Let's play / Games industry

[Froge]

This thread is about two different topics, much like that thread, and as before, you may only discuss one of them. Failure to comply will earn you a Froge™ mark of shame.

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Let's plays

Let's plays are highly entertaining. They've emerged all over the gaming community and many of the top subscribed channels on youtube do let's plays. Some channels become famous because they play certain games in an interesting way or have certain types of commentary. Do you think Let's Plays is becoming an emerging art form? Just like how games nowadays can be treated as art, will Let's Plays in the future also gain artistic recognition?

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Games Industry

The games industry is extraordinarily hard to break into. Most game companies require a lot of years of relevant experience before they're willing to hire you, but that creates the problem of not being able to get any experience in the first place. How do you think people get into the games industry nowadays? Do they just have to get themselves noticed by working on a lot of projects and being an indie dev?

[Alex Ros]

The games industry is extraordinarily hard to break into...

I suppose it was and still all about new ideas. Nobody really cares who are you and where are from and how experienced you are. As a result there is nothing "extraordinarily hard to break into", it's just damn hard to create something new.

Here's a few of quite different examples:
1. Slender. Here we got very simple new gameplay mechanics for a horror. The more you collect, the more often a monster appears. That was enough to start a bigger project Slender the Arrival. One man, one simple gameplay idea, and here we got a "break into".
2. Half-Life 2 Minerva. Interesting (vertical) approach on level design. Nothing really new in terms of gameplay. But even that kinda new approach to level vertical constructioning was enough to get attention. The guy's got hired (Adam, if I remember his name correctly).
3. Penumbra. Totally new approach on interactions. That's kinda big innovation, rarely big. I suppose everybody here knows the story. Anyway it's all just about new idea.
4. The Dear Esther. It's not even a game. But surely a new approach on storytelling in general... oh well. I suppose everybody knows that story too. No need to dive into details.
5. ...[whatever]

It's all just about new ideas. No matter if this is something simple or big.

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Another one thing is stealing. That's also kinda possible thing to do. Clear example with the 10-guys-project Outlast. Stole the Amnesia mechanics and made kinda nice AAA visuals. In general no one really cared about stolen Amnesia mechanics, players got their fun, developers got their start-up attention (and money).

[FlawlessHappiness]

Another one thing is stealing. That's also kinda possible thing to do. Clear example with the 10-guys-project Outlast. Stole the Amnesia mechanics and made kinda nice AAA visuals. In general no one really cared about stolen Amnesia mechanics, players got their fun, developers got their start-up attention (and money).

And this is the reason why Custom Stories are being made, and why Outlast got popular...

I don't care about where the mechanic is from. It's a great mechanic. And I want to play a game again with that mechanic but new stories and puzzles.

So, I agree. I think too it's about ideas and such, but I'm not yet at the part where I'm going to search for a job, so I cannot know for sure.


For the other question, no I don't think Let's Plays will become art.
Let's plays are reviews of art. Like a tv-show talking about how much a painting is worth and how/when it was made.

It'll always be focused on information about the game, and how well it has turned out.

Art is focused on itself.
A review is focused on the art.

[PutraenusAlivius]

Let's plays

Let's plays are highly entertaining. They've emerged all over the gaming community and many of the top subscribed channels on youtube do let's plays. Some channels become famous because they play certain games in an interesting way or have certain types of commentary. Do you think Let's Plays is becoming an emerging art form? Just like how games nowadays can be treated as art, will Let's Plays in the future also gain artistic recognition?

I think that Let's Plays will be pretty famous in the near future. Games nowadays is like 60$ or more because of the greedy companies. Because of this, they will watch someone else play rather than play it by themselves.

[Traggey]

If you want to break into the industry, there are four options for you.

A) Know the right people.
B) Mods.
C) Education.
D) Go indie.

[eliasfrost]

Another one thing is stealing. That's also kinda possible thing to do. Clear example with the 10-guys-project Outlast. Stole the Amnesia mechanics and made kinda nice AAA visuals. In general no one really cared about stolen Amnesia mechanics, players got their fun, developers got their start-up attention (and money).

Stolen is a very unfair and accusing word to use, Outlast is inspired by the mechanics of Amnesia but they certainly didn't steal anything. And to be completely fair Amnesia were inspired by mechanics from other games, such as sanity from Dark Corners and player-centered narrative from Half-Life 2.

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About the industry, I think the easiest way to break into it is to make something yourself and get exposure that way, or get into modding. It's much more valuable to be able to understand the corrolation between assets and game, and how those assets are generally handled by an engine. Much more so than you'd think.

Most of the time just being able to make a model is not enough, and it's not enough to just being able to draw sprites, there's a lot of technical stuff that you need to know before you can actually start making assets, like different file types and how they behave, the difference between colo-depths and stuff like that.

The reason why I'm working on Secluded right now is because it's pretty much the best bet I've got right now and I'm in the fortunate position to actually being able to work on it.