The Game Industry

If the games industry was'nt around, I would never be writing this blog, so in a way im really glad it is, as I feel it allows me to freely express my views about, well things.
In the last 20 years games and their companys have changed to suit their financial situation.
In other words it has been said by Chris Crawford that "video games are dead."
(Chris Crawford is the man standing in the picture below giving a lecture at standford 2003)
Chris Crawford is featured in an interview displayed in full on:
http://gamasutra.com/features/20060612/murdey_01.shtml


In this interview he explains how he sees the state of the industry today as apose to the industry during the 80's.
He beleives that their is no new ideas in todays market and that by producing the same "recycled" ideas they will never encourage new customers to the gaming world.
In his belief and I would have to agree, that looking at the the gaming industry during the 80's. The ideas of which were made and designed were never before seen and the same could be said about all of industrys history before that.
But it begs the question, is the industry dead. I dont believe it is because as I have mentioned in a past blog. Me and sophie had a chat about how far games can go and is their any limit to how far we can push them.
And we came to the conclusion that their had to be a limit to one factor in particular and that was Graphics. We had decided and agreed that the graphics of a game can only get as realistic as real life itself, and that to surpass that was way beyond technology we have todate.
This would then either cause the inevertable death of games that Crawford seems so adament will happen if new ideas are not created, or in some attempt to secure their futures. Companys will be forced to experiment with never before seen elemnts.
In my oppinion I think that that will make for interesting watching and makes me glad that I might be apart of its future.
Working in the industry at the moment can vary not only on your position in it but who you are positioned with. In conversations with various tutors I have heard about a student who went to work for a top games company and then left because he felt it was to structured.
If that is true and they are to structured, does that mean that maybe Crawford is right and because of this strict structure to how a game is made is applied to all of them then they truely are recycling the same ideas and leaving absolutely no room for imagination.
This I find to be very dissapointing indeed as it is my love of just thinking up random things and getting my imaginative juices really flowing that got me into wanting to be apart of the industry in the first place. Which gets me thinking about our drawing work this week about creating a character. It has taken a huge amount of thinking and just plain old imagination to conjer up these wier but usually fantastic ideas.
I over hear people talking and they cant help themselves give these characters an identity and even a whole world around them. I cant talk as I have done exactly the same.
But at the end of the day if that imagination is still their and people are still experimenting, then maybe there is hope for the games industry after all. Maybe?
Till next time cya.