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[Pug]

The BBC is asking if gaming is the future of entertainment. Its asking because lastest figures shows that the gaming market is growing rapidily year on year.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/3616436.stm

 

[Jonnyram]

What a fantastic selection of responses too. I know someone called Rob, from Yorkshire, as it happens. I presume that's not him though...

 

[Ghost]

No, videogames are not the future of entertainment, at least not in their current form. The problem that games have is that they are way too reliant on young-demographic-oriented formulae, which caps their ability to develop into a full fledged ubiquitous medium like the book or the TV show. While the market has surged in recent years, that spurt of growth is going to level off soon and the market will acquire the sort of stable niche that pop music has. It'll be for the kids, rearing its head only occasionally into the mainstream media, and otherwise make a lot of stable cash for a few large companies.
Anonymous Developer, London

ouch.

The truth DOES hurt

 

[AniHawk]

Video gaming is a fashion like any other and very soon will come the inevitable backlash. By 2006 kids will be enjoying marbles and conkers, and adults will be playing whist, cribbage and shove ha'penny. By 2008 hopscotch will have replaced the games console. By 2010 computers will seem like a silly and embarassing fad, a bit like rubiks cubes or space hoppers. It's an historical certainty.

.........................

 

[Optimistic]

What the hell does "future of entertainment" mean? Yes gaming will be/is a mainstream medium for entertainment, but it'll never* be the primary form of entertainment IMO. Its appeal is simply too narrow - does anyone really believe there's a market for videogames in the over 65 category, for example? Hell no. Perhaps in some alternate universe the gaming industry will get big enough to cater to the almost limitless interests of people, but really, it's just not going to fucking happen.

*conservative estimate

 

[Ghost]

my grandad plays games, he's over 65, he plays who wants to be a millionaire, card games, crossword generators etc...so hell yeah there is a market for every age group.


Maybe console games dont cater to every audience, the PC certainly does though.

 

[Pug]

Post in on the BBC optimistic

 

[Alcibiades]

Post in on the BBC optimistic

I sent in a generic "interactivity" is only on videogames type statement, hopefully adds to positiveness...

 

[deadhorse32]

No, videogames are not the future of entertainment, at least not in their current form. The problem that games have is that they are way too reliant on young-demographic-oriented formulae, which caps their ability to develop into a full fledged ubiquitous medium like the book or the TV show. While the market has surged in recent years, that spurt of growth is going to level off soon and the market will acquire the sort of stable niche that pop music has. It'll be for the kids, rearing its head only occasionally into the mainstream media, and otherwise make a lot of stable cash for a few large companies.
Anonymous Developer, London

The Truth

 

[Optimistic]

my grandad plays games, he's over 65, he plays who wants to be a millionaire, card games, crossword generators etc...so hell yeah there is a market for every age group.

Well yeah sure, but a. your grandad is probably in the minority, and b. although there may be a few select games that appeal to the older age group (this was just an example I used btw...don't forget other "possible" customers, ie: women etc), it's still nothing compared to the 87484940 movies and books most old timers would read.

Maybe console games dont cater to every audience, the PC certainly does though.

Well, perhaps...the 20th century was a time of rapid technological transition, it's no surprise that most old timers can't handle using a computer. But with our generation, we won't see such a jump in computer tech (or will we? ), only refinements and so forth. Fundamentally, computers and related tech will still be the same as it is now. It'll be interesting to see if our generation will still be able to handle computer tech when we reach old age, or whether we'll also simply find it all too difficult to cope with.

 

[shuri]

Anyboby who thinks that Video Games is the future of entertainement are seriously warped. It must be the same type of people who believe the stuff about the average gamer being 29, and for some reasons, believe the popular opinion that videogames became somehow mainstream (what the fuck does that means?) in the mid '90 with final fantasy 7. Every Kids played Intellivision, Atari and Coleco back then. Same thing with the NES and SNES/Genny generation. My older cousins (who were 20yo+) liked them too.

 

[dog$]

Tag me as "seriously warped", then. (Solely based on your first sentence)

So, can someone explain this to me?
Here's the heart of that paragraph:

The problem that games have is that they are way too reliant on young-demographic-oriented formulae

With it being called "truth" twice.
Can someone explain what the "truth" is, here?
And if you're taking time to answer the question, what can be done about it (so that games are not "way too reliant on young-demogrpahic-oriented formulae")?

 

[Funky Papa]

Video gaming is a fashion like any other and very soon will come the inevitable backlash. By 2006 kids will be enjoying marbles and conkers, and adults will be playing whist, cribbage and shove ha'penny. By 2008 hopscotch will have replaced the games console. By 2010 computers will seem like a silly and embarassing fad, a bit like rubiks cubes or space hoppers. It's an historical certainty.

PC gaming and Nintendo, both eternally doomed.

Bollocks I say. Bollocks!

 

[B-B-Bomba!]

'What can be done?' is generally an unfair question to ask of people whose main point is just that something must be. An inability to answer this question shouldn't detract from the validity of the argument.

The whole sticking-to-formulae thing refers to the fact that games are being made and marketed for children, and I presume further to the sense that rather than bust their asses designing new experiences for fresh demographics, and thereby encouraging people to develop new tastes and interests, the development and publishing communities (if not society itself?) seems to pluck for the easier option of encouraging a state of perpetual childhood.

Whether this is a good thing or not - whether this argument holds water, and I certainly wouldn't subscribe to it automatically - is a very lengthy and complex discussion. Like any sufficiently elevated problem, it draws in other issues from areas that have been discussed and disagreed over for milennia. More often than not this results in settling for pat temporary positions of no real significance.

 

[Mama Smurf]

The main problem videogames have over movies and TV, sports and reading, is that not everyone can play them. I'm not just talking about the fact that they don't understand the controls and things, I mean that games are too difficult for a lot of people.

If you're watching a movie, it's going to get to the end. If you're playing a sport, no matter how bad you are you can play with others equally bad and it'll still be fun (assumign you like whatever it is anyway). A videogame though...if you can't beat the first level of Halo, that's it, game over (I actually know someone who can't, even though they play games every so often). That's not appealing to people.

Some games are fine. I've never known anyone who can't play Samba. People who've never touched a game in their life can play that and enjoy it. Some of the simpler old games like Pac-Man I imagine most people could play too. But we don't want all our games to be like that, and I don't think they'd become a strong entertainment force if they were.

Developers need to understand that difficulty levels are important. REAL difficulty levels. Going back to Halo again, the difficultty levels have been built for gamers, not for everyone. But, why not for everyone? If you're going to put difficulty levels in anyway, why not? The easiest difficulty level should be absolutely simple (for us). We'd go through it no problem, we'd never even get hit. But for others, they'd actually enjoy it and find a level of challenge they could cope with. Now before any of you complain about having ridiculously easy games, there would still be harder difficulty levels. Legendary would still be there. After all, the point is to cater to everyone, we simply wouldn't even consider the easiest difficulty, knowing it's not for us.

I just don't understand why this isn't being done already. It's like developers don't want games to reach the largest audience possible. Of course, that still won't allow everyone to play games, you've got to start both bringing games prices down (and hopefully sales would go up with that, I'm not trying to screw developers here) and simplifying control schemes.

 

[deadhorse32]

Mama Smurf : IMHO It's more a problem of controller. More buttons more sticks more Dpad. Games like the Eyetoy, Samba, .... are easy to play because they have special controller or no controller at all.

 

[Mama Smurf]

Well that's a big issue, but a lot of games out there would still be difficult even without the difficult to pick up controls.

It especially amuses me when I hear people (Dyack mainly) saying games will be the next big thing in storytelling. Not only that, but one day they'll be the main form of such entertainment. Hah! Please. How is a game, where you have to have a degree of skill to progress in it, ever going to compete with a movie or a book where you have to keep going until the end. You WILL be able to see/read the whole story in those other forms of entertainment, there's no guarantee you will in a game, especially not the way they're made currently.

 

[B-B-Bomba!]

My oft-spouted position is that 'games' (as a concept including both Halo and chess) should occupy a set proportion of human activity (though one subject to change over time). We all play games, as Segas abysmal Euro-marketing strategy was keen to point out, and really bitching about the how, the when, the where and the why, at any scale ranging from chess vs Halo down to my system vs yours, is essentially pointless (if momentarily fun).

I think whoever said that computers and computer games will be overtaken by conkers and pogo sticks is probably onto something. At present technology is a concern, and it defines what and how we play in certain ways. In future I think this will no longer be the case. However I don't really want to think about what will be the case.

Perhaps we are finishing a lot of things. The end of games, the end of music, the end of stories. Perhaps these bizarrely pre-milennial contortions we still experience are the result of an increasingly desperate refusal to accept the finite?

 

[Mama Smurf]

...the end of music? The end of stories? Do you have any idea how old those are? The only way these things will ever see an end is when mankind is wiped out.

 

[Izzy]

No, videogames are not the future of entertainment, at least not in their current form. The problem that games have is that they are way too reliant on young-demographic-oriented formulae, which caps their ability to develop into a full fledged ubiquitous medium like the book or the TV show. While the market has surged in recent years, that spurt of growth is going to level off soon and the market will acquire the sort of stable niche that pop music has. It'll be for the kids, rearing its head only occasionally into the mainstream media, and otherwise make a lot of stable cash for a few large companies.
Anonymous Developer, London

Pure, unadultered bollocks. I'll be sure to post this quote in 5 years when UK gaming industry grows another 100%.

Rob Fahey 09:30 01/09/2004

Screen Digest reports record faster rates of growth than ever before

New reports commissioned by British publisher body ELSPA have found that the game software market in the UK has grown by over 100 per cent in the past six years, far outstripping the growth of other media.

Unveiled this morning at EGN, the two reports were compiled by market research experts Screen Digest, and provide a comprehensive look at key trends within the interactive entertainment market.

In the six year period from 1997 to 2003, according to the research, the videogame software market in the UK grew by 100 per cent - compared with growth in cinema box office revenues of 30 per cent, VHS and DVD rental growth of 14 per cent, and a decline of 4.5 per cent in music retail sales.

This growth has helped to sustain the UK's position as the largest territory in Western Europe for games, with a market larger than France and Germany combined, and as the third largest market in the world after the USA and Japan.

Screen Digest's figures estimate that the UK market for game hardware and software - not including PC hardware - was worth over UKP 2 billion in 2003 for a second year running, while the global market was worth some $18.2 billion, an annual rise of 10.8 per cent. The reports predict that the market will be worth $21.1 billion by 2007.

Perhaps more importantly for the UK as a whole, the leisure software industry contributed UKP 200 million to the country's balance of trade in 2003, according to Screen Digest's calculations - which again compares favourably to other media such as film and TV, which continue to be substantially in the red in terms of balance of trade.

"Our research suggests there is plenty more scope for strong sales within the current console cycle," according to Screen Digest chief analyst Ben Keen. "However, innovation is the cornerstone of the games industry and we expect the launch of exciting new handheld machines to give the market a huge boost ahead of the next generation of TV-based consoles."

The two reports which have been compiled by Screen Digest on behalf of ELSPA are Interactive Leisure Software: Global Market Assessment and Forecasts to 2007, which will be made available for purchase later this week on GamesIndustry.biz, and European Video Games: The 2004 State Of The Industry Report, which will be published in October.

Link

 

[B-B-Bomba!]

As we know it, Mama ...

But how much do we really know about anything? The only thing that seems certain is that we are reaching some kind of cultural vanishing point (replete with cultural pop-up and cultural jaggiez! ). It seems to me as if we are unentangling ourselves from certain debates and issues ... not answering them, or making them go away ... just reaching a point where we no longer think about or are concerned by them. We know they are there, and are happy to respond to whatever situations they present us with, but are essentially freeing our minds from long-term involvement with these basic issues. This then allows us, individually or in groups, enough cognitive space to ask one or two really pertinent questions, before the effort of doing so forces our feet back down into the quotidian swamp.

The questions I ask - still - are things like who we are, what we are doing, and why we are doing it. However this cache of expendable insight is more often applied forwards, into the future, into the practical issues that people face in their professional capacties, mining away at the edges of the fractals and pushing them ever deeper, ever closer, ever further over the edge of the horizon.

The answers I get to my questions, I ... I don't really know what they mean, though it be my job to explain them. I can't explain myself much more than this, I'm sorry if it's bollocks. However it seems to me that the process of dividing stories into two, and pretending that the resulting halves are two new stories in themselves, and applying this same process to music and games, is shortly to prove to have run its course. IMO we still have all the toys we started with; it's just that a lot of them are now outside the pram.