Over a year ago, a company called Manifesto Games was founded with the idea that it would aggregate and sell low-budget but innovative games and by doing so help to advance the state of the game industry. While I have yet to see a new genre of games spring from this site, I do generally like and agree with the idea of invention as an essential but under-explored component of interactive entertainment.

Unfortunately, for all the talk of revolution (or even incremental improvement), the level of rhetoric actually displayed on the site is quite disappointing. The hyperbole in the actual Manifesto of Manifesto Games may be explained away as a stylistic choice, but the tract often crosses over into statements that are simply untrue. I believe it’s imprudent to base the foundation for a revolution, or even simply a new company, on such sloppy thinking.

Here are some of the statements of the manifesto that bothered me:

A low percentage of players actually finish the video games they begin. While we’ve known for some time that this is true anecdotally, recent developments like Xbox Live and Valve’s Steam have allowed us to collect some real statistics, and they are disheartening: as the game progresses, more and more players fall away, until a mere fraction of those who start the game experience the ending. People get bored of books, or walk out of movies and plays, but not on anything like the scale that they don’t finish games.

Is this really a problem? I think it is.

Woe is the professional game critic! Nobody takes him seriously. Film critics are lambasted by consumers and studio executives alike for being out of touch with the movie-going public, but this at least lets them stand by artistic merit as the true measure by which they judge a film’s worth. Literary critics work in the medium of their topic, and occasionally earn genuine respect as artists of prose in their own right. But the game critic rattles around in small box and wonders if anyone outside even knows he’s there.

Beyond the numbers and the money, another aspect in which the game industry competes fiercely is something called “thought leadership,” the talk and the perception of both people inside the industry and those who observe it. Like ladies maneuvering for status in a period costume drama, companies in the industry experience peaks and nadirs of sentiment about them. Nintendo is the grand dame of this season’s thought leadership ball, back at the top of the heap after close to a decade of suffering through life near the sidelines (not that she would admit it). Sony, the reigning queen, has made some decidedly awkward steps on the floor this evening and people are holding their breath to see if she stumbles. And Microsoft doesn’t understand why it isn’t all about her– after all, she’s bought the best dress in town and hired the most expensive carriage!

It’s time to look at another bit of writing that our industry has produced, this time from one of our purported trade publications. Most large industries have such periodicals; some are a little dry, while others are obnoxious. But if every industry gets the trade publication it deserves, the game industry must be guilty of sins I can scarcely imagine. We get articles like “Game Investing 101,” printed, apparently with serious intent, by GameDailyBiz, “The industry source for video game professionals.”

Much of it is condescendingly obvious, but some of it is actually wrong. As usual, I will refute some of the points that the article attempts to make.