Blacksite… Yeah. While I haven’t played it yet (it’s next in my Gamefly queue), it definitely seems like the depth they were aiming for was very tacked on (and therefore not very successful in achieving that depth). It’s easy to put some kids in the middle of your warzone, but unless you interact with them, it’s all window dressing.

Yeah, we are already starting down the road of making games for art snobs. That’s the frustrating part, because I think we are reaching a critical mass of older, more mature gamers, that would apprciate such depth, but they’re turned off by most commercial games – the silly power fantasy, the amount of time they require, etc.

I don’t think it’s necessarily a relationship between the complexity of a concept and the effort it takes to communicate its worth – a game with core gameplay mechanics as overtly simplistic as Katamari Damacy is still a tough sell. You make an excellent point in that the more a game veers away from delivering an experience of fun alone the more you’re going to have to find other ways to convince people of its value. We’re so used to games delivering on the reward of fun that unless it makes us smile we’re not sure why we’re playing a ‘game’. Schindler’s List is regarded as an excellent film, but it certainly shouldn’t produce a burst of happiness; maybe someday a game can say the same.

I think the problem is that when we try to create these more ’serious’ games we end up countering our own arguments. Look at Area 51, it attempted to handle some mature issues but the gameplay was the same as any Doom game. The actual moment-to-moment mechanics of the game and what it proposes to tell with its story contradict one another. Of course I’m not some genius – everyone has thought of this and some are making games this way, for instance an IGF finalist called The Path which puts a macabre twist on Red Riding Hood. People are trying to do this, but it’s reaching the wrong crowd: us. The industry is already aware of these changes, but the industry isn’t the audience that matters the most. In effect then we’re already making games for the art snobs.

It’s just that the more complex the concept, the more work it takes to simplify communicating its value. And the more the game’s focus goes away from straightforward, random reward schedule “fun”, the more you have to think about to show it’s value to someone who’s going to pay money for it (assuming you’re selling it).

I mean, what you say about ideas shifting from more “advanced” design sensibilities to more “popular” ones is true, I think, as a general trend. But part of that process is because individual creators take the effort to “market” their game (where the verb “market” is much larger spectrum of activities than is typically considering under average game marketing, mind you). Word slowly spreads, more people are exposed to it, etc. and eventually it becomes a more accepted thing.

And part of their appeal is, true, that you, or any gamer that plays them, can feel “in the know”, hip, or better than people who just play Madden. In my book, playing on that appeal of the associated status is a perfectly fair trick to getting people to play your game. But if you go to far down that route, you’re not making a game to communicate something meaningful, you’re making a game for art snobs. Not that there’s anything wrong with that either, I guess, but that point it’s a different problem.

Does that make the majority of people, of consumers, stupid? To an extent maybe but it seems to be a more a fault of the game. Games that are trying to do something different aren’t as easily accessible as games that everyone already knows how to play, and that’s just a fact.

With that in mind I think these kind of games will remain in the background, slowly and quietly influencing the mass market as their design sensibilities are picked up and absorbed by the mainstream. Unless there is some radical shift I don’t see that ever changing, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Maybe I wouldn’t like some of these games as much if I couldn’t be a pretentious asshole when talking to people who play Madden.