Sigh. Same old crap. Dead royal parents, surviving heir, evil necromancer armies taking over a kingdom, warrior maidens, heroic rogues, revenge. It's as if people used 3% of their brain capacity in order to barf out this sort of pompous drivel.
Oh wait, they do.
It sells. Pray to the great god Mammon.
ReplyDeleteIt's why sandbox MMOs never flourish as the likes of WoW and the rest. We're fundamentally lazy. We (in general) like to follow a well-trodden path where it's not too taxing; where after a day in the office, or college, or family life you can switch off your brain and relax into an easily familiar environment where you understand the rules without having to read up on them.
It's why 'brands' such as Lotro do all right. No more than 3% of our brain power is needed to tackle the underlying rules of the world we enter.
Don't blame the writer. Everything we read is written to an agenda for a specific audience. His finance/marketing/research team have told him who his audience is and what they expect. He's just fulfilled his brief.
But I agree. There's no space for creativity or originality. Just formulas mundanely applied, until one day one brilliant gamble - amid so many failed ones - succeeds and the formulas are rewritten to swallow up that original thought again...
All too true, unfortunately. And I know, it's not really the guy's fault, as you said, marketing department/focus group studies show that the target segment of the population wants to have a lame fantasy story that's branded as "dark" just because it has sex and violence in it...
ReplyDeleteWhich is actually amusing, because such themes are generally marketed as "mature". The marketing sells immature acts and line of thinking of a teenage imbecile as "dark, mature stories". Bah. Ironically, if the said marketing department's staff was to be threatened with bodily harm, they'd say you act immature and should grow up. But anyway.
You're absolutely right about the successful new formulae being copied to death. Which is unfortunate, since instead of some sort of innovation and perhaps earning the money through that, people choose the path of stagnation and milking the familiar cash-cows.
Furthermore, this is sad, for in case I had no shame or some sort of standards, I'd probably be as rich and famous as the Eragon guy. Or even richer! If I weren't lazy on top of that.
Anyway, I just froze my face off so my mind isn't quite as composed as it should be.
Don't even get me started on the subject of 'mature'...
ReplyDeleteAge of Conan and its bloody (literally) mature tag were just an invitation to bring a horde of pubescent males flocking to knock their doors down (and rampage straight through and out the other side from the server-merging news).
I've never encountered such a selfish, self-serving, self-obsessed gaming community. Actually community is entirely the wrong word, there wasn't one. Mature it was not...
I know everyone on there wasn't like that, and that many pubescent males are mature, and many middle-aged players are distinctly immature, but that 'mature' tag drew the proverbial moths to the flame.
Hmmm. Rephrase that last comment. In this case the moths destroyed the rather weak flame, I fear...
ReplyDeletePlaying on my kin's name, are we? *grin*
ReplyDeleteI've not had the dubious luck of playing AoC, the selling points made me believe it would be rubbish. The realtime combat seemed a bit interesting though.
Was it any good?
Not everyone has the skill and talent to innovate every time.
ReplyDeleteEven if it weren't encouraged by management and marketing, there would still be a fair bit if stagnation, where people would just create cool stuff that they like.
In reality, it feels sometimes like innovation is thwarted as much as possible. Stagnation pays, I guess, as is evident in the CPU and GPU markets...
Stagnation pays best. Period. No need to fund the development beyond initial investments.
ReplyDeleteOr, in other words, in order for next "breakthrough", the old tech has to pay itself.
MMO developers know their market. Not the vocal minority but the silent majority who don't question, challenge or demand. And there's no innovation without questions,
ReplyDeleteAnd as to AoC, some would say it was released unfinished, but I think there were more fundamental flaws than that. The first 20 levels were actually rather good for story and gameplay. But after that it all faded somewhat into blankness. However it genuinely was the community that stank. You didn't need to group to do anything really. So groups didn't form, people didn't meet, friendships didn't gel. It had some lovely emotes and player cities, but you had no reason to act with or react to other players. The RP server was released almost as an after-thought on the day of release, when all the excited pre-orderers had flocked into Hyboria several days earlier - but I imagine on there the community was stronger. I didn't play for all that long so shouldn't comment too much (yeah, right) but I'm told by friends who played longer that there was a great game in there struggling to get out. I'm not convinced...
You know, I'm actually not quite sure if the devs really know their market. They know what the marketologists say. And the "audience" knows what the marketologists say to *them*!
ReplyDeleteSo in the end, the marketing department forms both the illusion of the need and of the way to achieve that need's satisfaction. In other words, it's artificially generated.
Of course, after it's out of the MD, the devs and the clients are all satisfied, but regardless of that, it doesn't mean that the users wouldn't want something else, if only they had something else to be actually offered!
Yeah, actually you're right. It's an endless circle of everyone telling everyone else what they want to hear.
ReplyDeleteHowever the public do tend to vote with their feet (or credit card details perhaps) and so the market for pompous drivel with heroic rogues, warrior maidens and necromancer armies flourishes.
Not for long, not for long, now!
ReplyDeleteI mean, even if we drop my own ideas aside, there's the rising popularity of The Witcher novels, which are quite far from the regular Western fantasy, what with racism and *actual* darkness and despair.
ReplyDeleteOr the relaunch of the Batman or James Bond series - they're dark. Dark's becoming more popular.
I feel old now. Dark is cyclical.
ReplyDeleteAh, I'm just shallow. I offer no defence.
*peers*
ReplyDeleteWell, everything's cyclical technically, every cool idea will be eventually discarded and then picked back up and claimed to be new and fresh...
What does worry me though is that dark is actually shown to be *cool*, while it's technically something that should be used to contrast the light with.
Sort of the "You can't see the light without seeing the darkness" thing.
Also confused as to where the shallowness thing came from, seeing how you brought about a great discussion with many a point to think about and toy around with...
ReplyDeleteVery good things indeed, rock on, I say.
And furthermore, you're absolutely right about the public voting with their feet, so to say. And it's just the thing that's been having me wonder - is it really the expansion of gaming and fantasy/sci-fi lite into mainstream that caused all the trash to appear and become popular? Is the "lowest common denominator" falling because of this?
ReplyDeleteI mean, back ten years ago, when computer games were a thing for the geeks, cRPGs were the nobility of the geek and the few MMORPGs and MUDS were the nerd kings, things were different. The devs actually considered the audience to be "people" rather than "crowd". There was no mythical "casual gamer" to pin the blame on. And why is it that today, the casual gamer is considered to be some sort of a slobbering retard with brains someplace in the (tiny and easily excited) genitals? People only turn to idiots after being told they're idiots for most of their lives, any of them can be converted back to a normal human being with some decent effort...
Same goes for books. Books have taken a huge dive towards the bottom and they're not even trying to hold their breath for a re-surface. The literature is either high-brow academia-lauded navel-gazing no-one can read (that's a lot of dashes there, Ang), or pulp fiction blockbuster bestsellers without so much as a single thought behind.
One media branch that seems to be getting some sort of a mental revival is, shockingly, the movies. If we take, for instance, the relaunched Batman franchise, it's not only been hugely successful, it really does try to be philosophical with the spectator, while remaining on the "viewer's" level and not straying into pontificating. And that's to take but one of the few!
Of course, then it all falls back to what you've said - after one success has been made, the rest will copy it. There's already a "dark Hulk", a "dark Ironman", a "dark Superman" and whatever else dark that's coming up...
But anyway, back to where I started - do you think the expansion of the audience caused the standards to fall, or do you think that the corporate way of generating a product simply fails to *create*?
Also, I feel much more forgiving to the guy now:
ReplyDelete"Yet I digress. I’ve always thought that the reverse must also be true: having lots of experience writing games is probably not going to make you a better prose writer. So the fact that I’ve written games for almost ten years, now, hardly made me qualified to write a novel (aside from those early High School attempts which are better off staying in the drawer where they are currently collecting dust).
But Dragon Age was my baby. I was the one who first formed the world. With direction, sure, but beyond that it was my vision. My footprints are everywhere. I’ve watched it grow, cringed as other hands touched it and tweaked it and sometimes I was even amazed as something I’d barely considered had life breathed into it and became something better than I’d ever hoped it could be. But suddenly there was the suggestion that maybe someone could write a novel, something that for many would be their first look at that world, their first dip into the dark and epic swimming pool that is Dragon Age.
What would you do? I said give me that bad boy and clutched my baby to my chest like an overprotective gorilla. Or so I’m told. I wasn’t to become truly dubious, however, until – rather like changing one’s first diaper – I began to consider just what this baby was about to get me into."
http://blog.bioware.com/2008/12/09/writing-a-novel-p1/
I can see how I'd get over-protective over a setting I've spent years on fleshing out of. Doesn't suddenly make him Shakespeare or Bradbury, but I suppose that with all other things considered, it makes perfect sense.
I don't think it's possible to split one aspect from the other in the question. It seems to me that it's about motivation. As you say, 'converted back to a normal human being with effort' but effort costs. No corporation is going to expend effort unless there's a financial bottom-line. For the sake of the greater public good is where governments, charities and other organisations (are meant to) step in, and I shudder at the thought of an online community constructed by many of those organisations.
ReplyDeleteAnd I don't think the market is made up of mindless players, it's just often they want an undemanding challenge (probably an oxymoron) when they relax. And that's fair enough, to be honest.
As to the 'dark' films, well, it seems to me that many of these are repackaging of what comic books were doing in the 1980s-90s - Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore's Killing Joke, Moore's Watchmen again. Repackaging isn't the right word there really, it's unfair on new writers. It's the cyclical argument in action.
Oh, and being shallow, there was a long wittering paragraph which I pulled out before publishing where I tried to explain that I didn't think 'dark' was a solution to a dearth of creativity. A solution, but alongside a blossoming approach to the lighter side of life. You phrased it better. And I edited badly.
I'm generally uninspired when I walk into a bookshop nowadays. The piles of chick-lit, the unpleasant thrillers, the indulgent rants or the voyeuristic 'poor-me' tales. And this is where I, once more, confess my shallowness. (Although not shallow enough to enjoy chick-lit.) I want a decent story, well-crafted and well-told. I don't want to be left with unpleasant mental images that I can't shake from my head. I don't want to be left baffled as to the point of the story. I don't want to feel that I've already read this a hundred times. But then again, I do like to feel that certain issues are addressed, but never in a 'pontificating' way.
Mmm, yes, the two would seem to go hand-in-hand. I must admit myself to be nowhere a "hardcore" gamer, I do like an occasional good challenge, but for a great part of the whole gaming thing, I do want to relax and be entertained. It's just my fault that my standards on entertainment are someplace way above the clouds.
ReplyDeleteAnd it's true, the corporations don't want to - and don't need to make that effort. In fact, a corporation's desire would be to dumb the population down to the "world average" intelligence, because such an audience is easiest to cater for, and such a workforce is the best, happiest workforce out there. All they need is a segment that could be educated to be managers and designers, and that's it, the rest can be the hive's drones!
Of course, that's a gross overstatement, but that's the general tendency.
And yesh, agreed on the bookstore bit. There's hardly anything to pick at it anymore, with some very rare exceptions I usually get to hear about from other people.
Brave New World...
ReplyDeleteI'm sure people complained about this a century ago as well!
ReplyDeleteThe world has always been composed of peons, knights and kings.
ReplyDeleteEvery human organisation works the same way. Pretentious writers would call it a 'microcosm'.
I'm no biologist but I'd wager that most of the human body is made up of cells that do nothing but exist and produce energy.
Eh. Existing and producing energy isn't exactly my issue. That's cool. Nor is it a problem that another bunch of cells will use that energy in return for... Whatever. Screw the analogies.
ReplyDeleteHere's what! It doesn't bother me that someone makes money out of the ideas and works of others while all the Head Poobah does is invest some cash. That's what pays the majority of the people that end up employed in capitalist societies. That's just one of those things that can't be changed and I don't even see it as a necessary to change.
However! What I do find alarming and not to my liking is that the people's standards are being actively brought down, all the while they're told about how much every one of them makes a difference and how much choice they have and how much better they are off being free and democratic than [insert whoever's antagonised today].
Furthermore, people are implicitly taught to be idiots! Read stupid books, and your acceptance to stupidity grows. Watch stupid TV, and your threshold lowers. And then some smart guy on the telly explains how "casual gaming", "casual reading" and "casual watching" is all about ingesting shit, and suddenly, ingesting it is cool and hip and normal. So, it becomes a norm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kyklos
ReplyDelete