Dear Readers:
I know it has been over two years since I have written on this blog. You will be happy to know that I am still in Japan, teaching English, in Hiroshima of all places. My job is wonderful, but, it is taxing, and I do not have as much time to play as many games as I used to.
But, for a few weeks now, I have been thinking about bringing this site out of its hibernation. I might simply just talk about news, and if I do a review it will be well informed, well thought out, and useful. I will probably use this site to discuss video game news, and video game ideas, and ideas about the future of video games. So this will be less of a review blog and more of an informative, news critique (and sometimes soapbox) blog.
I regret that I cannot post on this website as much as I would like, but I have been considering doing more and with this commentary on the post below I hope to start this up again, for whoever is interested.
Happy reading!!
Here is the post
Give the article a read. It is interesting, but I went jogging for 30 minutes and I couldn’t stop thinking about how flawed it is in its core reasoning. Come back after you have read it.
Welcome back. The thing is, I see where the author is coming from. He is saying that a discussion for any kind of media platform should be discussions that move that medium forward. I agree with that. He is saying that they should be thoughtful, directed, and well written. I agree with that. He is saying that they should not be written unless the author has experience making a game themselves, even two. Wait. Hold on. That's like saying there should not be writers of baseball because they have never played the game. That is like saying that there should be no Rich Eisen for NFL Network because, you know, he's not a football player. That's basically saying that all of the people working for EA, Rockstar, Ubisoft, Bethesda, Nintendo, Square-Enix, they should be the only ones writing about the games because they are the only ones with insight on how to further games and their creations.
Step back in time with me for a second. The year is 1985 and we have this strange new character, on this amazing console (which cost $200 by the way) called the Nintendo Entertainment System, and we have this wonderful character called Mario. Did you catch what the E stands for in NES? Entertainment. Games were first introduced as entertainment and entertainment only. Not art, not story telling, no in your face experiences that could rival some books I've read, none of that, it was strictly entertainment.
Fast forward to 2011. We have games like Grand Theft Auto that have worlds bigger than we can imagine. We have Super Mario Galaxy, which makes our idea of gravity all crazy while still being on a 2D TV. We have Uncharted 2, Final Fantasy XIII with its rich movie experience. We have online games such as Marvel vs. Capcom 3, joint collaborations from competing companies such as NAMCO and CAPCOM to make a game, we have the Call of Duty franchise for goodness sake which rakes its millions of millions of millions of dollars.
Now, go back to 1985, tell me if it was simply up to the developers, the people with business and creative knowledge of the industry, tell me if they were the only ones that were critiquing each other where we would be? Would we really be where we are now?
Consumers have driven this industry so much. I am not going to compare it to the movie industry, or the music industry because they are separate things. But speaking what I do know about, the game industry, it is extremely important that your game is memorable, brings out certain emotions, and is fun.
How would developers know to drive innovation toward what Call of Duty Modern Warfare did if it had not been for the brilliance of Infinity Wards ideas actually being accepted by the masses? Have we seen a different kind of Call of Duty game? Not really, just a bit more of what the consumers have been asking for. The Consumers. And the consumers can be the critics.
Not every consumer can be a well thought out critic however and here is where I agree with the author. Not just any Joe Shmo with a computer should be critiquing video games. It is an art form in itself, it takes planning, it takes what you think the reader will most likely want to hear, and frankly, it takes some sort of entertainment ability. After all among many things such as art, stories and interactive experiences, video games are themselves entertainment. And if the game fails to do that and the only people we have to drive the discussion are people who have been on a project for X amount of years from inside the developers room we are limiting ourselves to progression rather than, what the author says, expanding it.
There is a lot of crap out there, there has to be, its the internet and it's a big world, but putting such a narrow limit on who should be able to comment isn’t the right idea. Instead, the gamers that want to be writers should practice their craft and then get more involved in asking the developers WH questions to make their understanding of what they are critiquing that much better. I don’t think someone who wants to be an accomplished writer has to be involved in said critique for X amount of years.
Games are entertainment, people want to be entertained, sometimes the technical ins and outs aren’t always the most important, and a developer is going to look at a game much differently than a gamer looks at it, and both views should be recognized, welded, and formed into a well thought out, beautiful article, blog-post, or opinion piece.
-Jeremy aka Adridius
Step back in time with me for a second. The year is 1985 and we have this strange new character, on this amazing console (which cost $200 by the way) called the Nintendo Entertainment System, and we have this wonderful character called Mario. Did you catch what the E stands for in NES? Entertainment. Games were first introduced as entertainment and entertainment only. Not art, not story telling, no in your face experiences that could rival some books I've read, none of that, it was strictly entertainment.
Fast forward to 2011. We have games like Grand Theft Auto that have worlds bigger than we can imagine. We have Super Mario Galaxy, which makes our idea of gravity all crazy while still being on a 2D TV. We have Uncharted 2, Final Fantasy XIII with its rich movie experience. We have online games such as Marvel vs. Capcom 3, joint collaborations from competing companies such as NAMCO and CAPCOM to make a game, we have the Call of Duty franchise for goodness sake which rakes its millions of millions of millions of dollars.
Now, go back to 1985, tell me if it was simply up to the developers, the people with business and creative knowledge of the industry, tell me if they were the only ones that were critiquing each other where we would be? Would we really be where we are now?
Consumers have driven this industry so much. I am not going to compare it to the movie industry, or the music industry because they are separate things. But speaking what I do know about, the game industry, it is extremely important that your game is memorable, brings out certain emotions, and is fun.
How would developers know to drive innovation toward what Call of Duty Modern Warfare did if it had not been for the brilliance of Infinity Wards ideas actually being accepted by the masses? Have we seen a different kind of Call of Duty game? Not really, just a bit more of what the consumers have been asking for. The Consumers. And the consumers can be the critics.
Not every consumer can be a well thought out critic however and here is where I agree with the author. Not just any Joe Shmo with a computer should be critiquing video games. It is an art form in itself, it takes planning, it takes what you think the reader will most likely want to hear, and frankly, it takes some sort of entertainment ability. After all among many things such as art, stories and interactive experiences, video games are themselves entertainment. And if the game fails to do that and the only people we have to drive the discussion are people who have been on a project for X amount of years from inside the developers room we are limiting ourselves to progression rather than, what the author says, expanding it.
There is a lot of crap out there, there has to be, its the internet and it's a big world, but putting such a narrow limit on who should be able to comment isn’t the right idea. Instead, the gamers that want to be writers should practice their craft and then get more involved in asking the developers WH questions to make their understanding of what they are critiquing that much better. I don’t think someone who wants to be an accomplished writer has to be involved in said critique for X amount of years.
Games are entertainment, people want to be entertained, sometimes the technical ins and outs aren’t always the most important, and a developer is going to look at a game much differently than a gamer looks at it, and both views should be recognized, welded, and formed into a well thought out, beautiful article, blog-post, or opinion piece.
-Jeremy aka Adridius
1 comment:
You're right in what you say about game experience as entertainment, but I don't think it's fair to take that as criticism against the linked article. The author didn't say that professional reviewers should be the only ones doing criticism, just that it would be good to have more of them because they're few.
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