Everybody gets carried away with the technology. When the technology gets more usable… Then the story tellers get more to the forefront. My hope is, but I can’t tell you when it will be, that we reach the peak in perfection so that the consumer doesn’t see the difference in technology anymore – then it is a pure race for entertainment.
Chris Crawford Michael Samyn Gerhard Florin (Electronic Arts)
Source: News.com via Gamesindustry.biz
Indeed. I can’t wait for the arms race to be over. But Mr. Florin is smart to not put a date on this. The truth is that, despite the glossy pictures from the next gen consoles, the technology is actually still quite crude. In fact, it is still so primitive that it takes entire teams of engineers to make the hardware respond in an acceptable fashion. The technology needs to become excessively powerful so that everyone can experiment with it without the risk of bringing performance to a crawl or crashing the machines. We’re still a long way from that level.
And when we achieve such extreme hardware performance, we can finally start working properly on solving the real problems of interactive entertainment. I agree with Mr. Florin that things will get interesting then. But just making way for “the story tellers” is not enough. They need to learn how to work with this technology, how to tell stories in interactive media, how to make things look and feel and sound the way we want. There’s a lot of work to be done. I can’t wait for the builders to leave the kitchen, so we can finally start cooking!
I feel that you hit the nail on the head. But I feel the tech race will never really end in the world of games. We just need to hope those builders will get distracted long enough to cook something tasty.
Reminds me of the printing industry; when writing was new (well, I say new) you just had monks copying out the bible over and over again. Then education hit, and you got all these greats writing wonderful stories.