A perfect game is...

Answering the implied question of this article...

>> Sean Malstrom largely confuses higher with wider. His claims on pop music just reek off silly leftism, global dumbing down. You need a core of high quality that keeps pushing the bar higher, so the mainstream can't allow itself to reach for the lowest denominator. Likewise, Dickens' and Shakespeare's words were appreciated by a limited amount of the northern population, as "education" was hardly as wide spread as it is now. In a way, that audience was a quasi-hardcore audience, if not outright hardcore. There just wasn't anyone else. It's a matter of perspective, which is why Malstrom's point is so astoundingly easy to debunk. It's just so silly how he can miss that.
This problem in his definition of hardcore leads him to point to WoW players and call the hardcore. I'd rather call them intoxicated casual gamers, since if anything else, MMOs are completely stagnant and WoW just leveled everything. A real MMO hardcore is certainly nothing you want to become. They're devoid of any social life worth talking about, and they have tried to many MMOs and they only play new ones because they're junkies, although they'll be the first ones to tell you that they more or less all suck these days.

Now, Alex forgets to be pragmatic at times and fails to see how big games and their increasing budgets only work well with a larger consumer base.
They both hold a piece of the truth but both fail miserably at getting the whole picture.
Of course Alex' position would prevail in a world outside of capitalism's diktat. With profit out of the loop, you wouldn't have to focus on the largest swathe of the plebe possible.
It goes without saying that ironically enough, the ballooning budgets are applied to games which are actually crafted to a large audience. The content gets heavier, but there isn't exactly an increase of complexity. Shadow of Colossus was rather focused and knew a limited success, but it clearly made popular gimmicks such as riding a horse over vast and empty landscapes and climbing tall structures. These gimmicks made it to Red Dead Redemption and Assassin's Creed. What these larger games did was just shove random stuff around gimmicks which were brought forth by a sort of niche game. The sandbox Holy Grail taht everyone praises is nothing more than Carmageddon made much more popular, for example.
He's also limiting himself to the idea that imagination can't work once all is on the screen. Surely, this is a bookworm's position, and is the same kind of criticism leveled against movies. Of course, since the visuals are forced, since the scene is already built, your imagination has to work on something else. Fans do that rather easily in fact, although many consumers of loud and flashy movies and games don't really want to dig deeper than what they're given, and generally, the further we go, the more the games and movies don't even try to pretend there's something worth looking at beyond the presented play. Yet products that seem to have a richer and perhaps solid universe to tap do produce customers and fidels who will feel entitled to expand on it. Such can be said of Star Wars or Halo, as painful it may be to admit.

I'd rather play a good game than a popular one, but the current industry's requirements make it so that a sort of perfect game needs to be a hybrid of both propositions. No, strike that. It better has to be the sum of both.
I wish this sum wasn't so forced down our throats, but I'm no man to change the world and everything that's wrong in it.

Youtube's obsession about sex - Part II

Just to illustrate my former claim:

Click on the picture for the full size display.

Oi! Update time!

I guess there's never enough incentits... erm, incentive to tittytainment.