Game Culture
An MTV piece I read today hails back to some of the things said about Stalker by Borut Pfiefer. From the MTV article:
“I think we went through about a year’s worth of failed ideas… we tossed everything around,†Hennig said with a laugh. Right after she finished her stint as Game Director on “Jak III†in 2004, Hennig was pulled onto a small team to think about ideas for the PlayStation 3, and they ran the gamut of ideas — even considering alien and war shooters. “Some ideas were shockingly similar to things that came out since… we had ideas that were really close to ‘BioShock,’ we had ideas that were really close to ‘Resistance,’†she said. I asked for specifics, but she declined.
“It’s sort of a weird industry in that we’re all similar ages, and we’re all sort of driven by some of the same influences,†she explained. “Because of that, we tend to like the same kind of things, so there’s this sort of little zeitgeist within the game industry where the same ideas can crop up in different companies. It’s almost like you have to second guess yourself and say, ‘Was that too obvious of a choice?’â€
Zeitgeists are a hokey idea at the best of times: Sometimes there really is a massive and sudden cultural uptake of something, but when it comes to a couple of similar game ideas in development at the same time (i.e. Second Sight and Psi Ops going head to head), it seems more like the kind of coincidence our brains just pick up on and ascribe more significance to than they should.
Nevertheless, what she says about industry influences is quite pertinent. The cultural references of blockbuster games are utterly and horribly hemmed in by a gaggle of worn clichés. For the next few years at least, it’s only smaller games that are going to be nimble enough to take risks and poke around the cultural fringe.