Welcome to Blog Banter, the monthly blogging extravaganza headed by bs angel! Blog Banter involves our cozy community of enthusiastic gaming bloggers, a common topic, and a week to post articles pertaining to said topic. The results are quite entertaining and can range from deeply insightful to ROFLMAO. Any questions about Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!
Q: If you could ask for one thing this year from the gaming industry as a whole, what would it be and why?
Ah, the thought warms the soul. Just imagine waking up Christmas morning to see a DVD-shaped gift nestling snuggly between that tennis racket you never wanted, and yet another pair of socks. This mysterious box has a tag attached:
“To Lou, rock this shit, Playuh! - Gabe Newell”
I tear away at that wrapping paper like it hurt my family to reveal a shiny new copy of Left 4 Dead on XBOX 360. Oh Valve, how did you know?
This is gaming giving back at Christmas, but does it owe us a damn thing? I’d like to think our perpetual gift of money and dedication throughout the year is more than equal to the odd gift in the holiday season. But video games and EA-branded oranges aside, what would be the one thing to ask for from the gaming industry? That one, pivotal factor you think is more important than anything else? While I’d like to say 10 free games a year, as standard, I ultimately want to see the industry continue to be a progressive medium.
Gaming is constantly evolving. More so than any other entertainment form. While film and music are dynamic platforms, they are bound by many years of standards and traditions. They are also far less direct in their demands for the consumer to be an active participant in the experience, instead, with a lot of mateiral, you’re simply an observer or listener; you’re not part of the experience unless you choose to be. In gaming you must become part of the experience to connect with the game, and I don’t mean this on any kind of spiritual or metaphysical level. I simply mean that you’re required to take action when playing a video game; you push buttons, you traverse worlds, you have to act on your involvement to get anything rewarding from your investment.
Developers are certainly exploring the immersion of gamer and product on a physical level (we have more gaming peripherals than ever this holiday season), but perhaps in order to go forwards we need to take a step backwards and boil gaming down to the fundamentals. This is where independent development takes the spotlight, and websites such as PlayAuditorium.com become prominent figures in the progression of ideas.
So, this Christmas spend some of that holiday cash on XNA or PSN. Money talks, and those couple of dollars could say a lot about the direction we want the industry to be taking in 2009.
Other Blog Banterers:
What I want in 2009, The “Roxanne” Edition, Dear Gaming Industry, if the industry gave us all presents this Christmas, Demands for the industry, Santa, Don’t Bring Me Toys I Have To Share, All I Want for Christmas Is…, My Wish for the Year, Crossing Over, Checkpoint Unobtained. errr., Loading Requests, LISTEN BITCH!!!, One Wish, Dear Video Game Industry, More games like Portal and Braid, Imagine, Dear Video Game Industry, A Wish for 2009!
There once was a time when I pictured Electronic Arts, and all my imagination could muster was this dreary, impossibly-tall tower complex. It was nestled in the clouds, and constantly blanketed by a storm. At the top of this complex sat an overweight man in a three-piece suit, I could picture him slovenly choking down currency like some sort of executive Jabba the Hutt. The mind works in mysterious ways. Lucidly I knew what I thought of EA, and it wouldn’t take a protege of Freud to figure those daydreams out. But, how does one of the most hated companies in the gaming industry turn itself around so quickly? A company who based a few decades of its existence on cashing-in, how does it become so credible? At what point can you draw the line at a person’s wrong doings, and give them credit for turning their life around? I’m not sure when or how it happened, but in the past few years I’ve started to like EA.
I think we all can associate some hatred to at least one or two of the EA Sports franchises, which were persistently relatable to fecal matter. Year after year the company sold us games bloated with official-this and licensed-that, and inevitably those games rode on the waves of their own associations, aggrivating gamers who were so hopeful that this year would be better than the last, surely? It wasn’t. Then there’s franchises, such as Medal of Honour and Need for Speed, that went from respectable to downright abused. You would anticipate that a company with the name Electronic Arts would have some fundamental belief in digital artistry, I guess it comes as no surprise that somewhere along the line they dropped a whole mess of letters and settled on the simple acronym, EA. Perhaps this was as much a result of some residual guilt than it was a marketing strategy.
Fast-forward a mere few years and suddenly EA is one of the most revered mainstream icons in the gaming industry. Very suddenly it has placed an emphasis on giving new IPs a chance, and breathing life into their previously stale franchises. In the past year or so alone we’ve seen Crysis, Spore, Mirror’s Edge, Dead Space, and Burnout Paradise come through the company. Games which, at one point, EA would have passed on. These are games heralded for their re-imagining of a certain genre or direction, and while, if Mirror’s Edge is any example to go by, some may not nail the formula first time around, it seems all the more likely that EA are more than willing to give them some breathing space and allow them to grow into potentially incredible artifacts of gaming.
And then there’s EA Sports. If you’d have travelled back from the future, sat me down some three or four years ago, and told me that come 2008 EA Sports would be king of the sports gaming hill, I would have laughed in your face, thrown you back in your budget-Delorean, and politely waved you off as you tried to hit 88 MPH before crashing into a building. For one company to go from creating the worst entrants into practically every sporting genre, to creating the best, in what seems like such a short space of time is unthinkable. FIFA, Madden, NHL, Fight Night, even Skate, have all become triple-A titles. Of course, in the case of Madden there’s a grey area to dwell on. it has no competition in the form of a shared license, as it does with 2K Sports’ NHL and NBA games. But a license doesn’t necessarily make a game, as has been the proof with previous EA titles, and no developers from leftfield have tried to contest Madden for gameplay, it’s only competition being its little brother, NCAA Football.
Please don’t read into this article as a love letter to the artist formerly known as Electronic Arts. I recognize that for all of the company’s recent investments in creativity and innovation, at its root it still, to some extent, relies on high-profile, shoddy franchises and licenses to pay its bills (Harry Potter stinks, and Need for Speed continues to be frustratingly inconsistent). But the ratio of good to bad has tipped for the better, I feel. Hopefully EA continues to use that dirty money it amassed to let new ideas and initiatives flourish, and perhaps in a few years we can all learn to forget the horrible crimes it committed against gaming.
Hi, Live.
How are you? You’re looking well. It’s been a promising few years, right? You seem to be going from strength to strength. I’m just writing because I’m a bit worried about something. Lately I’ve noticed that a few of your children have been stepping out of line, costing people a lot of money. We were all okay with the odd kid here and there demanding that bit extra in child support payments. Perhaps they deserved it, they were gifted, exemplary young things after all. But nowadays it seems every other newborn to fall down your virtual shoot is demanding a peak rate for their well-being and development.
I’m writing to ask if you could pull aside some of your new family members and have a word with them. If 1200 MS Points is to be the new standard then surely you, Live, should be more accommodating to us. I don’t want to have to spend money on 1500 points to keep your kin smiling, thus leaving me with 300 extra points that I have no intention of donating to anywhere else.
Here’s hoping these devious little methods of making a little extra cash don’t hold up, Live. I know you’ve got a decent heart in there somewhere.
Lots of love,
Lou.
Welcome to the latest installment of Blog Banter, the monthly blogging extravaganza created by bs angel and coordinated by Game Couch. Blog Banter involves our cozy community of enthusiastic gaming bloggers, a common topic, and a week to post articles pertaining to said topic. The results are quite entertaining and can range from deep insight to ROFLMAO. Any questions about Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!
Q: Are there any video games that possess a timeless appeal? Games that, despite constant advances in technology, retain a game engine or narrative that will forever be relevant. If so, why?
The idea of the timeless video game is something I’ve been asking myself for a long time now. In a medium where every new iteration of a console or technology creates new opportunities for the developer to further refine the intangibles we love about gaming, it’s easy to stay rooted in the contemporary. It’s even easier to therefore support the idea that titles from generations passed are merely a foundation for the most important games of today. We look at titles such as Resident Evil and System Shock as the grandparents to the likes of Dead Space or BioShock, but we don’t hold the former up to the latter and contest that those classics play a better game than their successors, because it simply is not true. But then it begs the question: are there any grandparents that do give their children’s children a decent run?
Timeless appeal, and the idea of the constantly relevant video game boils down to factors that remain timeless, and those factors are not audio or visual. With the constant advances in graphics processors and 380.1 omni-surround sound (probably) a few years away, they could never be timeless. Instead it is the fundamental aspects of any creative project, its vision, purpose, and execution, that hold up throughout decades.
It seems it’s always the most simple ideas that invigorate the hearts and minds of gamers. Portal relied on one idea: teleportation, and built an entire game around the use of one gun that had a couple of functions. It’s revered as one of the best games of 2008. Braid was also built around a single concept: the ability to reverse time. Its use of this mechanic, paired with its deceptively deep story attracted people in drones (even Soulja Boy). Games which access these simple, visionary concepts are, at their peak, revolutionary. But not timeless.
I’ve dwelled on the idea a lot these passed few days, but I’ve reached the understanding that no idea is truly timeless. Both Portal and Braid are two recent examples of games that could be considered as such, but somewhere in the future a developer will take the concept of a Portal or a Braid, and they will evolve it. Pong, Super Marios Bros., Wolfenstein 3D, these were all incredible games, but they’ve long since passed the torch to endless streams of reiterations, and thus become artifacts. Notes in history that we games could, and SHOULD look back on and link with the elite of the current gaming crop.
Evolution is a part of existence. As much as I admire my caveman bretherin, stumbling one day across the concept of the wheel and soiling their collective, beast-skinned undergarments with excitement, I don’t want to go back there. As such, gaming must follow the same path, and that’s not a bad thing. There are no timeless games, just timeless ideas.
PARTICIPANTS:
CrazyKinux’s Musing: The Timeless appeal of Homeworld
Lou vs. Video Games, FIGHT!: Defining the Truly Classic Video Game
Silvercublogger: Lost & Found
Hawty McBloggy: Much Like Your Mom
Game Couch: Finding Citizen Kane
Delayed Responsibility: Oldies but Goodies?
I’ve decided to begin doing a little feature within this blog that highlights the connections and relationships that occur betwen cinema and video gaming, and with any luck I’ll be able to shed a little added light on the importance of film to gaming, and almost certainly vice versa.
You may be wandering why the name of this blog has been painted all French and what not. It’s a reference to the film journal Cahiers du Cinema, an important, Paris-based publication whose writers revolutionized the way the world watched and interpreted cinema. Now, by no stretch of my feeble little imagination do I have the same aspirations for these articles, especially from my humble, rarely traversed corner of the blogosphere. But mostly I just feel it’s enlightening for the few of you who do read this to be able to add that dash of supplementary spice to your already stellar enthusiasm for this great entertainment medium.
In this debut write-up I wanted to discuss the subject of the games journalist-turned-developer epidemic that’s sweeping gaming (of course, I use the term “epidemic” some what loosely.) I’d been observing the news as names from the journalistic loop quietly evaporated, only to re-appear as condensation hugging the windows of development studios from coast to coast. My interest peaked when my favourite gaming commentator and personality, a bright, young dynamo by the name of Shawn Elliott, left 1UP.com to become a part of 2K Boston. While I was sad to see Shawn go it felt as if his exit was entirely justified by his destination as he would be joining the team who created BioShock, a game I believe was the best of an impressive 2008 line-up. It is, in my humble opinion, a mind-bending marriage of creative talent.
Somewhere around the late 1950s two notable film critics, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, writers for the afformentioned Cahiers du Cinema, set about creating their own little pieces of cinema. Armed with an enthusiasm for mainstream, Hollywood film and the influence of Italian neorealist movies and surrealist art, they debuted their projects to the world. Truffaut was the first with The 400 Blows, and Godard followed him a year later with Breathless. The impact of these two projects, both low in a budget and high on concept, tore the established acceptance of cinema to shreds. These films, among others from the Nouvelle Vague film movement, went on to teach and inspire the likes of Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, and Robert Altman.
With critical names effecting the video game industry in more and more influential ways, names from the gaming press who are steadily being granted higher positions of power, it is not beyond comprehension to consider that these people couldn’t apply their own observations and understandings of game development. And I mean this way beyond any kind of position of consultation, these men and women plucked from journalism could one day be granted the opportunity to redfine gaming. Of course it’s highly subjective, and there were very likely as many Uwe Bolls as there were Christopher Nolan’s back in 1950s France, but the right minds with the right ideas, being vacummed into an industry they spent so very long observing could just well serve to change the standards we’ve come to accept from video game development.
This’ll be a short rant, more or less, as I have a pretty direct point to address. I’ve been staying hot on the Dead Space coverage, and ever since that first teaser hit I’ve been waiting, excitedly, for the game to hit the public. Overall I’d say I’ve watched a good 80% of the developer/producer interviews and what not, Not once have I heard a single person on their team allude to the fact that the story is, essentially, a carbon copy of ALIEN. Not one single time. I could understand if they’d replicated the scenarios and ideas from an obscure, Thai character-study, but they’ve duplicated the premise of a landmark piece of cinema; a film that revolutonized the very genre the game belongs to. I get increasingly more uncomfortable that every interview I do see, there isn’t at least one person who describes the story and says at least something to pay the source some dues. “We used ALIEN as a template as the concept is so culturally relevant,” say anything! But don’t keep quiet.
The art director behind the game even talks about the design of the ship like he had this insightful, metaphorical idea of making the ship almost akin to the human forn. Again, this idea is lifted straight from ALIEN. When I was studying the film at college, the most important topic was the set design - how the Alien ship was very organic, alive almost; similar in design to the human form.
This probably bothers me way more than it does anyone else because I’m a film school kid, and when I witness things like this it riles me up, but principally credit should be paid where it’s due. We don’t belong to an age where you can ignore the elephant in the room, especially when it’s as big as this one.
Dead Space is one of my most anticipated games of this year end. Even more so than the likes of Gears 2 or Fallout 3, so don’t pin me as a guy who just plain has it in for the game. I just needed to get this off my chest.
We start on a film set, as a tubby French gentleman - Fahrenheit’s Director, David Cage - confronts us with instructions on the controls and techniques that will see us through the modest, six or so hours that follow. We assume the role of a crash test dummy, and guide this vessel from wall to wall of the setting, little hints of what’s in store peppering crevices of the creative space. It’s a some what poignant beginning to an experience that would much sooner allude to being interactive cinema than a mere video game. In the film business it’s referred to as breaking the fourth wall; that instance you engage the audience and turn the passive observer into an active participant. But then a gamer must surely, on some subconscious level, ask his or her self just if or when that happens in every video game.
When you pick up a pad, do you automatically assume the role of hero, or are you merely the guide; the puppet master peering down from above the strings? On gaming journeys where you, the gamer, and your pixelated alter-ego on screen share in an experience it’s not hard to find yourself filling the shoes of the protagonist. Unknowingly you can refer back to your actions in a game as if you were the person who physically acted on them, like you’d pulled the trigger to drop the kingpin, executed the sharp turn, or scored the most decisive goal in the final. This immersion was one of the strongest factors behind why I didn’t consider Fahrenheit an instant classic that moment I’d finished the game. Quantic Dream’s decision to have you assume the role of multiple heroes, and even a villain or two, shatters the ability to form a bond with your lead, as the starring roles in this piece are split between up to three different characters at any one time. It’s a creative approach that, on one hand, I certainly admire, but on the other it was a bad decision for the narrative progression of the game, and an even worse one in the spirit of gaming as a source of immersion and escape.
At this point you’re probably questioning why I’d be doing a retrospective on a game I don’t even seem to like, but I assure you that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, despite Fahrenheit’s most fundamental flaw I consider this to be an astute example of gaming’s potential to hold its own with cinema as a legitimate narrative platform. It makes a strong case for the idea that interactive story-telling should be considered the next evolution in entertainment. As a gamer you are encouraged to make snap decisions that effect the progression of your journey, and this is something wholly unique to video games. It’s not as if you could sit down to a movie at your local cineplex and be confronted, directly, at various stages of the film, with options for where you want to see the movie go. Even DVD, in all of its empty promises of a fully interactive experience and a future in which cars hovered a foot from the ground, failed to make good on the pledge to evolve home entertainment (can anyone say My Little Eye?) There is arguably much room to grow, and Fahrenheit is not a flawless masterpiece that’s going to visually or narratively put The Godfather to shame at any point in the near future. It did, however, present the world with a series of ideas that can only be explored and elaborated on with tomorrow’s games.
In 2005 Atari shared with the world a solid adventure game, but more than that the company released a package of concepts that revitalized a specific aspect of the gaming industry, which, in turn, belong to a team seemingly dedicated to the idea that the script, story, and character development in a project don’t have to be an afterthought. While gaming is dominated with mascots dripping in machismo or sex appeal, it’s nice to believe in an industry where the likes of Fahrenheit’s Lucas Kane can be revered alongside a Marcus Fenix or Master Chief.
I’ll end this on a video I only recently got around to watching. One that, in my opinion, is an incredible achievement for gaming as an art form, and affected me as much as just about any scene I’ve caught in film or television. Enjoy.
Power to the people and all that jazz. Frankly Microsoft deserve a mass revolt against their amazingly over-priced HDD upgrades when you look in computer shops and see the prices of regular PC hard drives in comparison to those Gates and Co. are exclusively shipping out.
