How the Videogame Industry Shot Itself In the Joystick--and Why the Wii Has Stopped the Bleeding

[Avinash_Tyagi]

Words Of Wisdom said:

Avinash_Tyagi said:
Even though our graphics are reaching realistic levels we are still far from getting to the point where games are indistinguishable from reality, the characters on screen still don't act like real humans so in that regard its still not at a point where costs are going to go down, AI still has a long way to go before it can fool a person. And like couch said all these things don't make a game better, as some of the best games don't have those features to begin with, so the quest to just make things bigger and faster isn't going to help attract more people to the medium.

Would you still be content with 8-bit gaming then?

The point is not that these improvements make gaming inherently better but that they allow game designers to more fully realize their ideas. A 3D Mario could not be realized without the hardware innovations to make it possible for example.

When people begin using these innovations only because they have them and for the sake of using them, and not because they make the game better, only then is there a problem.

 Two things, the move to 3d alienated more people from gaming, as it made the controls more complicated and intimidating.  Also even though the added graphics were needed to get to 3D since then have games really changed all that much, its still mostly the same games, even with all the vaunted AI and physics and the such the games are still by and large the same, just more refined and tweaked, yet costs of these games have been rising very fast, and yet they still have a long way to go before they can ape reality.