Category Archives: Best of 2010

Haute Of Breath

If you haven’t had enough retrospectives yet, Slate is doing its year-end conversation between prominent critics on games. It’s one of my favorite features generally (oh-em-gee so flippin’ stoked to have participated last year). This year, in addition to Slate’s MC Chris Suellentrop, there is my friend Tom Bissell, NYT’s Seth Schiesel and a dude with whom I confess to being totes unfamiliar, and they seem to be having a good conversation.

As I type this they seem to be debating how seriously to take video games; Schiesel likes Call of Duty: Black Ops best and says that it’s fine for games just to be fun; Bissell says fun is not the point, that Black Ops is cynical and that Schiesel’s favorite of last year, Dragon Age, is “boner-killing” (yes, thank you).

I have to side with Tom here. I definitely think Seth has a point about a contingent of haute critics so desperate to be taken seriously and/or for games to be treated like “art” that they elect to see depth where fallows lie; in last year’s roundup I think I chided my friend Jamin for weighing Uncharted’s Drake, whom I see as a fairly basic action-hero construct, a knockoff of Indiana Jones, as, like, a meaningful protagonist (despite me finding the franchise to be one of the finest-crafted couple of games we currently have to hold up). I cringe at my own past blogitorials, where I whipped a few poignant play moments into frenzies of gravitas (no, I will not point them out).

Seth says we should just be past that, and if we like blowing things up in Black Ops, it’s cool to just admit it, like the millions and millions of people who’ve bought the game. Games are accepted now, so we no longer really have to worry about their souls. Just like what you like!

I am not the biggest fan of that line of thinking, because it embraces the idea we want a furtherance of the medium of gaming just so that we can be “accepted” or “feel cool” (the main idea of my column in Kill Screen Issue Zero), when I think some of us just want to see how far games can go, want them to be richer and more inclusive.

Either way. Black Ops is a spiritually dead piece of work, and I don’t want to reward that. And that’s all beside the point: Even if games, or just some games, were just for fun, Black Ops isn’t that fun.

I think there’s a fair lot of people so desperate not to take games seriously that they see “fun”where there isn’t any.

Ultimately, when intelligent people get together to discuss their favorite games, the conversation turns out similar: Why do we play? What’s good and valuable about this game versus that? What are our values as critics? I’m not always prepared for these debates, especially as I think the people involved won’t always agree. I get tired just reading the back-and-forth. So tired! That’s why when people want to ask me what’s my game of the year I blurt it out and then I wander off so I don’t have to discuss it.

Oh, yeah, my game of the year. Not time for that yet. But! The developer of my game of the year is listed in my colleague’s article today on 2010′s best developers. Actually, there are two developers listed in here whose games could top my list, but I am trying to work out where to draw the line between “the best” and “my favorite”, which I am not convinced are the same. Sometimes I think it matters and sometimes I don’t.

[today’s good song: galleries + foxes in fiction, ‘borders’]

Bites

We’re continuing Gamasutra’s end-of-year retrospectives, and today I kick in the top five controversies of 2010. Do the thing where you try to guess em before you click on them and go see how many you got right. Because, you know, if you picked something different from me, you’re wrong, naturally.

I stick up for a friend in this Bitmob piece, and I also have some things to say about Twilight, of all things. Such a fundamentally useless and vulnerable heroine appeals to so many people for a reason — when sexism is escapism for the modern feminist? I dunno, man.

Please accept my apologies: I haven’t done Today’s Good Song on here for a while. To make up for it, have an entire music mix from me, my second Fall-season mix, download here.

Finally, here’s actual gameplay for Catherine.

Hairy Palms

The refrain about how tacky and misrepresentative the Spike VGAs are is so prevalent now that I can’t believe anyone still asks me what I think of the VGAs or did I watch them or blah blah blah. But miraculously people still ask; I haven’t responded in a structured way since 2008, so it’s a good thing Jeff Green played appropriate complainant this year, saying what I would have said if I felt it’d make a difference.

We spend a lot of time saying “video games aren’t like this” and yet the stereotypes persist. Maybe video games are like this, and we’re a vocal minority. Isn’t that a terrifying thought?

This fascinating New Yorker profile of Shigeru Miyamoto may not tell you anything much you fans don’t already know about Nintendo’s heart and soul, but the tone and word choices are illuminating: The article illustrates the bizarre paradox between the seriousness of people who make games and the way they’re generally perceived by others, with the product an inscrutable plain lying in between.

For the most part, the piece refrains from judgment, but does contain one particularly damning quote: “The best analogue for combined disreputability and ubiquity may be masturbation.” And if you don’t know where the author gets that, and if your instinct is to splutter and argue and ignore what elements of our business and culture might have led him to that conclusion, you’re in denial.

So what’s the big deal about the Spike VGAs and aren’t I excited about the marketing-coordinated super-reveals of pre-rendered cinematic trailers of games that are at least a year away and aren’t I so happy we’re getting any mainstream celebration at all? Tch.

It’s a marketing blitz; it’s an advertising show. But can’t we sell the scale, scope and excitement of new video games without being like this about it?

Also, to throw levity on the concept of Being A Total Douche, reflection on this parody “GDC commercial” that Mega64 did last year might be in order. It never stops being funny.

Finally, for other, bigger disappointments in the game industry’s year, check out my colleague’s retrospective today. On Friday, I contributed a piece on 2010′s biggest surprises, and the picture is very cute.