A washing machine convention

There has been an unusually high amount of negative feedback in the aftermath of this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). The general commentary was something along the lines of few surprises, plenty of snubs for gamers, and that was just the Washington Post. People expected great things, and were disappointed. Me, I just wondered whether that isn't the sort of normalcy the business is heading to. Would journalists complain about too many similar products and lack of innovation when writing about a washing machine convention? Or would they realize that there wasn't much chance of anything revolutionary to start with, and that the new model with the improved child-lock and 10% lower energy consumption is nice enough?

As somebody who has been around since the first Pong console, it appears to me that there are more games around than ever. Hundreds of games are released every year, and that is just from the big names studios on the big platforms, there are thousands more on mobile platforms or from smaller developers. Steam has over 1,500 games. There are over 750 games listed on Wikipedia for the PS3. And nobody can agree on how many MMORPGs there are, as that depends very much on how you define the term. One thing that is for sure is that there are far too many games to play them all.

While the number of games has exploded, the number of game genres has pretty much stayed the same. So with each genre now having so many games, the differences between any two are relatively small. Somebody who isn't into shooters could be forgiven to not be able to tell the difference between Battlefield 3 and the latest Call of Duty. Just like you probably couldn't tell the brand of a washing machine if it wasn't printed prominently on the thing. Just like washing machines, games have become to a certain degree interchangeable. You might have some personal preferences for one or the other, but you could probably play any game of the same genre without any problem if your choice was somehow limited.

I don't think the games of 2012 or the games announced at the E3 are bad. Many are just solid games with small incremental bits of innovation in their respective genre. Take any of them and send them back 10 years in time with a time-machine, and people back there would stand in awe about something we today consider as meh. TERA would have looked brilliant compared to Everquest, UO, and Asheron's Call. It is because we are now so overloaded with games that we end up finding all them a bit boring. It isn't easy to stand out from a crowd if that crowd is so huge. At some point buying a new game becomes as mundane as buying a new washing machine.

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