Hey, just a quick word to the…seven-and-a-half of you who enjoy reading what I have to say. It’s likely become all too evident that I haven’t posted a damn thing and have gone on to assume that, like 98% of bloggers the world over I’ve gotten bored and lazy and have stopped posting anything.
Well this is only half-true! Turns out I’ve got something of a gig with a local Vancouver gaming and tech website, and I’ve been news-editoring for them for the past couple of weeks. So I guess this is my official plug: if you enjoy my occasionally liquor-fueled take on electronic nonsense then I suggest you head on over to http://geek-badge.com/ and give them a look!
I do still plan on putting up the occasional editorial here, though it will likely be on a less often scale than I was doing in the past.
I don’t want to get too hyperbolic here, as I feel like this next statement could be seen as potentially “controversial”, but after a lot of internal debate and soul-searching I’ve realized that 2011 was the year that saved video games. For myself, at least. This may have just been the first tentative steps of adulthood breaking through this warm coat of arrested development I’ve knit for myself, but the last couple of years and especially 2010 started to sour me on the entire video gaming experience. I mean, last year could have been largely defined as “more of the same”; so much came out that was either a painfully derivative sequel (see Crackdown 2), buggy to the point of near-broken (sorry, Fallout New Vegas), or just chock-full of motion gaming garbage that looked and felt less like video gaming than it was an attempt by publishers to chase the Wii casual-market dragon. There were a couple of gems in 2010, to be sure (Mass Effect 2, Bayonetta, and Super Meat Boy quickly come to mind), but it felt like a year of high promises eventually being proven empty. So I walked into 2011 with less than stellar expectations.
Despite the protestations among the wide-eyed navel gazers within the world gaming community, the video game industry is, at its heart, very much a business. Individuals (such as myself, oftentimes) can go on ad infinitum about the jaw-dropping technical majesty of a car taking a perfect turn in Forza 4, or the beautiful art direction of games such as Okami or Kirby’s Epic Yarn, and a tear may even glisten in their eye as they’re discussing just how they felt when Sephiroth stabbed out Aeries in Final Fantasy 7*; but to the cold-hearted businessmen who produced and financed these games every previous example I just gave was to them nothing more than an excuse to write something marketable on the back on the box.
When I started playing video games, a wide-eyed child fascinated with the concept of taking the moving pictures on the television and telling them what to do with my NES controller, the core ideas behind gaming were simple and concrete; you’d move Mario to the right because that was the only damn direction to go, you`d jump on top of enemies for points, and it ended with you fighting some inscrutable boss creature. Essentially the idea of distinct levels, a lives system, and points, hoo boy were there points to accumulate.
Remember when you were a budding post-adolescent and started having this almost instinctive urge to start “raging against the machine”? That feeling of needing to fight The Man, whoever That Man may be, though in retrospect probably juvenile and almost assuredly stupid, has become the basis for untold stories, films, and video games, though none have been created with such bravado and outright Japanese insanity as one of my most treasured experiences from my youth, Jet Set Radio Future.
Last week one of the worst domestic acts of terrorism this century was committed in Norway, with the coordinated bombing of a government building and the shooting of a labour party youth camp leading to the deaths of over 80 innocent people, many of which having not even been given the chance to reach adulthood. It wasn’t perpetrated by a terrorist cell of bearded, Islamic fundamentalists, as was initially predicted, either, but rather (allegedly, we are all innocent until proven guilty) from a sole Norwegian citizen, Anders Behring Breivik, who was motivated through his own twisted political ideology.
The world sits stunned, even a week later, that any one man could go through with such a crime against humanity, and as is common with the after-effects of such inconceivable tragedy, people are grasping for any sort of explanation as to why. And, sadly, there are those who seek a scapegoat.
For the (slight) number of individuals keeping up on my insane electronic rantings, I’m sure you’ve noticed it’s been like a month since I’ve written, well, anything. Without boring you with the details, let’s just say I’m going through something of an existential crisis, and I’m likely going to be taking the rest of the month off to get real life in order before I come back to pontificate on the intricate meta-art that is Duke Nukem Forever, or why Chrono Trigger remains the most bitchin’ game of all time, or some other such nonsense.
To tide you over though, here’s my 8-second synopsis of E3 2011:
Gaming is apparently just military-shootin’ dudes now
The Wii U and Playstation Vita have made me give up on caring about console names forevermore
No Microsoft, I don’t want to yell instructions at the imaginary characters on my television screen
I will never forgive Ubisoft for not announcing Beyond Good and Evil 2. When the revolution comes Mr. Caffeine will be the first against the wall
The prehistoric theme has been vastly under-utilized in the world of video games. I mean, what comes to mind? Jurassic Park for the Genesis? Christ it was difficult. That cancelled BC game for the xbox? Just another case of Peter Molyneux being the step-father of the video game world, promising the world and then letting us down. The Dino Crisis series? The first one was terrible, the second one was mediocre, and the third one was in goddamn space. You have officially broken through the bottom of the barrel when you’re taking your game with a prehistoric-enemy theme and putting it in space.
It’s been a while since I’ve had any real discussion on video game music, largely because I kind of ran out of VG music that I liked and wasn’t already a lot like the stuff I had shown previously.
But! I’m back, with music of the quasi-video variety! In my travels I’ve come across a curious hobby of individuals who frequent the internet, specifically the idea of taking popular songs and 8-bit-itizing them. It’s an honourable profession and one I wholeheartedly endorse!
So I’ve decided that whenever I find an 8-bit song of something I love, or just something generally awesome and crazy, I’ll pass it on to!
Tonight’s first showing, one of my favourite songs from one of my favourite bands, “No One Knows” by Queens of the Stone Age. Enjoy!
And somewhere right now, Roger Ebert is screaming into the night.
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a program under the federal government created to decide which art projects are deemed worthy of federal funding, recognized video games this week as an official art form worthy of endowment, in a move that’s sure to have gamers across the globe smiling in a smug, “I-told-you-so” kind of way.
In an official statement, the NEA outlined their new revisions to what is and isn’t considered worthy for a grant application. Specifically, they changed their grant category of “The Arts on Radio and Television” to “The Arts in Media”, stating officially that “Projects may include…multi-part webisodes; installations; and interactive games.”
This brings up a great deal of intriguing new situations for video game developers. Aside from the distinct PR victory that is official government recognition of their work as “art”, there can be created in this funding an entirely new kind of game developer, one whom creates games for the public for free, to be enjoyed as art, while still being able to, you know, pay rent and eat food thanks to federal funding.
Though I feel safe in suggesting that EA and Activision won’t be clamoring for art endowments anytime soon, this could potentially allow the next Jonathon Blow (creator of Braid) or Playdead studio (the dev. house behind Limbo) to be able to create something beautiful, without the need to compromise their visions in attempts to “maintain fiscal solvency”.
Or, you know, the almost-certainly old men in control of the NEA could decide not to give a dime to video games, because they probably still don’t believe games can be artistic. Either-or.
