This is my final post for Full Sail University’s Game History class. Enjoy!
Prompt: From the TED videos from this week we see two great designers (Dave Perry and Will Wright) discussing games and toys. Do you agree or disagree with their views on games and why? Can you see alternate views on design from their discussions?
Coming from the perspective that games are art, I fully agree with Dave Perry’s assertion that games should create emotion in the future. While Perry was only talking about the visual aesthetic that will come in the future for games, the student video he played talked about varying parts of games as art. I do think that, if video games need to have a legitimate view, games should be produced with the same depth and feeling as art. However, I do disagree with the theme of the student’s movie, which is trying to create a feeling that soon all interaction will be in the digital space. Theorizing that we will all be bytes in a world scares me a bit. This will create a feeling of sterility and alienation between the player and the real world.
Watching Will Wright’s talk, which was more like a 20 minute presentation of Spore, I can agree that gameplay can be considered to allow games to be more like “toys”, where each aspect of gameplay is like a separate toy that has a specific function. However, looking at games from this perspective fails to allow for innovation with the emotion making elements in video games. Ultimately, the innovation will be in the direction of technology, which can only be improved until it is no longer possible to improve it. Basically, this way of thinking will ultimately be the downfall of the industry, where we will have more games like Spore that will have no true value to video games other than the technology it employs.
As I said earlier in my post, I think that if games strive to become more like art, then we will have more games that push the boundaries, creating a form of video game renaissance where the only the visceral emotion is created in the player. Right now, since technology that drives video games (hardware and software) are now mature enough to drive innovation with how we perceive the world, we should use it to express our feelings about that same world, while giving players the tools to do the same thing. It is a hard mix to maintain, but it can be done.
