Vilnius, we all feel that sometimes! Don’t feel intimidated by how much other people seem to be able to say, that’s not the point! Usually they’re blowing their entire expressive load or they’re bullshitting. We’re all as deep as each other, as long as we’re not ashamed of those depths – as almost all of the above described video game designers, basically, are.

The life course of many of the people involved in making video games has removed them from reality. They grew up playing video games. In school, when given the freedom to select a topic, they wrote reports about video games and video game characters. They entered college or took vocational classes to learn programming, art design, or 3D rendering to create video games, and eventually got jobs at companies making video games. In their free time they play video games, their friends are people who play video games, and they marry other people who play video games, or maybe that nice girl from the accounting department (of their video game company employer) who puts up with their obsession with video games.

Our minds contain only what contents we put into them, and their minds are filled only with video games. Point out that a game is completely divorced from reality, and the message is lost: recognizing that something doesn’t mesh with reality necessitates familiarity with reality.

This part of your review struck me like a ton of bricks.
1. I’ve lived a life full of video games, almost as saturated with them as your example.
2. I’ve taken on a career as an illustrator, and cultivated some level of skill in writing and speech, yet I’ve often secretly felt that I don’t have anything to say, that I’m in truth wholly uncreative.

Reading this, I had a realization that these seemingly disparate (to me) things were in fact connected. That maybe I feel uncreative because I’ve only ever dealt with and imitated abstraction, never reality. And here’s where I had a real epiphany: Throughout my life I’ve crafted myself into a tool for expression, but with nothing to express for myself. Which perhaps explains my otherwise inexplicable preference to work for others rather than myself, despite the constant assurances from others that, professionally, I could do very well on my own.

So I’m gonna get some more hobbies. Maybe call up that girl again. Just live in the real world more. So, uh… thanks for inspiring me. And please please PLEASE, let us see more writing from you!

I actually like Call of Duty quite a lot, especially the first one, and have been on Modern Warfare 2 regularly since it came out. It’s one of my favorite FPS series, but I can’t bring myself to say it’s anywhere near the cream of the crop. Some games are better in technology and gameplay like Killzone 2, some games are better at storytelling like Half-Life, and a handful are better at both like Far Cry 2 (opinion!). While I think it’s done some pretty bold things with perspective, brushing up on some important issues, it’s failed to take the next step and say anything interesting about them. And there’s nothing wrong with that – its releases are consistently among the most exciting and most enjoyable every year.

are you saying you are one of the people who don’t think call of duty is great? why not?

i think modern warfare is, in general, pretty great (as i say in my review on this site), and though i understand it’s neither perfect nor The Omega Entertainment, i dare say it’s one of the better, more entertaining, more meaningfully executed pieces of videogame entertainment to come out of the west in the past ten years, at least, and stars many Nice Little Touches that i would very much like to see every game developer on earth try their hand at one-upping.

square-enix, for example.

It really saddens me to see some of these comments and I urge you not to let them impact you (i’m sure they won’t). I find it unbelievably sad and cruel that after 12 years of tireless jihad, some people still refuse to allow their brains to accept the fact that many people like Final Fantasy VII for valid reasons. I almost literally lol’ed when one poster said that FFVII, or any relative piece of entertainment, can be “objectively bad”.

There’s a lot of people on the internet who recognize games like Call of Duty as mediocre re-imaginings of better executed game traditions in the past. But they don’t go online to write multi-page thesis-papers trying to make their own insecure stubbornness seem like a rational viewpoint.

I don’t want to take up a lot of space because the article says it all, it was incredible and no one should try to steal your shine. But I did want to tell you that I’m like you, I’m always waiting for the next game that’s about something. But I’ve learned in the meantime to embrace the games that don’t and have enjoyed myself quite a lot. I hope you can do the same.

I bet if that rumored FF VII PS3 remake does get made though, the original’s fans will either complain about the “lack of non-graphical upgrades” or “the blasphemous changes made to the updated version”. Both *could* be excuses if FF VII indeed was a one trick pony that only succeeded because of the circumstances of its time. Or they could not!

It’d be interesting nonetheless.

If this was the case, would you put your money on FFVII being about death and acceptance, or merely just the manga author filling pages? I think a much more alarming number of games these days are “about something” than you give them credit for; I’ve never actually played the game, but read a number of articles about Gears Of War 2 where the team wanted to make a story worth caring about touching on difficult subjects like euthanasia. You argued that FFX was simply trying to be like FFVII, therefore was about nothing (as opposed to it being about dealing with family issues (nevermind how poorly it did that)). The exact thing could just as easily be argued about FFVII.

I actually agree with your argument about wanting more than just action figures in videogames, but to say that a fairly poor game that is “about something” is better than a well designed and executed game that is just about dudes shooting shit is kind of dumb. In fact, that seems to be the complete opposite of what ACTION BUTTON DOT NET is about in the first place. The action button “manifesto” praises…
“clean games with crunchy, frictionous play mechanics, self-confident graphics and sound, and natural flows, where the in-game challenges get progressively more and more difficult due solely to the arrangement of obstacles and positioning of enemies, not because you’re under-leveled or ill-equipped: in most of these games, the game is over when you are not good enough, not because you don’t possess the orange lantern, whose red fire is the only thing that can burn down blue trees.”

Yes, she claims that the current (1964) climate encourages this kind of interpretive behavior; but she also calls for a return to first things–hence, her “erotics of art” as an expansion of the formal analysis approach. If you start with what’s plain to see in the work, there is less risk of, well, being wrong. As Jay asserts, you either discern the motive behind a work correctly or incorrectly. That’s not to say you can’t introduce outside ideas into the discussion; but Sontag’s point is that doing so without good reason and support “pollutes” the discussion. The motives become your own instead of the work’s (or the author’s).

PriorityShifts’ mention of context is also pertinent. Take Duchamp’s Fountain, if you want a piss-poor excuse for shitty art. Its context, however, solidifies its place in art history as an indictment of the European academy system.

I won’t suggest that FFVII is a bold indictment of anything but good storytelling and elegant design, but examine what it did have in a historical context: FMV was relatively new for console games, and I must admit they really did look amazing. It wasn’t the first game with FMV, but prior to this, most console gamers had either an SNES or a Genesis. There’s the jump to 3D with Sony’s new gray plastic spinner. Add to the equation the loyal fanbase of an established franchise (previous installments of which were on the SNES and its predecessor), and its influence on the industry might not seem as puzzling.

I haven’t even mentioned Jay’s thesis yet. It isn’t such a stretch of the imagination that the game’s “aboutness,” however ill-adapted to the medium, might have been more compelling to a lot of players because of the factors mentioned above.

Maybe the game being “about something” is still a somewhat vague criterion, and could perhaps be narrowed down further, but reducing the game’s success to two insults (“idiot” and “n00b”) doesn’t make for enlightening discussion. This article does, and I appreciate it.

@fnool: the internet is coop, not deathmatch.