Also, with mass acceptance comes the pressure to make everything attractive and pretty just to get people’s attention. Kids, fanboys, and newbie/wannabe developers are completely blinded by all the buzzwords and acronyms shoved out there by video card manufacturers and high-priced game engine developers for the sole reason of selling their wares. Those kids seem to think that Shader 3.0, ragdoll physics, full-destructable environments, realtime hair and fur, and what-have-you are essential requirements for good games. Sure it’s nice to see all these pretty things happening on screen, but do they really make the game any better? Does seeing every single hair follicle on the bouncy-boobed leading lady’s head sway in the wind while she guns down fuzzy fire-breathing demons in the middle of a rainforest with sunlight shining through the leaves and casting semi-translucent shadows on the ground while shiny bullet shells fall to the ground creating small puffs of dust actually make the game more fun?
As a game developer, this frustrates me to no end. Too many players are concerned with how it looks and not enough with how it plays. Ideally, it’s an equal balance of both. Great graphics, great gameplay. However, it’s the looks and the fluff that get the game noticed, so we have to deal with it. MTV used to be about music and videos. Now it’s about Jessica Simpson living the blonde stereotype, horny co-eds on The Real World, and Jackass. Is the game industry turning into MTV?
I must say I really agree with him, even as one of those people that implements the "sunlight shining through the leaves and casting semi-translucent shadows on the ground" and finds that utterly fascinating and interesting. Those people will always exists, but in order for the games industry to be taken more seriously and expand beyond the current experienced and hardcore gamers, buzzwords and superficial advertisment can't be the sole focus. But that's obvious, isn't it?
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