People often have trouble understanding the word “tradeoff,” but it’s easy enough to know as an exchange. Still, in today’s corporate parlance, it is meant to exchange one commodity as a cost for another. I played Final Fantasy’s Dissidia on the good old PSP yesterday when I marveled at the game’s replay value; I have spent over 50 hours on it already, which is what this entire topic is all about.
Normally, if you look at the oldest games like Mario and Dave, they had one thing unanimously in common: addiction. I am not propagating obsession towards anything; however, this is what the current gaming paradigm has become: a commodity.
I have always been a gamer, and I will not deny that which is exactly what I contend with in gaming today. The first games had many things that hooked people up, but most of all, it was about the level of engagement that the player had with the game environment or the “world” of the game. And this engagement has little to do with the 3D graphics or the extensive options available.
Let us look at the progression; first, it was the advent of the simple arcade-type games, which were phenomenal to a certain point. It kept players hooked and introduced a new media boom into the world. This was where every child was begging for the Atari systems, and your Pentium II and III machines had Sega and NeoGeo emulators installed (mine still has both installed, by the way). Gamgameplayements were about difficult commands mixed in with clever sequences.
Take this forward a bit further, and the same two systems incorporated decent mixed stories and continuity in the games to enhance the media capabilities being explored in the two avenues. The fighting game series KOF is an ardent testament to that, and from there came the further boom of turn-based strategy and role-playing games, which became akin to “user-controlled novels” on computers. This adaptability of both gamgameplayd media can be called the turning curve of the gaming industry.
This was when many business heads realized that games could simulate many things, pretty much everything; hence, their potential as a business commodity was obvious even then. The progress from then on was about enhancing the game’s visual effects; the additives were obvious, but the visuals needed more work, so in came the influx of investment in gaming studios and the push for 3D graphics into gaming.
That apex can be called the secondary curve because the potential for business gain via games became second to almost none once established. Hollywood movies will tell you the story of boom and fall without fail, but games have the replay factor attached to them, irrespective of their audience size, that guarantees reward.
Related Articles :
- Psychological Aspects of Users’ Mobile Gaming Motivation
- HTC Mobile Phones – Truly Powerful Handsets
- Major new LG G4 details: Stunning camera quality and display secrets revealed
- Top 3 Design Improvements in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
- Google Android and the Latest Trends Enveloping the Platform
This replay factor was cashed in next. We all can see the online capabilities of games, which have paved the way for players to buy the next power-up or update online. The concept of “buying all” is where we can point out that gaming has devolved. So, at a point where gaming was fun with added complexity, like Baldur’s Gate, Ys, and Metal Gear Solid, the games became more about commodity value.
The biggest factor in all this is mobile gaming, of course, and here I point at the smartphone games, which are purely centered on time killing. The problem occurs when most smartphone gamers are not regular gamers but more so there to kill time. So when you give a game like Subway Surfers online buying advantages for the “normal” people, some level of competition envelopes the console/PC games and the phone games.
The niches are different, the categories are different, and the size is different. A game like Temple Run cannot be compared to Farcry 3, but ultimately, when the games become about money, these things sidetrack and mix in. Today, you have fantastic gamgameplayements being added, furnished, and perfected. Complexity is a given; some features sit well while others do not.
The holistic focus on sales harms the gaming paradigm, often compromising many things from the gameplay. Ultimately, when gaming becomes more focused on buying rather than playing, the entire reason for playing a game gets removed.
