Building a 3-D world, modelling a bunch of characters, and animating them is labor-intensive and expensive. For language instruction you can get pretty much the same effect by just videotaping some actors speaking.
Generally, people who didn’t play games as kids don’t start as adults. Yes, there are plenty of exceptions, but as a general rule there aren’t enough gamers over the age of 40 to justify targeting products at them. This will change over time as the leading edge of gamers continues to age. The fact that adult brain training titles like Brain Age are doing well is evidence that the market is maturing. Thirty years from now we’ll probably see games targeted at retirees.
Surely costs could be cut by re purposing existing software.
I don’t know, I think if learning a language was fun instead of drudgery it would fly off the shelves. The world grows smaller everyday.
And by the way, I know people well over 60 who use computers and would probably play games if they weren’t all about smashing and murder and stuff. Inventing something cool for old people is a pretty good way to get rich these days, it seems to me.
It’s not the software that’s expensive. It’s the modelling and the animation. Unless you want your language lesson from a mutant zombie in a burned-out chateau … . Sort of like Typing of the Dead, I suppose.
But most games aren’t about smashing and murder. There are lots of games they could be playing right now if that’s how they wanted to spend their time: the Sims, Civilization, Gran Turismo, etc. But they don’t … at least not in the numbers that would justify targeting a game at them.
Daggerfall did this. The dungeons were built by LSD- and amphetamine-using dwarves and dotted the countryside. There was some sameness to the randomness, but those sprawling dungeons were great, and I missed them in Morrowind and Oblivion, where every place is static.
In another thread I mentioned that I’d like to see a Shadowrun game with randomly-spawned office complexes. When you go into it, you don’t know what to expect. Instead, the game would fill up a given space with standard office peices and personnel (hence going in in the daytime with the workers around may be a bad idea if you’re a low-charisma character). But each peice or floor would be specially created to work well on its own, with standard connections for others to use. Challenges would exist built-in, like heavy blast doors to protect safe zones (you might have to blow one, or hack it, or rip it off, or steal an electronic key, or force security guard to open it and kidnap someone. Thus, each stage is built when entered. However, it won’t take any longer to load up into memeory, since the peices are simply selected and stacked up atop each other. Once loaded, the AI takes over and can move its resources (guards, etc.) around freely.
Clock. Maybe most people don’t have this issue, but my compuiter room doesn’t have any clocks. I can get up, go into another room, look at the time, and come back, but I find that annoying. I can also close the game and chek my system clock but that’s annoying, too. Put a clock in the game! If you don’t want it cluttering up the interface, make it optional.