Overexagerating: our toys - eeyor's Blog

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Overexagerating: our toys

Posted on February 26, 2010 at 01:45 AM.

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Hahh, I loved the times, when you could put out your bag of toy soldiers and play a little war on your kitchen table. Mum would come in and disrupt the epic battle with some unimportant stuff, dinner for example, and you would have to put this unbelieveable battle "on hold", until she was finished. Hahh, great memories of times were epic things just not only happened on a screen but in your head.
You might feel tempted to ask why all this nostalgica. Why do I have to read all this in the first place?

The dilemma of videogames:
In a very interesting Speech at DICE 2010, which confronted us with the two opposing forces currently known in videogames,fantasy and reality. Fantasy has been a vital aspect of human imagination for a long, long time. It was and is one of the most important aspects for kids and adults alike to play games.
But then there is this new phenomenon of gaming in the 21st century, reality or in a sport gaming case, realism. When thinking about it, both, realism and fanatsy seem lightyears apart. But the question is: Can games portray realism, while also being fantasy? Can sport games contain phantasy at all?

The foundation:
Having read MMChrisS's Blog over the last weeks made me thinking about his proposals, his ideas of how the perfect sports game, should look like and it sounds something like this: "Like the real thing, but..."
But how can any game be like something but different? In the gamin industry you will find many people using this quote. Dante's Inferno was like GoW but..., Bayonetta was like DMC but..., all is everything but....

Coming back to sport games. Here we find a certain phenomenon which attributes to the uniqueness of the genre. The two main aspects of games, realism and fantasy want to be both replicated in only one game. And this is the point when it gets tricky. Remember the first part of this blog, the memories of a child playing with his toy soldiers. The whole thing about this is, that it combined real parts (the plastic soldiers) with fantasy (the imagination of the child).
And maybe this is the way it should be. Fantasy, for most parts in life is a personal perception of a situation and how it could / we would like it to turn out. As a child did you really want someone to say, how your toysoldiers should strike? how they should flank the invisible opponent? My answer would be no. It was all in your head and only you were the one to influence decision. (Or mum by accidently interupting your experience.)

What does it have to do with sports gaming:
Sport games have the problem on their own. Sport games try to portray a real life experience and convey the player of having an opportunity to influence the outcome. They try this by making it feel real, organic and by that believable. Here we find the next stone on our path to full enjoyment. Games, especially sport games, with all the statistics etc. underlying them have a very hard position in the minds of the hardcore gamers. They need to replicate the statistics, and by that I mean replicate, with about 0.2% margin on every statistic. This is the next point where realism strikes fantasy. When developing a game that is so closely related to statistics, the margin of epicness, of fantasy, diminishes at an unbelievable rate. Also, the possibilities for the user to alter the outcome, diminish. This is the dilemma we are facing right now. We are asking and praying for sport games to inherent realism in a way never seen before, but on the other hand, we as a player, want to be able to play the "century play" when our fantasy desires it.

This is the problem developers are facing. We want them to play both parts, realism and fantasy, in a way that satisfies every single player around the world on his/her current need, which are allways changing depending on the situation. Just think about this. Did you want the toy soldier company to tell you how to play with them? Did you want them to to the playing for you?
The controversy is not at the development facility, it is in our heady and in how much me want to watch a game of sports or to play it. Playing means unrational decisions the system has to cope with. And I personally think, that we should go back to our roots and try to give the games an opportunity to breath, without us demanding things, that only we, by ourselves can satisfy.