Quote:
Originally Posted by Yuda
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Great post t0lkien.
Is it possible for anything to appeal to the mass market without being mediocre, not necessarily relating to games, but that's what I had in mind.
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You know, this is a very good question, and I've thought about it *a lot*.
My answer is ... quality will almost always make it to mass market, but
you can never create quality if mass market is your primary goal. That impetus short circuits the ethic that is required to produce quality. My one huge example (not surprisingly) is
Lord of the Rings - the books now, not the movies; don't get me started. The music industry is also full of examples (see the fantastic documentary
Searching for Sugarman for one). Tolkien wrote that trilogy over 30+ years as a work of love drawing upon his immensely deep, professor-level knowledge of linguistics and history and mythology acquired over a lifetime of study and interest. It was published by its original publisher under the belief it was going to lose money, but they published anyway because they believed it was a work of genius. You could hardly get a clearer contrast to the attitude of games publishers today. And look at what LoTR has done. We are here on this board discussing EQ only because of Tolkien's seminal work. RPG's would not exist without it.
I would also say that classic EQ similarly was a work of integrity and passion, and Luclin and beyond was the brute child of publisher greed. The reason that the MMO industry exists at all is directly due to classic EverQuest. Vanilla WoW was a carbon copy of EverQuest and some of Ultima Online, but polished and executed beautifully to make it accessible. I always said the absolute best thing Blizzard did for MMOs was WoW's original UI design. It was inspired, and took the impenetrable mess that was the EQ UI (including all the console command madness) around the start of Velious and made the game and its mechanics immediately intuitive for absolute beginners. That is (was) Blizzard's talent. The art style was also inspired in that it played to the strengths of both their engine and one of the biggest technical challenges of the genre (low poly, HD textures), but that's a bigger discussion.
So all that to say, yes it can. But as soon as anything hits mass market it has also already inevitably been turned into the creative equivalent of a slutty crack whore. For visual reference see any Michael Bay (or Peter Jackson and that awful script destroying wife of his) movie.
For genuinely creative, artistic people, I would say the motivation for success always has a negative effect upon their work. This would be a very long post if I went into any examples, but they are all over the music, movie, art, and book publishing industries. There is a reason patrons existed around the time of the Renaissance, and that the world is still in awe of the art that period of history produced.
In the specific instance of the games industry, I will say this: money currently runs the industry; it didn't start off that way. When money runs anything, it destroys it. Games need to get back to the place where inspired people who love what they are making can get into the position to make what they love again because they love it. That cannot happen while self-important, incompetent, unethical, fiscally brutal mercenary dicks in suits call all the shots. It's changing, but the change will be slow and uneven, and full of missteps and outright mistakes (for reference see anything F2P the sole purpose of which is
to make money).