User blog comment:Draevan13/The streamlining of the Elder Scrolls series, and some Skyrim flaws./@comment-3492791-20121112055543/@comment-3492791-20121113045406

Technological advancement and game design are not the same thing. While it is perfectly reasonable for technology to become more easily accessible to the everyman, video games, and entertainment as a whole really, is not trying to make things more accessible, they are trying to make things more marketable.

It all comes down to profit. What can they do to get the most revenue with the least expense. Clearly charging crazy amounts of money to purchase the game won't work, as no one will buy the game if it's too expensive. So the best strategy is to keep prices lower (but not that low >_>) and make a marginal profit off each copy, but sell a lot of copies. So who the audience of your game is and who it can be marketed to becomes very important. And it seems one of the first rules in entertainment is that if it worked before, it will work again.

It takes a lot of money to produce games quickly, and the publishers have all the money. So publishers buy up all the developers and regulate what they can do. If you present an idea to the publishers, they have to like it, or you won't get any of the money you need to make it. If it doesn't have a guaranteed profit potential, they won't like it. So new and interesting ideas are usually shot down as being risky. So as this process continues on and on the market starts to blend together into a lot of versions of almost the same game being sold by different people all competing to catch your eye with their ironically dull brown/grey landscapes. I mean look at Nintendo. They have made an entire company off of releasing the same game with a different sub-title for 20-something years.

So now that the revenue has been assured, they move on to limiting the costs. This is usually accomplished by the focusing of efforts on key features while lesser ones are given less attention. Sadly most of the time "key features" end up being graphics and gimmicks while "lesser features" end up being story and gameplay innovation. The majority of effort is put on how the game appearance on the surface, while the underlying substance is ignored. And, although I hate to say it (but not really that much because i'm a cynic) this has a lot to do with the actually market itself.

The majority of the core-gamer base are adolescent males. Most of adolescents in current generations have lost patience with the Instant gratification generation. Thus small things like subtlety and story are usually ignored by the many gamers just here for the action. People like things that look cool and make you feel cool, not provide interesting gameplay experences and thought provoking stories. Feel free to call me one of those Game are art snobs but I feel that video games can be a powerful medium or interactive storytelling (See Shadow of the Collosus and Spec Ops: The Line).

Granted that isn't what it's all about, as no matter how good your story is it's not a book, and you can't call it a game without some gameplay. Good gameplay can sometimes eliminate the need for a story entirly. I don't remember anyone ever playing Pacman and every asking what he ever did to make those ghost try to kill him, or what he needs all those pellets for. Pure simple gameplay can sometimes be satifying on it's own without needing to be bogged down with piss poor attempts at stringing together some sort of relevant plot. Simple, eat pellets, avoid ghosts...unless you eat the big pellet, then you can eat the ghosts too, and there's fruit, eat that too...and if you go off the side of the map you appear on the othersid- GGAAAHHHH IT'S TOO COMPLICATED!

When a game fails at both of these however, it is not good in any respect. Shallow gameplay, shallow story, shallow grave.

I feel like I may have gotten off topic. what were we talking about again?