Eidos Executive: Games 'Still the Red-headed Stepchild'

They're not taken seriously for good reason. Half Life is an important game because it shows one way that games could be taken seriously by a wider audience. It's a game devoted to presenting a seamless immersive experience, rather than a "gamey" one. There are no scoreboards, there are no items to collect so you can get the powerup and win the game in that sort of blatant pick up the steroids and run a kilometer in a second Duke 3D sort of way of doing things, in fact there is hardly any interface at all, or design which exposes the mechanics underneath the games presentation. The only things standing between you and the game world were your health, your ammo and the occasional screen titling which read either a chapter name or very briefly "loading". Not just the level transitions but everything was entirely seamless. If there was a cutscene you watched it in the game as you played, not in a letterboxed, annoying cul de sac you visited on your way to playing the game some more, and a real effort was made to create the illusion of a world that was only incidentally a battleground, and if it wasn't for you and the aliens the place would be an everyday office, or a typical lab.

That's an initial indicator of what games can be, and when I played Half Life I imagined a glorious interactive, immersive storytelling game future... which ultimately never came. Look at where we are ten years after Half Life. Of all the accomplishments of Half Life I rattled off above - the narrative, the presentation, the realism of the game environments - scarcely any have been improved on, if at all, and worst of all Certainly after the release of that game, stories started to become more important to developers but have they, as a whole become much better over the last ten years? No, they remain very much fixed to a sort of not-quite-acceptable, inferior to film, inferior to literature standard. If anything, on the whole, developers have regressed and have forgotten some of those lessons. Instead of figuring out how to exploit this great new way of presenting games not as naked and furtive hunts for items and points but experiences, they have begun to reintegrate those old elements into their expensive, finely animated, painstakingly presented titles. Far Cry 2 just came out and it's all about this seamless, beautifully world full of misery and darkness, political power plays, murky, loose alliances, AND 221 DIAMOND BRIEFCASES YOU HAVE 2 OUT A POSSIBLE 221 BRIEFCASES USE YOUR GPS TO COLLECT ALL THE BRIEFCASES IN THE GAME :D

Developers have shat all over their hard work by including stupid little easy to implement but ultimately counterproductive features in a hysterical fear that the 15 year old XBox Live moron will not be able to maintain interest in their game unless he has a million banal carrots to chase. Achievements, "unlockables", and all these other things popping up with progress interpreted through ratios and percentages - high scores in other words - constantly remind you you are toying with something and thus poison the well because they encourage the player to skill or game his way through the game rather than take the narrative seriously, suspend his disbelief and play a role according to the cool universe the game has set up for him. To this a lot of people, including developers, would say "But players don't take story seriously anyway, SpaecKow." WELL NO WONDER.

Far Cry 2's a great game, having fun with it for sure. There's always going to be a place for that kind of gameplay, but it's never going to be the kind of game that communicates meaningfully to a wider audience. In short, if games want to be taken seriously they are going to have to shit or get off the pot in regards to commiting to strong, truly compelling narrative-rich interactive experiences and leaving their "toyishness" behind.

I'm red haired.

And I find his comment offensive.

He can stick a tomb raider purchase up his arse now.

The only time I met Ian Livingstone was at a games conference in Melbourne. He gave a brief presentation on his history, and then took up an hour just talking about how hot he was for Lara Croft.

It was fucking creepy.