I want to take a moment to talk about a woman in video games. She made a really great game, well some people don't call them games, but it was a text adventure game. A quite well made one. Many people didn't realize how effectively you could leverage the medium to make such an emotionally evocative piece of, dare I say it, art.
I am of course talking about Emily Short. In the year 2000 or thereabouts, she made a short interactive fiction story called "Galatea." ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galatea_%28video_game%29 ) I highly suggest trying it out.
I think it's sad how fourteen years later, similar to the devolution of FPS's from Quake to Call of Duty, some new text adventures may have gained a much wider audience and are praised to high heaven but are clearly inferior artistically and in design.
Emily Short is a truly great game author, theorist, designer, and contributor to Inform7! She has won several awards for her work. I hope no one thinks of her as "forgotten".
I don't know what he means, but I can give my own perspective (primarily ex-gamer, used to play a lot of Q3A, Doom, and similar):
FPS games used to have very simple orthogonal game mechanics. Large amounts of complexity would arise from those small lists of simple game mechanics. A 'board game equivalent' to this concept might be Go (or if we are being less flattering to the video game industry, Draughts/Checkers). This orthogonality was best showcased in weapon design; you'd often have less than 10 guns, which each behaved in completely different ways and were best used in completely different situations.
Q3A examples:
gauntlet: the only melee weapon
machine gun: hitscan, accurate, fast rate of fire, low damage.
typically available on spawn.
shotgun: hitscan, inaccurate, slow rate of fire, large damage when close.
must be picked up.
railgun: hitscan, accurate, slow rate of fire, devastating damage.
must be picked up.
lightning gun: not-quite-hitscan beam, medium-short range, high damage.
must be picked up.
etc...
Modern games, typically aiming for some perverse sense of "realism", typically lack this sort of weapon orthogonality. You get typically get the basic categories of "assault rifle", "sniper rifle", "handgun", "submachine gun", and "something that shoots explosives", which is all fine and good, except each of those categories has half a dozen or more variations that have very boring differences. Like 6 pistols that only differ in clip size or damage (with one or two clearly being the dominant weapons in all situations). For a concrete example of a game that I think suffers from this: Watch_Dogs. 10 different handguns, but the only one that it ever makes sense to use is the handgun that you start the game with (accurate, silenced, and semi-automatic. yeah there are the automatic handguns, but why would you use them when you could just use one of the automatic rifles? The game gives you absolutely no reason to care about the other handguns).
That's just weapons. I have observed similar trends across nearly all other game mechanics in modern shooters. It is like game developers forgot how to create complexity from a small list of simple mechanics and instead just pack games full of shallow features.
When you play or watch a game, try the following: Imagine that all the models and textures were swapped out with generic low-poly abstract placeholders. All handguns are small thin blue boxes, rifles are all long thin teal boxes, etc. Does the game still play well? If it is Quake or Doom, then the game plays exactly the same as it did before. If it is a modern game, then chances are several pointless redundancies become obvious and several previously "neat" game mechanics become obviously shallow. They have several "different" game mechanics that are different from each other only in the model, texture, or animation used.
Mario-Party-esque "Push X to perform [every damn action in the game]" stuff is another biggie for me. Incredibly lazy stuff which apparently appeals to modern gamers.
I am of course talking about Emily Short. In the year 2000 or thereabouts, she made a short interactive fiction story called "Galatea." ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galatea_%28video_game%29 ) I highly suggest trying it out.
I think it's sad how fourteen years later, similar to the devolution of FPS's from Quake to Call of Duty, some new text adventures may have gained a much wider audience and are praised to high heaven but are clearly inferior artistically and in design.