Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
What's great about Spacewar! is that it really shows us the promise
of digital games. Here we have a game that's calculating velocities and
gravity, and randomizing things, all in real time. The outcome is that
players are forced to make the sorts of decisions that they have never
been forced to make before Spacewar! was invented. That is the promise
of digital games.
How Far Have We Come?
Next I'm going to move into the formal video-game eras, but before I do,
I want to stop for a moment and really consider a question: since Space-
war! was created, how far have we come?
Could it not be said that Doom —and therefore Quake and Call of
Duty and Battleield —are simply 3D versions of this same gameplay
concept? The core gameplay of all of these is dodging projectiles and
aiming your projectiles at the opponent. Of course, that doesn't make
them all the same game, but it could be said that all of these games are
variants of a game that was created in 1961, 50 years before the writing
of this topic.
As we'll review, and as many of you know, there are all sorts of
genres of games in the modern world: platformers, real-time strategy,
turn-based strategy, shooters, RPGs, etc. I think under duress, we could
probably come up with about a dozen real genres. But using the lens that
I am proposing—looking at games in terms of what kinds of decisions
players need to make—does it not become clear that in a way, we've also
only come up with a dozen or so games , with thousands and thousands
of variants of each?
The standard for what innovation means in a digital game design in
2012 is very low. If you add any new gameplay features at all to an ex-
isting game, that's considered innovative. However, I can't help but feel
that every game could—and possibly should—be fulfilling the promise of
Spacewar! . That is to say, each game could be forcing us to make entirely
new kinds of decisions.
It would be a mistake to claim that in the early days, everyone was
innovating. But consider how different Yars' Revenge was from Aster-
oids , or Pac-Man was from Donkey Kong , or Galaga was from Frogger .
Even games that were considered awful, such as the infamous E. T. the
Extra Terrestrial , were very interesting and innovative (did you know
that E . T. T.'s game map is the surface of a die?). Games like Defender and
Asteroids presented entirely new verbs. he way you moved about, the
objectives, and what “you� even were was interesting and new.
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