The Technocrats

Executive editor Greg Kasavin has spent a lot of quality time in Tamriel lately. Urge him back to reality at greg@gamespot.com.

[Editor's Note: GameSpot's Freeplay columns have returned! And in a slightly modified format. In order to make the columns more open-ended, new editions of Freeplay no longer use the last paragraph of the previous column as the lead-in. Let us know your thoughts by posting in the Feature Stories Forum.]

You don't know how disappointed I was to have missed the Game Developers Conference for the second year in a row. It's a good thing I was busy playing one of the best role-playing games I've ever played in my life, otherwise I'd have had more time to dwell on it. At least I got a vicarious thrill from reading all the insights and critique coming out of the show from practically every industry luminary I could think of, except for maybe Hideo Kojima and Peter Molyneux, neither of whom had much of a presence in San Jose this year. Coming out of that show (or just from reading about it), there's a tremendous amount of thought-provoking material to consider. There are all different angles, from the idea that games could be life-changing for better or worse to the trials and tribulations of being an upstart developer. However, there's a shared theme to it all, an interesting undercurrent...sort of a "human spirit always prevails" type of optimism that's genuinely inspiring and encouraging, especially if you're into games.

Reading about what the various speakers at GDC had to say, I was filled with the sense that, above all, it's good to have these type of people in charge. And what a strange, unfashionable feeling to have that is. There's the sense out there that nobody quite knows what's going to happen, but the leaders of the game industry seem quite frank and comfortable about it. The wheels of change are in motion, and everybody's trying to stay on top of it, taking advantage of new technological trends, responding to the growing market for games, getting smarter and more experienced as businesses...even getting more socially conscious.

In short, that rough-cut, torn-jeans-wearing game industry that always needed to grow up seems like it's finally growing up after all, and while there's still plenty of anxiety in the air, there's also the sense that, in the end, everything's going to be all right. Gaming might be losing its innocence, but other than that, it's getting better.

It was interesting to realize this notion, even as I was spending more and more time playing Oblivion, becoming increasingly awestruck by how I had to constantly remind myself that some people out there actually made this game. I've been playing games for long enough to where it could be easy for someone like me to be nostalgic for the way things were, the days before ESRB ratings, before game publishers were publicly traded companies, before games needed to simultaneously launch in multiple languages on multiple platforms, and so on and so forth.

There was a certain purity to gaming back then, a sense that developers simply needed to realize their vision to make a successful game. Things seem so much more complicated now. But is it complicated-bad or complicated-good?

Complicated-good. We all had reason to be skeptical about the promises of the next generation of games, so it's amazing to see that those promises weren't straight-up lies. Recent games such as Oblivion and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter haven't just impressed me, they've pretty much blown me away. My jaw never actually drops, and I never exclaim "wow!" because I'm not that type of guy. But when I'm playing these games, I'm sitting there quietly stunned. Where did this come from? These games really are a cut above most of the stuff I was playing only a matter of months ago. It's really hard to go back to playing "normal" games after playing stuff like this.

I often wonder whether, eventually, we'll all start to take attention to detail in games for granted. When I play Oblivion and one of its characters tells me, "You look like you've swung a mace or two in your time," I grin ear to ear...yes, my friend, I have swung many a mace in the dozens of hours I've spent playing this game thus far. So good of you to notice. But I know that the reason this type of subtle detail made it into the game isn't because there's a little man inside my television who's actually impressed with my expertise in blunt weapons; it's because some combination of programmers, designers, technicians, and artists made time to throw that into the game. What's the value of this feature? If it weren't in the game, would Oblivion be any worse for wear? No...not really.

But that's wrong. It would be worse. The reason this game is resoundingly successful is because it's filled with this type of thing--all those little details that other games can't justify. It's these little details that we'll all take for granted one day as the bare minimum of what should be expected from a similar game; but for now, it's the details that are so cutting edge. Who could have come up with all that, and more importantly, how did they get it to work? When I sit down to play a game, and especially when I sit down to review one, I tend to avoid spending any time thinking about the people who worked on it. But with a game like Oblivion, I can't help but wonder what sort of people could have pulled something like this together. Forget about comparing Oblivion to other games...it's an amazing, creative achievement by any measure.

And then it occurs to me that the people who made this game are the same people who took time out for the Game Developers Conference, and it all makes sense. Above all, these people are concerned not so much with the advancement of their profession, but with finding new ways to manifest their ideas into something nearly tangible. Is there even a word for how games are? When they're at their best, you can just bask in them. It seems like all my life I've been waiting for games to finally earn the legitimacy they deserve, and now it's finally happening with each passing week--now they look and sound about as vivid as our imaginations, or at least mine, always helped make them. Now our imaginations are free to consider what other types of experiences we'd like to try, and the possibilities are endless.

Next Up: Freeplay by Carrie Gouskos