Laptops: The Last Refuge of Gaming Innovation

Browse the shelves of your local game store (if you’ve still got one) or look at a list of this year’s bestsellers and one thing becomes clear: gaming has become safe. Incredibly, depressingly safe. The reason? Enormous development costs ensure the only games with a chance of earning their money back are massive titles that have cast lists and a marketing budget to rival your average Hollywood blockbuster or sports titles that benefit from established franchises.

On one level, this is fine. FIFA is as addictive as ever, and the likes of UNCHARTED and Call of Duty offering amazing-looking immersive gameplay driven by strong narratives. But surely there’s more to gaming than this? What happened to the truly wacky titles that refused to imitate the imaginative ones – the games that made you love being a gamer?

The answer is rather simple: they’ve all gone to PC. These games are great from a developer’s perspective. Lower production costs allow for greater risk-taking and creativity, and niche audiences can be catered to with titles that would never stand a chance on consoles. Crucially, this is also a view shared by the industry. Marcin Lwinski, CEO of CD Projekt Red, the studio behind The Witcher 2, stated in a recent interview with gamesTM that PCs are “the platform of freedom and innovation,” and that “we will certainly see new and crazy gaming ideas, which hopefully will revolutionize the gaming industry and change the development landscape.”

PC gaming has always been – to a certain extent – a platform for creativity and free expression. It was birthplace of first-person shooter (FPS) games, the home of point-and-click classics Broken Sword Trilogy and Monkey Island, and the primary destination for every crazy Popcap casual games creation from Zuma and Bejeweled to Peggle. Console gaming also used to be niche enough that it welcomed a good dose of innovation and off-the-wall ideas. These days, however, console gaming has crashed defiantly into the mainstream, and PCs have been left to shoulder the burden of gaming innovation alone. The good news is that this innovation in games is echoed by the innovation in PCs themselves. Now, users can improve the quality of gameplay by investing not just in peripherals like gaming keyboards and mice, but also in laptops manufactured by Lenovo, Dell, and Asus. These laptops are powerful, fast, and portable, and unlike gaming consoles they can be used for a variety of other tasks, like word processing and data processing.

Heartrendingly, some of the more notable recent and future titles on PCs include interesting and unconventional games, such as ambient first-person ghost story Dear Esther, The Trench – a game set entirely within the confines of a WW1 trench – and Gone Home – a game which simply invites players to wander around an abandoned house and uncover its myriad mysteries. These are all thoughtful titles that have no place on today’s consoles. Rather than buying another mass-market game for your Xbox, it may be time to start investing in a gaming laptop in order to get that ‘authentic’ gaming experience when playing these innovative games.