in my previous and first TL blog i mentioned how the late nineties were a kind of golden age for video games while my list had four fps games in it with the most recent one released 1999. in this blog i want to start to explore how first person shooters have changed over the last 20 years, and explain why this development left me cold and where i see a light at the end of the tunnel.

part 1: doubling down on graphics

every medium is directly influenced by advancements in technology. moore's law was in full effect until recently: the performance of computing hardware made leaps every odd year and only now with the advent of mobile computing we see more improvements in terms of smaller and more power efficient transistors instead of simply more powerful ones.

since wolfenstein 3d, every new generation of shooters was a competition: who could take the biggest advantage of faster processors and better graphic cards, with the highest resolution textures and smoothest effects. but with every incremental improvement, development time and budget had to increase exponentially, and other parts of game design seem to have been neglected. while games have become prettier, they also became shorter, less complex, less imaginative, less challenging (both mechanically and intellectually).



that's a very natural process that has been documented in other mediums as well, look at the history of western visual art, and paintings in particular. as david hockney well proved, from the middle ages onwards the improvements in optical technology changed the medium radically: with the help of camera obscuras, lenses and projection artists could depict scenes and humans in a much more realistic, natural way. the process became increasingly complex over the curse of a few hundred years, and by the dawn of the 19th century painting had become a time consuming craftsmanship and each piece was a process of month to years of hard work.



the side effects were very pronounced: because it took such a long time to complete a painting, all work was done inside a studio, and to recover the costs of months of dedicated painting the artists made only agreeable and sellable art: portraits of wealthy persons, still lifes, depictions of historic or biblical events, and dramatic landscapes. if you take a look at the art of the time, it's all amazing craftsmanship but little to none imagination, creativity or threshold of originality.



that sounds to me just like the triple-A video game industry today. so what happened to art, and what could happen to games? first of all, photography happened. suddenly it became incredible easy and faster to create a lifelike image of reality. while the first photographic images were very much inferior to the big paintings in terms of accuracy, resolution or color, the technology advanced quickly and replaced more and more of the functions art had. first of course representation, with portrait photography spreading like wildfire. suddenly it was much more affordable to hang up a family portrait on your wall.

second, there was born a generation of painters who believed that the long and tedious studio process produced boring and lifeless images. so they went outside and created very quick, vivid and spontaneous impressions of the nature and life surrounding them. first they were mocked and not taken seriously by the art establishment, but soon they were finding success and others followed their footsteps, taking their principles further one step at a time.



art experienced an explosion of creativity as soon as painters let go of the boundaries that were imposed by the requirement to depict reality as close as possible. after impressionism there followed expressionism, futurism, cubism, fauvism, pointillism, bauhaus, minimalism up to post-modernism. after centuries of stagnation, the concept of visual arts had been totally transformed within a time span of less than 50 years.



the next technological leap is next to impossible to spot from the present, so it's hard to tell what exactly may be the medium that challenges video games to change in order to stay relevant. maybe it's already upon us, but still making baby steps. maybe it has not been invented yet. but there's already a generation of young developers who refuse to make games the way the big studios do them: aka the indies.

i do not want to draw a direct parallel between the impressionists of the past and the current indie scene, but games like minecraft, receiver, warsow and amnesia have spark in them that's missing from the big budget low risk triple-A titles. and even the big guns in the industry suddenly start experimenting with riskier and uncommon concepts, like farcry: blood dragon or portal. while we still get a new call of duty every year, the signals are pointing to a more interesting, more volatile future. here's to the crazy ones.