[MISP] NYT: Can DIY Supplant the First Person Shooter?

[Eric Renz-Whitmore]

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Good article in Friday's NY Times Magazine section -- and it features Las Cruces area game developer Jason Rohrer.  In many ways, the game industry is seeing something similar to what we see in the movie industry: there are many more producers of content, and that content is getting to consumers/viewers in myriad ways. 

But while big game companies -- like Hollywood studios -- remain, the long tail phenomenon and increased use of social networks is allowing some small-mid sized game developers quicker and easier entry to market than we typically see with indie movie producers.  It was interesting to see game giant EA purchase social game company Playfish (Techcrunch) about the same time EA was making significant cutbacks in its staff.  

What does this mean to NM?  It's tough to say, but as things continue to change there appear to be increased opportunities for indie and smaller producers of all sorts of media content (albeit for less $ per project).  Additionally, it seems that with regard to distribution, there are lessons each industry can learn from the other.

From the New York Times: 

Can D.I.Y. Supplant the First-Person Shooter?
By JOSHUAH BEARMAN
Published: November 13, 2009

The face of the enemy flashed across a 20-foot screen. “That’s right,” Jason Rohrer announced. “It’s Roger Ebert.” There were a few boos, as several hundred people stirred in their seats. The film critic’s cherubic face stared at the audience. “Ebert said video games can’t be art,” Rohrer said. “He issued all of us a direct challenge. And we need to find an answer.”

Rohrer was addressing the Game Developers Conference, one of his industry’s premier trade events. Each spring, the conference convenes in San Francisco, and among the tens of thousands of people who attend is a burgeoning fringe of independent designers like Rohrer who hope to radically transform their medium. “A realization is dawning that games can be much more than what they are now,” Rohrer told me later. “They even have the potential to be meaningful in deep, fundamental ways.”

These game designers, a self-described indie scene, form a tightly knit group with a do-it-yourself culture and a rebellious spirit — something like a ’zine movement
for video games. New and cheap technologies have enabled the movement’s rise.
New tools for production and distribution — through smartphones, over the Web
and via downloadable services on PlayStation, Wii and Xbox consoles — now make it possible for individuals to conceive, develop and publish their own games.

Rohrer himself is a kind of Thoreauvian game designer, a 31-year-old back-to-the-land programmer-philosopher who lives in Las Cruces, N.M., where he codes his eccentrically engrossing games, which can feel like digitally mediated poetic moods, on an ancient computer and makes them available free online. “Now anyone can do it,” he says, “which is not how the mainstream video-game industry
works.” ...

The rest of the article is well worth reading... check it out at: Can D.I.Y. Supplant the First-Person Shooter?

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Posted By e to NM Media Industry News at 11/15/2009 07:27:00 PM

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Eric Renz-Whitmore, Program Coordinator
ARTS Lab
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