This is a small part of my new book, it's called "Game Design: From Abstract to Uncertain", and I do believe this part is kinda interesting on its own, so I made it into a little preview for you. This subchapter is called The Darwin Lie, hope you enjoy.

The Darwin Lie

To survive competition, the game industry tell us many lies, but by far the one that goes most unoticed by the major mass of people is the evolution in games. Are games evolving? Are they where we never dreamed before? That's a lie.

When the NES replaced the Atari, a lot of people started to count generations and write game history, but that videogame wasn't a new generation, it was a new product. Since then we have the same product recycled, each time with better graphics, but the concept, it's still the same since the 8 Bits, the biggest changes were on the battlefield, not on the weapons.

Like in a battlefield, Nintendo and Sega fought with all their might during the 16 Bits, Super Nintendo (Super NES) x Mega Drive (Genesis), and no different than a real war, one army was defeatted and the other was scrapped. By the end of the 16 Bits war, the battlefield was devastated, and while having won the war, there was no victory for Nintendo.

Pay atention how the term "generation" has no real definition. In the beginning it was measured by the processors power: 8 Bits, 16 Bits, 32 Bits, 64 Bits, 128 Bits, etc. It worked back then, but soon we saw it didn't mean anything. The clunky Xbox had "only" 32 Bits, but it was a lot more powerful than the 128 Bits PlayStation 2.

Challenge your convictions. Generations do not exist. When I said the NES was a new product and not a new generation, it's because it created a pos-Atari modelo, that would only be broken by the recent Wii, and I'm not talking about the controls. Think about a reunion of concept and execution of an idea different than the current one.

There's no better example than Apple. Products like iPhone and iPod surpass its own qualities, they are legends. People don't want a MP3 player, they want an iPod, they don't want a cell phone, they want an iPhone.

The generation does not exist, the consumer didn't buy the previous generation of cell phones and most certainly won't buy the next one, because only the iPhone appeals to him. This happen because the iPhone is a real product, not a new generation, a momentary treat that has to be exchanged in some time for the next one. The consumer hates that.

The game industry dictated by the competition is comparable to the conspirations that portrait the Cold War as a way of United States and Russia being able to explore their own countries trough arm races as allies pretending to be enemies.

To us, Darwin is a lie. Words like extinction do not exist in the games dictionary. Until today all generations are halted by the entrance of a new competitor, but what would happen if games would still be made to all the videogames that ever existed?

Insane! That doesn't sounds logical to our image of the current market! Still, everytime the industry try to terminate them, they come back! Not the videogames, but the games!

Clouded by the idea of extinction of previous games and evolution to a new level, the companies made games that were more complex during the 16 Bits, and what happened? The portables came into play with simple games!

But so have the portables walked into a new "evolution" of complex games, and what happened? Cell phones became an incredible game market! The console players do not understand! How can people prefer to play on that screen with terrible control?

If history (and Einstein) teached us something is that human stupiditty is infinite and the same mistakes will be repeated eventually. As soon as cell phones become home to more complex games, I wouldn't find it strange if the new trend would be key rings that play games.

In our world, we have hundreds of games. Sport, board, card, and the easiest thing we can attest is that a game does not nullify another. Tennis didn't kill Ping Pong, Chess didn't kill checkers, Poker didn't kill Hearts. So why do we believe that games nowdays killed our old ways of having fun?

It's stuck in the players mind that it's only worth it to play recent games, the ones that are coming out right now, to the current generation. Even though there's no human being on this planet that have played all the good games from all generations, he doesn't believe he can still find something on past generations.

This is just another facet of the lie, the hype. To sell games at absurd prices, the industry creates hype, games that will be incredible, the best thing you've ever played, until they reach the player hands and it's not all that. You finish them and put them on the shelf, or don't even finish it and the cycle starts again with another game. By this point the previous game gets a formidable price cut and you realize you just paid their bill.