The Current Gaming Trifecta

Hey Murder Junkies,

It's that time again. Another week or so has passed us since I last left you and more gaming related thoughts have cluttered up my mind so I figure it is time to do another one of these articles.

This week I thought I could talk to you a bit about the state of video games in general and lay out, as I see it, the Current Gaming Trifecta.

First I'm going talk about just what this Trifecta is, then I'm going to talk about how it got that way by reminiscing some and giving some historical context. Finally I'm going to speculate on what it all means for gaming in general going forward.

So what is the Current Gaming Trifecta?

Well, it seems like lately video gaming as we all know it has split into three distinct sectors. There are the big budget, corporate-sponsored "triple A" games, your Call of Duty's, Grand Theft Auto's, Assassin's Creed's, and so on.

Then we've got what has come to be known as "the indie scene". These games are pretty much the anti-Triple A's. They're low budget, often made by one or few people, and usually don't make much money in general. These are the creative hobby projects made by people who love games and who also love making games.

Finally we have what I am going to call, for lack of a better term, "the mobile sector". These are the games that show up on your smart phone or tablet device. This sector is kind of a weird hybrid of the other two. Major publishers as well as indie developers make games for mobile devices and it's not unusual to see a GTA right next to something from someone totally unknown in a best-of year-end list.

So we've got Triple A games, Indies and Mobile. On top of that I should also mention the developers and audiences for these sectors only overlap some of the time.

Triple A's are made by professional artists and programmers who work for large companies. They are played by what the marketing departments call "core gamers". These are mostly normal people though some of them consider "real games" to be the kind you can only play on a dedicated console like those sold by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.

Indies are an eclectic mix of all kinds of people. Some of these developers are former professionals or hardcore, or keep up with the professionals and hardcore, but just as often they are simply artists and programmers who makes games as a hobby. Their audience is as diverse as they are, drawing in people from all kinds of scenes and non-scenes.

The mobile sector, like I said, is comprised of the other two, developer and audience alike. Initially mobile devices were the purview of the so-called "casual" market, i.e. people who were just looking for something fun to do on their phone while riding the subway or standing in line somewhere. Big companies made cheap or free-to-play games like Angry Birds or those city builders where you have to eventually pay real money if you want to get anything done in a reasonable amount of time.

Then things changed a bit and small companies and individuals were able to put their games out on these devices and now we're kind of where we are today. More people play indie or mobile games than they do on a dedicated console, even though some indies end up on consoles and some console games end up on your phone. Despite this a vocal minority of people still contend that consoles are the last bastion of "real gaming" because they're the only places left, just about, where you can get certain types of games.

So how did it get this way?

In the beginning video games were things you played on a specialized machine at a bar or a local game hall called an arcade. There was one game per machine and they cost money to play, usually a quarter per try.

I think it was Space Invaders that got this whole scene started. Before that it was pinball machines that companies stuck in bars and public spaces but those started dying out after microprocessor technology reached the point where you could cram a computer chip inside an arcade cabinet and thus video gaming was born.

Space Invaders was hugely popular so lots of companies sprang up to meet the demand for more video games. Because they were the new pinball machines the games were designed to be incredibly difficult to reach the end so you were encouraged to keep sinking quarters into the machine every time you failed.

At the same time as arcades were becoming a thing technology companies were trying to figure out how to put video games in your living room. Early consoles were basically machines people used to play graphically simplified arcade games on their televisions because the companies could not yet fit all the technology from the arcade cabinets into their game boxes.

Then at some point in the mid-1980s video games collapsed. Actually the video game wings of major technology companies collapsed. This was partly because the video game market was too saturated with crappy games that no one was buying but it was also mainly a result of larger economic forces at the time that were wreaking havoc across all economic sectors.

So video games collapsed because technology companies were collapsing because the whole damn economy was collapsing. This was all in America, at least. It was a wild time to be sure.

After American technology companies wrote off the home video game console market Japanese technology companies jumped in to pick up the torch. Just a couple years after video games collapsed in America Nintendo put out a video game console that wiped the floor with its American counterparts, mainly because it had graphics that were more on par with arcade games.

And Mario. Mario was a pretty big thing too.

So pretty soon for a whole generation Nintendo kind of dominated the console games market while arcades continued to be a thing.

Then in the late 1980s and early 1990s thanks to advances in computing technology personal computers started to become a viable platform to play games on. They had always been a potential gaming platform and had games released on them but they didn't look like the arcade games that were so popular.

That all changed during this period. As the technology was improving making personal computers viable platforms new ways of marketing and selling games were popping up as well. This was the time of shareware.

Shareware was a term used for a business model whereby game makers gave away part of their game for free and if people liked it they could purchase the rest for a nominal fee. This is how the game Doom became so popular and it was also one of the first shareware games to be distributed digitally over the internet.

Digital distribution let small, independent developers like id Software distribute their games without having to pay publisher overhead. They saved money on marketing by making a cool game that spread across the internet's BBS message boards via word of mouth making them an early 90s small start-up success story.

By the early to mid 1990s personal computers were competing with consoles as the go-to place for certain types of games. You could only play Mario on a Nintendo machine but if you wanted to play an FPS like Doom or Quake or eventually Half-Life you had to have a gaming capable computer.

Then by the mid to late 1990s console technology started catching up to computers. Sony got into the game with their PlayStation console which featured 3D polygonal graphics that competed with Nintendo's N64 console.

Up to this point I should note the main gaming audience were those dedicated enough to take the time to learn how to play a game, which at this point where still pretty difficult to learn how to play unless you had been playing them for a long time. Even Mario, while mainstream and accessible, still had a difficulty curve to it that meant only the most dedicated would see the end.

During the turn of the century video games had evolved into a huge industry despite not being taken seriously by mainstream society. Console technology was quickly approaching parity with personal computers but this ever-expanding upward technology curve could not be sustained. By the middle aughts computer hardware manufacturers and console companies had reached a kind of equilibrium wherein games on one device could be safely ported over easily to the other. This was welcome development for the people who made the games because it meant they could just work on the game and not have to focus too much on the hardware side of making it work across all these different devices.

During this time it also became increasingly easy for people who were not tech-savvy to make and distribute their own games. Lots of middleware software suites popped up, many of them made by video game companies themselves, that streamlined the whole process of making a game. Valve Software, who made Half-Life, put out a digital distribution platform with the release of Half-Life 2 in 2004 that eventually evolved into a platform for nearly anyone to release a game on.

Then smart phones came along and put a lot of the computing power of personal computers into peoples pockets.

Smart phones, and later tablets, meant that there were now highly powerful, highly mobile platforms on which to release video games. With the advent of smart phones new audiences found a new generation of games to discover and more people than ever started playing.

Which brings us to today where you can make, publish and play video games on just about any device provided it has enough processing power and memory.

So where does it all go from here?

It's hard to say. Mobile games and indies are here to stay it seems like while console games are kind of going through an identity crisis. Because it costs so much money to produce and distribute a Triple A the studios that make them pander to the widest audience possible and especially to the lowest common denominator within that audience. This is why there is currently a, for lack of a better word, "conversation"going on in the gaming community about sexism and misogyny, because "gamer" culture is rampant with it to anyone who has eyes to see it.

Because the Triple A sectors caters to the lowest common denominator console games are largely about killing people in some fashion, unless the console is a Nintendo console at which point the games are about Nintendo or Sega mascots hopping and bopping their way through cartoon worlds or else it's an RPG or cartoon license or some "family friendly" dreck that was shoved out to market in time for the holiday buying season.

Much of the interesting, innovative stuff that's happening in gaming is happening in the indie scene, which is not beholden to shareholder profits or large companies. Much of it is still on the personal computer but a lot of what starts there ends up on a mobile device at some point.

Triple As are still hugely popular and to some degree profitable but many of the people who grew up playing games have started or completed the process of maturing into adults and are ready for the Triple As to be about more than just killing people.

I often hear the sentiment that, as beautiful and interesting as Grand Theft Auto looks, it would be much better if you could do more in those games than just murder people and be a sociopath. Which technically you can but it's not the focus of the game. You can only walk around San Andreas enjoying the sights or drive around listening to the radio for so long until you start wanting something else to do that's a little more engaging.

I get the feeling that the Triple A, console-driven sector is heading towards another implosion. Not just because the global economic order has been steadily unraveling for some time now but also because the games themselves aren't keeping up with the changes in their audience. The big companies are still chasing after the 13 year old boy with mom and dad's credit card and making games that cater to the tastes of a 13 year old boy.

They try and dress them up so that grown up players will have something to talk about but this leads to absurdities like BioShock.

Not to mention the fact that, technology-wise, we're fast approaching the point of diminishing returns. Photorealistic graphics are probably only going to get slightly incrementally better from here on out so that "wow factor" from the technology end of it has to come from better art in general.

Better art styles, more color and variety, anything to take the edge out of all the gritty, urban crime epics and brown, dusty military shooters. It's not all bad though. There are some new consoles that just came out and there are some colorful, vibrant games on the horizon.

There's always something new or nostalgic popping up on mobile and if you dig deep enough you can find all sorts of weird little gems in all corners of the indie scene.

So things might not look so hot for Triple As, even though it's all but guaranteed they'll keep getting made, but the future is bright for everyone else. Video gaming is exploding into the mainstream culture and there are more games than ever for everyone to play. I know there are more games out now that I want to play than I'll probably ever have time to play the rest of my life.

It's a lot like books or films, really. There's lots of books and films I'd like to see at some point as well, but my hobby is games and I only have so many hours left before I die. I'll never get to read, see or play it all.

And it's kind of reassuring in a way to know that. Despite whatever else happens the rest of my life I know I'll never be bored.

Thanks for reading.