[Teuthida]

Wonderland: Burn The House Down

Greg Costikyan

In the most heated and applauded rant, Greg Costikyan discussed creative stagnation. Costikyan was originally a developer of paper based games and is also the co-founder of Unplugged Games which publishes mobile games. In his talk he stated that he has researched the cycle of popular games since the earliest table top games were developed decades ago. He stated that the Microsoft keynote address "made his flesh crawl" and that the age of innovation in the video game industry is over. Higher developmental costs and larger teams will mean that publishers will be less willing to take risks which in turn will stifle creativity and lead to more homogenous gaming experiences.

Costikyan went on to include Nintendo in his rant saying that the company could have shipped development kits to thousands of eager third parties to work on their next generation of titles but instead chose to rely on the ideas of a single aging game designer. He said Nintendo president Satoru Iwata "has the heart of a true gamer, and I wonder what poor bastard's chest he carved it from". He remarked that if the industry's current idea of innovation is "blowing into a microphone," then future of gaming will most definitely consist of endless Grand Theft Auto clones.

Chris Header

The rant closed on a technical note with comments from Chris Header, who works at Definition Six Inc, a development company that works on high-end physics and graphics technologies. His slant on the industry was that the graphics and physics engines are based on sound code while the actual gameplay code is poorly constructed. This leads to great looking games that play horribly. In the next generation of systems the code will become more difficult to write. Header stated that the processors of the next Xbox and PlayStation are "in-order chips which process in-order core slower than the current machines". What does this mean? It means that the industry is adjusting its hardware to accommodate poorly written code, and this "sucks".

There seems to be a lot of developers sharing the same worries. People really weren't that impressed with the Microsoft speech. There seems to be too much focus on this so-called "HD era". As one developer said...If you make HD into a key selling point for your console, you've potentially alienated a huge majority of consumers. Is Microsoft really willing to do that? "Xbox is so busy trying to look cool to American teenage boys that it looks like they might forget about everyone else - again."

The future looks grim.