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The Week Ending January 18, 2000

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Happy New Year! Welcome to another year of the Gist List here at GameSlice, where each week I give you a round up of the gaming industry as I see it.
Modem Gaming
If there's one unspoken truth in the gaming industry, it's the simple fact that most action games don't run very well on 56K or slower modems. Sure, some games are better than others, but on average, the Internet gaming experience for action games over a modem pales to what you experience over a network or faster cable/DSL modem. Well, last week news broke out that Cisco Systems along with a huge group of gaming developers are banding together to hopefully solve the dial-up gaming lag once and for all with Powerplay.
From the outset, I'm glad to see developers tackling this issue head-on, instead of blaming the end-user's ISP or modem speed. Even though online gaming is developing into an important segment of gaming, I challenge anyone to have a really fun and big deathmatch game on a dialup 56K modem. If you are battling folks on cable modems, you might as well just turn off your computer in my experience.
With smart developers such as Epic and Valve on board for PowerPlay, I am optimistic about the results, but also mindful of the fact that modem gaming is a big hurdle to overcome. Although it has been suggested users might have to pay for Powerplay, let's hope it goes "open source" as soon as possible. I don't think anyone is going to be willing to pay for something they expect right out of the box (i.e. fast modem gaming).
Passive vs. Interactive
For my final Behind the Games article of 1999, I had the pleasure of talking to 23 of gaming's greatest designers about where they see the industry going next. If you're interested in this extensive article, you can read it here at GameSpot.
One particularly interesting aspect of the article involves comparing and contrasting how different designers answered the same questions. For instance, I was surprised at just how many designers said they still see passive entertainment as always being the dominant form over interactive entertainment. Why? They say human nature is to be lazy. While I certainly agree that we're always going to have non-interactive forms of entertainment, I think a stigma has developed even among designers who think interactive has to mean "hard" and "laborious." The challenge of a good game design is to make a product which is accessible to the audience and makes them quickly forget they are playing a game.

I agree with the designers that I'd probably rather watch a movie or read a book than play most of the game's released today, but that's because most of the games have poor interfaces and turn out to be a hassle to play. In the future, I think interactive entertainment has a huge upside, but only if designers have the primary task at hand of creating an accessible fun experience – A world that isn't necessarily a white-knuckle challenge, but rather an immersive experience. When we reach critical mass with those types of games, I think we are going to see passive entertainment become much less interesting.

Next, read about Sega Rally 2, variety in gaming, and more >>>