Category: Press

Brice Morrison has published an interesting article about how Metacritic, while being fairly reliable for traditional videogames, seems to be consistently wrong about Nintendo games. Wrong in the sense that the professional criticism does not correlate with the audience appreciation.

The reason for this, as he points out, is that Nintendo is adding two values to their games that are simply not being evaluated by the games press, illustrated by the reviewer’s recurring apology/warning that “this is not a game!” Traditional game reviews look at a combination of aesthetics, design and length. But Nintendo adds to these accessability and peripheral benefit (i.e. the value of the product beyond its entertainment value). And it is exactly these two values that attract new customers to Nintendo’s products, which, as we know, has been the key to success.

This is something that has been a concern of ours ever since we’re on the path (pun intended) towards publishing a commercial game. While our games are nothing like Nintendo’s, we also lean heavily towards exactly the same values that their games add to the mix. We also want our work to be accessible: there is no competition in our games, no stress, no hard rules and the controls are easy. And we want to add “peripheral benefit” in the form of a meaningful artistic experience that we hope enriches the player’s life.

We already know that The Path is going to get low review scores. Simply because its main benefits fall outside of the range of things that game reviewers pay attention to, or can express in a score. We’ve been toying with the idea of asking the reviewers to simply give the game a score of zero. But I don’t know. It seems so arrogant. And I’m still hoping that some day, the games press will open up, or soften up. Perhaps Nintendo will come to the rescue.

What exactly does it mean to beat a game? You can’t have a meaningful contest against an inert digital artefact. From the game’s point of view, you did not beat it. On the contrary, you did exactly what the game wanted you to do, every step of the way. You didn’t play the game, you performed the operations it demanded of you, like an obedient employee.
Steven Poole, “Working for the Man: Against the Employment Paradigm in Videogames”

Steven Poole made some very interesting observations about how deeply playing videogames resembles work in his keynote presentation at the F.R.O.G. conference in Vienna, last October. Observations that brough to mind my own “Of cogs and machines” post, where I approach a similar subject from my perspective as designer and use some eerily similar metaphors.

[…] obediently following a game’s narrative or challenge-reward structure is nothing but work. Only when the player does something that isn’t mandated by the system can she be said to be playing.

He goes on to quote Horkheimer and Adorno as visionary prophets of our dystopian industrialized present and makes an interesting analogy with the Slow Food movement that states:

The culture of our times rests on a false interpretation of industrial civilisation; in the name of dynamism and acceleration, man invents machines to find relief from work but at the same time adopts the machine as a model of how to live his life.

Inspired by this challenge, Mr. Poole imagines a “new videogaming manifesto”:

It would speak of games where you really could choose your own adventure, but also where, if you preferred, you could just take time to smell the coffee, with no shadowy boss figure watching your clock and tapping his foot. It would be called Slow Gaming. Gamers of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but your boring virtual jobs.

Read the full article here!

The next decade or so is going to see the world of video games convulsed by battles between the moneymen and the artists; if the good guys win, or win enough of the time, we’re going to have a whole new art form.
John Lanchester, “Is it Art?” in The London Review of Books

Since we partially make it our business to create “videogames for non-gamers” here at Tale of Tales, we have a keen interest in any messages we receive about games from the world outside. The few times when this happens, the author is either uninformed or simply a hardcore games enthusiast doing a little job on the side. A pity, because what better way to learn about ourselves as through the eyes of others?

So our interest was immediately peaked when we noticed a long article about videogames in a publication called “The London Review of Books”. Through thoughtful observations, John Lanchester combines a broad knowledge of the games industry with the advantage of both distance and erudition to place gaming within a larger cultural context.

And while his article is critical, Mr. Lanchester also does a good job at explaining the appeal of games to people not familiar with the medium (i.e., as he points out, everyone who does not actively play videogames). He points out the strong points and achievements of the medium as well as its flaws and shortcomings.

He compares games to novels:

You are in the game in a way that is curiously similar to the way you are in a novel you are reading – a way that is subtly unlike the sense of absorption in a spectacle which overtakes the viewer in cinema. The interiority of the novel isn’t there, but the sense of having passed into an imagined world is.

And to cinema.

Games are not, in general, better than films. But they are often better than huge-budget Hollywood films.
[…]
Not all games are cynically, affectlessly violent, but a lot of them are, and this trend is holding video games back. It’s keeping them at the level of Hollywood blockbusters, when they could go on to be something else and something more.
[…]
Games do a good job of competing with blockbusters, but it would be a pity if that was the summit of their artistic development.

And then, of course, speculates on how video games might become art.

The other way in which games might converge on art is through the beauty and detail of their imagined worlds, combined with the freedom they give the player to wander around in them.

He also makes a reference to a keynote presentation by Steven Poole (of “Trigger Happy” fame), which deserves a post of its own.

A common criticism of video games made by non-gamers is that they are pointless and escapist, but a more valid observation might be that the bulk of games are nowhere near escapist enough.
[…]
Most video games aren’t nearly irresponsible enough.

Read the full article here!

In your average game store, customers do not read reviews. They do not post on forums, they have never been motivated to leave Amazon feedback just to “send a message,” they do not blog. They do not know which publishers have poor reputations and which ones have good ones. They do not know the names of famous Japanese game designers; they might have Mario Kart Wii at home, but they do not know who Miyamoto is.
Leigh Alexander

Reading this felt so comforting to me. I know this. Everybody knows this. The math is simple. There are simply not millions of hardcore game fans out there. A few hundred thousand, perhaps, if even that many. But video games sell in millions of copies. Most of them to people who couldn’t care less about the discussions on this and other blogs. That is the gaming audience! That is the people we are working for. Not the clever reviewers, the whining commenters and the nagging bloggers on the internets.

This ties in neatly something we have talked a lot before but apparently have a hard time expressing properly. Maybe we should try again…