How We Got Here - Game Design Theory - page 82

Game Shame in 3D (Fifth Generation, 1993-2002)
Much like the fourth generation, the fifth generation was essentially all
about increases in graphical capability. By this point the largest and most
successful companies had all but stopped creating interesting new kinds
of gameplay. There were exceptions, of course, but for the most part, the
fifth generation established the model for the entire next decade—and it
was a 3D model.
The major innovation of the late 1990s was to make games look
and sound like movies. Whether they were cartoonish games, such as
Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie ; games influenced by anime, such as Final
Fantasy VII ; or the Indiana Jones -style adventures of games such as
Tomb Raider , the goal clearly was to emulate cinema. In no game was
this more obvious than in Konami's 1998 hit, Metal Gear Solid , a game
that was fully voice-acted, had long cutscenes with careful cinematog-
raphy, and featured a long, epic story.
Why did developers want to emulate anything else? Firstly, for the
reason I stated before: if publishers and developers in 1995 had wanted
to focus on game design, what would that have meant? Secondly, though,
is because of a property I call game shame . Ultimately, publishers and
developers were trying to make a living from spectacle—the wow fac-
tor, since that was something that was already well understood by that
time. But why film? Well, in short, because we could. Not only was the
film industry very successful at the time, but according to many at the
time, film and video games were fundamentally pretty similar. But, as
I've explained before, this is not the case at all. The properties that form
the foundation of cinema are completely unrelated to the properties that
make up the foundation of games—digital or otherwise. The argument
went a little bit like, “Well, games have visuals, and movies have visuals.
Games have music, and movies have music. Games have characters, and
movies have characters. Sounds like a match to me!�
Of course, games don't need characters ( Tetris ). Games don't need
music (or even sound) and actually, games don't even need visuals . here
are plenty of games that are entirely verbal, such as the game telephone
or the word game Ghost. One may argue that the addition of video to
game requires that visuals be involved. Maybe, but I think that if some-
one released a digital game that didn't use the TV screen, with only
sounds as its output, we would still call it a video game . Regardless—it's a
game, and there is no need to draw a distinction between games that are
digital and those that are not.
The emulation of movies during this era was really a tragic thing,
particularly because this period was another era of exploding popularity