There is a lot of talk about gaming eventually becoming a dominant part of the future of Home Theater.  The interactive storytelling paradigm and digital technologies found in console and computer games today coupled with the grand scale of the latest display and audio technologies in the Home Theater world would seem like a marriage made in heaven.  But not so fast, this guy correctly points out some serious hurdles the gaming industry needs to overcome to gain that last vestige of mass appeal it needs in the “Gamer's Manifesto“.

I’m not saying gaming shouldn’t be happy as the formerly niche market that has exploded into new wealth.  But giants in the games industry like EA make no secret of their avarice, they really believe they are the new Hollywood.  But the top heavy, “graphics first”, safe business model the games industry has turned into of late is also sapping the computer gaming industry of the unique creative spark that made it so interesting.  Consider the 90s when computer games were first put squarely onto the consciousness of the business world with names like Myst and Doom.  Doom is the testosterone laden first person shooter that spawned a whole genre of imitators, Myst was its vaguely endogenous cousin.  Today games companies aren’t so quick to follow the success of Myst.  But Doom clones, with its easily replicable formula can be mass produced for decades to come.  As the Gamer’s Manifesto says, the business of creating games today has become expensive with stratospheric graphics demands, risk (and creativity) has become the exception not the norm and that’s too bad.  Without software companies willing to take risks we’re going to miss out on future Mysts.  Even if you didn’t care for Myst (I was too busy with Doom to care about Myst) the death of less successful games that follow a different direction makes the industry that much less as a whole.

It seems gaming will remain an adolescent boy domain (and for us old boys who just can't catch on to this grown up thing) for some time.  As an aging gamer I don’t know how many more years I can hack wandering corridors killing suicidal zombies bereft of any decent AI, and games that blatantly cheat as a substitute for so called challenge.  Multiplayer just doesn’t do it for me like it used to.  In 1998 I agreed it was the wave of the future and was hungry for more.  But in 2005 I’ve had about enough of getting handily mopped up at any game I play by potty mouthed 15 year olds with not much else going on in their lives.  I’m starting to return to single player games.  Unfortunately the art of storytelling and meaty content is lost, traded in for the massively multiplayer game features.