War of the Consoles: a new indy hope

I'm writing this intro to remind myself not to fall into a trap. I won't expect any coherence, or continuity out of this space and neither should you. Whatever's going through my mind on a given day at the time I sit at the computer will show up here. I might continue a thread on a project such as Idle Mist, or like today, I'll skip it all together and blabber about some random thing I had fun doing. Disclaimer: I'm not a gamer. Haven't been one for a long, long time. But here are the reasons I may become one once again.

Last Friday I tried both the Wii and the PS3. Sony's new Play Station had just been released and Wii still had a few days to go. The PS3 impressed me in the graphics department. It made me think about if/how its technology could be used to easily create lavish machinimas or some new forms of narrative media. Gaming technology offers incredible possibilities to blend interaction with narrative-driven forms like film, and provide new virtual experiences.

However, fighting and shoot-em up games rule the market, leaving room for little else. I guess the same happens with movies.

But when games offer me nothing new in terms of playability or experimentation and make a greater attempt to look hyper-realistic, I get this instant temptation to compare it, detrimentally, to conventional photography and cinematography. Games like Okami offer interesting visuals well suited to these machines' potential and games like Indigo Prophesy or Killer 7 offer fresher takes on narrative and game play than most of today's games, but some of us, nostalgic farts, sometimes long for the simple fun induced by the old ATARI and early NES games.

Why were some of this simple games more fun? Maybe because they weren't concerned with trying to emulate the visceral visual experience of the movies. It was a more immediate interactive response, maybe a very superficial one, and one that we should evolve from, but fun non-the-less. To this day, games as visually primitive as Tetris and PacMan remain among my all time favorites. Although it's hard to beat the enjoyment a kid in the 80s got out of the first adventures of Mario and Luigi, we shouldn't expect those over and over again... But how to keep that level of audience engagement alive? That's where Nintendo's Wii comes in. Instead of charging you 500 to 600 dollars for a multi-media HD extravaganza, the big N is betting squarely on fun factor. And they are doing so by coming up with an entirely new way of playing, more instinctive and welcoming: the free movement offered by the Wiimote. While using this tiny, ultra-light and stylish gadget to control my Excite Truck, I could hardly imagine going back to depending completely on buttons and arrows. This is the kind of breakthrough that makes you wonder how you settled for anything else for so long, the kind that makes what you were using seem like it already belongs in a museum.

I hope indi programmers embrace the possibilities of the 8 and 16 bit platform that the Wii's virtual console is providing. The low cost of making and now distributing these games over the web should open the gates to a wide variety of more experimental and unique games, that need not shoot for the blockbuster mass appeal necessary to recoup large production budgets. Instead, they can offer specific works to niche audiences that lurk only a click away. Instead of waiting for someone to make the game of your dreams now you can have a stab at it. Same for web-cast narrative videos. Wait. Instead of procastinating, we could be making those right now.