Task 15

Welcome once again, dear readers. Do you take tea? Alas I have none.

Instead, let's talk of the Game Industry. I've always seen it as a secretive, mystical place. A place of pleasant headquarters buildings guarded by keypads, full of cardboard cutouts, posters of various gaming characters, those funny plasticy skirting boards, and those things that hold wires. I also see cluttered desks and all manner of people working away.

Although unfortunately, it's a very secretive business, whether those industry people realize it or not. Apart from the usual Gamespot-grade interviews and things, very little is ever seen of companies' inner workings. In many ways I can understand this, to be honest I'd rather work in a secretive environment than one with everyone and their grandmother looking in on it.

Long ago, at the beginning of time, shortly after the Earth's mantle had cooled and atmospheric conditions had become favourable, bedroom coders were hard at work producing their own video games, putting their ideas into reality and creating ye olde classics we talk about today. Back then, things were simple enough to create, provided you knew your code. There was no real need for art in games like pong and Pac Man, and most of the time the programmers did the graphics themselves. A few pixels here, a few there, and you have a car, lovely.

However, in the space of a few years, games companies grew to titanic proportions, handling budgets of millions of pounds, employing hundreds of staff to work on a single game, taking advantage of entire teams of artists and coders. Nowadays the industry is extremely serious business, but has its share of challenges.

I've been reading over this article written by Colin Campbell of Next Gen about the seven biggest challenges for the Games Industry in 2007, and the one that catches my interest the most is the point about Development. Arr!

Campbell tells us that graphics haven't reached any kind of limit of greatness, and will continue to improve well into the future, along with Nintendo's growing fun-style way of introducing different ways of playing games. This is well and good, but the challenge is to create games that will actually sell. With budgets of millions of dollars these days, it's very easy to fall into a process of formulaic, 'boring' games that play exactly the same and push no real frontiers. On the other hand, as games progress, the number of frontiers to push seem to decrease. New ideas seem hard to come by.

It's funny that in the age where games companies are powerful enough to create pretty much anything they can imagine, the one thing that's deficient is imagination and origianlity. We'll have to see how 2007 unfolds...