Quote:
Originally Posted by Junkenstein
The gaming creative geniuses are out there: Tim Schafer, Ragnar Tornquist, Ken Levine...
But the software houses want clones. It's even worse than in other forms of entertainment. Games are are treated as disposable garbage, made to make instant flows of money and impress volatile teens. And it's great how in the end a huge size of their target audience proves them wrong by buying and worshipping mart games like Bioshock, Mass Effect or Half-Life. But yet they dont get it and do a thousand Modern Warfare clones with more gore.
There's a similar pattern in what comic books went through for a while, until somebody like Moore or Morrison came out (i quote Moore "If we made comic book that look like movies, then we would be doing illustrated movies. I want to do something unique") and demostrated that youc could use an entertainment medium to do adult and daring stuff.
I deeply believe in this. But that means being called any second a juvenile idiot when i try to explain how Bioshock is really a philosophical psychologic horror, or Mass Effect is a dark sci-fi epic to people. But i'm a geek, so that's how it is.
Note: The controls in Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy were very annoying sometimes, but when i got the right combination of moves and made my charcters pull out something incredible i felt way more satisgied than getting it from a simple click.
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Yeah, it's a real problem. I don't think there's been another medium that got infected with advertising and commercial concerns so quickly - the medium's a victim of it's own youth and it still has an image of being for kids or teenagers when the average gamer is more around our age range.
We need those guys like Morrison and Moore to break through, twist and distort our expectations of games. Those two are giants within the medium yet ignored at outside but their influence is on creators and can be seen everywhere in every medium.
You've touched on why I love geeks so much - geeks are the pop culture explorers - they seem odd and are often misunderstood but they find new, strange things and are open to them and share enthusiastically. The rest will catch up if we share.
I loved the weird, singular controls of Fahrenheit but it expressed ideas and drew characters a little crudely, I have high hopes for Heavy Rain.