The "Enginefication" of Games

say is i played a ton of games when i was little like a ton i mean this is the era of like rampant piracy where everyone copied like floppy disks and crap like that and i bought games if i ever had any money i bought the boxed versions of games as well and my parents would buy them for me as well as like a gift or whatever and i played

I mean, I don't want to know how many games, but it would have been probably easily in the hundreds as a child across tons of systems, Commodore 64, Amiga, and PC over the years, as well as Atari 2600, ColecoVision, and...

that probably is it for home systems and i we never had a nintendo entertainment system but i played it at like friends house occasionally right so i played a lot more games when i was little uh than i do now and there's a couple different reasons for that one is obviously maybe more busy uh and also uh i mean well there's a lot of reasons but i do still play games fairly frequently and i guess what i would say is

my interest in gaming is still there but i've noticed that i think one of there was like a downside to so there's kind of like a there's kind of like a thing where like people started using engines instead of making engines and naively you would think and i think i probably would even think

had I not experienced it myself, that that's probably just mostly good.

It's like, well, if you think about it purely from a separation of labor kind of a thing, there's going to be people who are really good at making engines, and the chances that you will have those people and also really great game designers is lower than being able to do both separately.

If I'm a great game designer,

i don't know john carmack how am i going to make wolfenstein or whatever right i'm not because he's the only person to make that at the time well there may be a couple of people right but it's like mostly just him two other guys or whatever so naively i think like okay so we have unity and unreal and these things now that's probably good

Unity's, I have issues with it in terms of the quality of the output of the engine, but that's more, I think it would have been nice if it had better technical underpinnings, right?

That's a different statement than the one I'm about to make about what happened with the engineification of things.

It feels like the degree of creativity in games has dropped dramatically since the engineification.

i don't know why that is it may have nothing to do with the engineification it may have more to do with just the lifetime of games could be the engines have nothing to do with that and it's just the lifetime but i'll give you an anecdote i went back uh uh two years ago four years ago i you know and i don't even know when i went back i went back to my parents house

visit them occasionally they live back in massachusetts i went back and the calico vision just old home console they they still have it and uh i i took it out i sort of tried to get a controller working of course they're so old and broken a lot of times like there's only one controller where all the directions still work things like this right because the contacts are old and all this other stuff and i just go through the cartridges i just start playing the cartridges

every single game i played was different and most of them we don't even have games like them today disability different i like playing i'm like venture ladybug mousetrap uh uh pepper two there's like all this stuff they're all different

Congo Bongo, and then Donkey Kong Jr. All the games, the mechanics are totally different.

And nowadays, you buy games, if it's a AAA game, there's only one mechanic.

You move the character with the left stick, and you push buttons on the right side to do some attacks, and there's a giant menu system to do all, like, where's the skill tree, and learn the new, like, try and fight.

It's the same game.

You can't even open a AAA game without five minutes in being told to push some button to crouch in the tall grass to avoid being seen by enemies.

Every single one.

It doesn't matter which game.

They're all the same, right?

And so we ended up in this place where big games, like the ones that you would buy in a store, like the old ColecoVision games, they're all the same.

You can buy indie games and there are some creative games happening in that space.

And I can name certain ones like, you know, Return of the Obra Dinn is an example.

Same where someone came up with like totally new mechanic, kind of.

You could point to things that existed before.

I was like, no, this is completely different.

And whether you like it or not, it doesn't really matter.

It's new.

The game was written from scratch with the engine.

So it kind of supports your theory.

no it wasn't it wasn't it's unity really right i think so okay okay okay i think so okay it doesn't really need any engine stuff right because it's just you walk around a 3d environment so it's the kind of thing you can do in a walking simulator and they came up with a good sort of thing to put on top of that right so there are times that people are making these really creative new ideas that are interesting to play right

But most of the time when I boot up a game, it's just a game I already played with a new skin on top, right?

And that's wearing on me a bit.

So I find that a lot of times now I just like my attitude going into games is kind of bad.

So it's like, well, I'm just going to play some tonight and they're probably only going to be bad and then they are, right?

And by bad, I don't really mean like low quality because that might be true.

There might be high quality, like Horizon Forbidden West or whatever, like the quality is incredibly high.

the game is just there's no game i've already done all these things there's nothing i'm gonna do in this game i haven't already done right and so uh it's like my brain is getting kind of tired of it and i wish that i had more things and part of that might be like

better discovery there's probably some indie games out there right now that we're doing some things that i would find fun and interesting i just don't know about them because there's so there's 10 000 games released a year or whatever how do you find the good ones right um but the other problem i think is that like well because you don't have to program the game from scratch

you're very likely to make something that's whatever you can do straightforwardly in one of these tools.

Like whatever's the easiest thing to make in Unreal Engine, which is this set of games in some shape, and whatever's the easiest things to make in Unreal, that's what you're most likely to make because you all are starting at this point.

So I don't think it was true that all the people who made the Colecovision cartridges were better game designers.

I bet they were worse game designers a lot of times than some of the people making these fairly derivative titles in Unity or something.

But because they had to start from nothing, they weren't forced towards what is the easiest thing to make in this already existing toolset, which is walking around a 3D environment and pushing a button to do something.

And so I don't know.

I don't know if the engines have to do that or not.

I think you obviously can make new experiences in these engines, but I just think maybe people aren't as inclined to do so.

Another aspect of it that I'm sure doesn't help, that has nothing to do with engines, is the barrier to entry getting too high.

Yes, you don't have to make an engine, but no, you can't get away with the kind of art that you were shipping in ColecoVision.

I mean, that's below even the acceptable art, pixel art-wise, that people do now.

So...

a lot of your attention is focused towards sequencing animations and importing sprite sheets all these things they really have to do because there was very little that they could fit in memory in the first place so that was not going to be much of it right so yes they had to make the engine yes that was a bunch of work that you don't have to do excuse unity but also you're having to marshal all of this other stuff that they never had to think about at all right yeah um so yada yada yada right