I appeared on the latest episode of the Brainy Gamer podcast, along with Brad Gallaway of GameCritics.com and Nels Anderson of Above 49, to talk about what we've been playing lately. You'll find some solid under-the-radar recommendations, one of which I was glad to be able to provide. Hint: It's Yakuza 4. I also took a little more time to slag on LittleBigPlanet 2, which Brad admitted that he hated too, much later in the podcast than he should have.
The super-sized podcast also contains two other GDC-based segments, one featuring cool dudes Patrick Klepek, Matthew Burns, and Chris Dahlen, and one with Sean Duncan of Miami University (himself a cool dude). Give it a listen!
Showing posts with label Brainy Gamer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brainy Gamer. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 05, 2011
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
All mod confabs
Another year, another Brainy Gamer confab. This year, I joined the host Michael Abbott and guests Manveer Heir, of Raven Software, and Tom Bissell, author of the New Yorker profile of CliffyB, to talk about our favorite games of 2009.
Listening to it, I thought it came out pretty well, though as usually happens with these things it's a little long. Additionally, I'm rocking some pretty heavy sibilance, which I wish somebody had mentioned at the time so we could have tried to fix it. Even so, the discussion is pretty good, and covers all of our favorites, which were Borderlands, Uncharted 2, and Demon's Souls. Check it out!
This episode, by the way, is part 3 of 4. The last part is yet to be posted, but you can listen to part 1 with Chris Dahlen, Steve Gaynor, and L.B. Jeffries, and part 2 with Leigh Alexander, Nels Anderson, and Corvus Elrod.
Additionally, I've appeared on the Brainy Gamer podcast three times before:
Obviously I am running out of "confab" puns.
Listening to it, I thought it came out pretty well, though as usually happens with these things it's a little long. Additionally, I'm rocking some pretty heavy sibilance, which I wish somebody had mentioned at the time so we could have tried to fix it. Even so, the discussion is pretty good, and covers all of our favorites, which were Borderlands, Uncharted 2, and Demon's Souls. Check it out!
This episode, by the way, is part 3 of 4. The last part is yet to be posted, but you can listen to part 1 with Chris Dahlen, Steve Gaynor, and L.B. Jeffries, and part 2 with Leigh Alexander, Nels Anderson, and Corvus Elrod.
Additionally, I've appeared on the Brainy Gamer podcast three times before:
Obviously I am running out of "confab" puns.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Friday afternoon tidbits
Because I didn't learn my lesson last time, I'm going hiking again this weekend. Presumably there will be no waist-deep snow to wade through at this time of year, unlike the last time. If I don't come back, tell them I was cool.
-Duncan Fyfe's farewell tour at Hit Self-Destruct (which is total bullshit, by the way) includes a penetrating look at the state of games journalism. His conclusion: It's much better than it was, but there's always something tragic about growing up. No one really sees working for a game magazine as akin to landing a job in the Wonka factory anymore. That makes for better writing. Isn't it also a little sad?
Duncan talked to a few excellent writers for this piece: Simon Parkin, Kieron Gillen, Nick Breckon, and Chris Remo. I'm in there too, for some reason. When Duncan first asked me about my career high points, I wouldn't have expected that one of them would be seeing myself mentioned in the same breath as those guys.
-The announcement of the Rock Band Network is further evidence that Harmonix isn't just fumbling around in the dark. Rather than forcing people to use in-game samples, they're giving musicians the tools to import their actual music into the game. Kirk Hamilton has a good take on what this means from the musician's perspective. You have to wonder how they'll handle the inevitable flood of submissions. Good problem to have, I suppose.
-The latest edition of the Brainy Gamer podcast features an interview with Clint Hocking, plus a round-table discussion about game design with Hocking, Manveer Heir, and Borut Pfeifer. All three guests have some terrific insights into game design, which comes as no surprise. It's great to hear the perspective of the people who make the games. That's something the broader public -- myself included -- doesn't make enough of an effort to do.
-More reasons never to have kids, from Julian Murdoch at Gamers with Jobs. What I mean by that is: I can't risk somebody melting the ice around my heart!
-Anybody notice that PixelVixen707 hasn't posted since the book came out? Guess the marketing budget's tapped.
-Duncan Fyfe's farewell tour at Hit Self-Destruct (which is total bullshit, by the way) includes a penetrating look at the state of games journalism. His conclusion: It's much better than it was, but there's always something tragic about growing up. No one really sees working for a game magazine as akin to landing a job in the Wonka factory anymore. That makes for better writing. Isn't it also a little sad?
Duncan talked to a few excellent writers for this piece: Simon Parkin, Kieron Gillen, Nick Breckon, and Chris Remo. I'm in there too, for some reason. When Duncan first asked me about my career high points, I wouldn't have expected that one of them would be seeing myself mentioned in the same breath as those guys.
-The announcement of the Rock Band Network is further evidence that Harmonix isn't just fumbling around in the dark. Rather than forcing people to use in-game samples, they're giving musicians the tools to import their actual music into the game. Kirk Hamilton has a good take on what this means from the musician's perspective. You have to wonder how they'll handle the inevitable flood of submissions. Good problem to have, I suppose.
-The latest edition of the Brainy Gamer podcast features an interview with Clint Hocking, plus a round-table discussion about game design with Hocking, Manveer Heir, and Borut Pfeifer. All three guests have some terrific insights into game design, which comes as no surprise. It's great to hear the perspective of the people who make the games. That's something the broader public -- myself included -- doesn't make enough of an effort to do.
-More reasons never to have kids, from Julian Murdoch at Gamers with Jobs. What I mean by that is: I can't risk somebody melting the ice around my heart!
-Anybody notice that PixelVixen707 hasn't posted since the book came out? Guess the marketing budget's tapped.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Friday afternoon tidbits
I've had a two-week layoff from reviewing games, and in that time I have played... nothing. Didn't pick up an old favorite, or finish off something that had been lingering. Haven't even turned on a console. Weird. But I've still been reading lots of blogs!
-There were a couple of good editorials at Game|Life this week. Earnest Cavalli said good riddance to Duke Nukem, calling him a relic with no place in 2009. It's true that Duke is an anachronism today, but it's possible that a solidly executed Duke Nukem Forever would have made that seem like a good thing. After all, who doesn't get sucked into watching Commando on AMC every time it's on? Even though the character might still have his place, it's probably for the best that we close the book on Duke Nukem, forever. This game would have had too much baggage, regardless of how it turned out.
(As an aside: Remember when Daikatana was an oft-delayed, much-maligned punchline? It's still got nothing on DNF, right?)
-Also at Game|Life, Chris Kohler decried the looming possibility of an English-only audio track for Final Fantasy XIII. Although I think it would be nice for players to have the option of Japanese audio, I disagree with his premise. Movies and games are not a fair comparison when discussing the merits of dubbing and subtitles. The reason for this is simple: all video games are dubbed.
Sure, I'd rather watch a live-action movie in the original language, with the voices belonging to the actors onscreen. It's jarring when the movement of someone's lips don't match the words coming out of their mouth. And, quite often, inferior actors are used for the voiceover. In a film, the dialogue, the actor's voice, and his movements are equal parts of the performance. You can't reconstitute it from its many parts and make it work. I doubt anyone would argue that.
But in the majority of animated films and video games, the voice actor in the studio is providing only one element of the performance, whether he's the "original" performer or not. He's not doing motion-capture in most cases, nor is the movement of the characters' mouths so precise that you can tell when the lip-synching fails. There is no inherent drawback to dubbing animated characters. The process for giving them voice is exactly the same. (It may be the case that the Japanese voice actors are better than their American counterparts, but that's confusing the issue. The solution to that problem would be to hire better American actors.)
Kohler's larger point about not scrubbing the "cultural odor" from the Japanese-made game is one that I sympathize with a little more, but that's not the reality of the market. If Square Enix wants to sell millions of copies of Final Fantasy XIII to Western audiences, they have no choice. Maybe it's a shame, but you may as well complain about the sun always coming up in the East.
-Michael Abbott makes a great point about what video games are really sending the wrong messages to kids. Certain culture warriors get hung up on depictions of violence, sex, and profanity in games, but one thing they never seem to do is consider the context. Often, violent games make an effort not to reward indiscriminate bloodshed. Even the notorious Grand Theft Auto series sends the cops after you when you break the law. Believe me, I'm not giving a pass to GTA or anybody else, but at least they implement some kind of recognizable morality system in their games (usually too simplistic a one, in fact).
Marketing games specifically to kids that emphasize rabid consumerism, materialism, and social climbing -- that's just as bad. Now, I don't think playing a first-person shooter will make a kid shoot up his school, and I don't think playing Style Up for Prom will make a kid max out her parents' credit cards. But I've called for everyone, from publishers to players, to take the messages of their games more seriously, and what's bad about the games Michael mentions is how innocuous they seem to be. Lots of parents look at Grand Theft Auto and say, "Not appropriate for my kid." What parent would say the same about these?
-Finally, Gary Hodges bids farewell to Joystick Division, and, apparently, to freelance game reviews. Can't say I blame him. It's very hard to do this for the love of the game, especially when there's so much about the game that makes it hard to love. In his reviews for Village Voice Media, and his posts on JD, Gary's always shown thoughtfulness, integrity, and a real ability to get to the core of a game in just a few words. We'll miss him.
-There were a couple of good editorials at Game|Life this week. Earnest Cavalli said good riddance to Duke Nukem, calling him a relic with no place in 2009. It's true that Duke is an anachronism today, but it's possible that a solidly executed Duke Nukem Forever would have made that seem like a good thing. After all, who doesn't get sucked into watching Commando on AMC every time it's on? Even though the character might still have his place, it's probably for the best that we close the book on Duke Nukem, forever. This game would have had too much baggage, regardless of how it turned out.
(As an aside: Remember when Daikatana was an oft-delayed, much-maligned punchline? It's still got nothing on DNF, right?)
-Also at Game|Life, Chris Kohler decried the looming possibility of an English-only audio track for Final Fantasy XIII. Although I think it would be nice for players to have the option of Japanese audio, I disagree with his premise. Movies and games are not a fair comparison when discussing the merits of dubbing and subtitles. The reason for this is simple: all video games are dubbed.
Sure, I'd rather watch a live-action movie in the original language, with the voices belonging to the actors onscreen. It's jarring when the movement of someone's lips don't match the words coming out of their mouth. And, quite often, inferior actors are used for the voiceover. In a film, the dialogue, the actor's voice, and his movements are equal parts of the performance. You can't reconstitute it from its many parts and make it work. I doubt anyone would argue that.
But in the majority of animated films and video games, the voice actor in the studio is providing only one element of the performance, whether he's the "original" performer or not. He's not doing motion-capture in most cases, nor is the movement of the characters' mouths so precise that you can tell when the lip-synching fails. There is no inherent drawback to dubbing animated characters. The process for giving them voice is exactly the same. (It may be the case that the Japanese voice actors are better than their American counterparts, but that's confusing the issue. The solution to that problem would be to hire better American actors.)
Kohler's larger point about not scrubbing the "cultural odor" from the Japanese-made game is one that I sympathize with a little more, but that's not the reality of the market. If Square Enix wants to sell millions of copies of Final Fantasy XIII to Western audiences, they have no choice. Maybe it's a shame, but you may as well complain about the sun always coming up in the East.
-Michael Abbott makes a great point about what video games are really sending the wrong messages to kids. Certain culture warriors get hung up on depictions of violence, sex, and profanity in games, but one thing they never seem to do is consider the context. Often, violent games make an effort not to reward indiscriminate bloodshed. Even the notorious Grand Theft Auto series sends the cops after you when you break the law. Believe me, I'm not giving a pass to GTA or anybody else, but at least they implement some kind of recognizable morality system in their games (usually too simplistic a one, in fact).
Marketing games specifically to kids that emphasize rabid consumerism, materialism, and social climbing -- that's just as bad. Now, I don't think playing a first-person shooter will make a kid shoot up his school, and I don't think playing Style Up for Prom will make a kid max out her parents' credit cards. But I've called for everyone, from publishers to players, to take the messages of their games more seriously, and what's bad about the games Michael mentions is how innocuous they seem to be. Lots of parents look at Grand Theft Auto and say, "Not appropriate for my kid." What parent would say the same about these?
-Finally, Gary Hodges bids farewell to Joystick Division, and, apparently, to freelance game reviews. Can't say I blame him. It's very hard to do this for the love of the game, especially when there's so much about the game that makes it hard to love. In his reviews for Village Voice Media, and his posts on JD, Gary's always shown thoughtfulness, integrity, and a real ability to get to the core of a game in just a few words. We'll miss him.
Monday, December 22, 2008
The confab of confabs
If you have any of the same Twitter friends and RSS subscriptions that I do, by now you've probably heard dozens of times about the latest Brainy Gamer podcast. Just in case: Have you heard about the latest Brainy Gamer podcast? Michael Abbott has assembled a super-confab for an epic three-part discussion of the best games of 2008. I shared microphone space with Dan Bruno, Corvus Elrod, and Spencer Greenwood, who must always be referred to by his full name.
All three had unexpected picks for their favorites of the year, a trend which extended across every discussion. Michael says he asked 20 different writers for their picks, and got 20 unique responses. That's unbelievable, and maybe unprecedented. We had a bit of a discussion about what the lack of a consensus pick means, if anything, and I'm not sure I said what I really meant about it.
Essentially, when everyone you know picks BioShock or Portal for their game of the year, I don't think that's indicative of a hive mentality or a lack of imagination among gamers -- I think it means that those games were seriously awesome. This year's best games still all seemed to suffer from one massive annoyance or another, and it's a matter of each person's individual breaking point how they responded to that. That may be what accounts for the divergent responses.
If, instead of asking everyone for their top pick, Michael had instead asked for our top 10 lists, and then compiled the results into one master list, you'd probably get something altogether more predictable. Fallout 3 or Grand Theft Auto IV would probably be the number 1 pick, and most of us would think, well, it's not my favorite, but it makes sense to be up there. But that's much less interesting than the way he actually did it! There were games of all types represented here, independent and big-budget, story-driven and wholly competitive, new IPs and sequels. It's fascinating stuff.
Here's that link again.
All three had unexpected picks for their favorites of the year, a trend which extended across every discussion. Michael says he asked 20 different writers for their picks, and got 20 unique responses. That's unbelievable, and maybe unprecedented. We had a bit of a discussion about what the lack of a consensus pick means, if anything, and I'm not sure I said what I really meant about it.
Essentially, when everyone you know picks BioShock or Portal for their game of the year, I don't think that's indicative of a hive mentality or a lack of imagination among gamers -- I think it means that those games were seriously awesome. This year's best games still all seemed to suffer from one massive annoyance or another, and it's a matter of each person's individual breaking point how they responded to that. That may be what accounts for the divergent responses.
If, instead of asking everyone for their top pick, Michael had instead asked for our top 10 lists, and then compiled the results into one master list, you'd probably get something altogether more predictable. Fallout 3 or Grand Theft Auto IV would probably be the number 1 pick, and most of us would think, well, it's not my favorite, but it makes sense to be up there. But that's much less interesting than the way he actually did it! There were games of all types represented here, independent and big-budget, story-driven and wholly competitive, new IPs and sequels. It's fascinating stuff.
Here's that link again.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Confabulous
Above: Leigh Alexander, right, defends Princess Debut to a skeptical Mitch Krpata and Michael Abbott, left and center.I had the pleasure of joining Leigh Alexander as a guest on the latest episode of the Brainy Gamer podcast, as part of Michael Abbott's new "Gamers Confab" roundtable discussions. We covered quite a few topics, including what we're playing now (Rock Band 2 ftw), the difficulty of keeping up with all the fall releases, the desirability of keeping up with all the fall releases, and the state of the survival horror genre. That last subject takes up about the second half of the conversation. We talked about Dead Space and Silent Hill specifically, with room to talk about classics of the genre, and what the hell makes a game scary, anyway.
I thought we had some pretty interesting things to say, while covering a lot of ground. Mostly it was nice to have the discussion with live people, as these are topics I never discuss with anybody in real life. Sometimes it's nice to just sit down and shoot the shit about these subjects, without all the editing and hard work of a good blog post. You sort of get the impression, listening to the podcast, that we all felt that way.
Have a listen, won't you?
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Lead, follow, or get out of the way
A fascinating conversation has developed over at The Brainy Gamer in a post about non-gamers' reactions to Braid. There are a couple of disparate strands running through it, one of which is the old debate about whether great art needs to be accessible to a wide audience, whether anything accessible to a wide audience is therefore not art, and just whether the hell we're even supposed to be enjoying art in the first place.
I'd first say that, at bottom, accessibility is irrelevant to questions of quality. I say this as a vigorous defender of Michael Bay, clearly the most skillful filmmaker of his type working today. Great art shouldn't pander to the masses, but there's no reason the snootiest, most discerning critic can't also appreciate great trash. Once you start wondering what other people will think about the game you're playing, you've taken leave of your critical senses.
There seems to be a continuum of reactions to Braid, from people who liked and admired it, to people who admired it but didn't like it, to people who thought it was pretentious piffle. All of these are legitimate stances to take. If anything, the range of reactions and the vigor of the conversations about the game are a positive development. Even if people didn't like the ideas, they're engaging the game on that higher level. They're not dismissing meta-textual considerations as they so often do. That's a big step.
Michael's concern is that when a game like Braid comes along -- a game that seems unique and maybe even important -- it still alienates non-gamers. If you've played it, then you know how hard Braid is. The problems it poses, and the solutions to those problems, all take advantage of the player's numerous built-in assumptions about how games work. Without those assumptions, you're sunk. This is what Nintendo has tapped into with the Wii. They've made games that people can pick up and understand immediately, without having to rely on a foundation of gaming knowledge that's taken decades to construct. But they're not really making games for those of us who do know these things.
There's a good point raised in the thread by Jonathan Blow and others, who point out that we don't press the masterworks of literature into the hands of illiterates and demand that they learn to read right now, dammit! You learn to read by starting small. You recognize the shapes of letters and their associated sounds. You piece together basic words. After a decade or two, maybe you're ready to try James Joyce. (God knows I'm not there yet. Joyce makes me want to tear my hair out.)
In the Brainy Gamer thread, I argued that Braid's time-altering techniques were much simpler than people seemed to be giving them credit for, comparing them to the similarly constrictive rules of movement that govern chess. I still think that's true. There's nothing overly complicated about a ring that slows down the timeline within a certain radius, or a doppelganger that repeats your movements. By the time you've cleared the first stage in any world, you understand the rules. What the level design does with those rules is astonishing, but it's always logical, fair, and consistent. The game doesn't cheat.
I missed something important, however. For a non-gamer, understanding the temporal mechanics of Braid isn't the equivalent of learning how the pieces move in chess. A better analogy is learning to push the A button to make your character jump. Or that jumping on an enemy will kill it. Or that jumping on an enemy will bounce you as though you'd landed on a trampoline. The more you think about it, the more you start to notice all of the ingrained assumptions we have as gamers. It's even more basic than chess: for non-gamers, this is like learning the alphabet all over again.
Michael laments that his non-gaming friends feel shut out by the very process of playing a game. He wants them to appreciate the artistic and dramatic possibilities of the medium, but how can they do that when they can't even use the controller? Ultimately, they're going to have to work for it. Hey, it takes effort to read a great book. It takes careful attention to watch a subtle, nuanced -- maybe even subtitled! -- movie. Most of us couldn't do these things until we'd first read easier books and watched easier movies. We work to improve our appreciation for art because we know the results are worth it.
Let's not overlook what did happen: these people gave it a try. I bet they wouldn't have done that a few years ago. What we're seeing here, I think, is just another sign that games have yet to achieve the level of cultural penetration people like Michael and I would like to see. That's okay. That's what we're doing this for. Give them a few more years.
I'd first say that, at bottom, accessibility is irrelevant to questions of quality. I say this as a vigorous defender of Michael Bay, clearly the most skillful filmmaker of his type working today. Great art shouldn't pander to the masses, but there's no reason the snootiest, most discerning critic can't also appreciate great trash. Once you start wondering what other people will think about the game you're playing, you've taken leave of your critical senses.
There seems to be a continuum of reactions to Braid, from people who liked and admired it, to people who admired it but didn't like it, to people who thought it was pretentious piffle. All of these are legitimate stances to take. If anything, the range of reactions and the vigor of the conversations about the game are a positive development. Even if people didn't like the ideas, they're engaging the game on that higher level. They're not dismissing meta-textual considerations as they so often do. That's a big step.
Michael's concern is that when a game like Braid comes along -- a game that seems unique and maybe even important -- it still alienates non-gamers. If you've played it, then you know how hard Braid is. The problems it poses, and the solutions to those problems, all take advantage of the player's numerous built-in assumptions about how games work. Without those assumptions, you're sunk. This is what Nintendo has tapped into with the Wii. They've made games that people can pick up and understand immediately, without having to rely on a foundation of gaming knowledge that's taken decades to construct. But they're not really making games for those of us who do know these things.
There's a good point raised in the thread by Jonathan Blow and others, who point out that we don't press the masterworks of literature into the hands of illiterates and demand that they learn to read right now, dammit! You learn to read by starting small. You recognize the shapes of letters and their associated sounds. You piece together basic words. After a decade or two, maybe you're ready to try James Joyce. (God knows I'm not there yet. Joyce makes me want to tear my hair out.)
In the Brainy Gamer thread, I argued that Braid's time-altering techniques were much simpler than people seemed to be giving them credit for, comparing them to the similarly constrictive rules of movement that govern chess. I still think that's true. There's nothing overly complicated about a ring that slows down the timeline within a certain radius, or a doppelganger that repeats your movements. By the time you've cleared the first stage in any world, you understand the rules. What the level design does with those rules is astonishing, but it's always logical, fair, and consistent. The game doesn't cheat.
I missed something important, however. For a non-gamer, understanding the temporal mechanics of Braid isn't the equivalent of learning how the pieces move in chess. A better analogy is learning to push the A button to make your character jump. Or that jumping on an enemy will kill it. Or that jumping on an enemy will bounce you as though you'd landed on a trampoline. The more you think about it, the more you start to notice all of the ingrained assumptions we have as gamers. It's even more basic than chess: for non-gamers, this is like learning the alphabet all over again.
Michael laments that his non-gaming friends feel shut out by the very process of playing a game. He wants them to appreciate the artistic and dramatic possibilities of the medium, but how can they do that when they can't even use the controller? Ultimately, they're going to have to work for it. Hey, it takes effort to read a great book. It takes careful attention to watch a subtle, nuanced -- maybe even subtitled! -- movie. Most of us couldn't do these things until we'd first read easier books and watched easier movies. We work to improve our appreciation for art because we know the results are worth it.
Let's not overlook what did happen: these people gave it a try. I bet they wouldn't have done that a few years ago. What we're seeing here, I think, is just another sign that games have yet to achieve the level of cultural penetration people like Michael and I would like to see. That's okay. That's what we're doing this for. Give them a few more years.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Friday afternoon tidbits
Just a few leftovers before I embark upon a weekend full of exciting activities, like drinking beer and falling asleep on the couch:
-I'll take full credit for this: The Boston Phoenix cleaned up at the New England Press Association awards. The paper won the association's top prize, the George A. Speers Newspaper of the Year Award. In addition to almost two dozen individual awards, the Phoenix also nabbed first place nods for General Excellence in the Alternative Weekly category, and for Arts and Entertainment Section, alternative class, for the September 29, 2006 issue. I think it was my Yakuza review that put us over the top.
-In the Brainy Gamer podcast, we touched upon the commercial prospects of No More Heroes domestically. Kotaku has the numbers, and the verdict is: it's doing okay. I don't know what the benchmarks are to call something a success or a failure, sales-wise, but 200,000 units shipped and over 100,000 sold in the first month sounds pretty good to me. Much better than under 40,000 shipped in Japan, even accounting for the population difference. Crazy.
-N'Gai Croal is in the midst of an epic multi-part series called "Is the Cultural Trajectory of Videogames Doomed to Parallel That of Comic Books?" As usual, it seems silly to even attempt to piggyback upon the man's wisdom, so I'd only suggest that you waste no time in reading it.
Okay, maybe I'll toss in one observation. N'Gai quotes Steve Gaynor as saying that the barrier to mass acceptance is much higher for games than for other media: "To read a book, all you need to do is go to a library, pick one up, and start reading (which isn't usually an obstacle considering the high literacy rate in the modern world.)" Which is true, but that's a relatively new development. You only need to go back a few hundred years to find a time when the only literate people were the ruling classes, either in government or clergy. Even our hyperliterate society is largely a post-war phenomenon. Maybe we need to look ahead by decades, or even centuries, to find a time when gaming will be as ubiquitous as reading or watching movies, but it seems to be catching on much faster than its predecessors did.
-Along a similar track, Alastair Harper of the Guardian makes the bold claim that games already are art. He argues that the vast majority of all forms of art and entertainment is trashy -- just look at the bestseller list, the box office charts, the Billboard charts. Yet we don't disqualify the works of genius in those media because of their association with lower-brow fare. Nor do we use their weak sales numbers as an argument against their worth. It's generally accepted that commercial fiction subsidizes literary fiction, blockbusters subsidize art films, and so on. We're not there with games. Instead, games with something on their minds have to sneak in that part of themselves, under cover of blaring pronouncements about next-gen graphics.
-Following up on recent Blu-ray news, Wal-Mart has announced that they, too, will be discontinuing HD-DVD in order to focus exclusively on Blu-ray. The writing's on the wall -- even Toshiba may be ready to pull the plug.
-Enjoy your weekend!
-I'll take full credit for this: The Boston Phoenix cleaned up at the New England Press Association awards. The paper won the association's top prize, the George A. Speers Newspaper of the Year Award. In addition to almost two dozen individual awards, the Phoenix also nabbed first place nods for General Excellence in the Alternative Weekly category, and for Arts and Entertainment Section, alternative class, for the September 29, 2006 issue. I think it was my Yakuza review that put us over the top.
-In the Brainy Gamer podcast, we touched upon the commercial prospects of No More Heroes domestically. Kotaku has the numbers, and the verdict is: it's doing okay. I don't know what the benchmarks are to call something a success or a failure, sales-wise, but 200,000 units shipped and over 100,000 sold in the first month sounds pretty good to me. Much better than under 40,000 shipped in Japan, even accounting for the population difference. Crazy.
-N'Gai Croal is in the midst of an epic multi-part series called "Is the Cultural Trajectory of Videogames Doomed to Parallel That of Comic Books?" As usual, it seems silly to even attempt to piggyback upon the man's wisdom, so I'd only suggest that you waste no time in reading it.
Okay, maybe I'll toss in one observation. N'Gai quotes Steve Gaynor as saying that the barrier to mass acceptance is much higher for games than for other media: "To read a book, all you need to do is go to a library, pick one up, and start reading (which isn't usually an obstacle considering the high literacy rate in the modern world.)" Which is true, but that's a relatively new development. You only need to go back a few hundred years to find a time when the only literate people were the ruling classes, either in government or clergy. Even our hyperliterate society is largely a post-war phenomenon. Maybe we need to look ahead by decades, or even centuries, to find a time when gaming will be as ubiquitous as reading or watching movies, but it seems to be catching on much faster than its predecessors did.
-Along a similar track, Alastair Harper of the Guardian makes the bold claim that games already are art. He argues that the vast majority of all forms of art and entertainment is trashy -- just look at the bestseller list, the box office charts, the Billboard charts. Yet we don't disqualify the works of genius in those media because of their association with lower-brow fare. Nor do we use their weak sales numbers as an argument against their worth. It's generally accepted that commercial fiction subsidizes literary fiction, blockbusters subsidize art films, and so on. We're not there with games. Instead, games with something on their minds have to sneak in that part of themselves, under cover of blaring pronouncements about next-gen graphics.
-Following up on recent Blu-ray news, Wal-Mart has announced that they, too, will be discontinuing HD-DVD in order to focus exclusively on Blu-ray. The writing's on the wall -- even Toshiba may be ready to pull the plug.
-Enjoy your weekend!
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Insult Swordfighting visits the Brainy Gamer
I was flattered to be invited to appear on the Brainy Gamer podcast. Michael Abbott writes one of the most considered, highbrow gaming blogs around, and it was fun to be able to talk to him in person. We chatted about No More Heroes, Burnout Paradise, the state of the gaming community, and a whole lot more.
Cross-blog conversations tend to erupt pretty frequently, particularly when a game like No More Heroes shows up, but the nature of blogging is still pretty solitary. You tend to soliloquize, or invent straw men to bounce your arguments and opinions off of. It was nice, in this case, to actually trade some ideas with a like-minded person. Give it a listen!
Cross-blog conversations tend to erupt pretty frequently, particularly when a game like No More Heroes shows up, but the nature of blogging is still pretty solitary. You tend to soliloquize, or invent straw men to bounce your arguments and opinions off of. It was nice, in this case, to actually trade some ideas with a like-minded person. Give it a listen!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)