The internet and the evolution of gaming

When I started gaming over twenty years ago, I had no idea what the internet was.  In this day and age, the internet and gaming are inextricably linked.  The internet suffuses every aspect of gaming, the online community instrumental in orchestrating development, releases, and sales.

have you tried switching it off and on again?

I am not going to write a history of the internet, it is terribly dull, and that is what things like wikipedia is for.  What I want to talk about is the role that the internet has come to play in every aspect of our gaming lives.  Of course in writing this blog here on my IGN, I am accessing an online community of gamers that would not have been possible when I began gaming.  Even when not playing, I am still involved in the gaming community, it no longer switches off when I press the power button on my console.

communication before the internet was limited

Growing up, gaming was much more insular, consoles were not online, there were no networking games.  You played a game, on your own or split screen, and then you went and did something else.  Each person’s gaming activity was a distinctly personal affair.  There were no worldwide leaderboards, no achievements or trophies, and no youtube of clips.
Yet over time technology has improved in all aspects of life and has settled in, making space for itself.  Like a symbiote, the internet has grown and encompassed what was once a private hobby, and brought it to the forefront of the world’s attention.  Now you can see scores posted by people you have never met, and never will.  What changes then has this wrought on gaming?  Is it a good thing?
dialup was very basic…
The internet has allowed people to share.  All manner of data is now transferred globally, whether it be email, twitter, facebook, youtube, or any number of other sites and apps.  Opinions flash back and forth, hundreds of thousands of debates go on at all hours of the day.  Walls have crumbled, and a living room can encompass the world as terabytes of information flash between countries, cultures and beliefs.  This fundamentally open platform gives everyone a soapbox.  In the past, if you wanted to talk about gaming, you went to a friend who gamed, and your circle of those could be quite limited.  Now if you want to say something about a game, you simply go online and tell a thousand faceless individuals.  This of course has its’ good and bad points.  There are people who have things worth saying, and those who really don’t.

not everyone's opinion is valid

On the positive side, and in my opinion one of the greatest benefits of the internet, is the opportunity to seek new people with similar beliefs and likes.  The opportunity exists for true multiculturalism, people from all kinds of backgrounds can find common cause.  This of course extends to all sorts of topics, but how does it affect gaming?  What it means for gaming is that good games become known.  If you have been gaming for a while, what did you do before IGN and its’ like, before forums?  Maybe you bought a monthly magazine like me, where half a dozen people could inform the decisions of hundreds, if not thousands of people.  Now, if you want to know about a game, you click online and a hundred people can tell you.  That means that news on games worth playing travels fast.  No longer do you make a decision based on some guy who played it, now you can base it on dozens of guys who played it.
Hopefully this drives up standards.  If a game is poor, everyone finds out about it.  Of course different people have different opinions, some people will like something more than others, that is inevitable.  But if you look around online, there is typically one overriding opinion.  Scores between different review sites don’t tend to alter by much at all.  Developers must be wary, gamers have become far more savvy.  Likewise if a game is released and has issues, people talk about it.  Forum posts spring up, arguments break out, flame wars burn.  A developer can sort through this information, pick out commonly held issues, and hopefully take them to heart.  People can mobilise and get their thoughts heard.  A good recent example of this is Cole from Infamous.  The backlash against his change in appearance for the sequel was profound, and the developers have conceded.  This is good news for both sides, if people get what they want, the developers sell more copies.

who are you and what have you done with the angry potato?

Continuing on quality, developers now have the chance to do beta testing.  Making a game can occur truly epic costs, the amount of money required is staggering.  An online community allows developers to get their product to people essentially for unpaid quality control and bug hunting.  Again by listening to feedback, developers can make the tweaks necessary to cement better sales and a better reception.  Furthermore, the vast organism that is gamers online means that far more market research can be carried out.  Given the financial risk involved, developers can get an idea whether something will work or not.  The wealth of data to be had can track all kinds of trends, buying habits, and fashions.
The downside to this however is that certain games might appear unpopular or unfeasible on paper and be dropped that might have otherwise been excellent.  Given the financial risks inherent, it can lead to a more cautious reactive production, rather than something truly innovative.  Both the Move and the Kinect are perfect examples of watching market trends and seeing the consumer power of Nintendo.  The risk with all this information available is an overly risk averse developer community.  Will the Move be sufficiently different from the Wii to be worthy?  Many of the Kinect games look like carbon copies of Wii games, just as Microsoft stole Miis wholesale.  Some games are simply impossible to predict, who could say before hand how well something like Flower or Killer 7 would do?  Will off the wall games like this keep getting made as costs spiral?

an unpredictable gem

So the internet has provided a wealth of information to the developer, it also does the same for the consumer.  Along with the afore mentioned reviews, what the consumer also gets now in many instances are game demos.  In the past, a few demo disks might be distributed to stores, and I recall friends with PS Ones going to the store for specific demos, which would often be snapped up within a day or two.  Now, if I want to see what a game is like, I check online for a demo and try it for myself, any time I like.  In the last 24 hours I downloaded around eight demos to inform my future purchases.  Games are an expensive hobby, and having more information about a game can help you spend that money effectively.

ask the internet?

These things all feed into gaming from the net, but what about the other way round, gaming to internet?  As more and more people get connected across the world, games increasingly use multiplayer modes as a means of pushing sales.  The internet is such an essential part of life these days that multiplayer options have become pretty much standard.  Go back ten years and no console gamer played online, yet in 2010 a console without an online capacity is a bizarre concept.  Many games now have a significant emphasis on multiplayer, or focus on it exclusively.  Xbox live gold membership is driven by online titles, the likes of Halo and Call of Duty  are what guarantee subscriptions.  Sales of these titles would be a fraction of what they are if they had no multiplayer aspect, it is that which people return to night after night in deathmatches spanning continents.  A vast economy has sprung up around online gaming, from gold membership to microsoft and sony points, to extra peripherals like headsets.
Whilst the internet may have aided in a degree of caution in game developers, it has also opened up the market.  A few years back, the gaming market was dominated by a few big developers, independent studies were being bought out and subsumed into huge conglomerations.  Whilst this process is continuing to some extent, what we see now with the introduction of Wiiware, XBLA, and Playstation Network, is a resurgence of old fashioned independent game creators.  I mentioned in my blog on retro gaming that these online distribution forms have caused a certain resurgence in old style games, and we can see evidence of that point.  The likes of Castle Crashers or Shadow Complex conjure memories of games on previous iterations of consoles, and we even see the distribution of those very same old games with the virtual console and the Sony/Microsoft  equivalents, not forgetting Steam on the PC.  Old games are being introduced to a new generation of gamers, just as new games are made in their image.

steam has revolutionised PC gaming

Smaller studios can make lower budget games for an online release and get themselves and their talents noticed.  Their vision can become easier to realise.  In this age of big corporations, let us not forget that games are still made by people who love them, and who want others to love them.  As I said in the retro blog, Limbo and Shadow Complex, two XBLA titles, are two of my favourite titles of the last year or so.  The ability to make great games for less could allow a flowering of talent and a broadening of horizons, rather than a narrowing driven by risk assessment.  Digital distribution allows people to buy games when and where they  want, it can overcome geography and timezones.  If you want to play something at 4am when the shops are closed, you can buy a game online and download it immediately.  This makes the entire medium far more accessible.

he finds digital distribution invaluable

The internet has brought a significant proportion of the western world into gaming.  People who would never dream of buying a console now spend hours poring over facebook games and iPhone apps.  Millions of people now play games and spend their leisure hours engrossed in adventures both mundane and fantastical.  Even if they do not necessarily think of themselves as gamers, their input and attention can only serve to improve the industry as a whole.  By becoming mainstream, gaming is increasingly ceasing to be a hobby and becoming simply something that happens.  Just as people often wouldn’t describe themselves as tv watchers, so gaming is less and less something to be remarked upon as unusual.
Of course whilst the internet has arrived on PC’s and consoles to broaden diversity and enable small independent studios, it also has caused significant damage to the industry.  Pirating games has become a real issue, I was once introduced to someone who had over ninety titles for their PS2, not one of them purchased.  With the sharing of information, it is inevitable that some of that information is illegal.  Games get ripped, zipped, and distributed around the world overnight.  The leak of Halo: Reach is a clear indication of the risks inherent in an industry where everyone’s living room is just a click away.  This hurts a company’s profit margin, it hurts their ability to make games.  In turn this hurts the gaming community.  The need to sell well further heightens the cautious view mentioned earlier in which sequels and franchises dominate.

yarr?

The other problem for consumers that piracy brings about is that of copy protection.  All manner of methods have been tried to prevent piracy, seeking to prevent disks being copied, requiring long and irritating authentication keys and so on.  This can cause unintended hurt to gamers, PC gamers in particular, who can find that perfectly legit copies have games wont run on their machines, starfire (I think that was the name) caused this issue for many gamers with genuine games.  The most recent issue of protection harming the consumer is that of Starcraft II, which requires and internet connection throughout the play, even when playing the single player campaign.  In my local video game store recently a boy and his mother were returning a copy of the game because they had no internet connection.  It would no doubt seem odd to most people reading this that not every gamer has a net connection, but the internet is by no means universal.  This young boy was a dedicated Starcraft fan, looking forward to nothing more than playing the latest and long awaited installment of his favourite game.
I had a similar problem with Half Life 2.  It was released whilst I was at university, and the college firewalls blocked Steam.  As such we had to use a tunnel client over a dial up connection to bypass the firewall and decrypt the entire game, which took many hours.  Thus we have a vicious circle where piracy hurts the developers, and they seek new ways to prevent it, hurting the consumer.  Personally I see no easy solution to this issue, and I think the problem will persist for quite some time as methods and counter methods develop.
The internet has therefore brought about a significant evolution in gaming.  From gaming being a small personal hobby, it has grown into a vast entity spanning the globe, gamers have been brought out beyond their own homes and joined a network of gamers the world over to share, discuss, and game with.  Going back to my days gaming on the Commodore 64, it is truly amazing to see the way gaming has changed, what we now take for granted would be utterly alien not so many years ago.  I am certain there are many more changes to come as digital distribution takes off.  I doubt it will spell the end of dedicated consoles and hard copies of software any time soon, not within the next decade in my opinion, but it is coming, and our beloved medium faces a great deal of change ahead.
How it passes through that, and what it will look like on the other side remains to be seen…