Monday, May 11, 2009

Nothing to say . . .


What a pity.
By the time I assembled myself enough will and excitement to make a blog, with limited resources and certainly limited time on my hands, I thought there would be lots of things to say and comment on.

There are, if you don't mind talking about the same topics on and on and on, but there seems to be very little evolution.

The more time goes, the less there is to say about an industry.
Topics? The same, we're going in circles... piracy, girls and casual gamers, art, console wars, sales, serious gaming, progaming (barely gets a mention these days)... there's nothing truly engaged about the industry, nothing very serious (I'm afraid this isn't even the word I'm looking for)... besides making money.

We have jumped the ape and directly went for the over expensive Homo-Bruckheimerus style of games without even getting into some kind of former obscure and perhaps experimentally highbrow phase.

But what is there to expect about video games? They're games, entertainment after all. Although the definition of entertainment pretty much lies in the eye of the beholder, there are just far more chances to get served with Brits got Talent (with guns and boobs) than a game with correct gameplay and a mature message that sets the background.
Actually, there are very little efforts made to produce games that end being more than just dumb. Fun, but dumb.
From time to time, dumbness is swapped for poetry and inspiring escapism, if we're lucky enough. It may even get psychedelic, as in Rez.
When we want to brag about art, we generally cite the work done by Ueto Umeda's team on the Playstations.
Anytime we need to talk about a game being provocative, serious somehow, we fall back to fucking pre-Matrix Deus Ex and its nanobips, droids, sunglasses and Roswells. Yes, that's just how far we went.

Sometimes, we become excited for reasons that differ from the classical pattern of fanboyism and attachment to proven and used gameplays mechanics and lovable franchises.
It does happen to have hope for something different and more productive.
I was hopeful. Six Days in Fallujah could have been the starting ground of a new age of thought provoking video gaming culture, to shut the big gaping mouths of the Eberts and co, but it all felt apart. I'm afraid they were just that spot on.
SDiF could have been an honest and artsy punchy critique of the second war in Iraq, equally addressing the calamity of destructive self interests that come along our societies and the reality of what happened over there, but it seems to be nothing more than a mental shooter at best, going by the paper.