That something doesn’t sell well isn’t a perfect indicator of its value (I admit that there is a correlation there though). I just don’t think the gaming audience was expecting a FPS-RPG hybrid, especially when the FPS genre was too technically primitive to offer fully interactive environments. Look at the baseline first-person shooters now: real-time lighting, bump mapping, real-time physics, depth of field, motion-capture animation, etc.

Most reviewers tend to assert that Deus Ex 1 was a better experience, while Deus Ex 2 was the better game. That is to say, Deus Ex 2 was more polished and balanced as a piece of entertainment software than its predecessor, but I think most would argue that cross-platform development is what led to its lackluster reception. In any case, the fact that a sequel does worse than the original is no reason to claim that both games are riding on a flawed concept.

We’re almost there.

Deus Ex does however provide a good example of why I don’t think games are going to come anywhere near books in their sophistication for a long time. The bottom line is that Deus Ex just didn’t sell that well. Money is king in the games industry. It costs very little to produce a book but it costs millions to produce a game. None of you have mentioned the fact that Deus Ex had a sequel. Deus Ex 2 simply isn’t as highly rated as the original – that’s not progress !

I’ve been dying to play Bioshock for ages now but I have to buy a new computer before I can (you never have to upgrade your eyes to read a book !) I hope it sells really well and doesn’t get outsold by cheaply made Harry Potter tie-ins. Apparently they had great difficulty finding a publisher.

Bruce, I hope your pending article explains how you foresee the games industry being ’set free’ as I’d be very interested. I’m a bit more pessimistic than you !

Also, following the release of Deus Ex 1, the gaming industry seemed to be all tied up in its efforts to improve the visual quality of games. Real-time lighting, physics, and advanced texturing became priorities for a lot of developers (Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 come to mind). Now that those features have been implemented successfully, I think we may now start to see more titles that follow in the footsteps of Deus Ex. Or at least I personally would hope as much.

Let us hope that this BioShock business is one such game. =)

It’s true; gamer discussion threads are likely to be less mature and probably not as well written. I think there is, though, a social component to that trend. Discussions about games are by their vary nature less austere and prone to colloquially informal language. Discussions about books tend to be more academic, probably as a result of the way books are treated in school as a platform for more formal debate. And again, books lend themselves to that kind of discourse; a handful of games do (Deus Ex, for example), but a lot of them don’t or gamers don’t see them as works of art.

Anyway, of course I’m not trying to supplant the value of books here. I just think gaming has started to evolve away from the recreational diversion that it used to be.

Here’s another experiement: Read the posts on some popular gamer blogs (say, 1up.com) and some popular book blogs (say, bookblog.net). The typical gamer discussion threads are just embarrassing by comparison. Fortunately, I have high hopes for this blog!