If not actual narrative influence from the authors Soderstrom has mentionned, athough I don’t see why not, games could easily draw their aesthetics or moods from more diverse influences than they currently are. It seems that there is much inbreeding of genre conventions (be they mechanistic of aesthetic) to the point where you end up with games that seem to have been develloped with a bullet point list of “what a good game has” with little regard to how those points interact. Dead Space comes to mind.

Luckily there are some games like Tension, Zeno Clash, FEZ or Cactus’ own Braindead Toon Underworld that might end up being those rare flashes of brilliance we sporadically see outside the usual spectrum of gaming.

I know there are a lot more promising games out there, just naming a few. Anyone else care to add?

I think it’s just the same wall that games have been crashing against since inception: there’s an underlying need, at the moment, for games to be fun. They are judged highly against that. When you slip into the abstract or similar modes of conveyance, you tread farther from accepted norms of gameplay styles; accepted because people tend to enjoy them more than others.

You can always wrap deep and innovative concepts around a more conventional gameplay style, but that’s not really any different from any other game, is it? With authors and filmmakers, they can use (or abuse, in the case of Lynch) the medium but twist the telling for effect. Games, however, don’t just use a medium, they are the medium. They are each unique in how you play them, and every gamer approaches each one uniquely.

It’s not that programming needs to shift towards these new types of thought, it’s the design and purpose of the game itself. Maybe they can make it fun (for instance Lynch could be fun, Kubrick not), but they need first to accept that it doesn’t have to be, or at least that there are alternative ways to enjoy a game.

I figured most programmers come to the scene for the innovation, though most get watered down (or enslaved by mass-market giants like EA). It’s just they have an idea of what would be a fun or cool game, and so their innovation is only a cool new idea or approach, not a provocative experience.

I haven’t worked with many modding tools, but the ones I have aren’t very accessible and more advanced tends to mean feature creep rather than easier to use. Anyone have good tips for simple, accessible tools? Google has failed me, it seems…

(or, I have failed @ Google, of course…)

But maybe this indie revolution will happen and games without the 3D whizz will, in the future, not seem like a compromise or like second rate product.

But here’s my wonderful theory for the real reason it isn’t happening much:
Programmers are nerds. Programming is hard and, historically, not sexy, so the sorts of people who would be drawn into this specialised shadowy world of obtuse number crunching have been those drawn to the mechanics and the abstract mathematical structures of it. these people have not tended to have the types of personalities that tend to think in terms of theme, subtext or cultural statement.
The only ones with enough passion to get over the immense technical hurdle of knowing how to make games are not ones naturally given to the sorts of artistic statments Soderstrom is talking about.
That’s nice and broad and all-encompassing, isn’t it? The first game was about space ships. Programming nomenclature seems to hold a heavy debt to D&D. Well, it’s a theory.
The solution, if that theory holds any water, is generational. Creative types growing up now no longer have to choose to learn computers and programming because it is now all around them. They can’t not do it. So when they come to want to express themselves, a ‘game’ will be just as natural a choice as a book or a film.
So we just have to wait for those punk kids to grow up a bit.