Today I got home from dinner and sat down to do some coughing while I surfed up some of my regular web sites on the couch. Today was a good surfing day because I came across two links worth sharing with you, our beloved readers. One is a smart article, one is a stupid article.
First the good news. There’s been a lot of traffic at the game boards on the role of piracy in the PC gaming industry. I have no real opinion on this since I don’t play games on my PC. First, my PC is a Mac. Second, if I felt like playing games on my PC I could just go in the kitchen and cut my fingers off with a kitchen knife. It would be more enjoyable. I’ll stick with my consoles and hand-helds. Thanks. Still, the smart article I found today is about piracy and PC gaming. Since I mostly agree with it I’ll let it speak for itself. I think it is a perceptive commentary on the nature of PC development, PC development houses and the general mentality of the “hard core” PC gamer.
Now the dumb news. As usual, The Escapist is trying to be erudite and literate and instead just comes off as your friend who never managed to completely shed his adolescence. Even the title of the article has a frat-boy sensibility to it.
The premise of this piece is something like “sure, we’d all love to be playing serious games, but that shouldn’t keep us from being juvenile assholes once in a while.” He uses The Witcher as a basis for his arguments, claiming that even though the game is puerile and borderline misogynistic, it’s all in good fun.
Now, I would normally agree with the sentiment in this piece. I, for one, am not one to take anything too seriously. But here is something I think the gaming industry needs to wake up and realize right now. All of those complaints from people that games are in general about nothing but being a juvenile asshole come about because the content in your beloved video games is, for the most part, about nothing but being a juvenile asshole. We’ve ranted about this before, but for some reason no one except our ten readers seems to hear the message.
The quality and maturity of gaming as a medium will ultimately be judged by the quality and maturity of the content and with very very few exceptions there isn’t really a lot of content to be proud of, yet. I think that this will improve over time, but it will not improve if the very people who are supposed to be holding the industry up to a higher critical standard continue to be so delusional. The only way to get better content will be to demand better content and to call out the developers who create crap as the crap peddlers that they are.
Maybe I can help. Here are some things that video games don’t really need any more of:
1. Vaguely racist “crime fighting” games where you shoot minorities for fun and profit.
2. Hooker assault simulators.
3. Games where you collect sex cards.
4. Three-way sex with a God mini-games.
And on and on and on. The problem I have with this article is not the idea that we shouldn’t have some juvenile fun once in a while. My problem is with the claim that there is any content at all in out in the video game landscape that really rises above the level of juvenile fun. I haven’t seen it. I think the Defenders of the Glory of the Mature Video Game are going to have to work a lot harder to convince me that it’s there.
I was surprised to hear two other sources address something akin to point 1 today. Catching up on Yahtzee, his review of Uncharted starts with addressing the lunacy of every enemy being a minority. Then in the PA podcast for Friday’s comic, they spend nearly the entire time bemoaning the gratuitous enjoyment of violence in the script of Army of Two.
I’ll be posting my response to the Escapist’s decision to run that article later today.
I realized after I posted that I should have at least given The Escapist credit for running your original review of The Witcher, which was much less positive.
I’ve decided to keep the details of my departure from the Escapist’s roles somewhat private. Suffice to say this article was the final warning bell and I’ll be looking for another outlet for my articles from here on out.
Awww, don’t hold back. No one reads Tea Leaves anyway; writing the juicy details here is just like whispering to a priest in a confessional booth, only without the danger of pedophilia.
This post missed the mark for me. It has something to say about the juvenile content in video games, and has something to say about the Escapist article and game journalism in general, but seemed to stretch in connecting the two.
Your conclude with, “My problem [with the Escapist article] is with the claim that there is any content at all [that isn't juvenile]“. I didn’t really feel the article made that claim. The articles main thrust seemd to be that “The Witcher” was mindless fun, and that the writer enjoys mindless fun, so the writer enjoyed “The Witcher”. Not a great work of criticism to be sure but probably a common sentiment. In the end, you seem to be taking the article to task for expressing an opinion you “would normally agree with”.
See, I *would* agree if it were just The Witcher that had this problem. Or if it were a minority of games that were like The Witcher. But it’s not like that. That’s my point. Maybe I rambled a bit too much.
I guess I should have said that the claim of mature content elsewhere in the gaming universe was implicit in the discussion. Because it seemed like that to me. YMMV.
What’s cracking me up is the comment on that thread that indicate people are under the impression there IS mature content in the Witcher.
Maybe they are using the same criteria for calling something mature that the ratings agencies use, as in this video is for a mature audience only.