Our jester hats are awesome.

I’m not going to touch piracy. Legitmate sales alone are what killed the PC physical market.

The problem I see with consoles, however, is that they fare rather badly for strategy games. Sure, they’re an ideal platform for twitch-based games, but can you imagine playing an intricate strategy game, say Civilization V, on a console, when you need to point and click and micromanage everything?

I would have nothing against consoles (though if all games were only available through them, I’d give up on gaming altogether), except when they start having an impact on the type of games that get made. I don’t care for FPS — I’ve never had quick reflexes, so I’m quite lousy at them — and there seems to be less variety in today’s console game genres than there was in the time of the NES. As it stands, the only advantage of consoles I can see is that you know that the game will run on it, as opposed to the crapshoot that is your average computer game.

The Wiimote certainly broke some ground, but as I mentioned above, I believe Kinect and PS Move are going in the wrong direction, and I think they will fail. That’s not wishful thinking; Wii was “casual” and “family-friendly” enough (cue in my friend’s ‘filthy casuals’), but xBox and PS3 avoided going in that direction from the start, and now they’re going for the same “casual” appeal they never tried to reach in the first place. But their core gamer demographic doesn’t want to move around to play their games; I suspect they’re perfectly content to behave as couch potatoes and let their thumbs do all the work. In addition, such gimmicks only succeed in linking their in-game achievements to their physical prowess, and how many traditional gamers want that? How many gamers are, like me, physically inept? If I wanted physical exercise, I’d buy a treadmill, step outside, or join the army. I’m just surprised the Wii managed to pull it off.

Worse, there is no immersion. I’ve always been fascinated by virtual reality (yes, I’m so 1993), and I despise seeing the term being applied to a wider range of products that have nothing to do with it. An appealing form of VR would be, for example, a bicycle racing game with you on the bike, and the image projected inside a helmet visor (as if you were really wearing a biking helmet). The immersion would be as complete as could be, and your movements, even though you would probably be no Lance Armstrong, would actually make sense in relation to the game itself. Kinect is but a crude version of motion capture (I still haven’t forgotten that Project Natal video last year), and what’s more, movement reproduction is a mere approximation; so you just end up looking stupid, no matter how much ad money Microsoft and Sony can blow getting people with strenuous gaming credentials like Felicia Day to demonstrate it to the awed masses blocking circulation at your nearest gaming convention to tell you otherwise. (Not to mention: I don’t have that amount of space to move around, and I wonder what the neighbour downstairs would say if I started a Kinect gaming routine when I usually play, at 4 in the morning. But I know, I get the message: it’s not for me. I don’t know who it’s for, though.)

“As soon as I saw the gorgeous HD graphics on a 50-inch HDTV I knew that the days of PC gaming were numbered.”

You can always hook up the PC to the TV.

Vetarnias: To put it succinctly: What the hell has happened to gaming?

The same thing that happened to movies and music. It became an Industry.

The console is back, with every company aping one another over the next fad; but what’s the point to bicker over which of Kinect or Move will better fulfill its promises — not that I care, since I don’t own a console — when it’s their basic principle that is fatally faulty? When I end up on the same side of a debate as Yahtzee, something is not quite right — and recently I seem to agree with him all the time.

To put it succinctly: What the hell has happened to gaming? It’s not that I’m older, and I’m not one to go for rhetoric like ‘filthy casuals’. I just think it’s that the industry has now lost the last vestiges of its ‘homespun’ nerdy aspect, to replace it with crass mainstream commercialism; and whoever says crass mainstream commercialism, coupled with increasing production costs, means a general dumbing-down of what is offered. All in over-exploited franchises that used to mean something, but not anymore. What a coincidence, the high festival of vacuous gaming has just concluded in San Diego.

Paradoxically, all those AAA studios are expecting their clientele to keep up with Moore’s Law as well as they do, even in the middle of a recession, leaving out an (I suspect) increasing number of people. Case in point: Final Fantasy XIV; Keen of Keen and Graev wrote a post on trying out the FFXIV benchmark only to find out that his computer was incapable of running the game, and he bought it at around the time Age of Conan came out — two years ago. Really, they’re expecting a minimum of 1.5GB RAM on a Windows XP system? So no money for SquareEnix from me.

Maybe that’s why ‘social gaming’ and the ‘casual market’ are really growing while the more ‘hardcore’ market, outside of WoW, is stagnating; not because your average gamer is too busy changing diapers to dedicate his entire free time to video games, but because the money is lacking, and he has nowhere else to go. And your average person does not buy a new computer for Age of Conan only to throw it out two years later when the next shiny game comes out; in my case, my most recent computer is from 2007, which I use for gaming (an ever dwindling selection these days), but for everyday tasks, I prefer the sturdy reliability of my 2004 antique.

I think it’s where all those developing companies make a mistake: The casual market isn’t one of choice, or of lifestyle; the casual market is in fact a captive one. Give or take a few ‘hardcore’ games with unpopular features (FFA PvP, full-loot, etc), is there a natural boundary between a player of WoW (the closest to casual among traditional games) and, say, EVE or Age of Conan or Warhammer Online? A Tale in the Desert, casual or not? Wurm Online, casual or not? Puzzle Pirates, casual or not? (The last might be a typical “casual” title, but I have known people who played it hour after hour after hour. Some journeys lasted a full three hours; how does that compare to your average WoW raid?) Apart from those games where victory is guaranteed to the largest group who grinds the most, I find that we can’t really talk of a rift between casual and regular gaming, except on a technological/economic scale. As a result of it, I’m thrown in with the casuals, much against my own will.