From a political view (trust me, I'm a scientist!) you can see similar situations. A candidate will appeal to their base during early (pre-primary) times inorder to gain early funding and such. However, since most people are not hard line conservatives or liberals, they will spend most of their campaign trying to appeal to the moderates. Since ideology (when placed on a simple X/Y axies) takes the form of a bell curve, with most of the people in the middle, it is the only practicle thing to do. This appeases the greater number of people, but leads to homoginization of candidates, and alienation of the original base.

I think the same can be said of games. Most people are not "hardcore" gamers, regardless of genre. For them games are not an experiance, but an activity. And since that is all games will ever be to them, they are suspect of a game that requires something more. A good example of this would be all the individual reviews about GalCiv on Gamespot that complain aobut how big the manual is.

However, there is hope. When a market becomes so homogenous that people demand something differant, there is always someone willig to provide it for them. Why would someone spend $8 on a hamburger at Fudruckers instead of $1 at McDonalds? Because it is differant, it is better, it isn't always the same.

So, while Rainbow Six may be going more run n' gun, there will probably be another developer in future who thinks that they can fill the gap that was left behind. As their product gets more popular, thier comapny will grow in size. As they get more overhead, they will have to go more mainstream to secure the needed income, etc. and the cycle will have started all over again.

I think that most games are trying to appeal to such a large audience that most of them will turn in to something like The Elder Scrolls or Fable. You create 'you', and play around in their world. Spore goes beyond that, and larger the sandbox a game has, the the more it will be purchased.

MMORPG's have a very large sandbox, for example in World of Warcraft you create a custom hero and do what you want, for the most part it's up to you. In Star Wars Galaxies you have an entire planet to explore, and if you get bored just go to another one. Or get a ship and fly around in space doing whatever it is you do there. MMORPG's also let you have semi-social interaction, since you can chat in real time with many different people, most of which you don't know. It's a pretty good system.

I think that most games will let you have a large sandbox to play in, and only have some limited form of structure. Spore, for example, lets you build a race, let it evolve, and even go to other planets and see other peoples. But it still has the structure, you HAVE to build a race, and you HAVE to have it evolve, or you will hit the edge of your sandbox. I think most games will start to come out like that. And who knows, maybe people will start to want more structure and the older style of games will come back. But for the most part I don't think they are.

I doubt this very strongly. You have to take into consideration that on earth we have a certain conditions like gravity, temperature, atmospheric condition and such and this influences what form life will take.

On other planets with different conditions life will probably take another form.

But anyway, back to gaming. I myself have really been into MMORPGs ever since the first ones were released (Meridian, Ultima Online) and if you disregard gfx I think the games have more devolved than evolved. MMORPGs were originally designed in such a way that you as a player could influence the world and this was true to some extent in the early MMORPGs. But lately almost all MMORPGs have put heavy restrictions on what you can do and where. Take WoW for example, the freedom you have there is an illusion since even though you can go to most places in the world you really cant level or do anything useful there unless you are in the level range for that particular place which makes the world kinda linear. Level 1-10 you are in zone x and y, level 11-15 you are in zone a and b and so on.

Also there is nothing you can do which has server side effects. PvP is heavily restricted and dont influence anything really and killing high level mobs has no lasting effects as they will keep spawning. Same with quests, thousands of people can finish the quest which saves the same village from some danger or whatever but finishing that quest, or not finishing it, has no effect what so ever on the village. It's just meaningless fluff.

All in all you can say that MMORPGs have been "dumbified" so it requires little thought to do most of anything, it just takes time (=more fees for the company) and why has it become like this?

Well seeing as WoW has so many subsribers it seems that it appeals to the big masses of gamers and apparently those people want it easy and casual which means any "idiot" can advance to the top level. This is negative because if everyone can be at the highest level then it really means that noone is at the highest level because it means nothing. Imagine for example if there were a 1000 heavy weight boxing champions and a 1000 presidents of the US. The title would instantly become worthless.

And this for me is a devolution of the MMORPG genre. But not only the MMORPG genre has seen such effects. Alot of new games seem to focus more on instant gratification from the most advanced gfx but with little depth and with almost no requirment to actually use your brain when playing.

GC II is a nice exception to that but it too has shortcomings. Like no control of combat and a simplified tech tree without any advanced weapons or such, which would require you to think a bit more when designing your ship beside putting weapons that does XX dmg and defence that shields for YY dmg. In this case GC II has devolved from MOO2 where there was a huge varierity of weapons that did more than just doing dmg.

Game design is first and foremost an art--not a science.

Innovation in game design is driven by designers trying to make new games within the confines of the free market.

A lot of things about games are changing: graphics and computational power first and foremost. But gameplay--the way a game plays, the way a game feels, the kinds of things it challenges a gamer to do--hasn't seen much innovation in the last 5 years. Mainstream publishers seldom welcome innovation--it's too risky, whereas designing one more sequel to your latest cash cow is seen as a sound business decision.

I look back at some of the absolute favorite games that I ever played (Civilization, X-Com: UFO Defense, and Panzer General all come to mind), and I realized that each of those games featured a different style of gameplay than I had experienced before.

You don't have to create a whole new genre--the way Warcraft spawned RTS or Everquest broke open the long-sleepy MMORPG scene--to come up with an intriguing new game design. You also don't need fancy graphics to offer a compelling gameplay experience to a good number of fans (Space Rangers 2 and Dominions II both come to mind).

I think that the market's slide towards high-end graphics games has made it harder for small-time designers (read "small groups of would-be innovators chasing a brave new vision") to innovate as much as they used to. The barriers-to-entry are just too high (it takes too many graphic artists rendering too many polygons, etc.) for folks without major funding.

Lots of folks say that game design has gotten worse in recent years. But as Sid Meiers pointed out when asked this question a few years ago, there were always a lot of bad games out there--we just forget about them quickly.

I'm not sure that game design has gotten worse, but it does seem to me to be emphasizing the wrong things too often--primarily pretty pictures over gameplay (competent AI is perhaps the most neglected piece of gameplay, but it's only one piece).

"Being the geek that I am, I am fascinated by the idea of life somewhere beyond our own planet. Like many others, I've dreamed and believed that life could very possibly take on a from we humans would not be at all familiar with. But in recent years, that idea has been challenged by a theory called "Convergence" Basically the idea states that there are certain forms that are most efficient in nature, and that life will inevitably evolve towards those forms... For example, the vast majority of macroscopic life on this planet has an even number of legs (2,4,6,or 8). This is leading current theorists to believe that if/when we encounter life from another planet it will be something similar to what we have observed here on Earth."

I think they might be onto something, the laws of physics could be another example, surface area divided by volume, keeps animals inside a certain parameter, weight that is, effect of gravity, also prevents ants from being the size of cars, or elephants any larger then they are.

As for games, what the gaming community should do, is encourage responsible purchases, that is, make a quality gaming review, cheap and the sole place to get info, so that the masses who have bought one or two games for top dollar and realize they are crap know where to go to get an accurate rating on those games and ratings on other products that don't suck.

There are a large majority of consumers that would gladly be in the know and skip a purchase for a crap product in order to buy a quality and well liked program. If the community was to organize those quality programs would more then likely also be more hardcore then generic as well. Unfortunately I don't see that happening anytime soon.

They are evolving, but the pace has slowed when you consider the volume of money in the marketplace. No longer are major new genres or concepts introduced at a steady pace. Also most of the new stuff is just rehashes of older games, albeit with better graphics and improved interface as you suggest. They sometimes don't include enough flavor of their own to really be remarkable.

I'm speaking largely of PC gaming. What is evolving rapidly is the way in which we move the data, originally on floppy disk, then onto CD's, for a while over phone line download, then broadband download, then DVD. Pretty soon, texture files and software content will be too large and costly to produce on DVD's and another medium will have to be developed. I don't think Blue ray or the other larger CD type formats will really be that big either. DVD's hold plenty of data and the Blue Ray doesn't hold a magnitude greater like CD's did for floppy, and DVD for CD's.

I think in the future broadband is going to be faster stuff like optical cable and really wide pipes will allow you to download DVD sized files in seconds. The problem might not even be hard drive read/write speeds because in the 64 bit world, we are dealing with gigabytes of RAM, and 32 GB of ram seems to be less then 10 years off. Maybe within 5 years, They already sell 2GB ram sticks.

A 3D removable and writable/readable and dependable storage unit that used an advanced USB standard might be the perfect application for such medium storage. That is if most digital content isn't already just downloaded at whim.