Big Game Hunting - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 188

topic began to be researched and investigated. It is over fi ve years since the very
idea of activity profi ling using software to support the other theories was fi rst envis-
aged. At that time we and the rest of the games industry were solely concerned with
what we came to call big games: most games released for consoles. These huge
game worlds require upwards of thirty to forty hours of your precious time and
attention to complete in full. We literally went big game hunting. We wanted to fi nd
out what made them tick, what made them so compulsive.
Since then the game world has fragmented, broadened, and generally started to
appeal to a far wider spread of the population. We investigated this in some detail,
particularly in Chapters 6 and 11. So we don't just hunt big games any more. We
hunt any type of game and, as we have seen in the last couple of chapters, funda-
mentally they are all related. The industries that make up the game world might be
fragmented but the games themselves are not. As we have shown in this topic, big
games are not fundamentally different from casual games; it's just a question of
scale and back-story. There are just video games and some are bigger than others
but at the heart of it all is compulsive repetition; you'd do well to remember that.
The gaming world is actually opening up. New business models are emerging that
mean it is easier to break into the market and easier to do so with smaller, less
complex games that maybe do not need the major investment of a publisher.
So it is over to you now: you are the one!