old school vs. new school

I think I understand what you're trying to say, even if your keywords (imho) don't make a lick of sense. First and foremost, as far as the english language goes, you're using synonyms and antonyms, and yet, you approach them from a stance that they are seperate and unique entities.

I would say simulation is a better keyword for how closely a game models "reality"(and I too define reality by meaning realistic within the sphere of the game world).

Abstraction is a better term for moving towards or away from "reality" but both of these things (transparency/opacity) seem to be opposites(by your definition). So perhaps as a game becomes "more transparent" it becomes either more simulated, or more abstract. Transparency works as a metaphor here because one could say that a highly realistic game would be "nearly transparent" in that the game cannot be easily seperated from reality (in the context of the game world), while it becomes more "opaque" as we lose the transparency be it from poor game design, poor graphics, whatever.

Finally, translucence, which is a direct synonym of transparent, definitely needs to be changed. Perhaps ambiguity would be more fitting, but it is important to note that transparency and opacity might be directly related, moreso opacity. As a game becomes more transparent, the player becomes more immersed in the physical images that they are seeing and therefore, there is less need for their imagination to fill in the gaps, lessening the amount of ambiguity in the game.

With that being said, I do think that you're on to something with this theory. While most of today's games become more and more graphics intensive, and as those graphics become more and more life-like, we begin to feel physically transported to another world rather than imaginatively transported. This could be the reason that text-based MUDs continue to thrive despite the multitude of MMOG's flying around. Where one immerses you physically within a game world by sending to your eyes and ears the physical sensation of that game world, the other immerses you mentally in that world as the text descriptions of the scene, much akin to reading a book, fill your mind with mental images of your own creation that will always only play a small second to actual real-life experience.

But I don't think it's safe at all to say that gamers who miss the "old school" are simply more imaginative than gamers who prefer the "new school", especially considering many people ride the fence on this issue and enjoy a fair mixture of both the old and the new. Perhaps as others stated in nerd_boy's post, it is an attempt to recapture something of our youth, considering the younger players now-a-days would think that we were playing on an abacus if they saw a copy of Super Mario Bros. But instead they will create a whole new generation of nostalgia as they fondly recollect UT2004, Counter-Strike, GTA, etc... as the games of their childhood and long for those "Good Ol' Days" when the latest and greatest is full-immersion VR simulators or some other funky thing people have yet to think up.

Anyway, that's my two cents, something to chew on,

Vopisk

"translucent" != "transparent"

I chose the words because I wanted to denote a continuum between farther from reality and closer to reality, with light serving as a metaphor for reality. "Translucent" is the wide grey area between "opaque" and "transparent."

Playing football in Madden '06 is more "transparent" than playing a war game in chess. Final Fantasy 6 is "translucent;" not attempting to directly imitate reality, but supposedly being set in some sort of real, 3d world.

This doesn't have anything to do with nostalgia. I still play old games because they're fun, not because I want to be 13 again. I still play a lot of X-Com, Master of Magic, and Final Fantasy Tactics. I play through LoZelda: LttP and River City Ransom once every year or so, because I enjoy them (Although I play the GBA version of RCR now).

My own theory is that older video games, not having access to realism, were better as "games" and more directly comparable to board games or puzzles (like those blacksmith puzzles made of horseshoes, etc.). Newer video games seem to be moving more toward story telling. In some the designer tells a story, in some the player tells a story, but the story/atmosphere seems more important than the game as such.

I think this fits the opacity analogy. Playing the NES Mario games wasn't about a story or experiencing a world, it was about beating the game. Solitaire is about beating the game. Chess is about beating the other player in a game. The Adventures of Lolo was about the puzzles. I think many gamers "of the new school" would be like "So you're a blue... thing that shoots... eggs? Yeah... I'll just play my games and you just go smoke whatever it is that you smoke...". They aren't interested in enjoying that world any more than gamers "of the old school", but the old school wasn't concerned about the world.

Is it as clear cut as that? No. Is there overlap? Yes. Are there new games that are good "games"? Yes (especially flash games). Do I think that invalidates the conclusion? No.

And, for what it's worth:

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Wikipedia In optics, transparency is the property of allowing light to pass. The opposite property is opacity. ... Translucent materials allow light to pass through them only diffusely, and hence cannot be clearly seen through.

So, translucent would be an apt description of games that are somewhere between the opaque(abstraction) and transparent(simulation). We didn't really need to introduce new terms because we already have the terms "abstract" and "realistic", but I think opacity may be a good analogy to help with the "ambiguous" (not as abstract as chess, but not as realistic as Doom 3) games like Zelda:LttP.

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Original post by Way Walker My own theory is that older video games, not having access to realism, were better as "games" and more directly comparable to board games or puzzles (like those blacksmith puzzles made of horseshoes, etc.). Newer video games seem to be moving more toward story telling. In some the designer tells a story, in some the player tells a story, but the story/atmosphere seems more important than the game as such.

I really dislike the story-telling angle that is so hot right now, but that's another thread.

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I think this fits the opacity analogy. Playing the NES Mario games wasn't about a story or experiencing a world, it was about beating the game.

Actually, I'd say it was all about experiencing the world.

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The Adventures of Lolo was about the puzzles. I think many gamers "of the new school" would be like "So you're a blue... thing that shoots... eggs? Yeah... I'll just play my games and you just go smoke whatever it is that you smoke...".

Yeah, exactly.

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We didn't really need to introduce new terms because we already have the terms "abstract" and "realistic", but I think opacity may be a good analogy to help with the "ambiguous" (not as abstract as chess, but not as realistic as Doom 3) games like Zelda:LttP.

I can't really think of a good word to denote the grey area between "abstract" and "realistic," though. "Ambiguous", is, well, ambiguous. So, I felt the need to craft a metaphor, since I was trying to draw attention to the grey area and how it demands more imagination and is what is most lacking from the new school games.

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Original post by abstractimmersion Quote: I think this fits the opacity analogy. Playing the NES Mario games wasn't about a story or experiencing a world, it was about beating the game. Actually, I'd say it was all about experiencing the world.

I'd agree if by this you meant experiencing the puzzles and gameplay offered by that world, but I think it's unlikely that's what you mean. I think you're enjoying the goombas and pipes as a world to be explored, which is more what I was getting at with "experiencing a world" but less in line with how people talked about these games. People talked about them like puzzles; they abstracted away what little realism the game was dressed up in. Gamers collected "coins" in many games without a coin in sight.

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Quote: We didn't really need to introduce new terms because we already have the terms "abstract" and "realistic", but I think opacity may be a good analogy to help with the "ambiguous" (not as abstract as chess, but not as realistic as Doom 3) games like Zelda:LttP. I can't really think of a good word to denote the grey area between "abstract" and "realistic," though. "Ambiguous", is, well, ambiguous. So, I felt the need to craft a metaphor, since I was trying to draw attention to the grey area and how it demands more imagination and is what is most lacking from the new school games.

Which is why I thought it a good analogy.

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This could be the reason that text-based MUDs continue to thrive despite the multitude of MMOG's flying around. Where one immerses you physically within a game world by sending to your eyes and ears the physical sensation of that game world, the other immerses you mentally in that world as the text descriptions of the scene, much akin to reading a book, fill your mind with mental images of your own creation that will always only play a small second to actual real-life experience.

Looking at how popular books remain in spite of television and interactive storytelling games, I'd say this is a spot-on observation. When playing Zelda on the NES, the graphics and gameplay didn't provide much immersion, but the nature of the story and the limited information that could be conveyed through the game 'interface' (in the broadest sense) stimulated your imagination to provide a great gaming experience.

Today, most games show and tell everything there is to know about the world you play in (which sadly isn't a whole lot in many games today). I think that would be the main defect of today's games, other than that they're lacking the appeal to our childhood nostalgia. To add depth to a game, I think you need to incorporate a decent back story, leave certain bits of information mysteriously underexposed and you'd have to appeal to the player's imagination. 'Old games' had to do this out of necessity, lacking storage space, graphic and sound capabilities and corporate funding.

Lucky for us old fart gamers, some more modern games have returned to these roots. When you take a look at Shadow of the Colossus for example, it's a puzzle game made fun and mysterious because you simply don't have all the answers. And as mr. Aonuma, director of Zelda:WW, stated Link doesn't have voice acting, since that might not match up with the players' mental images of how Link should sound. They actually chose not to use a common feature in video games to give the player more room for his or her fantasy.

Let's just hope this trend I see isn't only wishful thinking [wink]

Quite a true observation, I often find myself becoming visually bored of high-quality games, yet seem to always drift to the old pixel/blocky-3d games. I think there's a certain level of over-saturation in newer games, you see the most amazing mind-blowing countryside, characters and world presented to you, leaving nothing to your imagination. But after that there isn't much else to see, how many times can you be blown away by the same thing? Since it doesn't leave anything to the imagination there isn't much reason to even think about it anymore.

I don't think its entirely a factor of Nostalgia, these old methods are somewhat like styles of Art, you don't see people throwing away charcoal and calling it "Old school" when pastels come along. I see Pixel-Art/2d and other old methods the same way, not obsolete but simply a different method of presentation and style.

As someone who started gaming as old school gaming was coming nearer to its end, I'd have to say that I enjoy both, just as much.

'New school' is obviously much more frequent now, and I love thoses games, and everyso often comes a game that looks old school, or has elements of old school games, I love both just as much really.

I think if Old school games were still in style they wouldn't be the games we love today, and the industry would be bored, and longing for the 'new school' games we have at the moment.

To the "core" of a game, graphics and sound don't mean doodly squat. A piece of drek can have the neatest graphics and sound and be unsatisfying. An old school game I remember as being quite fun was Earthrise. The background was an asteroid was heading toward Earth, a base had been established on it to provide the propulsion to steer it away. Communications with the base had been lost. Go there, find out what happened, stay alive long enough to fix it in time to avoid collision with earth. We are talking 16 available colors, 320x320 available pixels and the very first soundblaster audio card that didn't work with most games so you had to rely on "internal sound". So you took this really crude, boxlike guy around salvaging things like rope and wrenches etc, avoiding torn out ladders etc even taking a honey bee you put in an empty jar to transport it through vacuum to occupy an alien plant while you blew the biosphere up to access the engines room....poor bee. Anyway, it was the unexpected things you encountered in the game that made it fun. It was the imagination of the design not the graphics or the rather pathetic sound.
Being able to use your own imagination is important yes, but equally so is the enjoyment of the other person(s) imagination. I enjoyed the lovely graphics of Fable. I enjoyed the oriental plot twists of Jade Empire. I was tickled by the humor of The Sims. Its important to engage the players imagination but you're only going to do that when you impress, surprise, delight them with your own.
That's what us old farts miss! It doesn't help either that the older you get the less new things are under the sun to surprise and delight us. The nostalgia isn't for the times or the style of games but for that delight it gave us.

i agree with this thread.
Dungeon Master was the greatest rpg ever and i only played it about 5 years ago.

Hmm. I suppose I must be hopelessly newschool then. I need my eyecandy - I could never really get into games until they hit PS1 quality graphics, I just don't find games immersive unless they make some attempt at modeling reality. And I think it's important to point out that I'm not talking about realism in the artistic sense. I love anime art, and western cartoons can also be good; the graphics just need to be high-quality enough that you can consider the characters to be attractive, and read their emotions from their body language and facial expressions. The realism I crave is realism of character psychology and emotions, which of course require a good story for the characters to be acting in.

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Original post by sunandshadow Hmm. I suppose I must be hopelessly newschool then. I need my eyecandy - I could never really get into games until they hit PS1 quality graphics, I just don't find games immersive unless they make some attempt at modeling reality. And I think it's important to point out that I'm not talking about realism in the artistic sense. I love anime art, and western cartoons can also be good; the graphics just need to be high-quality enough that you can consider the characters to be attractive, and read their emotions from their body language and facial expressions. The realism I crave is realism of character psychology and emotions, which of course require a good story for the characters to be acting in.

I think there are pre-PS1 games that fit this. Final Fantasy 4/6, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Evermore, Seventh Saga, Zelda:LttP, etc. are all beautifully done games for the SNES. Several of those even show lots of emotion through the sprites. For example, FF4 didn't do much for "facial expressions", but the body language is surprisingly expressive. Some of it has to do with idioms (e.g. spinning for excitement/surprise. It's a little odd, but no worse than face faults in anime (I think FF4 even used facefaults)), and some of it has to do with movement of characters within the scene (e.g. Rosa's tentative steps toward Cecil in his bedroom as she tries to find out what's wrong).

Pre-SNES, I think the main problem is lack of cartridge space to store enough plot, so I'll give you that.

Like sunandshadow, I need eye candy. In addition, I need games that are about more than reflex times and spatial reasoning and finger contortions to manipulate the gamepad just so... I want ethics, and narrative, and drama, and adventure, and intellectual stimulation, and a pace that doesn't make me physically weary from all the tension the developer is trying to induce.

I don't really care for "old school" games - I was never very good at most of them. Nor do I care for "new school" games - they all blend into a mass of sameness. The games I really enjoyed are the dying/dead/reawakened genre of adventure (pretty much all the games built on SCUMM) because they encouraged lateral thinking and had dramatic narrative objectives, rather than just killing an opponent or accruing a set number of points/loot/swag.

Most importantly, violence was not the core of these games, nor was pattern matching. I can't stand pattern matching games.

Some things which I always enjoyed in games:
- Open map concept: no/few areas blocked off due to level/item deficiency (at least, early on in the game, if not immediately upon game initialization).
- Relative open-story: it's possible to deviate from the story of the game in order to satisfy wanderlust.
- Graphics which make my eyes water. They don't have to be über-realistic (e.g. Industrial L&M-esque), but they do need to offer a sense of well thought out color scheme and sense of mood.

Some things which I've always hated in games:
- Requiring unrealistic amounts of manual progression through levels of play in order to accomplish tasks: this is fine if the jump from level 1 to level 2 doesn't require a lot of work on my part, but as soon as I have to repeatedly macro a key in order to see progression, the game becomes a bore.
- Death: If I can easily reload my game, why should my character have the ability to die? This is not an easy one to solve, and very likely won't be addressed anytime soon, so I will stop here. :)
- Conveyor-belt progression: I've just gotten a new Super Ultra Whatsit for saving the Kingdom of Urtraw from the evil Blotoks, but suddenly I've got to go on a series of adventures before I can have my own peace and quiet. Similar to the Open Story idea above, except it's the developers' method of handling urgency and questing all at once.

Having said this, some of the recent game I've played (at least, in the RPG genre) offered some of these features, but never really addressed all of them. My preferred games would have to be defined something to the tune of, "games under the RPG guise which offer a realistic simulation of the game world setting". Not too many of these appear often (Morrowind was the most recent; before that, Freelancer, then Ultima IX in 1999 -- though it failed on a few features too.)

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Original post by sunandshadow [...]I just don't find games immersive unless they make some attempt at modeling reality.[...]

Exactly! Some people (such as yourself) find immersion to be the definition of 'good game', while others (such as myself) prefer 'games' in the sense of 'game theory' - abstractions that don't try to simulate (possibly an 'alternate') reality.

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Original post by Oluseyi [...]In addition, I need games that are about more than reflex times and spatial reasoning and finger contortions to manipulate the gamepad just so...[...]

It seems that most game designers that build 'realistic' games build the simulation to progress in 'real time' as some kind of natural extension to the simulation.
I generally prefer turn-based games, but active-time games aren't too bad. I can't usually keep up in real-time games, even after many, many years of playing them. Generally, such games are more abstract presumably because it's just as much a natural extension to go from 'not realistic' to 'not realtime'.

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[...]I want ethics, and narrative, and drama, and adventure, and intellectual stimulation, and a pace that doesn't make me physically weary from all the tension the developer is trying to induce.[...]

I find ethics, narrative, drama, and adventure interesting things to read about/watch on TV/etc, but any game that involves me in such things generally annoys me by forcing me to make choices in that direction without providing me enough information about the setting for me to make any kind of informed decision. I hate randomly selecting options (or essentially doing so by making a character without knowing anything about the setting they'll exist in), and have a difficult time doing so. Note that I don't mean I must have all information, but I should at least know the setting, considering the character almost always starts with ~20 years experience living in that world and I start with none at all. This is true even in 'real world' games because my perception is vastly different than others and finding out the details of the differences after half the game when I can't change the choices is not much fun.

I don't generally find social problems(where I would place ethics, drama, and narrative) intellectually stimulating. Learning lambda calculus was quite interesting, though =-) I also enjoy figuring out solutions to all the problems I use programming to solve.

Graphics are very important to me, but they don't need to be realistic, just well-done. IMO, Zelda:LttP has better graphics than many modern games. Warcraft 3 also has excellent graphics, despite serious deficiencies from a realism standpoint.
I think that part of the problem is that in many modern games, the world itself is rather squarish because it's inside buildings etc, so polygons can easily make a quite-accurate approximation that looks at least somewhat realistic, but the entities in the world (humans or whatever else) have more 'organic' shapes and the approximations appear much worse as polygon edges become more noticable.

There are words for what you are describing. Please don't bastardize words without need.

I believe "Sensory Immersion" is the term you are looking for.

Opaque = Cannot see through
Transparent = Can see through, possibly can see object
Translucent = Can see through, distorts stuff behind it

An opaque system (and therefore an opaque game) is one where you cannot see the internal workings -- basically a black box.
A transparent system (and therefore a transparent game) is one where you can see the internal workings -- much like voting should be.

Sensory immersion is a scale from completely abstract to completely immersive.


Checkers, Go, and many other games are about as low as you can get in sensory immersion. The only requirement is something to play on, which can be as primative as a drawing on sand, and some tokens to play with, which can be as simple as pebbles. Contrarywise, you can find game boards costing a fortune made out of exotic materials. The pieces themselves don't represent anything.

Chess is a game with a bit more sensory immersion. You have a very abstract representation using specific types of pieces, and your pieces represent things like Kings, Queens, Knights, etc.

We'll skip other board games, card games, parlor games, and just jump to video games.

Games like NetHack have more sensory immersion, since they represent a dungeon and hundreds of creatures, using only plain-text markers.

The 'old school' RPG games are a little deeper than that, whith icons representing people, icons representing objects, and so on. Fundamentally they could easily be represented with plain-text markers.

Sound increases the sensory immersion.

Next, side-scrollers and top-down shooters have a little more immersion. Deeper still are 3D-ish games like the old D&D maze games, then Wolfenstien, Descent, Doom, and so on.

Movies can be very immersive, even more so with positional sound, 3D polarized glasses and moving 12-passenger theatres.

Complete sensory immersion would be the final extreme, where you plug in to your brain and you believe you are physically there.



What I hear in all these posts is that some people prefer low-immersive games to highly-immersive games, while others would be willing to spend a fortune on a completely immersive experience.

There's nothing too big about that observation, in my view.

I don't think it's so much about sensory immersion, as it is about Imagination. A game with visually stunning models, rich 3D sounds and beautiful effects will typically lead to a higher level of sensory immersion. It does however require imagination to take the game above sensory immersion, essentially to get into the game. And this is the paradox which holds for many modern games. Telling everything within a beautiful, realistic world leaves very little up to your imagination.

Now, I'm not saying we should just dump beautiful, realistic worlds in favor of good ol' 8bit NES graphics. But as has been pointed out in countless rants, games shouldn't be about their graphics and sound. It's but the medium of the story you're trying to express and it's a very tempting medium to show and tell everything, simply because you can.

Maybe it's just my love for mysteries of any kind, but I think this holds some merit in many cases. Take a look at the original Halflife for example. No one needed to explain where mr X came from, imagination filled that in for most players I think. And as Hickman wrote, there is no greater fear than the terror of the unknown. Words, pictures and even 3D graphics can convey a lot, but it takes imagination to create an experience above reactions to perceptions.

Quite philosophical, I'll admit, but I think it's key to the success of the Zelda series as well as many other games. I guess it does really come down to:

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...gaming doesn't need limits so much as it needs the creativity the limits inspired.

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Original post by frob There are words for what you are describing. Please don't bastardize words without need. I believe "Sensory Immersion" is the term you are looking for. Opaque = Cannot see through Transparent = Can see through, possibly can see object Translucent = Can see through, distorts stuff behind it An opaque system (and therefore an opaque game) is one where you cannot see the internal workings -- basically a black box. A transparent system (and therefore a transparent game) is one where you can see the internal workings -- much like voting should be. Sensory immersion is a scale from completely abstract to completely immersive.

You realize you aren't really talking about light either, you're just changing the metaphor, right?

Amen!

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Original post by remigius I don't think it's so much about sensory immersion, as it is about Imagination. A game with visually stunning models, rich 3D sounds and beautiful effects will typically lead to a higher level of sensory immersion. It does however require imagination to take the game above sensory immersion, essentially to get into the game. And this is the paradox which holds for many modern games. Telling everything within a beautiful, realistic world leaves very little up to your imagination. Now, I'm not saying we should just dump beautiful, realistic worlds in favor of good ol' 8bit NES graphics. But as has been pointed out in countless rants, games shouldn't be about their graphics and sound. It's but the medium of the story you're trying to express and it's a very tempting medium to show and tell everything, simply because you can. Maybe it's just my love for mysteries of any kind, but I think this holds some merit in many cases. Take a look at the original Halflife for example. No one needed to explain where mr X came from, imagination filled that in for most players I think. And as Hickman wrote, there is no greater fear than the terror of the unknown. Words, pictures and even 3D graphics can convey a lot, but it takes imagination to create an experience above reactions to perceptions. Quite philosophical, I'll admit, but I think it's key to the success of the Zelda series as well as many other games. I guess it does really come down to: Quote: ...gaming doesn't need limits so much as it needs the creativity the limits inspired.