What I Want. What You Want.

The time has come, the blogger said, to talk of many things.

Well, okay, maybe not so many.


I am very interested in what makes games fun. For me.

But what does that do for you? Not much, I'd wager.


I'm fairly interested in the business of games, because I'm cheap and because it determines what games get made (which flows back into wanting games that are fun. For me).

What does that do for you? I suspect that does a little bit more, because you like to follow the business, see what the trends are.


You asked about graphics. Intel is apparently pushing real time ray tracing. (Intel will always push whatever requires more transistors because they sell those.) John Carmack is apparently talking about voxels and octrees. (Nobody understands John, but he made the industry we have today, and betting against him is unwise.) Nobody's saying much that interests me, though, so I don't write it up.

Graphics are done, for me. If it wasn't for graphics card memory constraints forcing certain textures to be lower resolution, current games like BioShock and Crysis would be about as close to real as I'd ever want. But visuals are just that. If the game is engaging, I don't care.

In fact, I was just talking to Chris the other day about how no FPS has significantly improved on DooM. They've added lots of stuff. But the process of prioritizing and eliminating threats is still the core of the experience. And I don't have more fun doing that in modern games than I did in DooM. The only thing more recent games bring to the table are more convincing environments and extra interactivity, which is usually just used to add puzzles and / or collectathon elements, which DooM had enough of (even too much of).

This is my long and rambling way of explaining why I don't write much about graphics. And even then the biggest paragraph had to be about gameplay. But I write about what I care about. And I've never learned to fake it.