Y’all, am I going crazy? Have I lost it? Is this what watching 500 trailers in four days does to a motherfucker? I feel like it has to be my problem, because all of a sudden I can’t seem to tell the difference between most of the video games announced during the ten press conferences I watched since Thursday. I can no longer pick out specific details; I can only make out the rough shape of the industry at this point. And what I see… I do not recognize.
Actually no, the problem I have coming away from the Summer of Games is that there are a lot of games coming out soon, and quite a few of them seem to overlap in mechanics, themes, setting and even story with other games. Before any dense motherfucker comes at me like “tHaT’S wHaT a GeNrE iS”… shut the fuck up, I know what a genre is. I mean even within the confines of genre, there were quite a few games that looked functionally indistinct from each other. I know that problem came up a few times in both the Summer Game Fest stream with all the space horror titles and in the Wholesome Direct with games featuring frogs doing shit that frogs don’t typically do, like gun. (that’s a bad example; a better one would be the sudden explosion of cozy farming simulators.)
How do you get around this problem? Developers, especially Indies, are going to wear their influences on their sleeves, and I think that’s not only natural but should be encouraged. As far as triple-A games go, they’ve always been influenced by market trends, so fuck me sideways if they ever move entirely away from gun as the operative term for the bulk of games in that space. And anyway, video games are hard to make and I’m a dumbass who knows nothing about that process, so I am definitely not the right person for this article? Possibly?
Nevertheless, what I can say definitively is that this weekend as a whole felt like we were moving one step closer towards some nebulous future of total cultural homogenization, and that’s kind of scary.
Anyway, I don’t have any answers, I am tired, and I don’t want to just shit on the work people do, so I’m cutting this thought off maybe a tad early, and even turning this over to y’all. What do you think? Is there a way to make games where players do different stuff than the handful of verbs in use now? Should there be more games like that? What are the challenges in trying to do that? What are some games you think meet that criteria? (I think Death Stranding and Lake are certainly two games with a lot more in common than not, for example.)