Time and again developer are complaining that they are not being allowed to express creative ideas because they never make it past the “faceless men in black’s” review.

It seems everytime a large gaming conference crops up Game Developer magazine is filled with angst ridden commens from big names in development complaining that ingenuity is dead.

In fact the Indie development scene has all the same feel as the Indie movie industry.

Its not all the faceless corporate evils fault of course but they are definitely not helping at all.

After all, the film industry somehow manages to make movies that step beyond the 16-24 demographic.

I think that at least part of the problem is that game designers have no interest in looking past the infantile and the adolescent. I also think that there are some hard questions around exactly what it means for a game to be “mature.”

They are pandering to the broadest appeal base and once again the tastes of that group are anything but impressive. I don’t see it getting much better either.

Nintendo has always been safe zone. I know there is a large enough fan base to keep them in business and they really do crank out some phenominal games. As long as they are around I am pretty confident I will have something to play.

I thought the demo had a lot of potential, and Gamefly should have it in my hands in a few days…

Did you run through any of the Director’s extra’s in GoW? If you want a mind that never left puberty, there’s a rather depressing example where you can hear commentary obsessing about a cyclops’ penis. I’m not sure that “childish” is the right term so much as “painfully arrested adolescence”.

The question now is, what games aren’t like that? Trinity tried something interesting there, we can always point to U4 (and I think it says something about the poverty of the genre that we’re going to ALWAYS end up pointing to U4 at some point). Thomas Disch tried something with Amnesia, and there are a few more experimental games from the mid 80′s like Portal.

What really bothers me the more I think about this is how much of what’s coming to mind kind of peaks around 1988 – then we’re frozen into genres and downhill from there. “Interactive Fiction” as a concept more or less devolves into a hobbyist community and a lot of largely ignored research.

O’course, to go back to a previous post – isn’t this partly a function of the craptacular criticism for games? It’s not exactly like folks are getting challenged that much on the intellectual grounds (I’m imagining a seperate “imbecility” score for games. GoW could get a 9.5 for graphics, an 8.5 for gameplay, a 9.3 for imbecility).