Re:Are all the MS Zunes dying?
by unalone on Thursday January 01, 2009 @02:23AM
(#416308)
That's a really neat feature of the 360. I think it's an excellent media center.
At the same time, I agree with the ancestral poster: I wish that Microsoft and Sony held more reverence for gaming. I say this as somebody who wants to be a game developer: right now, gaming is easily the most disregarded artistic medium. Most games are sequels or spin-offs or rip-offs, have been for two generations. There are some games that rise to the top - the Katamari series and Shadow of the Colossus both showed, on a mediocre system, just how hilarious/moving a good game can be - but even most of the top-name games are awful. The writing and character graphics of Fallout 3 made me cringe on quick glance.
Part of it is that games have become a generic commodity. You have the shooter genre, the RPG genre, the sports genre, the racing genre, and games compete to be the best of each every generation, and it's always the same groups competing. You don't have this treatment of a game as an art form.
Unlike movies where you start off in theaters, unlike TV shows which start off as incremental releases, with games the release is the release and that's the only release. Games lose their mysticism an hour after they've launched. It's terribly demeaning of the entire medium, the way things stand right now. And it hurts both the developers and the consumers to have games treated so matter-of-fact. It kills something that ought to be magical.
At the same time, I agree with the ancestral poster: I wish that Microsoft and Sony held more reverence for gaming. I say this as somebody who wants to be a game developer: right now, gaming is easily the most disregarded artistic medium. Most games are sequels or spin-offs or rip-offs, have been for two generations. There are some games that rise to the top - the Katamari series and Shadow of the Colossus both showed, on a mediocre system, just how hilarious/moving a good game can be - but even most of the top-name games are awful. The writing and character graphics of Fallout 3 made me cringe on quick glance.
Part of it is that games have become a generic commodity. You have the shooter genre, the RPG genre, the sports genre, the racing genre, and games compete to be the best of each every generation, and it's always the same groups competing. You don't have this treatment of a game as an art form.
Unlike movies where you start off in theaters, unlike TV shows which start off as incremental releases, with games the release is the release and that's the only release. Games lose their mysticism an hour after they've launched. It's terribly demeaning of the entire medium, the way things stand right now. And it hurts both the developers and the consumers to have games treated so matter-of-fact. It kills something that ought to be magical.