As the videogame industry has struggled to remain profitable in recent years, a television-centric approach to doing business has grown more appealing. After years of experimentation at the margins, episodic gaming is becoming a credible alternative to the old business model of selling a single boxed game in a store.
Most of these changes have little to do with improving the player's experience and are instead corporate reactions to changes in the market that have made their games suddenly seem less worthwhile in comparison to all the alternatives. But the rise of serialized gaming is a way of postponing change, not embracing it.
Halo 4's Spartan Ops mode is the most dramatic advance into a serialized television model. The mode tells a separate story from the single-player game, and is meant to be played in cooperative groups, supplanting Halo: Reach's Firefight mode. 343 has stated that Halo 4 starts a new trilogy for Master Chief, so the addition of still another story-based mode in between the acts of a larger series is a bizarre kind of excess -- almost an acknowledgement of how the game's stories have become near meaningless explanations that always end with players back where they started, advancing through a series of laser gladiator arenas.
http://feeds.ign.com/~r/ign/all/~3/ca89Oq5yj70/are-games-learning-the-wrong-lessons-from-tv
No comments:
Post a Comment