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When BioShock Infinite was originally conceived somewhere between 2008-2010, Ken Levine and his team at Irrational Games likely looked at where they'd come from, looked at the game-making landscape, and said, "Yeah, it's gonna be first-person, and it's gonna have headshots." From there, the world's fiction was painted on top of the gigantic hay-barn that was the contemporary FPS genre.
Of course, a "walking simulator" is a sarcastic genre definition from video game commentators lacking imagination. For the sake of SEO, and to keep with common parlance, I'll indulge the definition so everyone can follow along without layering in the requisite vocabulary-math, should I not borrow the terminology.
Why are they so popular? Seems like new entries show up no PSN and Steam every week. Why? Why do I mention them in the same breath as BioShock Infinite, a first-person shooter, and as well as Netflix, a video streaming service?
Because upon revisiting BioShock Infinite, I can theorize this game truly wishes it didn't have to include quite so many guns, quite so many headshots, and quite so many magic powers. I enjoys its violence, profanity, and racism, as most walking simulators do, but if BioShock Infinite could engage its own story in sexual congress, it wouldn't invite the shooting in for a threesome.
BioShock Infinite devotes football fields of square footage to its lovely worldcraft. It has ideas about American dynamism, sense of self, and destiny. Its floating cult-city of Columbia is a digital, racist theme-park. Its gun-sessions are limp, piddly affairs.
Walking simulators are popular because players like video games with ideas. People like entertainment with things to say and characters real enough to say them. Few games have the time and money to invest in such an intangible factor. I'll cite Telltale's The Walking Dead series and The Last Guardian as games who prefer their world-missions to their jump buttons. Yes, The Last Guardian is a walking simulator where you follow a strange beast. Trico is the subject, you do the walking, get over it.
Walking simulators can be smaller coding affairs, propelled by creativity and human story. They require little to no enemy AI, no destructive environments, and few game "systems" beyond carrying objects, should the designer require an inventory. They are narrative vessels, above all. They happen to be available via game distribution networks.
Elaboration: compare the roughly 10 hours required to play a season of Telltale's Game of Thrones to the 10 hours required to watch a season of HBO's Game of Thrones. The former permits you to explore and engage, often calmly and casually, a violent medieval landscape, as told by digital actors. The latter permits you to observe a violent medieval landscape, as told by flesh and blood actors.
Someday, the writing and production for the game will equal that of the show. The game will permit greater depth and involvement. The game will be our Netflix alternative. In our current environment, audiences must study additional resources online between episodes of Game of Thrones for greater detail and motivation. In the potential video game future, the audience will have the opportunity to explore the digital space in pursuit of the same payoff.
Someday, a game as thoroughly unique and gigantic as BioShock Infinite will not remain beholden to piddly gunfights between 3D storyscapes. Its imagination and literary aspirations are already there, despite occasionally being misguided and hot-glued together to reach a video game release date.
Creator command will rise in games. The production funnel will quicken and prices will lower. Video game auteurship will become more viable. With the current demand for coders in the world, eight people and $4 million will be able to develop interactive creative content as potent and passionate as Ken Levine's BioShock Infinite, and the market will not demand it be a first person shooter, too. It'll borrow technology from movie making. Entirely digital walking simulators telling stories of all kinds will rival Master of None.
Audiences will subscribe to creators' streams and follow their work. It'll be worth the investment for studios to fund big, beautiful projects.
That will be half of video games: digital novels and works of original fiction. That will be your Netflix alternative.
The other half will be e-sports. MOBAs, shooters, fighters, and any digital, competitive playing fields developers can conceive. These will be digital sporting goods: simple enough for a player to engage casually, righteous enough for professionals to parse and global fans to enjoy. That will be your sporting alternative.
They will vary in tiers of complexity, quality, and creativity. Personality behind both the story and e-sport variants will either fail or succeed to attract an audience. Buying in will be inexpensive, or even free, just like tuning in for a football game or checking a book out of a library.
The Ghost Little blog publishes EVERY WEEKDAY. It's sometimes immediately relevant to the books' development process. Other times, it's only thematically-relevant. Thoughts and ideas influence the creative process in ways that you wouldn't initially anticipate. They're all worth detailing and discussing!
I've been systematically informing the YouTube recommendation algorithm that I never want to watch any video posted by anyone with the word "angry" in their username. You can imagine how neckbeards have fallen to my sword of disinterest. You can imagine a little harder, and figure there's not a drill-bit sharp enough to bore through all that toxic content. Sunlight will never find these deserving motherfuckers.
Too much content is created out of a desire to be heard, instead of a desire to know and be known. Too much content is about other content, this very post of mine included (which is why I write free books to read online during my nights and weekends).
To be blunt, the internet's content, the perpetual doggo chasing its tail, has now deep-throated the thing and is molars-deep into its own ass, ignorant to the ashy flavor. The dominant moods on the most popular content platforms are psychosis, shrieking, and self-preservation.
And that's making the audience crazy. The gap between corporate-created content, which includes the blockbuster movie studio system and the prestige-television / Netflix alternative-streaming sphere, and the 'content-creator' / YouTuber industry is widening. To my surprise, the big guys, the Star Wars and Avengers shared universe worlds, are increasingly-inclusive in their content, crafting offerings for all types, not just white dudes in America. Elsewhere, the "content-creator" jackbags making $10,000 a month publishing Minecraft videos on YouTube are cruel nerve-balls without taste or talent. It isn't their fault, and I'd explain why, but I don't have three hours and enough construction paper.
This is mainly a staging device to present Neill Blomkamp's Oats Studios: the weird in-between of big-budget auteur content things. Blomkamp and his crew of professional weirdos have been publishing science fiction short films on YouTube since the start of the summer of 2017. The fourth film, Zygote was recently posted. They're ultra-slick and artfully thorough in design.
Who is Neill Blomkamp? He directed District 9 in 2009 under the supervision of Peter Jackson, netting an Academy Award best picture nomination. A remarkable achievement for not only a first-time feature film, but a science-fiction genre movie addressing South African apartheid.
All of Blomkamp's movies have a handheld filthiness to them that's more befitting for a YouTube / streaming environment and audience. He outpaced his ideal audience's gestation period. His design aesthetic for world-building, vehicles, and weapons are a harder, oilier military-future, another snuggly fit for the folks already familiar in streaming esports. His ideas are satirical, and heady, and a bit-too-obvious sci-fi, perfect for snacking over a 4G LTE network.
Consider Netflix's original films: Okja, War Machine, or I Don't Feel at Home in this World Anymore. Like Blomkamp's Hollywood feature films, they're blunt, obvious, and much too weird for theaters. But they're art and they're creative ideas that deserve to be witnessed, like Blomkamp's.
I recall seeing Blomkamp's Elysium in the theater years ago. I was sick as a dog with both mono and strep throat. Walking out, I joked aloud about the movie, "So, uh, was that movie about universal healthcare, or what?"
Blomkamp's preference for high-concept trash means his current manifestation as the Roger Corman of YouTube is well-earned. In an ideal world, he'd make a billion quick-hit ideas with workable special effects. If Zygote is any indication, we would be so lucky. Some of his might become features. Some might land on a streaming service, again, Netflix or a Netflix alternative (Hulu, Amazon, HBO).
Maybe others short films develop cult followings. Maybe Oat Studios will expand and become the incubator for artists? Just as we say in hushed tones that the likes of David Fincher got his first work directing music videos and James Gunn was a product of Troma studios, there might be a generation of visionaries produced from an institution like Blomkamp's.
We need increased professionalism in content produced for online platforms. It's a new, living medium, just as film went from moving pictures, to talkies, to its own craft. But the internet platform, and the content on it, needs to be watched carefully. It's too easy for artless psychopaths to scream into a camera about how the world is changing and it isn't what they're used to, and then mouthed fungus in the comments section all jerk each other off in agreed congratulations.
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