Gamasutra posted an interview with Warren Spector, which starts out promisingly but quickly gets mired in little rants. To be fair, Spector prefaces the particular comment I am about to deconstruct with, “I’m going to alienate just about everybody in the game business,” which sounds conciliatory; but instead of being alienated, I just want to point out one or two specific things which ring false to me. It may seem picky, but we should hold our industry luminaries to this kind of standard because the level of discourse in our industry will not improve unless we do so.

I cannot help but be irritated when developers– whether they be first, second or third party– wade into the province of fanboys, the gaming press and financial analysts by publicly taking sides in the console battle. Recently a developer at Insomniac Games wrote a piece entitled “10 Reasons Why PS3 Will Win This Console Generation,” and at this year’s Game Developers Conference earlier this month, a well-known and respected programmer at Electronic Arts suggested (in foolhardy language) that the Nintendo Wii was not powerful enough and essentially frivolous. Game industry message boards, no strangers to platform brawls, seem even more turbulent of late as the most current generation of consoles touch off emotions like never before. For lack of a better term, this is just disgraceful.