Customization and Consoles

The PA Report had an interesting article about "The Minecraft Problem," which got me thinking about the future of video games.

Several months ago, I discovered some YouTube channel with a weekly "Top 5 Skyrim mods" series. It was actually quite amazing to see - hundreds, if not thousands of people were tweaking the game in various ways, from tweaking lighting effects to introducing hilarious new abilities (such as a shout that called down a "Rain of Trains," which does exactly what it sounds like it does) to adding entire new game areas with their own quest chains and looks.

There's a granularity of customization to modern video games that's kind of amazing - far from limited to a couple of 15-dollar DLC packages.

Here's the thing: I play Skyrim on an XBox 360. I use a Mac computer, which shuts me out of a lot of games, but even if I had a PC, I certainly can't afford to spend a thousand dollars to put together a fancy gaming PC, and a thousand bucks is probably a very conservative estimate of what I'd need.

Console makers have begun to realize that they have a disadvantage over PCs. Consoles were conceived, I think, to originally be basically home arcade units. But once people figured out how to create save files, they blossomed into something that even the most sophisticated arcade cabinets could never really be. In more recent generations, console makers started to take the idea of data storage seriously, eventually just throwing an actual, legitimate hard drive onto their consoles.

PCs (and for the record, I'm referring to both Windows machines and Macs) never really had to work on this as a "new" thing, because unless you're talking about the era of the Apple II, home computers have almost always had some kind of storage. That's why games like Civilization could work, allowing you to save as many times as you'd like in as many different copies as you might like.

Yet PCs still have an advantage (again, let us never forget that the off-set disadvantage is much higher cost) which is the ability to look at the nuts and bolts of the game. Controls aren't really an issue, because if you want to play a game with a controller, you can easily get one that plugs into a USB port. But the environment of a PC, where it's not just "play this game" but "here's the game and all its files" allows you to do all those awesome things like give Tamriel a Death Star or a Tardis.

I imagine some consoles will try to become more PC-like in this regard, opening up customization, but it will probably require that they let you interface your PC more directly with the inner workings of your console. It'll also probably require you to start installing games on the console, rather than popping the disk in.

There are two things they would also need to fix: one is making switching out hard drives easy, which in fairness, is probably already not too hard - we'd just need to make it so that a PC-formatted hard drive was compatible with the consoles.

Next, we'd have to rework any download service. I'd recommend that games create a bank of user-generated DLC and that the people who operate the online services of the consoles make that stuff free. One should not have to pay a red cent if the maker of the content is giving it out for free.

It's a complex issue, and I'll be very curious to see how this develops over the next generation or two of game consoles, but I think customization is going to be the most important development in the evolution of video games as we head into the future.