Gaming Industry: New Year Resolutions

A video game enthusiast spells out some steps developers can take to help 2009 match last year's great strides

By Adam Swiderski

The art of game design made a strong showing in 2008, with innovation and excellence coming in packages both big (Mirror's Edge) and small (Braid). We got some of the greatest sequels ever created (Metal Gear Solid 4, Fallout 3 and Grand Theft Auto IV, to name just a few), and new properties sure to have franchise legs (LittleBigPlanet). It's going to be hard to top the past year in terms of great games, but there are a few key steps developers can take to ensure that 2009 is just the start of something big. Here, then, is our list of New Year's resolutions for the people on the production side of the games industry. Take heed, developers, and prepare to be excellent.

Keep Listening

It's incredibly difficult to spend hours, weeks, months and years of your life working on a labor of love game, only to put it out into the world and listen to people tear it apart. But rest assured, developers, the people who are raising the loudest voices over every little flaw, foible and f-up in your game are doing so out of LOVE. Nobody wants you to succeed more than they do, because they want only the best experience every time they play. It's understandable that you can't take every point of criticism or if-only-it-had-this-feature forum post into account, but there is plenty to be learned by listening to the people who are spending their time and money on your efforts. Listen, learn and incorporate as much as you can into your work.

Don't Equate Mainstream With Dumb

Thanks to the success of some of the more family-oriented stuff on the Wii, we're seeing a bit of a trend toward dumbing things down in order to reach the broadest possible audience. This is a cop-out. Please, spare us more commercials featuring super-generic cool kids yukking it up around a console and TV, laughing at inappropriate times and making it look like gaming is "hip." Grand Theft Auto became a pop culture touchstone without dumbing itself down. Starcraft sold a bazillion copies. Even The Sims had a level of complexity that makes the simplified stuff on the horizon seem downright primitive. Take a lesson from the failure of the Madden "All-Play" titles. People want good games, and will take the time to learn how to use TWO whole buttons if that's what it takes. Honest.

Beat World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft is great, and deserving of its status as the 900-pound gorilla of the gaming world. But as fans of video game football can tell you, competition is a good thing, and it's not healthy for the genre for the massively-multiplayer online RPG arena to have one name dominant for this long. There were some contenders in 2008—Warhammer Online offered a more PVP-focused experience, while Lord of the Rings Online was a viable alternative for Tolkien fans and players who prefer to solo—but you know things have gotten bad when even industry insiders are grumbling that any MMO without Warcraft in its name is doomed from the get-go. Perhaps Bioware will lead the charge with Star Wars: The Old Republic (despite whatever damage Lucas has done in the past decade, there are still few licenses stronger than that born in a galaxy far, far away), but it's time for other developers to step up, too. Azeroth awaits your challenge!

For the Love of All That's Holy, Don't Sell Your Film Rights to Uwe Boll

Seriously, this man must be stopped. It doesn't matter if, somewhere in his black, black soul, he has the potential to make a good movie—the damage he's already done to the very concept of video games as a viable source for quality films negates any future good that he might do. And this goes for every studio hack who would churn out childish crap like the DOOM movie (ooh, a "first-person" sequence! Whee!) and expect gamers to line up at the box office. There are developers working overtime crafting interesting stories for their games, worlds full of characters that would light up the big screen... and, instead, we get Postal. Peter Jackson's involvement, brief as it was, in the development of a Halo film was a good first step, but the time is now for games to get their cinematic due.