🚀 go-pugleaf

Ok.  So too many game designers are focusing on bells and whistles.  Too 
much glossy gunk like voice, music, and pretty graphics--not to mention 
game after game that asks us to zig-zag all over the map for Fribbit's 
shoes, a candygram, a hunk of lead, on and on, before we can pick up the 
item we wanted to begin with and get ON with the game.

We look at a shareware game like Aethra (no offense) that doesn't have any of 
that stuff--and it's more playable than many of the games on the market!  A 
fella recently asked on the net if anyone actually had finished Arena.  
At the risk of generating a lot of "I did" messages, I thought it was a 
valid question.  Open-endedness is one thing; repetitiveness quite another.

To have a programmer write a game is a lot like having an engineer argue 
copyright in the courtroom.  (Those who know understand that most law 
firms won't hire intellectual property attorneys unless they had 
"technical" undergraduate degrees.)  There's no way that an engineer, no 
matter how highly educated, is going to understand the intricacies of 
language, of art, the way an artist would (who also was as highly 
educated).  Yet the condition persists because it is engineers who become 
the intellectual property lawyers and they who do the subsequent hiring 
of others.  They don't realize what they're lacking!  The result is a 
highly technical, coldly abstract definition of art that completely 
misses the true individuality of the form, and that only creates future 
problems.

Similarly, we have programmers who do what they do best--and do it well, 
perhaps.  Impressively, perhaps.  "Xeen" was a BEAUTIFUL game.  But until 
writers are given the chance to do their work--and until they're given 
the chance to escape the bonds of adolescent fantasy & technical 
one-upmanship that currently seem to be the rage in crpgs--it's going to be 
increasingly difficult for those outside the computer entertainment genre to 
take the artform seriously.  We run the risk that computer games will follow 
the same path as have comics.  A lot of money can be made in this artform, 
sure, but profit does not equate with quality.  Until those who design the 
games recognize that writers have a crucial role to play in the process, the 
genre never will be able to go beyond "zig-zag around the map, kill lots and 
lots, get chew toy, kill Fribble".

Recently I participated in a conversation with several gamers and 
discussed the potential for a concept in which a player was taken to a 
new world from this one, a world in which no evil, no aggression, had 
ever been known, in which the sentients lived in harmony with their 
surroundings.  We discussed what could happen to that world if the player 
brought an innocent item, a tool, perhaps, like a drill or a hammer, and 
if that tool were used in the new world accidentally to kill someone.  We 
discussed the potential for a creeping illness across that world called 
"evil"--and we actually seemed to be coming up with a game world in which 
right and wrong would matter, in which choice made a difference, until 
one of the players said dismissively, "Nah.  Sounds too much like Ultima."

As though every rpg ever created had not copied from every other in its 
inclusion of quests, swords, kings, magicians, on and on.  Have we come 
to this?  That we can no longer talk about games that would require us, 
as another player said, "to have an IQ higher than a squirrel's," without 
dismissing it as derivative?

Here's what I seek in a game: moral choice.  Adventure.  A sense that 
something is at stake.  A compelling story.  Interactions with NPCs that 
seem vital not because those NPCs know of Fribbit's sizzle staff, but 
because those NPCs offer something else: spiritual or philosophical 
challenge.  I want, in short, fiction.  Not pretty colors or sounds.  I 
want the human dimension illustrated in the way that only crpgs can 
illustrate it.
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dennis owens			dbc			     ko...@netcom.com