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Known for his general grumpiness and predilection for drinking far too many iced mochas each day, Dylan won’t let the improper usage of a gaming term out of his
sights once he’s noticed it. BY DYLAN BURNS
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 t’s a term that people throw about like they know what the hell it means. I’ve done it, I admit. Whenever that hyphenated utterance rattles around my cranium and exits from my fingertips a moment of hesitation presents itself. Am I perpetuating this myth that ‘next-gen’ is an acceptable gaming term? Perhaps, but of course, like all languages that evolve over time, acquiescing to the pressures of modern culture, the term itself has become so ingrained, such a part of the lexicon, that to not use it risks being misunderstood.
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IO, the developer responsible for the Hitman series, as well as the totally awesome (not) Kane & Lynch, recently opened up an online survey addressing the topic. A lot of the questions focus on exactly what next-gen gaming is to players. Peeps who take the survey are asked to rank the importance of elements in games such as graphics, advanced AI, physics and non-linear gameplay.
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Imagine if a games reviewer opted to use the term ‘this-gen’. Not only does she/he risk being pointed at behind barely-concealed smiles that have been baked in the oven of supercilious contempt, she/he also risks coming off as a second rate journo; someone who is not up with the latest lingo, man.
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While this is a good first step, I still think that it suffers from the notion that we can actually agree on what constitutes good graphics, good AI, non-linear gameplay and so on. A survey taken by uninformed gamers or people with wildly different notions of these terms is not going to
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Well, I call shenanigans! Next-gen is a bullshit term because there is no possible way to define what it is. It’s a never-coming term, a phrase that looks to a horizon that never gets any closer. It is a stupid phrase thought up by PR bigwigs and what it basically boils down to is a synonym for ‘kick-arse graphics’. Eye candy, that’s all that publishers (and I dare say developers) are interested in when it comes to pimping this next-gen crap. “Can we get it at higher resolutions?” “More pixels?” “Bump up the effects, that’ll sell shitloads of copies!”
Maybe, Mr. Money Bags, but you’re doing it at the expense of my respect – and I hope the respect of a whole demographic of grown-up gamers who look at so called next-gen titles in confusion. It’s hard to explain but in the last year or so I’ve noticed that my interest in games has decreased because I’ve realised that developers are just pushing out the same buggy, unfinished releases that we were subjected to ‘last-gen’, except that this time its shinier, at a higher resolution and features some fancy new animation technique. Developers seem to be getting lazier, thinking that they can simply use the Unreal Engine 3 and slap a massive price sticker on the thing.One games company, it seems, is at least interested in looking into the disparity between what gamers think ‘next-gen’ is and what developers and publishers take it to mean.
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accomplish a lot. Additionally, this is not even addressing the issue of whether next-gen gaming is made up of an evolution or combination of these elements.
I intend to continue this subject further in the next issue of Pixel Hunt, but I leave you with a series of questions: what was last-gen gaming? What is now-gen gaming? And what will be next-gen gaming? Indeed, have we even seen a next-gen game yet?
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