The gaming sphere (myself included) debated about whether E3 had gone too far and had the ultraviolent kinds of game on show were representative of games any more. Many a journalist reflected on their personal feelings of depression in the wake of the show, thinking that for all the high talk games had not really moved on. All fair points, but studios go to the extreme like that for a reason.
They need the coverage, even if bad, because obscurity is the enemy of all creative endeavour. If you're not remarkable then you're not remarked-upon, and that means you're invisible - so nobody buys your game. Ideally game makers would all love to be talked about for their design, technology or aesthetics, but those attributes are often unreliable. A splashy, gory, over-the-top video though? Money in the bank, or so they think.
The problem is that that kind of extremity eventually gives way to apathy, and from there it's a short hop to commoditisation. The approach of being bigger/better/faster/harder than the other guy ultimately results in a bland white noise where even the most shocking act is no longer really that shocking. In this, the E3 games industry may find itself traveling down the same sorry path as the adult entertainment industry.
When Sex No Longer Sells
Ethical debates about adult entertainment aside, one of the most interesting things about it as an industry is how often it has been at the forefront of trends that affect all other digital media. Its producers were among the first to figure out how to deliver video content online, how to monetise content, outsource and market it. The industry has proved endlessly inventive in how, where and by what means its content is delivered, and it tends to have a very bottom-line approach. In adult film it's all about user acquisition, retention and conversion to customers at every opportunity.
So in these times of analytics and measurement you would think that it's boom times. Not so. According to Louis Theroux, the adult industry is in dire straits, with many performers unable to find work and sales in many genres having collapsed. The problems seem to stem from three main areas: Over-supply (it doesn't cost much to produce a film), a lack of sociality (not many people really want to share their proclivities with their Facebook friends), and the proliferation of free sites.
This last in particular is often blamed because it commoditised the product into a free video, which - when combined with oversupply - means that there is so much product available that nobody ever needs to pay. And they have no reasons to share. (This is also why many musicians are terrified of Spotify).
What always happens in any market where there is a glut of over-supplied average content is that some producers decide to try and differentiate. They look for an angle that will get them talked about, regardless of the tone of that coverage, so that they won't be invisible. That can take many forms, from the slow building of a tribe and a marketing story to the over-the-top push to extremity to try and create shock and awe. And this is largely where porn went.
Adult content today is much harder than it used to be, according to many former performers. It's meaner, more violent and brutal. It's also much more functional, with many of the pretenses of story (such as in the Boogie Nights era) washed away in favour of identifying the product by genre, act, performer and so on. The various genres have diversified and diversified some more, to the point that the product is thoroughly atomised.
And yet even despite all of that pushing to the edges and forking of content into sub-divisions, the industry continued to hollow out from within. In the end of the day even the most extreme content became freely available (legitimately and illegitimately) and the places where extremity could go ran out. And so the industry as a whole shrank. Porn (like games, music, books, movies etc) has never been more widely available, and yet has never been less valuable.
Bigger/Better/Faster/Harder
In the Kano model of customer satisfaction there are three kinds of attributes: threshold (stuff that users expect to be there), linear (stuff that users consider useful, if predictable, improvements) and delights (stuff that users didn't expect).
Another way to think of linear attributes is the urge to be bigger, better, faster or harder. It's things like the the razorblade industry's push to have 3, then 4, then 5, then a strip, then 2 strips and so on on their blades. Bigger/better/faster/harder also represents the overwhelming tone of marketing in the PC industry, with numbers like processor speed and RAM and graphics chips and so on all buzzing about the vast majority of products. It's always about who has the biggest number.
The problems with linear attributes, however, are twofold. First: they often become threshold attributes. PC customers now expect a lot of functionality in baseline machines, which means that a manufacturer has a lot of bases to cover. Second: the numbers eventually become meaningless when the user cannot tell the difference. 6 razor blades and 3 strips is beyond the point of nonsensical, for example. And PC sales have stalled as users no longer really feel the difference between cheap and expensive products. When that happens, prices drop.
In the adult entertainment sector this is what the free sites effectively did. Going free was the only way to meaningfully compete as oversupply and a lack of new ways to be extreme took hold. In supermarkets the Wal-Mart effect does the same thing with food, clothing and other products. PCs, porn and packets of gum have all simply become commodities. And the risk in that model is primarily to the producer whose prices can't drop.
Enter AAA E3 big bad console game mega-publishers.
It's easy to point at social game makers and paint them in the equivalent role of the free video site, but actually the threat to the mega-publisher model comes from all sides. Jonathan Blow is every bit as much a problem for AAA games as Mark Pincus, as are tens of thousands of app developers. While those markets have their own oversupply issues, they also have vast capabilities of cheap distribution and either free, freemium, or pretty darned cheap retail business models. They can do this because their team sizes are generally much smaller than a AAA team.
AAA teams are not simply over-staffed, they operate in markets where the audience is driven more by a desire for perfection rather than innovation. Activision can look at ways of making Call of Duty a freemium product, but not if that means dropping its production values. Those production values have become threshold attributes, and thus far attempts to streamline that process (such as with procedural content) have largely failed. So the only option they have is to be even bigger/better/faster/harder than before, which means more manpower.
When this cycle started in the early 90s, bigger/better/harder/faster was easy. It was better graphics and physics, who had the most cars, the best water effects, the most licensed sports stars and the biggest game world, the most game modes, the most weapons or the biggest explosions? These and other questions have been answered linearly by game after game for decades.
While some new inventions have also appeared during that time, in the main the formula continued. Big budget games tend to exist within a narrow set of genres (racing, shooting, sports, real-time strategy, platform and roleplaying games mostly) and are littered with conventions of form. We also have a matured audience, whose expectations are defined by cultural as well as functional attributes. So bigger/better/faster/harder went on and on, but it started to run into some limits.
The Uncanny Valley steadfastedly refuses to budge no matter how much money is thrown at it, and so perceptible improvements in animation have slowed to a crawl. Physics and other simulation elements likewise are now indistinguishable. Level design, open world structures, different doll modes and so on all also hit a natural point beyond which they don't seem to be evolving.
Bigger/better/faster/harder has become harder to define. With every feature considered a threshold feature and every competitor having the same roster of features, the sense of commoditisation grows. Some game makers try to make less obvious attributes into those which can be expressed linearly (such as using storytelling as a way to talk about better animation systems), but the market often finds those harder to relate to. Bigger explosions are easily demonstrated, but better character development? Not so much.
And that's where the need to shock comes from.
Shock and Yawn
Competitors who can't differentiate on product often try to do so on message. Cars, for example, are mostly identical machines with little meaningful difference in how they operate, their mileage or their reliability. So car manufacturers have taken to producing expensive adverts which try to sell the car on experience, and this too becomes an exercise in extremity. How many car adverts do you see these days where the act of simply getting into the vehicle is portrayed as stepping into some sort of hyper-reality, for example?
What was frenetic and kinetic the first time becomes bland and apathetic the hundredth time if it always follows the same formula. What was shocking in the year 2000 is now barely worth mentioning. What was considered very violent in the days of Carmageddon is now just blood and pixel effects in a game trailer whose name you can't even recall.
So this is why the art industry is not really about paintings and statues any more, but of installations, graffitti and diamond skulls. It's why fashion houses often produce bizarre outfits that nobody would actually wear. It's why videos are so important to the music industry, the more controversial the better. It's why Lady Gaga wore a dress made of meat. All of these activities are attempting to rise above the norm, to be bigger/better/faster/harder and more extreme. So that the viewer, reader or player will remember.
For AAA publishers, the equivalent is the ultraviolent trailer.
It is in the nature of gameplay to destroy, and arguably death is the meta-subject of all games. In fact, it has to be this way. Killing a zombie, taking a bishop and digging through the Minecraft dirt are all change-making acts, and that's why players play games. A game helps you feel successful by causing lasting change, and so death is always nearby.
Sometimes that death is visibly violent, but for a reason. Though outwardly shocking, pulling off a special move in a game which results in a lot of carnage is often also the move needed to beat the level, unlock the door or defeat the boss. However sometimes games include violence just to be violent, which I would call ultraviolence. Far from arguing over appropriateness (it's the right of game makers to make what they want and players to play what they want, just as in every other medium), my point is that ultraviolence is often boring.
Ultraviolence is largely just an aesthetic addition to a game, from over-the-top car crash cameras to headshot/zoom angles. They can be pretty exciting or sickening, but even the most extreme example seen 20 times in a row is just another cut scene. It becomes humdrum, yawn-worthy and acquires the air of the threshold feature, just another commodity. A bit of carnival freakshow theatre. That's all.
The real subtext of E3, AAA games and the swerve into ultraviolence is this: It's one last desperate throw of the dice to shock-and-awe players back into becoming premium customers. It's saying "Don't look at all that free gameplay out there on phones and Facebook. It's cheap, but we are premium." in a shower of gore. Just like the adult film producers they are feeling the need to punch through the fog of over-supply before the industry grows holllow. This is also why they want new consoles, a new platform story, and a new hype cycle to start. It's why they hate the very idea of the Ouya.
The big fear is that the Spotify-ification of games will become permanent, that between cheap Steam sales, freemium content and app pricing the markets as we know them will evaporate. It's already happening to handheld games, and so consoles will inevitably follow. And you know what? They will. But bigger/better/faster/harder is not the answer.
Delight
Recently, the biggest successes in porn have not come from some new even harder or more ultra-violent content. It is the return of the parody. The industry, it seems, has rediscovered its Boogie Nights sense of humour. Story, character, costumes and bad acting are all making a comeback in a big way and interested fans are buying. When it seemed that there was nowhere linear left to go, someone figured out a way to go at right angles to everyone else, to think orthogonally.
Orthogonal thinking is where delightful attributes come from, and delightful attributes are the ones that tend to prove most remarkable. Delightful attributes surprise users out of their normal expectations. They are where the next genres come from, and they generate loyalty rather than shock and awe. Delightful attributes are shared, whether that means some very humourous aspect of the game or some bold design decision.
Dear Esther is every bit as much a delight as Draw Something, Minecraft or The Walking Dead because all of them are orthogonal to the games surrounding them. Each deliberately forgoes one or more attributes that the expectant audience might consider linear, or even threshold, and that creates room for the new. Delight is not about bigger/better/faster/harder, nor extremism. It's about difference.
Where extremism tends to fade into apathy, delight endures because it is well remembered. A year from now 95% of the violent trailers of E3 games will no longer be remembered, but Media Molecule's new game Tearaway? That you'll remember.
To be at the front of the wave is to be risky, experimental, small and scrappy. The explorer game maker often does not have a big budget, and even if he did would not really know what to do with it. What he needs is room to feel his way into an idea, to be left alone to see where it takes him. He will often fail, but every once in a while (largely dependent on talent), he'll stumble into something amazing.
To be behind the wave is to be calculated and permutative. This kind of game maker knows the general shape of the game that he's going to make, whether by genre or market, and is figuring out how to make his either best in show, or cash in on a passing trend. Often this kind of game maker is better funded (after all, he can explain what his game is to a potential stakeholder) and can achieve better production values, but is virtually guaranteed never to do something orthogonal.
But all waves die out, and new waves usually have a different shape to their predecessors. So being behind the wave is great as long as the wave is strong, but when it's gone there's no guarantee that the next wave will carry you along like the last one did. Ironically when that kind of threat does present itself, behinders will often just double-down on whatever it is they are used to doing (extreme, bigger, better, faster, harder) until they drown.
Changing from being behind to being ahead of the wave is really hard because it means giving up something. A company like Natural Motion moving over from making high-end console animation systems to a relatively lean game like CSR Racing is not easily done, but the new direction seems to really be working for them. Imagine what kind of effort it takes to change Sony's direction.
Conclusion
Since the turn of the millennium, the number of big game publishers has dwindled. It is conceivable that in five years time there will only be five mega-publishers worldwide, that the average console in the home will be a low-powered Ouya (or Apple TV or something else). The price of gameplay continues to decline, just as the price of filmed sex has. The business model of games marches relentlessly toward providing free gameplay and monetising around it. Again, just like adult entertainment.
So the reaction from mega-publishers to amp up their value is understandable, even if they likely have a limited lifespan. Shock and awe is seemingly the only idea that some of them have, but if so then their time is likely limited.
Time to get ahead of the new wave.
