The Future of Gaming

[Bodhesatva]

Starless said:
To be honest, I don't see games like Wii Sports and Wii Play games as adult games. They're just very accessable. They're games for adults that want to be like kids again. A game like BioShock (to choose a more recent example) seems (I obviously haven't played it, I'm basing this on what I've read) a lot more "mature". And a game like ICO is infinitly more mature than Wii Sports or Wii Play. It's like saying Harry Potter is an adults book. There's nothing deep about it, it's enjoyable because it makes you fell like a kid again. Real mature books are things like Ninteen Eighty-Four or Foundation. They make you think. I'm not saying a game like ICO is as mature as Ninteen Eighty-Four but it's certainly a lot close than Wii Sports.

/rant


Anyway, I really hope that these adults that are being raked in by Wii Sports and Wii Play decide to give gamer games a go. Maybe they'll see how truely mature a game can be. If they don't, I see this big "non-gamer" push being completely useless to me. All we're going to see resources (not all resources, though) being switched to making overly simplistic games and "boundary breaking" games being left in the wayside again.

I think this is a valid argument, although you'll have a tough time convincing me that Wii Sports is less mature than, say, Killzone, for example. I haven't even played it, by the way; I'm just going to judge a book by it's cover and say that it's extremely unlikely that any game called "Killzone" is going to have significant intellectual value.

Really, I don't expect us to jump from "almost no adults play video games" to "video games are a serious art form" in a single bound. There are a LOT of small, in-between steps, and as I said, I think the first step goes something like this:

1) Stop making so many games about killing legions of aliens or zombies or soldiers. 

From there, we can move away from video games as a young male's fantasy land and start attracting an adult audience. Not necessarily a serious artistic audience, just some adults, for any reason whatsoever. Once that is accomplsihed, then we can start worrying about providing these adults with complex story lines, mature dialogue, and intellectually sophisticated material.