What is it going to take for video games as an industry and as a medium to grown up?

What is it going to take for video games as an industry and as a medium to grown up?

They need to move on from children being the primary audience

step 1: teach the japanese how to make proper PC games
step 2: outsource all video game development to japan
step 3: enjoy the new golden age of video games

It's a multi-billion dollar industry that doesn't take itself seriously.

Fans lay out what they want in games, and the entire industry ignores it. Instead copying other games that nobody wants.

I don't think there's a need to grow up. Just like in movies, books and music the bad art will always be more popular than the good art but that doesn't mean that good, grown up stuff doesn't exist.

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A bit weird, innit?

That won't solve the problem of a large part of their audience being adults that are mentally children.

>muh superior jap taste
Weebfags are cancer. Games such as Nier, FF and Persona are cancer.

What is the difference between the current state of vidya, and vidya as a 'grown up medium'? What do people think will change once vidya 'grows up'?

name one (1) western game released recently that is better than either one of the ones you posted

It's too risky. Try making a game where you play as an ISIS infiltrator planning an attack in a European city and you'll see just how serious it gets.

Your not racist are you?

Prey
The Surge

Fight me faggot.

Games won't be dumbed down to appeal to children. Games will actually have meaning and depth, rather than whatever some slovenly manchild thinks is meaning and depth.

>generic shootan
>dark souls rip off
try again, m8

Plenty of games aren't dumbed down.

Plenty of films, songs, tv shows, books, and plays are dumbed down.

I'm not following you at all.

That's because you're the sort of person video games would leave behind if they ever grew up.

Serious critique. Read: not by Journalists. They need to lose all influence over games culture, like they already lost all their own credibility. The MSM obstructing human progress once again...

Every fucking medium has shit that is dumbed down to appeal to children/retards. The presence of some dumb shit doesn't make an entire medium "childish". You aren't even giving any examples of what will make video games "grown up", you're basically just insisting that you're too mature and sophisticated for video games.

What is with this obsession with maturity? You don't need acknowledgement or validation for a medium, to be able to enjoy it. Videogames in general had a lot of different options for a lot of different people in general already.

>implying these games aren't better than an edgy autistic text menu based high school drama, a cheap DMC ripoff with bland gameplay and the massive turd FF XV turned out to be after 10 years of dev time

Wrecked

What sort of person am I and what sort of games would the medium be producing if it had left me behind?

I haven't played any of them so I wouldn't know

I'm guessing half this thread is storyfags who think aping novels instead of movies will make games better.

What actually will make games better is making them actual games emwith good design, not just some overly expensive way to tell your middling tier story.

Get your design together and /then/ worry about the fluffy stuff.

DKC2 is the best game ever made

I forgot Sup Forums doesn't play games.

It will never "grow up" as long as gaming is mainstream. Normies, for lack of a better term, want to play bland, unchallenging interactive movies and until gaming stops being popular that's all they're gonna make.
Good games are relegated to indie devs, small studios and a few chinamen.
Unless by "grow up" you mean games becoming more mature, in which case go fuck yourself.

People always say that narrative doesn't matter in vidya, but it's funny that basically all the old 'classics' that are talked about on Sup Forums are mostly games with strong writing

Doom has strong writing?

Stop playing AAA shit. I know that's all Sup Forums talks about, but you can play other games you know.

It's the equivalent of constantly moaning about capeshit in film and saying film is dead because of it.

>basically all

There are obviously other games that are remembered outside of their writing you autist.

Just saying that some of Sup Forums's most loved games, are loved largely because of their writing and this meme of narrative being completely unimportant is stupid.

The posts in this thread prove that the gaming community isn't very mature. Everyone here sounds childish. They cannot act mature, they just can't. They cannot do it.

You're a fucking doo-doo head

>basically all
>some
Oh user you card.

Listen OP, why don't you try to explain what would happen if gaming "grew up", possibly without using any meaningless buzzword?

Gaming would be "mature".
- OP

>audience
You mean developers? And journalists?

Either realizing what makes good games would probably innovate the whole industry, at least if they talked about it. It's really specific what's likable on a large scale.

They won't, because it's a medium where large companies have to appeal to the largest audiences.

And the largest audiences for videogames are not grown up in the slightest. If anything, the industry will regress, not grow old, and you'll see more casualized titles like Fallout 4, or trash for autistic kids like Minecraft.

People who want more interesting and complex games are more and more a minority, and it's going to keep going that way.

Yes, and how are you going to get better game design if you're making games for children who don't know any better and want more of the same?

This isn't hard to follow, user.

The endgame is abandoning games all together.

Amazing how gamers have gone all this time, disgruntled, expecting developers to rescue them from themselves because damn it all gamers don't know shit about what they really want. Over the years there's been a cycle whereby gamers pick up on jargon used by other gamers, originating all the way back to public icons, journalists, who used to talk about rough categories of analysis. No one really knows what the hell anyone else means by any of that, beyond the most broad definitions of terms. We have never thought critically, deeply about games either for ourselves or as a group. At least not in any memorable or productive fashion.

How do you people hope developers can save you when they don't know what you want and neither do you? No wonder you're not satisfied. You'll never be.

>things should grow up
>why do videogames make me feel immature
>why do I worry about being immature
>I desperately want to be mature

grow up kid

This is a fallacy, development techniques and assets are getting more simplified daily, as such it is becoming increasingly easy for developers to create niche content without ending at a net loss. As such indie games will become increasingly proliferated and increasingly complex and eventually paralleling triple-A titles in quality. This will resuscitate the stagnant market as it stands and renew the medium.

We need better funding for porn games than patreon.

Yeah and Vegeta is the legendary super sayan

That quote from what I assume is a Polygon article doesn't really help the discussion.
You can't take such lump together hundreds of thousands of people classifying them as "gamers" and expect them to reach a consensus on what they want.
This might surprise you but different people have different opinions.
Everyone likes to call himself a gamer, you'll find that the twat that likes walking simulators, some guy who started playing on the Atari 2600 and never stopped, the 12 year old console fanboy, the pcbro, that one girl who thinks she's such a nerd because she played Skyrim and some asshole who thinks modern cinematic garbage is the best shit ever all think of themselves as gamers and all expect the industry to revolve around them.
I have my very own definition of gamer too for that matter.

>This might surprise you but different people have different opinions.
That's your opinion.

I bet I agree with you about gamers though. It's supposed to be a niche sub-group, enthusists. Not casuals and plebs and every tom dick and Sarkeesian appropriating the scene for nefarious self-interest. Too bad naive young gamers were terrorized by the journalists they thought they could trust into accepting the trojan horse: allowing the unwashed masses to get away with stealing their identity.

>Plenty of games aren't dumbed down.
Like Zelda? GTA removing a bunch of features?

The industry being grown-up != games having no childish features. The state of gameplay is a major criticism point for 90% of games. That's an immature medium.

Less fun and more emotions.

Your autism almost shattered my phone.

>The state of gameplay is a major criticism point for 90% of games. That's an immature medium.
If basing criticism on gameplay makes video games immature, I am perfectly okay with it. I can't even see how that's a bad thing, and you haven't given a single good point throughout this whole thread. Give us some solid example. Something about the industry that's 'immature' that could be fixed if it were to 'grow up'.

That wasn't autism, friend. That was truth.

Yeah, that's pretty much my opinion.
When people who used to play videogames before it was mainstream express their distaste for games getting easier and easier, stupid "games are art" journalists, walking simulators, "gamer girls" or whatever you wanna call them, feminists, any censorship however trivial they are demonized.
The truth is that they are normal guys whose subculture became mainstream and was invaded by people who had absolutely zero respect for it.
They came in expecting everything to revolve around them and condemned people who weren't happy with their hobby taken away from them as elitists and manchilds.

Nobody said that the relevant mediums criticize gameplay properly, or at all. Sup Forums coming out with good posts per thread isn't making a bunch of games better.

I just listed 2 games. Furthremore, feel free to show all the good melee combat in the industry. Where are all the combos?

Indeed.

Science can describe what makes games good, and developers just don't look it up..

Oh come on, just look at your pic, it reeks of immaturity oversexualizating a woman and making her do sexual acts and moans while you are playing the game, videogames should be more of an artform and respected rather than appeal to the lowest common denominator

I couldn't care less about the sex appeal. The fact is, Bayonetta is not cool. It's what someone who never grew up thinks is cool.

>videogames should be more of an artform
kys

Also OP, can you please explain what a mature game looks like?

Like what, the amount of possible game states? That's a really shallow way of measuring game quality. Otherwise no idea what you mean. Also developers do quite a lot of homework, it's just not homework people on Sup Forums would appreciate because they are more concerned about how to impress the average player rather than the hardcore crowd.

...

What about philosophy of gaming? What gaming ought to be?

Not sure what you're trying to say, how will that affect game quality?

>the amount of possible game states?
From where does that come?

>the average player
A meme statement. "Casual" isn't a design document.

It's clearly spelled out in that linked post and its literature.

>I just listed 2 games. Furthremore, feel free to show all the good melee combat in the industry. Where are all the combos?
Okay, I'll just ask. What fucking point are you trying to make? You call the medium immature, then you're whining about stuff being dumbed down by listing two of the most well known and casual series in the industry, and now you're talking about melee combat and combos like that has anything to do with anything. I have absolutely no fucking idea what point you're trying to make and I'm halfway convinced you just put a bunch of snippets from video game articles into a randomizer.

Video games are about video gaming, and appealing to the lowest denominator from them means turning them into shallow movies with throwaway gameplay in order to appeal to poorly-educated faggots like you who want things to be "deep" in the Chris Nolan vein.

Video games are their peak when they keep you engaged in problem-solving, be it fast combat in a twitch shooter or long-term planning in a strategy game.

You can put ugly women in your game and call them "realistic" all you want, but try to make the game good first.

Also, I'm not saying "read a book". I like a story and a nice setting for my games, but I don't try to legislate my tastes to creators. Sometimes the silly thing does a better job than a shallow narrative that tries to be poignant.

Flow theory is studied by pretty much anyone who has even a passing interest in game design, it's a very entry level subject and not a hard science. Game design is too complex, it involves too many different fields and has too many variables. Amount of game states was my assumption since it's the only real way to quantify the quality of a game, even though it's a terrible one.

>criticize gameplay properly,
Explain how to do this.

>. Amount of game states
What does this mean!

Video games are toys. Sure, some may be aimed towards adults (kinda like figurines and model building kits) but they're still fucking toys.

Games need to focus less on gameplay and more on world-building, story and narrative. If you just wanna mindlessly play a game to have fun you are what's holding back gaming as a mature medium

They are infinitely more complicated than a toy. How asinine.

Possibility space, the total amount of states your game can be in. If you have a game where you can only take one step to the left or right and then it ends then you have a game with 2 possible states. The more actions you add, the more possible states there are. People call it depth sometimes but it isn't really because most states will be either redundant or so pointless/similar that they don't make for interesting gameplay.

They're not toys because they're systems with rules and goals.

Yeah, states are really a tool more than an ends it self. Also, while I'm not crazy about linear games, I'm not too keen on the idea that every game needs to be a multi-ending multiple-choice rollercoaster of decisions. Sometimes a simple sequence of win-lose situations is quite enough, specially if you have good level and enemy design.

>sheer volume is framed as the ideal
>forgoes investigation within that frame
It is a tough question: how do you even identify a coherent pattern of possibilities within a space, which might be viewed as a particular variety of possibility sub-space, and then how do you frame that as superior to any other variety, including sheer volume?

Science perhaps is incompatible with this endeavor. This is why vidya is art. It can no more be scientifically understood than a painting. That's why philosophy must come to the rescue.

Yeah it really comes down to whether or not it makes for engaging decision-making, and there's seperate issues like execution and game feel that are also important to consider and add to the fun aspect of games. Even very limited games can be a blast to play. Rhythm games are the best example of this for me because they are almost pure execution.

Interesting comments but why on Earth hasn't anyone brought up difficulty yet?

The moment the industry stops trying to be mature and just is confident in what is it is when it has finally grown up.

Philosophy could come to the rescue, but most people in the world nowadays seem to follow rationalist principles. Maybe switching to different philosophical bases would make for interesting change, both narrative and mechanically.

Also, I don't think a lot of designers are ready to dive into philosophy books to seek different ways to frame the world.

>What fucking point are you trying to make?
The most popular games, and the most volume of games, are immature in their design. That's a problem for those interested in deep gameplay, or just that have played the other hundred games like them.

Combat being immature is another criticism.. what it was that previous post asked for..?

Flow theory isn't well described.. especially not in contrast with motivation, extrinsic vs intrinsic. Furthermore, there's a summary of 3 things that make up every gameplay session in its greatest: in equal parts, mental quietness, energetic effort, and focus.
Isn't, thereof, qualifying internal gaming states quite effective vs. gameplay states?

...

>chess and go are known around the world for their deep lore and twisting narrative

Tell me what you know about difficulty.

What's the interest? Genre, gameplay mechanism?

Mobility is basically *the* next feature to come innovated.

>gameplay mechanism?
That.

Punished Kamiya
Denied his Scalebound by Microsoft

Overly punishing isn't fun. Shitty juxtaposition isn't either.

Difficulty is the thing that mediates between the player and the game. It may very well be the most important element in all game design.

Have to have depth before difficulty is interesting.

Effective for what, though? You can qualify internal gaming states all you want but that doesn't mean the knowledge can be applied to game design easily. Nowadays developers are very concerned with providing a good difficulty curve, the idea of which is heavily inspired by flow theory, but the implementation is extremely inconsistent. Another thing to consider is that looking at player feelings during play doesn't let you get the whole picture. There's enjoyment to be had from completing frustrating challenges for example that won't be apparent if you just look at how the player feels in-the-moment.

I guess depth here is relative if you haven't played many games/mechanics before though, but it's an OK generalization.

I guess "difficulty" here is a non-statement. Gameplay should be effortless. That's flow state. It's when things get repetitive or overly punishing that questions arise, I guess.

>Grow up
No. I want it to grow down so games can be good again.

Difficulty is endlessly interesting, abstractly. It's like oxygen in the world of game design. It makes everything else go 'round in ways untold...

On the other hand, some failures are easy to notice. Such as the inability to scale bosses to player level in Nier Automata.

Completely kills replay value.

Low difficulty isn't the same as no difficulty.

He's a manchild that would have been laughed out of any industry with a shred of dignity or self respect.

It's also not a videogame.
>inb4 posts chess vidya games that are clearly just the traditional chess game made digital