Tadaima~. How goes it? I've been a bit busy (or lazy) lately, with work, my real work, draining all my energy away. Sorry for the long break between now and my last post. I'll try to be better about that in the future.

I finally broke down and bought a 360. Everyone at my job says I joined the winning side, but truthfully I only bought my 360 for one game and one game only... Resident Evil 5. And having just finished the campaign this past weekend, I have to say, it was money well spent. 'Course now I just have a $300 dollar Peggle-playing conduit, but I'm sure something else I care about will show up on that system sooner or later.

Anyways, with the commentary I received from my co-workers and friends after having purchased a 360 (and it was A LOT), I began thinking...What really defines "next gen gaming," and are systems like the PS3 and 360 really doing what's best for the industry? And so begins my exposition on next-generation gaming and the definition of hardcore.

See, I've always been a huge fan of Nintendo and their products, so it should come as no surprise that I have purchased all their major systems. Nintendo has always been the notoriously "family-friendly" console, an image they've more than outdone themselves to capitalize on with the success of the Wii and DS worldwide. But this immense success has been largely dependent on the introduction of gaming to a non-gamer audience; that is, it is assumed that so-called hardcore gamers tend to flock more toward the so-called hardcore systems, i.e., the PS3 and 360. A large majority of the gamer audience sees "family-friendly" Nintendo and thinks Fischer Price. I've heard (and had) this argument a lot with co-workers.

Of course, this is not to say that established gamers don't care about the Wii; I myself have purchased nine Wiis since launch either for friends or family. However, fanboyism is human nature, and clearly, by the zero sum principle, any exhalting comment of your console is a slight on mine.

I will admit, I don't like Sony (though this has more to do with their game politics that their hardware). Nevertheless, Sony has had some amazing exclusives for its systems. The same can be said for 360. And typically consumers decide on one console over another because of exclusives, right? I just have come to wonder, is the industry really growing with the mentality that "next-gen" is a term solely defining a console's graphical capabilities?

Now, I've already admitted to being a fan of Nintendo products, so you might choose to take any of my statements with a grain of salt, but my affinity toward the DS and the Wii has less to do with fanboyism (or fangirlism, in this case) and more with the proposed direction of gaming. If we continue to define next-gen as only 'bigger, better graphics, faster processors, etc...', we are quickly approaching a technological plateau. Obviously the only two consoles which can complete at this level (speaking exclusively to the home console market) are the PS3 and 360, and the more we continue to exhalt graphical realism as the sole next-gen defining point, the more gaming becomes an industry detached from the very reality it seeks to mimic. The wall between uncanny valley and the definition of humanity is in sight. So where more is there to go?

What we need to get back to is understanding why people play games in the first place and what is really important for the survival of the industry. Do people play games because they want to have fun -- an escape from reality? Or do they play games to gawk at how realistic the sweat looks rolling off Shaquille O'Neal's back? (Clearly there are people on both sides, so there is no one right answer to this question.) But in terms of survival of the gaming industry, we need to keep in mind that the relationship between our technological plateau is also directly influential on the accessibility of smaller developers to compete in the industry. Making a game these days is no easy task. For one thing, it takes money...lots and lots of money. And with the current model the industry is on, most of this money on the production side is spent on technology -- making a game "look" next-gen. So as we see a flattening of the technology graph, so also do we lend ourselves to a decline in creativity for the mass gaming market (though perhaps an increase in internet gaming market).

The industry has created a cyclical beast wherein it continues to cater to a continuously shrinking target demographic of hardcore gamers (brilliantly defined as the upstream market by Sean Malstom in his article "Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy") and will likely soon be eating itself alive while staring at the success of lesser consoles in befuddled disillusionment. Clearly, with the success of "non-next gen" consoles like the Wii and DS, the industry needs to start realigning their supply with consumers' demands. The expanded consumer-base, largely attributed to the success of the Wii and DS, is not interested in "next-gen gaming." If they were, they would have been gamers long ago. The industry at large needs to reevaluate its priorities, or neither consumers nor developers will be happy with the outcome.

In other (actual art-related) news, art dump coming soon. I'm scanning some of my old sketchbooks, so I'll be posting that in the coming days.

Have a good week! Laterz.
~Tet

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