Popular games' production budgets have skyrocketed in the lasst 10 years, coupled with a corresponding decrease in originality. Games becoming 'mainstream' may have something to do with this, though I'd argue that there's still no game more mainstream than Pac Man was in its day. No game since has had the same kind of hold on an entire culture that Pac Man did in its time. Everyone knew what it meant to score over 100,000 in Pac Man. One or two programmers coding against the bare metal of the hardware they were given to work with were forced to be creative in the only avenue left to them, the gameplay. The opposite of this would be a game like Myst and its kin, where you had the ability to show beautiful images, but the constraints of the development environment, hypercard (like Flash, only 10 years before), were such that only a point-and-click snoozefest, where the goal became to see the next pretty picture.

The trouble is that in the art field, an artist must prove his or her worth on his own before being given any backing. Hiring a competent graphics programmer who's worked his ass off learning OpenGL inside and out would be like hiring a housepainter to paint the Cistine Chapel, technically competent enough but with no artistic ability proven so far. To produce a game back in the 1980 took no more than 5 people working on everything, similarly an independent film can be produced with only a few key production members compared with a big-budget Hollywood movie. I think the comparison is valid between movies and games, where the studio-ization of games has done for them what it has done for movies, turned them into a pure financial endeavour. You've got a few ocmpanies like Blizzard who can crank out a million-seller every 3 years, and masters of their field like Papyrus who do racing sims better than anyone, though this is more of a technical acheivement than a creative one. Faithful simulation is a field separate from the traditional mass-appeal arcade game.

However, you've also got an overwhelming number of companies trying to emulate EA's success, where making the game look good is enough to recoup your investment, and getting the game out the door is more important than tuning the gameplay. Going back to Pac Man, the most important part of the game is the speed of your character moving on the screen relative to the ghosts, the exact amount of time a power pill is active, the scoring lattices, that little secret safe area to the bottom right of the starting zone. All of these things are such fine detail that could have made or broken the game when it hit the streets. In today's game production environment there isn't even a phase set aside in the development cycle for such fine tuning of gameplay mechanics (Blizzard, Maxis and to an extend id are the only ones who have shown that they really think through how a game plays)

Take a game like Metal Gear Solid as an example. Looking at it from an outside perspective, one could easily surmise that the purpose of the game was to walk from one cutscene to another. The gaming press ate it up because of the production that went into it, and also because they can be bought fairly easily by good PR people. The game took so long to develop but in the end all you were left with was an updated version of Dragon's Lair. Try one method to get through a room, find it doesn't work. Try the next one, that works, your on to the next bit of eye-candy. Of course the biggest offender in this regard are the console RPGs, most of which seem scared to death to move beyond the 'find the key, find the door' gameplay paradigm. Perhaps this is partly due to the very constrained interaction one has with a controller, as opposed to the old PC adventure games, where you could get the cop in Police Quest to take his clothes off and then walk into the women's shower if you had the imagination to try it. Shenmue tried to capture some of the spirit of the old adventure games but again was constrained by the fact that all you could really do was walk around and click a button to talk to people, who would always say the same things in the same order in classic NPC fashion. Language processing in some of LucasArts' adventure games was surprisingly ahead of its time. Games like Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango (the last good adventure game made) really push the player to come up with new ways to solve problems to progress through the game. 'Find the blue key' isn't good enough, that's been done. But before LucasArts could have made Grim Fandango, they cut their teeth on the Indiana Jones adventures, Maniac Mansion, and others. Their timing was good in that they hone their art and became more skillful as their platform also developed. As development teams who grew in the 8/16-bit era move out of game production you are getting more and more kids who learned to program in Visual Basic rather than in assembler on their Z80-specials (sadly slightly before my time as well). Kids who don't bother doing something if there isn't a DirectX API call to make it happen (thank you microsoft and your single-handed attempt to dumb-down the field of programming). A kid who is given a small lego set and who has to make due with that for a while before he gets any more will know what he's working with much more intimately than the spoiled rich kid who has a room full of bricks bestowed on him. The modern gaving development environment is akin to this wealth of resources and subsequent lack of motivation to be innovative.

Again, similar to film production.

When a future art filmmaker is going to film school he must prove himself by producing short film after short film, mastering the entire process, to produce something that stands on its own. Game designers are not forced to learn the limits of their platform, and have the idea that they are making enhanced movies rather than intricate puzzles wher enuance is the key. The job of the game designer is to come up with a mammoth design document outlining every aspect of the game, on paper, in english. Then it's given to the developers, and they subsequently say 'this can't be done, this is too hard, this is would require custom shading routines'. (can we make it a pie? Pies are easier to draw). This is even before the money people start butting in with their ideas of how the process should happen.

The golden age of gaming is still superior to that of film, since games didn't have the same mystique as moving pictures did in the 1900's. It was enough to show some cowboys and indians running after each other to get people to watch. This would hae been the equivalent of an arcade game where you moved a spaceship around a starfield without really doing anything, expecting the audience to be so enthralled with the experience itself that they didn't expect any depth. Arcade games weren't given that kind of welcome, and had to prove themselves before showing up in every corner store in the country.

The reverse seems to be happening now, however, where you've got people who've just spent hundreds of dollars on the latest graphics card or game console, because they're told that how a game looks will significantly enhance their enjoyment. Then they try to fullfill this promise by purchasing games that will most fully exploit their hardware, wanting some kind of return on investment. No one would by plain old pac man for the x-box, even knowing full well that it would get more replay value than most of the game they will buy.

Essentially, gamers have been told to expect graphics and production and to ignore finer points of the game. You're supposed to finish a game, and go on to the next one. Game publishers have probably realized by now that replay value is bad for sales. (God bless Blizzard and id who can keep people hooked on their games until the next one comes out).

Game production needs to mature as an art where a lower-budget production can get recognition from critics and make an impact. This will probably happen on the PC platform more readily than on consoles (see: snood, jardinains) but it's still a long way off.

Talking points: We need more true adventure games, more arcade style instantly playable but impossible to master games like pac man and tetris. Less emphasis on hardware capabilities and less money. Also, a single developer should have to prove himself on his own before being given a team of journeyman programmers and artists.

/whew.