Actually, that's old news: I left at the end of last year, I just hadn't been sharing many details about what's been happening with me since. Facebook's not the best forum for rambling essays, and now I have something more suitable, I feel I owe an explanation.
I should say for the record that SCE has been a great group of companies to work for, and there are good reasons why I stayed as long as I did. I have unbounded respect and admiration for some of the people who work there but there were a couple of big factors that made me feel it was time to move on. If you'll indulge me...
The industry isn't what it was
What made me want to enter the games industry in the first place is gaming as it was when I was growing up. They say it's constraints that make creative works interesting, and for gaming of the 1980s and 1990s, I heartily agree. Commanding a small, blocky sprite around a spartan, primary-colored world required a pretty healthy imagination, something that as a young boy I was more than happy to supply. |
| What I saw back in the eighties |
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| What I imagined |
It was an exciting time to be a gamer; an age when hardware's modest increments in complexity opened the doors to great leaps in software's capacity for expressivity. As each new generation of gaming platform arrived, game mechanics that would previously have been impossible to implement were bringing us ever more compelling and immersive experiences. As the years rolled by, games companies inched closer and closer to delivering on-screen what previously existed only in gamers' imaginations.
But be careful what you wish for.
With the likes of, say, Commando and Out Run back in the eighties, the lack of realism provided more than enough of a gulf to separate in any gamer's mind the abstract fun of a simple game from any concerns of the horrors of war or the tragedies caused by reckless driving. But in the years since, we've done a pretty damned good job of building a bridge over that gulf, and while others presumably can defend modern games as merely enhancements of the simple concepts developed decades ago, it's an argument I can no longer swallow. Commando was a shoot-em-up. Call of Duty is a murder simulator.
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| What I'm seeing today |
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| What I'm imagining |
And it's not just shooting games that lose their innocence as realism is cranked up. How advanced would you like your racing game to be? Gran Turismo took a lot of flak for not allowing its vehicles to show damage, while otherwise emphasizing how real its driving simulation was. But I don't think there's an alternative here. Modeling a realistic portrayal of a driver's grizzly death in a spinning fireball of twisted metal doesn't sound like appealing entertainment (the first-person shooter crowd may disagree); yet seeing a car emerge from a head-on collision at 100mph with only superficial scratches is going to seem jarring given how faithful the game's visuals are to real life otherwise. You can't win.
I know I can't take the argument all the way and claim that all genres are ruined by increasing technical sophistication. Sports titles at least don't get grizzly, they just get dull (their ancestors relied on high-speed cartoon physics to make them fun, a trick that 8-bit graphics handily disguised but with photorealism just looks dissonant), while abstract titles like Tetris are fun whatever the implementation.
But, see, Tetris has been done already, and while I'm certain that there are great gameplay concepts still undiscovered, the industry (who can blame it?) is competing to sate the appetite of its customers. And for some time now, the demand has been for violence, the more graphic the better.
At heart, my interests lie in creativity and technology. What excited me about the games industry originally was the opportunity to play a part in shaping new technologies to bring about groundbreaking, exciting new games. But as time progressed, it seems increasingly clear to me that technical advances post the millennium have been more of a curse to gaming entertainment than a blessing, and that the kinds of games the market's now hungry for just aren't the kind that I'd be excited to make.
(But a big tip of the hat to Portal 2, one of the few games in recent years to be fun because of technical excellence, not in spite of it, and for using a first-person shooter engine in a way that didn't get third-persons violently shot).
I needed to vent my creativity
Working as a project manager for five years was a great job and left me with many treasured moments to look back on. I had hoped when I took the position that I'd have enough spare time to continue my enjoyment of coding as a hobby, but sadly it didn't work out that way.As time went on, I missed getting my fingers dirty. I'd had a few ideas for personal projects that I wanted to work on, and the more that I missed engineering, the more it seemed like the right thing to do to take a career break and see if those projects had potential.
It's been about half a year now, and though it's taken me a little while to retrain in modern tools and languages (my previous professional experience requiring low-level C and hand-rolled assembler) and in spite of a couple of false starts, there's one concept I've been developing that's been getting a few people excited. It's early days yet, but I look forward to revealing more soon.
Mike, (y) ( and hi ! )
ReplyDeleteThat's why almost all of my game shopping has gone to the likes of GOG. Just spent my last flight back from Asia playing Star Control 3. ( On a Mac, too )
Good article, Mike. I tend to enjoy both sides myself. I can play games like Gears of War and enjoy the morbidly over the top gore (not sure why I find it enjoyable). It's almost comical and funny to blow up your friends in such a visceral manner in a virtual world. But I do understand the dislike of such things when thinking about the reality they represent. Since my son sometimes plays these types of games (lately he enjoys indie games more like Kentucky Route 0), I always have the conversation with him, that the realities of war are brutal and not something we want to have.
ReplyDeleteI find just as you pointed out, lots of the modern games tend to stagnate in terms of game-play mechanics and story and so on. I often play old dos games, and lately through the humble indie bundle, I have been enjoying independent games that focus on the game more than the visual or representation of reality.
At the end of the day, I think it would be an interesting long term 'study' (for lack of a better word) to explore the place that violent games and combat sports can/might fill in the absence of real war. It's undeniable that human beings have a violent side that gets expressed often times through war. If human society could eliminate war altogether, I might expect the need to act out violence through games or organized combat sports (Mixed Martial Arts for example) would increase. That could be a naive way yo look at things, but i think some analysis of the relationships would interesting nonetheless.