I am currently writing about SPORE (I really am – I really want to) but in order to get rid of a bad writer’s block, I’ve taken a breather from it and am writing about something else first.

Today, I want to bring up Torchlight.
I’m fascinated by the outburst the game caused around the gaming culture – Steam users especially, since it seemed to be a Steam “event” and it’s been called “Valve’s latest obsession”. There’s been excitement all around about being able to deck out your character in amazing armor, being able to get all these awesome weapons with magnificent effects, how lush the textures are and how addictive and fun the game is… but the thing that bewilders me is about people being enthralled with Torchlight is that it really brings nothing new to the table.

Torchlight is Diablo. In fact, it’s so much like Diablo that I might dare suggest it’s a phenomenon similar to the Waiting-On-Warhammer syndrome for a lot of players that are Waiting-On-DiabloIII. It’s the game in between, while people anxiously await more news from Blizzard about their third installment of America’s Classic Dungeon Crawler. There is practically no difference between Diablo and Torchlight, and even the pet system is taken directly from Fate, another Diablo clone.

It’s not a flawed game by any means, but it’s a little bit like playing an enhanced version of Monopoly. It still looks and feels and plays like Monopoly, no matter how upgraded the graphics may be and how smooth the game runs and how pretty the armor is.

I’m not saying Torchlight is bad. On the contrary, it’s a pretty fun game that keeps me entertained and I was more than half tempted to buy the full version of the game for myself so I could continue playing it (Hardcore Mode allows you to play with Permadeath and Lord knows I like a good challenge) but in the end I decided to opt out merely because I realized I could get much the same experience by playing Diablo II which is a game that came out nine years ago.

The fact that people that continue carbon copying games that came out almost a decade ago really grinds my gears sometimes, especially because it happens so often and so much in today’s industry. Right now, today, seven of the top sold video games on the charts are remakes and sequels with overused, rehashed game mechanics that may essentially be the same game (including Uncharted 2 – regardless of how good the game is it is almost exactly like Uncharted and you cannot ignore that fact) and the other three games are Wii Sports, Sonic and Mario at the Olympics and Borderlands, which essentially draw their own mechanics from plenty of other games in the past like any sports games in general, Olympics simulators and… something (let’s not start on Borderlands).

How did Mario and Sonic at the Olympics hit the top 10? Is it on sale or something? An early Christmas present for the kids? Come on, people.

Coming back to reused game mechanics, however, I think Brenda Brathwaite hit just the right note when she talked about getting sick of console gaming and seeing the same game repeated over and over at GeekEnd in Savannah (earlier today at 4:00pm). We are in an age of such repetition and copying that it’s hard to really fall in love with a game anymore. There’s been so few games that have really been revolutionary in the past ten years; we can only draw a handful. It’s the stories that are capturing our interest now, the environments and universes these games provide – and yet, if film can experiment with elements of film all the time, why on earth can’t games?

Returning to Torchlight, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t play it and enjoy it, but I believe its sudden massive following is a result of people wanting to play Diablo III more than its inherent quality. It is Diablo, with a few elements of what Diablo III has been advertising. Conversely, Demon’s Souls, I’ve come to conclude, is undoubtedly a Japanese take on Diablo – a player improves stats by fighting hordes of monsters in dungeons with different levels, avoiding traps and heading deeper and deeper into more dangerous areas, having to head back home to recuperate losses and save their gains; loot-centric item system; dying means you have to start from the beginning. However, Demon’s Souls manages to provide enough of a change in the gameplay and style that most people I’ve brought this up to have scoffed and have had a hard time believing this game could be anything like Diablo. But it is! They’ve merely done a good job of re-presenting it.

This has made me appreciate Demon’s Souls slightly less, but at the same time, I can’t complain. It’s a well made game. I feel the same way about Torchlight. I do like it, but I wish we weren’t so reliant on the same formulas that we’ve relied on for since the birth of the games industry – the same conventions, the same strategies, the same A+ B + C cookie-cutter game ideas that make their way to store shelves every other week.

Let’s come up with something new, eh, industry?

tl;dr: Torchlight is a fine game, but why is it exactly like Diablo? Why are so many games identical nowadays? Why can’t we make a new kind of game?

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Greg Costikyan wrote an article called “Death to the Games Industry” (Part 2 here) about two years ago. As much as I disagree with some of the things he says, I have to admit he’s right in this case. I read this article first around the beginning of this year or the end of last, and I had my own take on it back then. I completely disagreed. After learning a lot about the history of 20th century art, however, and analyzing the market over and over again, turning things around in my head, I’ve come to some very terrifying conclusions.

First off, let’s talk about Clement Greenberg. Clem was an art critic back in the 1950s and late into the 1980s that was known for his high praise of Abstract Expressionist art (more commonly referred to on Teh Interwebs as “Art That Doesn’t Look Like Anything”). Despite the cruel sport of “Clembashing” that has become popular over the years, reducing the critic to nothing more than a rambling old fool who couldn’t love anything more than pictures that look like nothing, Clement Greenberg was one of the most knowledgeable and insightful people of his time that helped establish a careful and precarious balance between what is “Kitsch” and what is “Avant-Garde”. He is the one who saw what no-one else seemed to be seeing: that art must be challenging the prior generation, making it, therefore, “Avant-Garde”, or “advance guard”, propelling art forward. Otherwise, it becomes “Kitsch”: easy, common, unchallenging, almost tacky in comparison. Pointless.

Now, this is especially important, because “kitsch” and “avant-garde” is not only relevant to painting. We see the same trend in literature and movies: compare a new book by Stephen King to his older works. Do you notice the difference? Back in the day, King was edgy, angry. Excited to write for a new audience, a new, darker world. Nowadays, he just releases gore on a payroll. It’s become easy, unchallenging. He’s stopped advancing. It’s the dividing line between avant-garde and kitch!

Now let’s move on to games. The problem with the games industry is that we’re starting to stagnate: to become to repetitive with our formulas. In other words, we’re becoming Kitsch. I call to the stand critically acclaimed games like Halo 3 and Soul Calibur IV. While the Halo 3 craze is slowly dying out, and more and more people admit, embarrassed, that no, Halo 3 isn’t Jesus Christ on Toast, Soul Calibur IV only came out recently and we’re still enjoying the hell out of it. I love it. I do. Personally, I enjoy it, and love it, and can’t wait to get more downloadable content so I can deck out my characters in all the armor I’m missing.

But it’s stale. It’s the same game it’s been for the past three games; don’t try to tell me about refining and balance and innovation, because I’ve heard it all before. Soul Calibur IV brings nothing new to the table, at all. You can give it stellar reviews. You can say it’s the best fighter game this year. But I can also give a restaurant five stars and say that it’s the best Italian food I’ve ever had. I can also compare two brands of soap, or hair conditioner, or soda, or furniture sets, and tell you which is better. It doesn’t mean it’s revolutionary. And here I must grudgingly concede another point to Costikyan when he says game critique is virtually nonexistant in today’s world. See, I’m not reviewing Soul Calibur IV right now. I could review it and say it’s great. Really, it is. Go buy it. But to critque art, to analyze it and to determine what was done, what was used, whether or not it’s moving forward… to determine whether it’s being avant-garde or kitsch… that’s what we need.

To elaborate on what’s avant-garde, let’s look at Portal for a moment. We all know Portal. It was stupendous. Do you know why? Yes, Glad-OS was awesome. But do you realize that you played through an entire first person shooter without actually firing any bullets? In fact, you never actually hurt anything directly, did you? Other than the Companion Cube. You jerk. But really, Valve in making Portal really challenged us to see what it could be like to play the same game we’ve played over and over again, but this time, do it in a completely differerent way. This time, we’re not going to shoot anything or anyone. This time, we’re not going to hurt people. In that same way, Mirror’s Edge might be doing exactly the same thing, really changing up the idea of what we’ve all experienced. But see, someone had to do it first. That’s avant-garde.

I wanted to disagree at first with Costik’s and my own thoughs. I mean, truly spectacular-seeming games like Heavy Rain and Little Big Planet are only on the horizon, and Fable 2 holds great promise (promises Molyneaux made for Fable 1, but we’re giving him the benefit of the doubt anyway). But we’re out of time already. Gameplay is dying. We need the industry to change fast, or it will be crushed.

Now, a lot of people thought the Wii was the savior of gameplay, and I know game designers all over were extremely enthusiastic about it. But I’ve been calling it for a while now, and nobody seems to have been listening. And now that we’re all more aware of Nintendo’s new end goal, people are walking around with their tails between their legs, and I feel awful because I was expecting it.

Here’s the thing about the Wii that people have been neglecting to think about: when you make a game focused on a new form of play, it’s revolutionary. Right? The Wii doesn’t do that; rather, it gives people the new form of play right off the bat. Therefore, most Wii games are forced designed around motion-sensing capabilities. To be blunt, every Wii game that comes out is basically just hacking off the motion sensor. Show me a Wii game that doesn’t use motion sensing technology in some fashion. It’s its only selling point! The Wiimote doesn’t open up new styles of play; it essentially incarcerates games into one hackneyed mechanic that requires little thought to implement!

Compare Portal to any new Wii title you’re looking at now. Raving Rabbids or that new Shaun White Snowboarding game. Raving Rabbids 2 actually uses the balance board as a sled function just like the Shaun White snowboarding game. And yet it’s so cheap! Anyone could have thought of that. The design requires no real challenge or thought as to how to radically change or improve a player’s experience–it’s just recieve, reprocess, repack and repeat! Whereas Portal took something people hadn’t done before and really moved the face of gaming! It’s now one of the most recognized titles on the market, acclaimed even by extremely embittered Yahtzee Croshaw, recognized internet game critic and author of the video series Zero Punctuation.

I mean, what are you going to do in Harvest Moon for the Wii? Tilt the Wiimote as if you’re watering plants? Move it up and down as if you’re cutting wood? Really? Seriously, think about it. Could it really be that hard to come up with the idea?

No.

Because when you do something once that no-one has ever done before, it’s innovative. When you give someone something nobody has ever done before and you let them all use it for their own creations, it’s a tool. The Wiimote is just another controller. It’s just another joystick. The design of games is still no different.

So gameplay is dying. And according to Costikyan, the industry needs to die, or it will crash itself. This sort of collapse happened in 1983, called the “Atari Crash.” A lot of us hip young freshie designers don’t know about it or can’t concieve of it because we weren’t alive back then. But it was bad, and there was a period of almost nothing in gaming until Japan and Nintendo suddenly brought it back again with the NES. We don’t want that to happen. So we need to look for innovation, for avant-garde games, to stop us from stagnating.

A huge source of inspiration for developers and publishers right now should be independent games. Not that independent games are all that great; personally, I usually can’t stand playing many of them. Much like indie film, they rely too much on shock value and mechanics and not enough on substantial experience. For them, it’s all about gameplay: it’s all casual. I’m a hardcore gamers. I’m a narratologist. I like story and plot points and cinematic. I like experience, and my closest friends dying, and the rookie coming out on top and Saving Private Ryan stories. I won’t experience those things in my own life; that’s why I play games, for new experiences.

However, developers need to learn from the indie market! The game I’ve been referring to again and again through this article, Portal, such a great example of what we need, is based off an independently developed student game named Narbacular Drop! I played it, and it was awful. Revolutionary, but terrible. But they had the idea down: portals, gravity, acceleration and perhaps most importantly, the core thesis of designing an action game you never actually hurt anyone or anything. Add some fascinating narrative and make the experience unforgettable, courtesy of Valve, and you have yourself a gorgeous gem of a game that now sells companion cube plushies.

The time is coming where the game market will be flooded by kitsch games that people will buy just because they’re on the market, and slowly gaming will lose its steam. Much like the decline of our contemporary civilization, we can’t let that happen. We need to continue forward, pushing for development, for improvement and preventing collapse at all angles. In this time of dire need, we need avant-garde. Otherwise, it’ll be a sad, slow, funless time before gaming comes back in a rebirth again.

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This may have just be Michael Bay rambling, and I don’t exactly trust Michael Bay. But it seems like there were various sources suggesting earlier this year that Microsoft wants to fight Blu-Ray with HD DVD just so they can drive both formats down. It seems that Microsoft’s ulterior motive was to keep the format war at a standstill so they could work on and release their Direct 2 Drive purchase system. So Microsoft’s support really hasn’t been about movies all this time–sorry, moviegoers, but this is actually closely tied in to the videogame industry.

I know it’s relatively old news, but I mention it now because 1) I really felt a need to talk about this, 2) I’ve had it on the backburner for a month now and haven’t gotten to it and 3) we has reached a general consensus the Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD war is more or less over. Blu-Ray wins.

But from thinking on HD-DVD’s “downfall”, I start to wonder whether Microsoft was really aiming towards competing. My theory is that, if anything, they were hoping just to slow Blu-Ray down, and never planned to even give HD-DVD a chance–which is rather uncool, in my perspective–it’s kind of on the same moral standing as Wal-Mart coming into third world countries and lowering their prices to dirt cheap in order to bankrupt all local businesses, and then raising their prices back to normal when they hold monopoly.

Thing is, I think this strategem was doomed from the start. You can’t really remove the physical element from game ownership–people don’t have the internet infrastructure necessary to download whole games that work in Hi-Def, so Microsoft would have had to sell physical copies anyway. And then there’s the issue with space–where are Xbox 360 owners going to save all those games? Their minute yet extremely lunky Hard Drives that are shipped with their consoles? PS3 at least gives owners the option of purchasing a computer hard drive and installing it in place of their standard drive on their computer. Microsoft holds exclusive market over the manufacture of their 120GB drives. 120GB aren’t going to cut it in this day and age. Computer hard drives are rapidly approaching massive space range–I can get a 500GB hard drive for 500 bucks at Best Buy.

In the end, PS3 would have been able to compete with Direct 2 Drive par on par. Especially since PSN downloads are so simple and straightforward.

So, we give you a send off, HD-DVD. I’m sorry you were just a tool. We’ll bury you near to all your fellow dead formats, like Beta.

(The following video is NSFW due to language and the fact that they’ve chosen Hitler to represent HD-DVD, which is somewhat mortifying.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=friS4OOcdgQ]

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Working with the future of the industry is just as equally rewarding as working with the figureheads of the industry, in its own way. I’ve been exposed to some of the most innovative thinking I’ve ever heard–project ideas so exciting and well thought out that I’m not even allowed to mention them, in case they’re someday developed. I’ve been recruited into several rising star projects for next year, and I have to say, I’m excited.

But that’s more talk for next year. This year, it’s time to focus on what I can done as I return to my home country of Mexico.

I’ve got an interview with Xibalba Studios which, according to GameDevMap, is the first registered Game Developer studio in Mexico. I know from talking to Mauricio Lozano, one of the impulsory forces behind Collective Minds/Digital Minds (an initiative to establish digital media and art as an industry in this country) that several graduate students are taking the knowledge they obtain from studying game design programs in places like Full Sail and Digipen University and bringing it back in order to try and establish a home base. I feel lucky to be witnessing the beginning of what I hope may be something huge for boosting Mexico’s economic and industrial presence on the creative side of the spectrum.

My portfolio lacks in-depth work with modeling and programming, but I have yet to see if it will land me a position (if only as an intern) for the winter break, and set me on good terms with the growing community of game developers and rich media designers here in my hometown of Monterrey. All indicators seem to point to the idea that this is the heart of the technological revolution that will bring Mexico’s culture into the digital domain–ironically enough, this town being one of the least culturally oriented in the entire Mexican republic.

There’s still plenty of time to grow as a designer, even if I don’t manage to work with Xibalba Studios, but, as it stands, some actual experience in the industry would be more than invaluable. What I do have going for me is that most of Xibalba’s team seems to be Digipen graduates and computer programmers; as someone with an art background, I wonder how my ideas and attitudes will differ from the rest of the development scene here in Monterrey.

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