[Evolutionary Stagnation in Gaming]

I found this great piece via insert credit: An article (in Japanese) was posted on the Japanese Nikkei IT's webpage recently, talking about the functional stagnation of video games. Basically, while the graphics are getting more and more amazing, the basic gameplay and nuts and bolts are stuck in old, non-innovative repetitions. Ollie sums it up:

"What really struck me about all this was that this was a Japanese piece published on a very mainstream online publication that stated a very important issue that the Western gaming press, in their orgy of banal Tweets, managed to conveniently miss; that these massive graphically focused budgets are forcing a functional restriction and an unnatural standardisation on gaming. Admittedly, we've had lots of coverage about the rising cost of games development but no-one has really mentioned the veritable elephant-in-the-room - that games aren't functionally going anywhere as a result of all of this."

I think it's a spot-on observation. Sure, games look flashier and all nowadays, but we're mostly still playing the same old clones of games that were invented 15-20 years ago. Is that really progress?