I keep a close eye on the developments of video games I truly believe that, just as the 20th century was the century of the movie, the 21st century will be the century of the video game. Right now we are standing at the cusp of the next console generation. Traditionally they have not in themselves been great for innovation in gaming. They tend to reset innovation, to make us content with the beautiful graphics and buzz hype. But amongst these blind blockbusters there have also been some signs of what is to come, and those are the game's I will be picking out for this list. These games carry over from the previous generation something we had just begun to grasp, and develop their potential in a way only possible from this point in time onwards. I give you, the list:
The Division (A natural public space in a game)
The Division is an open world 1st person shooter game set in a mid-crisis New York. It's visuals are stunning, and it's production values are excellent. So what is it that sets this game apart? It is the multiplayer features. Your friends can drop in and out as they please, no lobby required, to team up with you to do anything available in the game. And not only that, you can also meet other groups of players, like yourselves, which might be fighting you for the scarce resources in the game. Not many games have tried this type of multiplayer before, and never on this scale. Dark Souls and Journey did similar things, but not with an open world structure. The reason I think this is going to be one of the biggest trends in the next generation is that similar things are begin done by Bungie, with a game called Destiny, and in another ubisoft game called Watch_Dogs.
The Witness (Philosophically ambitious titles for a mature audience)
The Witness is the second game by Jonathan Blow. His first game, Braid, gave us a mature (if underdeveloped) story, and excellent puzzle-gameplay, which toyed with industry standards in several ways. Since Braid we have been given several mature stories and philosophically demanding games, but few of these have stood front and center in the media. The Witness is one of the games which set out to counter this trend. The Witness seeks to tell a complicated story through it's world alone, one which it will be difficult to understand for anyone but an adult. But the true innovation is that such a complicated work can get a prime spotlight in the release of a new console! When the ps4 was presented, The Witness was one of the showcase games. And in that it becomes a symbol of a new trend in games culture; The understanding that the median age of gamers is now creeping near 40, and that the audience of gaming demands more that power fantasies. I hope The Witness will help prove that games can be escapist and serious at the same time.
Project Spark (Game making enabling)
Project spark is, to put it succinctly, the Little Big Planet that Microsoft never had. It is a game, but also a toolset for anyone to create their own games. It comes with a simple logic system, and a palette style of material application which will make creating more complicated game world relatively easy. The possibility of this kind of game was shown in the last generation with Little Big Planet, but little big planet didn't completely realise the potential of the vision. It was a 2.5D game with some serious memory limitations. These limitations will be severely reduced with Project Spark, and I hope that it will set off a new trend in game making - perhaps one where simple versions of developer tools will come with more games.
Hyper Light Drifter (Cooperation and publishing trends)
Hyper Light Drifter was recently kickstarted, for that is the word, into existence by the trend of crowdfunding. It did a number of things right. It showed off the potential talent for the game, the art-work, the vision and most importantly the driven mind behind this vision. Crowdfunding has recently become an established trend, but it has had some problems. Often those who are funded are lone people, who just wants to get into the game, and to realise their own dream. HLP was different. In the background we could eye a team which was ready to step in when the project exceeded it's funding goals. And maybe most importantly, they decided to expand to the PS4. HPL symbolizes a trend where young people who have grown up in the world of technology use their expertise and networking skills to form loose coalitions around common goals. And on the other hand, Sony is showing their capability in playing off these groups by allowing indie games to publish on their platform. But this, in turn, is only made possible by the robust online game shops that businesses like Sony maintain. HPL symbolises a new work trend which was started in the last generation, but will develop in the next: Loosely connected groups forming around a vision, grass roots funding by interested and integrated people and near self publishing on larger platforms - curated to support this kind of activity.
Rime (Emotional depth and simplicity, a trust in game literacy)
We know very little about Rime. It seems to be an open world game. It seems to star a little lonely boy, and that it is almost unbelievably beautiful. And there is one more thing. It is very clearly inspired by the work of Fumito Ueda - especially the game Ico. Ico was released in 2001 - more than then years ago! Still, there are many of us who recognize this homage, if you will, and welcome works that play on the same kind of emotions. Though such a long time has passed, very few games have tried to follow a similar technique, where gameplay strongly informs the emotional state - which subsequently tells a story. In fact, the only one which readily springs to mind is Journey. But it is not the emotional content per se which is interesting - the interesting part is that we now have such a stable culture that we can trust people to have experienced the more important entries in gaming history. Games are starting to get a cannon and complexity which we normally only find in the established arts. Rime isn't notable for borrowing an aesthetic understanding from literature or film, but for referencing something which is so uniquely a game.
