weren’t for the hype around Gears of War and the frothing fanboy brain seizures prompted by any mention of Killzone 2, I’d probably be out of work. But god, I’m so sick of vapid big-budget games. I guess they’re a sign that the games industry has finally achieved its goal of catching up with Hollywood, because most blockbuster game releases feel as mentally empty and emotionally void as your typical $200-million-budget-Don-LaFontaine-would-have-narrated-the-trailer-when-he-was-alive film. So well done, games industry. You’ve realized your dream at last. Too bad it wasn’t the right dream. Games aren’t movies, and the horrors of Siliwood should have proven that…yet the biggest and most visible games still use “Hollywood summer hit” as their model. Sometime around June, I finally got sick of it.
Now, I’ve been sick of it far longer than June. Far longer than before even the DS came out. These cinematic games feel very ‘plastic’. One of the reasons multiplayer is so important is that multiplayer always createse a warm experience with the game. The AI computer, no matter how well it is programmes, will always come across as ‘cold’. Human players create a warmth. (Consider the effect of local multiplayer mega-hits like Wii Sports. It is warmth that catapults these first time buyers into stores to pick up a Wii. As corny as this sounds, Wii transcends the game machine to become the nexus of the family and friends coming together.)
Prior to the Wii and even DS, people said Nintendo was doomed to be a minority in the market due to the ‘cult’ of Nintendo fans. Yet, that was a reason why Nintendo was poised to explode again.
To compete with Nintendo means making your games ‘warm’. Sega was able to do this (but has lost it).
Again, I need to interrupt myself and get back to Parish’s words:
Specifically, it was the double feature of Metal Gear Solid 4 and Grand Theft Auto IV that did me in. Two giant games; two fantastically designed games; two games whose excellent interactive portions were constantly thwarted by their creators’ Hollywood pretensions. It makes me angry that reviewers actually called GTAIV’s narrative “Oscar worthy,” because (1) no, it really wasn’t and you guys seriously need to go and watch a good movie, OK?; and (2) that kind of empty praise is just going to encourage Rockstar to keep focusing on the sloppy, poorly-written pulp noir aspects of their creations to the detriment of the part that actually makes GTA unique and fun: the gameplay. I’ll save my irritation with GTAIV for another day, but playing it immediately after MGS4 made me realize that I don’t have to keep swallowing the games that the industry pays the most money to hype up, that I don’t have to accept these things as the limit and pinnacle of what this medium can achieve, that there’s more merit in games that are content to be games than in games that desperately want to be movies that you can sometimes control and in which the possibility of a temporary interactive setback interrupts the flow of the story.
I agree with all this. I’m just a little bewildered that Parish is saying this NOW. The regular customers have gotten to this viewpoint five years ago (around the time Nintendo began changing directions).
The kiss of death for Next Generation is the desire for prestige that is making it turn toward imitating Hollywood. I don’t like Next Generation because it, as well as Hollywood, believes ‘games’ are filthy and non-art. So Next Generation tries to put as much difference from ‘game’ and attempts to get as close as it can to ‘art’.
Next Generation slaps New Generation’s face and says:
“You need to make games, and stop making non-games.”
Next Generation accuses of the very thing it does. Wii Fit is more of a game than some of these cinematic titles.
Right now I’m playing a preview version of Dragon Quest V for DS, which I’m restricted from discussing in any detail until the usual stupid assortment of embargoes dissipates, but it’s an incredible game. It looks exactly the same as the DS version of Dragon Quest IV, and I’m fighting a lot of the same enemies with the same skills and tactics as in the previous title. But again…that’s not the point. The point is the game’s heart, and in that respect DQV is fairly unparalleled — maybe by Mother 3, or Skies of Arcadia, or a handful of smaller, more esoteric games. But I look at the efforts competing RPG series have made to explore similar concepts of family, personal duty and heroism through generations and I see well-intended but honestly sort of disastrous results like Phantasy Star III and Final Fantasy VIII.
I cringe when a developer brags their upcoming game is going to showcase ‘heroism’ or ‘love’ or ‘honor’ or ‘mythology’ or ‘whatever’ like nothing before. It is not because I am against those things. It is that I sense the developer is doing these things because he thinks it is ‘progress’ and ‘art’. But the game ends up being cold. Cold games, especially the ‘well made’ ones cry out: “I’m fabulous” whereas the warm games say: “You’re fabulous”. I don’t know how else to put it.
My biggest concern about the gaming industry right now is this nonsensical polarity between “hardcore” and “casual” games; I’d hoped the Wii would serve as a bridge between the two, but honestly Nintendo has done a terrible job of it, transforming all but a handful of their longest-running franchises into neutered, pandering messes while they focus their time and money on catering to the retirement home crowd. (That’s the current retirement home crowd, mind you — not the cool retirement home crowd of the future, the one with a stack of MegaTen games to work through.) I’m hoping that DQX is a sign of good things to come: a traditional, uncompromising franchise that’s found a home on Wii, where it can focus on its core strengths and be a great game without the need to run a $100 million ad campaign to convince everyone that it will make your brain explode due to visceral awesomeness.
Nintendo’s problem, and why they are losing their Core Market, is because they don’t realize they are in the content business. They realize it from a platform point of view. For example, the game console with the largest library ends up selling the most. People say, “Sure, Mr. Idiot Malstrom, that is because all the third parties gravitate toward the largest installed base.” But commentators have confused the chicken and the egg. It is the library that comes first. Customers buy the hardware only to get to the software. Iwata spoke much about this prior to the Wii release. It is, after all, how the PlayStation 1 and 2 systems became so successful. People bought the hardware to get access to the vast CONTENT available.
And what is video-game content? Is it gameplay? No. Genres share the same exact gameplay, yet they are different content. Is it game art and music? No. A game can have great art and great music and still have bad content.
There is a saying about the movie Die-Hard: the movie was not about bloody fights and macho attitudes. The movie was about a guy getting his wife back. The movie Gladiator was not really about the gladiator fights. It was about saving Rome. In one of his books on writing, Orson Scott Card pointed out what Star Wars: Return of the Jedi was really all about. He pointed out how parents were concerned that all the kids were imitating the villian, Darth Vader, after the movie came out. The truth is that the story, the content, was that it all revolved around the character of Darth Vader and how he turned on the Emperor to save his son at the last minute.
In video games, content is about what the player DOES and the ideas involved. This includes the monsters, the world, the abilities.
Games are in the content business, not innovation business. Mario and Zelda franchises are the same content with new ‘innovations’ (the purpose of innovation is to freshen the content. For example, many of the first 3d games had the exact same content as the 2d ones but were in 3d. It made old content new for a little while longer). World of Warcraft is in the content business. That is what ‘expansions’ are all about. To expand the innovation? No! To expand the content. WoW developers work very hard because their players consume content at a very fast rate.
New Super Mario Brothers had to have been fantastic if someone had never played a 2d Mario game (such as most of the DS audience). But if you played 2d Mario before, despite the innovations, the improved graphics, NSMB felt hollow. Why? There was no new content. There were new levels, even new abilities, but that is not content. Ideas are content. Consider the content the original SMB added. It was a whole new world! The TV shows and pop culture then depicted it as such: as Mario being Alice tumbling into a strange new world. Consider how much content Super Mario Brothers 3 added. The worlds were fleshed out, there were the koopa kids, etc. NSMB was not memorable because there was no new content in it. Nintendo needs to realize people buy Mario and Zelda games to explore the mythos further, not to see the old content repackaged into ‘innovative’ ways.
Remember Baby Pac-Man? It was ‘innovative’. But it had no new content. The innovation of Baby Pac-Man was to combine the Pac-Man maze with an actual pinball machine (game went into pinball mode when Pac-Man went through a tunnel). Pacmania had Pac-Man jumping around. But when people think of Pac-Man they like, after the original title, they think of Ms. Pac-Man. Ms. Pac-Man had very little innovation but had more mazes. It was new content. Customers prefer Ms. Pac-Man over original Pac-Man today because Ms. Pac-Man has more content. It is the same reason why customers shelled out $70 for Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger back in the nineties. It is also the same reason why customers are buying Fallout 3 and Oblivion and why millions are plugged into WoW. Content. Content. Content.
“Content is expensive,” says Next Generation. Well, whose fault is that? Maybe you should have thought twice before going HD and all. Actually, content is the cheapest element of gaming if done correctly.
Games that are extremely well remembered, such as Ultima VII and Star Control 2, are extremely rich with content. Yet, SC2 was made by two guys. As I understand, U7 was made by around a dozen people. How is this possible? In those games’ situation, they used text to create the content. How expensive is it to write words? In U7’s case, they hired a playwright to do much of the text. That content vastly helps. Remember the Dig? People think fondly on the content of the game. It was written by Orson Scott Card, famed sci-fi writer. Or what about the Gabriel Knight series? Written by another author.
There are so many ways to create EPIC content very cheaply. Hybrid games, such as Zelda II and Guardian Legend, mixed two genres together to create a larger canvas. In a way, the oldschool Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy games are two genres mixed together (the overworld part and the fighting). Together, they created a vast epic world. To the customer, the old school RPG has more ‘content’ than a new school RPG because of the customer experience, not because the new RPG can barely fit on a Blu-Ray disc.
Content is not the graphics, not the levels, and is not the music. Content is the customer experience. And the customer experiences the ideas. Zelda Twilight Princess had little impact compared to Link to the Past or Ocarina of Time because Twilight Princess presented very few new ideas to the Zelda world.
For the gamecube version, Nintendo approached Mario Kart in an ‘innovation’ way. It was less successful than previous Mario Karts. For the DS and Wii versions, Nintendo focused very much on the new tracks and the ideas of those tracks. The result? Mega hits. Everyone loves Waluigi Pinball or Coconut Mall because the tracks were based on some very interesting ideas. Aside from a couple in Double Dash, the ideas behind the tracks were pretty dull. The only people who liked them were people who hadn’t seen it before: children. And that might be a clue as to why Nintendo almost got pidgeon holed in the children’s market. Children were the only customers who hadn’t seen Nintendo recycling its content before. After a generation, they will say: “I’ve played this before!” and wander off to new systems to discover new content to play.
Ugh, let me interrupt myself so I can finish my Ramble Opus:
High-end PS3 and Xbox 360 games aren’t the future, and neither is the current, pathetic state of the Wii. If any game can reconcile the two, I think, it will be DQX: it’s a major franchise, steeped in the traditional vocabulary of video games, but with broad appeal (at least in its home territory). Here’s hoping that other third parties take this as a cue to start focusing on the Wii for something other than embarrassing shovelware.
For some reason, content has gotten a bad rap currently. Third parties on the Wii strive for ‘innovation’ which means ‘trainwreck’ to the customer. None of them are striving for ‘content’. Nintendo is no longer striving for content as Reggie’s endorsement of ‘user-generated content’ means.
People don’t want user-generated content. They want user control over the content. Miyamoto’s earlier games not only introduced great new content, Miyamoto made sure players had absolute control over that content. Blizzard’s games sell because of the content and allowing customers to have control over that content.
But that is a rant for another day. It is not enough to say that gaming is a customer centric business. Many businesses are. Newspapers are. Movies are. But the thing about gaming is that it is a content business. The customer consumes the content. Newspapers are going out of business not just because they got disrupted, their primary problem is their content.
Why do millions of people subscribe to World of Warcraft? Content.
Why are people buying Fallout 3 and Oblivion? Content.
A game with good content and no innovation is still a good game. But a game with no content and great innovation remains a bad game. Content is king in this business, innovation the servant. Let’s remember who wears the crown.