[NickCowan]

Hello there people, I was reading this post earlier, before I joined, and I had a few thoughts that I wanted to add... or maybe just steal from other people.

First off, I've never had a console game because my parents decided that, growing up, it would stunt my brain, or something along those lines... We got a PC back in, oooh... '90 maybe? which means of course, DOS. There was a game called Dungeon Master, where you ran around cutting things up. Admittedly, I was about 8 at the time, and so I'd probably not like it now, but I loved it back then.

My brother was into P&P and I played as many of the Ian Livingstone books as I could get my hands on. Again, we're quite a long way in the past here.

More recently, a PC I had in '98 came with Might and Magic 6 installed on it, and I loved it. Great game. MM7 was pretty cool, but then it went downhill a bit, MM8 was finished in record time, and I can't remember if I even played MM9 - which shows how much i cared about it.

Anyway, onto the debate about the decline in society's ability to stand thought-provoking games. It seems to me not that people are not willing to take on challenging games/books/movies, but because they ARE challenging, the chance of making money off them are slimmer... it's main-streaming if ever there was. Books are a good indication of what's going on, I think. SF and Fantasy books were all fairly slim things back around 50 years ago, but about the time Frank Herbert's Dune series got into, I think it's 3rd book, they got fat, and stayed fat. Robert Jordan has written 10 volumes between 700-1200 pages of one story, and hasn't finished it yet, much to my dismay. Books the length of Lord of the Rings are fairly common-place, and I think that's a sign that people have more time and more desire to read huge books.

I think that that is an indication that people's tastes are getting well, more spaced out. If you had a multi-pointed star with all the different tastes in game, or any kind of entertainment, I think you'de find that the points are stretching farther and farther from the centre - EA, Westwood, etc. are forced to try and hold the middle ground, because that's where the most money is.

So why have computer games gone crap? Well, I'm sure that part of it is the eye-candy syndrome, game developers are being given new toys to play with, and so they are doing just that... the insane increase in game sizes - I remember Silver being insanely huge at about 1Gig, and now Battle for Middle Earth is something like 4Gigs - the better equiment gamers and developers have means that they get to play with their new toys. And so let them have their fun, once people start getting bored of the same old "real" graphics, they'll have to go back to clever games - with luck, we're just in a slump at the moment.

I suspect that we'll start getting independent companies making smaller-budget but more playable games in much the same way as sourceforge is making decent programs from people who just want them out there. We can all hope, eh?