The biggest problem with social and interactive TV is that the computer already fills that niche, and effectively.
The conventional way of interacting with a television is through the remote control. This is the first and major impediment. Introducing a new controller would add the complexity of an additional interactive layer, as well as costs incurred. This would also just pave the way for the conversion of a television into a game console, which is not what we want.
If we just use a typical television remote control, any relatively deep interactive experience ends up getting lost under a maze of menus and dozens of "screens" of information. Remember the trials often associated with setting up a brand new TV?
Currently, interactive television's (iTV/Foxtel) approach is to present viewers with a single screen. The user moving a "box" around selectable options and occasionally hitting "OK".
A recent invention is the "Media Centre PC", a small computer that plugs into your PC. This Media Centre PC has a DVD drive, so you can use it for video playback, but it also has a hard drive (to store movies and music for quick playback), and can often save a television signal into its storage for later playback.
The Media Centre TV is as close as we are likely to get to a bridging between the PC and the TV. If someone wants to fiddle with their Facebook, the only reason they would use a television would be as a big screen to see the website on!
Current video game consoles such as the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 double as media centre computers. And this is likely as far as the bridging between currently computer centric concepts (such as interactivity) and the conventionally non-interactive medium of the television are likely to get, at least in any significant sense.
Only time will tell, really.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Bad Twinkies
If Hollywood is to be believed, a Twinkie never goes bad. Kinda like a McDonald's hamburger. Must be all the preservatives.
In this blog entry I hope to talk about bad/clichéd game design and narrative decisions.
There are two sides to the Twinkie coin:
The first is easy-way-out writing and design.
Computer games are often designed from the ground up, in a predictable fashion: start with genre.
-Are we producing a first-person shooter? (ie. do we, as developers, want to play a game where characters, creatures and sets get shot to bits by the player?)
-A strategy game? (Does our target gamer want to command armies? Make "strategic", "thoughtful" decisions?)
-An adventure game? (Static sets, low budget, indie production for the "elite" gamer?)
Yes, I make a lot of assumptions about how both production companies and "generic/cliched" players operate. But this is how many game designers think. They are gamers, first and foremost, and they want to produce something that is fun for them to play...And they want to play games like what they grew up playing. The problem is this sort of conceptual inbreeding.
Cliches are a problem for all writers and designers. They are there, always in your field of view, begging you to take the easy way out -- "Just grab onto me and you'll never need to be original again! I'm proven! I'm entertaining!" Clichés prey on those of us with writers block.
The other sort of clichés that game developers employ are those of juvenile content, often for marketing purposes (however misguided). This affects both well-thinking developers who want to target a particular audience, and bottom-line-comes-first-thinking executives and shareholders (Electronic Arts!).
These sort of considerations include: Dumbing down for the sake of it (as an example: removing the possibility of the protagonist to die, or otherwise be in any properly precarious situation), and of course, big tits (though this final one is, thankfully, dying out).
Most other Twinkie problems come down to lack of funding, lack of quality control, lack of proper adherence to proven UI/design conventions (Let's think outside the box! For no reason!), and lack of after-production support (patches).
In this blog entry I hope to talk about bad/clichéd game design and narrative decisions.
There are two sides to the Twinkie coin:
The first is easy-way-out writing and design.
Computer games are often designed from the ground up, in a predictable fashion: start with genre.
-Are we producing a first-person shooter? (ie. do we, as developers, want to play a game where characters, creatures and sets get shot to bits by the player?)
-A strategy game? (Does our target gamer want to command armies? Make "strategic", "thoughtful" decisions?)
-An adventure game? (Static sets, low budget, indie production for the "elite" gamer?)
Yes, I make a lot of assumptions about how both production companies and "generic/cliched" players operate. But this is how many game designers think. They are gamers, first and foremost, and they want to produce something that is fun for them to play...And they want to play games like what they grew up playing. The problem is this sort of conceptual inbreeding.
Cliches are a problem for all writers and designers. They are there, always in your field of view, begging you to take the easy way out -- "Just grab onto me and you'll never need to be original again! I'm proven! I'm entertaining!" Clichés prey on those of us with writers block.
The other sort of clichés that game developers employ are those of juvenile content, often for marketing purposes (however misguided). This affects both well-thinking developers who want to target a particular audience, and bottom-line-comes-first-thinking executives and shareholders (Electronic Arts!).
These sort of considerations include: Dumbing down for the sake of it (as an example: removing the possibility of the protagonist to die, or otherwise be in any properly precarious situation), and of course, big tits (though this final one is, thankfully, dying out).
Most other Twinkie problems come down to lack of funding, lack of quality control, lack of proper adherence to proven UI/design conventions (Let's think outside the box! For no reason!), and lack of after-production support (patches).
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