Games Programmed on Cheap Paper - 1/26/2014

So, awhile back I discovered Good Old Games, which is a site dedicated to re-publishing older games legally. Most of them require some help to run under more recent versions of Windows, and in those cases they're packaged with a DOSBox wrapper which allows for playing with appropriate settings already in place. It's a wonderful way to go back and play games that went out of production years or even decades ago.

It's also a great way to watch the development of the sophistication available in computer gaming. It's been a gradual set of changes over the last 30+ years, and most people have focused more on the technical aspects than the gameplay improvements.

Don't get me wrong, in many cases, the technical advancements in graphics, file-size, processing power and the OS-side tools have made gameplay improvements possible. But like any other tool, it required the industry to pick up those tools and make use of them for something beyond bigger bangs and wow.

We can point clearly to the technical advancements. CGA became EGA and then VGA and SVGA. Basic sprites and vector graphics became 3-D environments with polygons, textures, complex animations, even facial expressions (time to mention Mass Effect again!). Add to this the increase in the number of things and processes the computer can keep track of, the amount of information that can be held in RAM, and the sophistication of AI algorithms all made greater and greater complexity of world and gameplay possible.

But, again, it requires people to pick up those tools. Charles Dickens more or less invented the novel, but it took the early 20^th century and mass publication for enough experimentation to take place for authors to really learn how to put a book together. Without pulps and dime novels, we never would have gotten to people like Kurt Vonnegut or Chuck Pahlahniuk. Without Zork and Ultima I, we wouldn't have Starcraft, The Sims or (yes, I'll say it again) Mass Effect.

And the technical improvements are mirroring those in cinema, now. At first, movies were made by individuals, perhaps with a couple of helpers and actors. They grew to incorporate larger crews, and a manufacturing process in the 30's, 40's and 50's. Then they grew beyond that, and Directors became the driving force instead of studios, with giants like Hitchcock, Welles, Kubrick and Coppola.

Now we're seeing something of a return to the individual filmmaker and studio-independent crews. The technology has become cheap enough and easy enough to use that good stories can once again be told without having millions of dollars behind them.

Flash, and ultimately HTML 5, have put many of the necessary tools back into the hands of the small, even single-person development arenas. Even if these games never become the kinds of blockbusters that everyone wants to make, they are tools that allow the amateur to develop their chops, to walk the path through the design and implementation of a game and see the experience through, beginning to end. (A great site for checking out these games is Kongregate).

We have hit the age of the pulp game, when they are produced both on the highest of scales in development houses like Bioware and Blizzard, and on the most personal of scales. What comes out in the next fifteen to twenty years is going to give rise to the Vonneguts and Tarantinos of the late 21^st century.

It's going to be an interesting ride.

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