They always choose Space Invaders, don’t they? Maybe sometimes Pac-Man, or the occasional dalliance with Donkey Kong. But no game has ever represented “video games” in the consciousness of the larger culture like Space Invaders has. The space invaders have invaded art galleries, music videos, public spaces, magazine pages, and book covers. The invaders are, to borrow an overused term, iconic.

At some point, there’s frustration with their near-total dominance over people’s assumptions about the medium. There is more to video games than this, you want to shout. We can make them look like anything we want to now: like hyperreal fantasy matte paintings or spare sumi-e brushtrokes or totally abstract fields of light and color.

Good dialogue is a rare experience in games.

For one, even if it is well-written and acted, you can often undermine the weight of someone’s words by running away or swinging your sword or throwing a grenade while they are being spoken, unless all control is taken away during the scene. You will see developers stuff you into a tram or some other kind of apparatus that provides a fictional basis for restricting your freedom of moment and action for the duration of the conversation while, at the same time, providing at least a token sense of interactivity (perhaps you can look around, for example). But this solution isn’t all that ideal; besides feeling artificial, it often bores people. Watch someone play during these sections and they’re moving their camera in little circles or zooming in on a guy’s nose or getting a snack.

Secondly, spoken lines in games are often saddled with not just story exposition, which can be clunky in even the best films, but gameplay instruction, too. Imagine a movie that contained not just the background of its fictional premise but tried to work in some hints on how to operate your television as well. No matter how cleverly it is disguised as something happening in the game’s fiction (calibrating your sensors, or whatever) it does not actually fool anyone.

Imagine writing a novel like this: every two weeks, you gather thirty people into a room and ask them to read your draft. When they’re done, they fill out a series of questions. “Did you understand what was going on at all times? Did you understand the protagonist’s motivations? Did you feel compelled to read more? On a scale of one to five, would you recommend this novel to your friends?”

Imagine it doesn’t stop there. While the readers are reading, you watch them the entire time. How long does the average page take to finish? When does their pace slow? When do they skim? Imagine a camera on these readers’ faces constantly, tracking their eye movements across each page, data that is then aggregated and mined for trends. Imagine their brains wired, too, looking for activity related to rational reasoning, emotional response, excitement, imagination.

The data you gather feeds back into the revisions, and, two weeks later, you are testing your novel again.

When I first arrived at the ruins of Washington D.C. in Fallout 3 I was too busy to pay the scenery much attention or think about what it meant. I picked my way across the rubble towards my missions and glanced only cursorily at the structures around me, more worried about patrolling Super Mutants than exactly what ground I was traversing. It was during some non-directed exploration of these ruins when it finally struck me: coming around a corner to see a skeletal Washington Monument silhouetted against a blazing orange sky, a stark reminder– or evocation– of the idea that powers rise and fall inexorably with the flow of history.

It’s not that a little has gone wrong, or that one big thing has gone wrong, but everything we can think of has gone horribly, impossibly wrong in Fallout 3. The game has its share of silliness and humor, but ultimately the weight of its utter devastation is crushing. The original Fallout was pessimistic about humanity, but still tempered by its own self-regarding goofiness. Created and taking place in Southern California, what player couldn’t sense the existential absurdity and the surreal black humor of that post-apocalyptic wasteland? Fallout took us to a place where simply striving to scrape by in a horrible, incomprehensible world could be darkly funny.

Long ago in a philosophy class my teacher touched upon the well-known thought experiment called “the brain in a vat,” in which an imaginary subject’s brain is placed into a tank of something approximating cerebrospinal fluid and hooked up to a supercomputer that feeds it artificial stimuli that is comparable to kind the “real world” would provide. At its most basic level, the experiment brings into question what is “real” or “true” since the mind (we assume the brain is the mind, here) in the vat, by definition, is unable to determine if it is in the “real” world, or merely a brain in a vat. These kinds of theories were popularized through cyberpunk fiction and movies like Ghost in the Shell and The Matrix, which in turn affected the way we think about computers and the Internet.

Though I am not really equipped here to discuss the real implications of the possibility of a brain in a vat, I thought that another interesting area of inquiry might be how some (evil?) demiurge might construct such a mechanism using what we currently know about real-time virtual reality– or, in other words, video games.

Earlier this year, writer and critic Michael Thomsen appeared on the webcast version of ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson and declared Nintendo’s Metroid Prime trilogy “the Citizen Kane of video games”. The segment was not particularly persuasive, being a collision of film history, video games, and the evening news– we see quick cuts between Kane’s bold swaths of shadow and three-dimensional laser combat with space aliens, while Thomsen says something about loneliness– but the piece struck a chord in the video game community, which emitted a loud and derisive collective snort. The reaction of Anthony Burch at Destructoid was typical: he wrote “are you fucking kidding me?”

I usually prefer not to write about games immediately after I’ve finished them. The excitement of the experience can get in the way of the ability to evaluate it, and the internalization of the mechanics can take a while to unwind. It’s akin to writing about a relationship immediately after it has ended: one single emotion is likely to dominate, and it is difficult to understand what really just happened. What I was able to summon immediately after Braid was released was a simple parody– something that, while amusing to write, was ultimately a rather flippant reaction to a work that was clearly the product of a long and often lonely struggle. The game, of course, deserves better.

Fuel is an open-world driving game that takes place in an unimaginative post-apocalyptic future where gasoline is a form of currency. For a title ostensibly about the employ of vehicles to cover distance, the handling and the physics are unaccountably poor (in fact, driving in Fuel feels more like the requisite on-wheels interlude in a major action game than something actually meant to be about driving). But for a few days I was strangely fascinated by Asobo Studios’ deeply flawed attempt at a new racing franchise, solely because of the game’s free driving mode, in which one can explore what its developers claim to be the largest contiguous playable landmass ever created: over five thousand square miles, an incredible scale considering The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion successfully brought to life an epic, free-roaming fantasy in an imaginary space said to measure a tiny-by-comparison sixteen square miles.

John Leopold is a long-time teacher of ancient history and Latin at Oakwood Secondary School in North Hollywood, California. Since 1988, he has supplemented his curriculum with various role-playing games of his own design—something that began as he searched for a way to make learning more interesting for his students. Unsurprisingly, a few of the pupils in the Latin class were also enthusiasts of Dungeons & Dragons, and they helped him design some of the more technical aspects of the games he runs. Now, almost every class he teaches incorporates some kind of game.

One of them, Daggers in the Forum, pits individual students against each other in a contest of brinksmanship and intrigue set around Caesar’s rise to power in Rome. Another groups the students into countries in the Ancient Near East who must compete against limited resources and each other for survival. In his language classes he is not limited to historical simulation and becomes more fantastic, running campaigns (entirely in Latin!) based on Roman myths or Arthurian legend. More recently, he has introduced a new game based on vampire and werewolf lore set in 18th century Styria, specifically meant to engage the multitude of Twilight-obsessed girls in this year’s class.

Parents sometimes hear stories from their children about what’s going on at school and raise questions. Is this really a serious education?

Genuinely thoughtful commentary on video games doesn’t come by all the time, and how much the rarer is the emergence of a truly worthy and unique voice. So when Rachael Webster, an aspiring writer stagnating at a menial job at a small and mostly unknown city newspaper, first took up the pen for her blog in the fall of last year, she quickly found herself amongst enthusiastic supporters and a welcoming community. PixelVixen707, as she called herself, brought a sharp-tongued but winsome pluck to the conversation about games, along with unusual, sometimes genuinely surprising, insights. Rounding out the program was an occasional note about her personal life— and that is where things fell off the rails a little bit.

In Pixar’s Ratatouille, the triumphant dish that brings a fearsome restaurant critic to his knees does so by evoking a childhood memory. Watching that scene I remember thinking it wasn’t truly fair— a kind of cheating, really, to bowl someone over with such a direct appeal to his nostalgia. We all know those early memories often occupy a strange and protected place in the heart, and that this can give rise to much subsequent irrationality. If you played Chrono Trigger soon after it came out in 1995 and recall it fondly, you might have felt a pang of emotion upon seeing the advertisements for the 2008 re-release: “Good morning, Crono!” in that old pixelated font, on a field of black.

In a certain way, Flower is an interactive experience reduced to one of its barest possible minima. The player navigates a space, “touches” things to unlock other things, and touches those in turn to unlock new areas— where the same thing takes place, and over again until it ends. The simplicity of the rules makes it seem easy and short for people who are already fluent in the language of the video game medium. Distilled to its basic pattern of interactivity, divorced from its art and music and its ambience, Flower would not be particularly fun and would only barely qualify as a game. Our enjoyment of the experience comes mostly from the content, which in turn creates the context, and feeling, of its action: the sun and the clouds, the grass in the wind, the floating and the soaring.

Brian Green (“often known by the pseudonym ‘Psychochild’,” according to his official biography) has written for Gamasutra yet another one of those facile pieces that explores the issue of cultural legitimacy, why we don’t have it and how we can claim it for ourselves. Consternation of the why-don’t-they-respect-us variety has always struck me as more an expression of deep-set insecurity on the part of game developers than any genuine deficiency in others’ regard for us. Nobody convened a symposium or wrote an article for an industry trade magazine about how to get rock and roll accepted as a legitimate form of artistic expression; a rock star becomes one partially because he doesn’t explicitly seek the approval of the wider mass of culture about him. And now here we are, sitting on a new medium often portrayed as dangerous and subversive, and we’re wondering how we can get away from that, like we’re afraid of the barely perceptible frown on our dentist neighbor’s face when we tell him what we do for a living.

Sometimes it starts innocently enough. Maybe much of the game’s code is still under construction or it was written under great duress, so while you can freeze the game, you can’t yet capture some aspect of it, like the particle effects. The public relations people need ten new, never before-seen screenshots by tomorrow, because that’s the deal they put together with the magazine (exclusive content for them, many dedicated pages for the game), and the issue has a print deadline. Giving them screenshots of your title without a single explosion or muzzle flash or magic spell effect is unthinkable, so with the minutes ticking away, the solution is obvious: take the graphics the game itself uses to generate these elements and composite them over the source image. It’s not really dishonest, since you will just be doing by hand what the game does in real-time— or will do, when it all eventually works.

Knowledge, once gained, is impossible to ignore, and so it’s difficult to remember what things were really like in the past. The attitudes and assumptions we held before time torpedoes them tend to disappear, and everyone acts as if they’d known the truth of the matter all along. But rewind to the year 2005 and recall that gamers, technology journalists, soccer moms and developers alike imagined the PlayStation 3 as a mysterious and formidable box with potentially earth-shaking powers. The Xbox 360 was a fine machine, the thinking went, but the PlayStation 3, when it arrived, would blow everything else out of the water.

Almost every gamer is aware that modern video games run on things called “engines,” large pieces of generalized code that handle a game’s technical underpinnings. And many of those people further understand that an engine is comprised of many constituent pieces and parts which may be grafted on, swapped out, or rewritten so as to better meet the needs of the game in development. After that, though, we’re in the land of assumption and conjecture. A group of people somehow became convinced that using the Unreal engine led to good art, resulting in previews that state things like, “the game is shaping up nicely in the visual department thanks to the Unreal Engine 3.0,” and thus the idea that specific technologies somehow inexorably lead to graphical fidelity became ever more fixed in everyone’s minds— to the point that a reviewer sometimes expresses genuine surprise when a game that doesn’t actually look very good is based around Unreal technology. I don’t mean to pick solely on one engine, though, no matter how well-marketed: we can also read that Quantum of Solace looks good because it uses the Call of Duty 4 engine, or that Left 4 Dead makes the best of what it can of Valve’s Source technology, despite the fact that it is allegedly “getting a little long in the tooth”.

An opposite problem of bad writing about games in the enthusiast world is when people in the real world try to write about games for people who don’t get them and overreach, trying to impress the audience with how artistic and literary and important and serious games really are. Last year, Lev Grossman in Time magazine wrote that the towering alien architecture in Halo “recalls Piranesi,” prompting a colleague of mine to roll his eyes and say “okay, we get it, you went to college!” And now Tom Bissell, who is also a respected writer with good credentials in “real” journalism as well as a working knowledge in the culture of video games, has produced an article for The New Yorker about Cliff Bleszinski and the Gears of War series which seems so reductive and fawning that I’d be surprised if the piece wasn’t at least partially the result of a plot hatched by Edelman, the public relations firm for all of Microsoft including its games division.

Most people in the video game industry, and many people who write about them for a living, hope for games to be taken seriously as art or literature. It’s just around the corner, we believe— the day the establishment flings open the door to us and lets us in, apologetic tears streaming from their eyes. “We misjudged you,” they’ll cry, “Just like we initially misjudged movies, jazz, and prose poetry.” Games are a brand new medium, we console ourselves, and these hidebound fogeys just need time to understand it.

The two main spaces of Electronic Entertainment Expo had grown into more of a circus than a trade show. To give you an idea of the kind of money that was being thrown at it, one year, a major publisher internally decided they would try to spend $1 million less on their support for the show. The booths were huge and extravagant: Sony’s reached three stories tall at one point, ziggurat-like in its construction, the entire top floor reserved for a kind of lounge where employees and their guests could look down at the rest of the show. Hired performers littered the aisles, vying for people’s attention; there were DJs, full bands, skaters doing tricks on a half-pipe, actors playing zombies or World War II soldiers, and of course, the “booth babes.” Some publishers put together theme-park-like events on their own stages, trying to attract a crowd. One year, so many guys packed around the Tecmo booth to see a show with models playing the Dead or Alive girls that a fire marshal was forced to shut it down.

Several years ago, I worked in a development department of a major publisher. For its recent holiday season, it had, with a couple isolated exceptions, mostly released a cavalcade of licensed-IP, rushed and otherwise lackluster titles (sound familiar?). At a subsequent all-hands meeting of the corporate headquarters, the president of the company took the stage and thanked us for our tireless efforts. The company, he said, was doing better than ever before; we had beat earnings expectations, shown positive revenue growth, and pleased Wall Street once again. But not everything was rosy: we had proven time and again that we could make money, but our products were getting pummeled in the press – hurting the company’s brand in the process. This, he said, had to change.

There is an amusing scene in the film Amadeus (1984) where enlightened ruler and patron of the arts, the “musical king” Emperor Joseph II, having just witnessed a performance of Antonio Salieri’s opera Axur, King of Ormus, confidently declares it to be “the best opera yet written,” awarding the composer a medal on the spot to a standing ovation from the audience in attendance. This occurs in full view of our hero, Mozart, whose own recent opera, The Marriage of Figaro, has just closed down after only nine performances. One does not need to be very knowledgeable about classical music to know which of these two operas is still enjoyed today by audiences the world over and which has fallen into obscurity.

Lately, it’s seemed as though not a few weeks go by without some long-time editor leaving an enthusiast publication. Just when I feel like I’ve familiarized myself with someone’s output, they’re up and gone. Occasionally they join competing outlets, but often it seems like they more or less “drop out”: maybe do some freelance work while they set up their moody blogs or work on their artsy pursuits. Or, they simply leave the games behind to cover a more respectable industry. Even the people who haven’t left yet just don’t seem to believe writing about games is any kind of sustainable living. I imagine them quietly plotting their escape into actual game development.

How is one really supposed to write about a game? Most major game reviewers spend at least some of their review stepping into the shoes of an imaginary Everyman, attempting to impartially value a game based on ostensibly universal metrics. But there has always been experimentation with a more “gonzo,” experience-based writing approach, focusing on a writer’s personal exposure to the game world, something that doesn’t pretend to be objective at all.

One thing that struck me about this year’s Game Developers Conference was how so many people seemed to be sitting around nodding their heads at each other about how terrible it is that games do not feature enough meaning. Everyone agrees, or seems to agree, that video games just Don’t Mean Enough right now, and that’s why we aren’t being taken seriously by Roger Ebert and all his irritating friends-in-opinion. Onwards the march towards Great Import by injecting more Seriousness, more Sadness (games must make you cry, apparently) and more moving, tragic Reality.

The rapid advance of game technology and their ballooning budgets has resulted in some new trends that I think may become more familiar over the next few years.

Trilogies seem to be the new way to pitch big games.

The basic idea is that so much investment is required up front to create a new franchise that two more installments down the line (with lower production costs) are all but required to recoup the cost. This is sometimes referred to as a “Lord of the Rings” model, since that is supposedly how most of the profit on those films was made. Sequels tend to do well in games generally, and this development model ties in very nicely with marketing (“the story we wanted to tell was just too epic for one game”) and with Wall Street (“we aren’t just publishing games – we’re creating lasting entertainment franchises”). Additionally, if the first game tanks, the next two can always be cancelled. So, it seems like we can expect to see trilogies, whether the material really calls for one or not. Tying in with this is the next trend:

Imagine there’s a company– let’s call them “Midway”– that owns a number of different restaurants, each with its own specialty. The meals these restaurants serve are getting fancier and more complex as people’s tastes grow towards the elaborate. Unfortunately, even though the preparations are more difficult and expensive to make, the price for customers doesn’t have much room to go up. This company and other restaurant-owners are concerned about this trend. It’s clear to that whole industry that everyone will need to figure out to make these extravagant productions in a way that doesn’t bankrupt them.

Scott Sharkey of 1UP.com wrote a list of “tips” for game developers to help improve review scores for their game. I don’t want to sound like I’m on some kind of vendetta – I’m actually quite happy with the review scores for the last title I worked on – but it occurred to me that this exchange of tips might fruitfully go both ways. Just as the 1UP piece isn’t (I hope) meant to implicate all games or all developers, I don’t mean this little response to be a blanket indictment of anyone who has ever written about games, either. Like its companion piece, it is simply a list of pet peeves… except without any funny pictures.

Anyone who’s worked in the game industry for some time has been on a project that came in under the wire– so much so, in fact, that this is unfortunately many people’s exclusive experience with shipping games. Aside from the obvious negative effect this has on our quality of life, and our desirability as an industry for the world’s best creative talent, the last-minute cuts and the seemingly heroic hacks show through in the shipping product as well. Here are some elements to look for in determining how a game’s production went, from smooth sailing (mythical as that may be) to the worst bare-knuckle stress and drama.

Before I begin, I’d like to note that Mass Effect is a great game that I thoroughly enjoyed. I use it as an example here because it’s fresh in my mind, and because I get the feeling that it was meant to be more– maybe much more– than what ended up on the gold disc. I don’t know anyone personally who works at BioWare Edmonton, so everything you’ll read here is just a guess on my part. I mean them no ill– Mass Effect is all the more a triumph, and the team all the more laudable, for overcoming the adversities I’m certain the project faced.

Sometimes it seems like Western video game businesses love to sink money into Japan. From Microsoft’s well-documented and long-running tale of woe trying to sell its Xbox and Xbox 360 there, to Electronic Arts’ multiple aborted strategies for the region (including recently starting up and closing down a complete internal studio, with nary a product to show for it), one gets the sense of a lost cause that can’t be dropped. Why keep trying? A recent article in the Wall Street Journal summed it up this way: “The Japanese market is less than half of the size of the U.S. market, but Microsoft has been unwilling to give up on it because many of the top software makers are based there, and Japan holds huge symbolic value as one of the big videogame cultures.”

Halo 3 will be released in a few weeks, supported by a marketing campaign so large and unprecedented for the video game industry that the Wall Street Journal saw fit to publish an article focussing solely on the game’s advertising, entitled “Here Comes ‘Halo 3’ – With a Side Order of Fries”. This has, naturally, resulted in a lot of cynical reactions from some corners of the hardcore community, especially those who feel Halo is already too mainstream– a game for jocks and frat boys, for people who don’t know what the really good stuff is. But regardless of one’s personal taste for the series, we should recognize that something very important is going on here.

“Why not just use Unreal?”

I don’t think many people who cover the industry actually understand why not– even if they say they do. Ever since Gears of War came out in late 2006, it’s possible to read in magazines statements like, “the game runs on Unreal Engine 3, so it should look quite sharp when it’s released” or “imagine what a studio like Bungie could do if they were using Unreal technology.” The assumptions are clearly made, and they are wrong. Is the general gaming press really this uneducated and gullible?

This is the sort of thing to which we developers ought to pay more attention – in response to Denis Dyack’s rather frenzied comments on how games ought to be marketed, industry journalist N’Gai Croal runs a piece in which he asks a marketer about how game should be developed. Now, I don’t particularly agree with what Mr. Dyack has been saying (more on that later, perhaps), but to turn the tables on him this way strikes me as pointless and condescending. Allowing this moronic marketing rejoinder to what is actually a real and legitimate concern from a genuine creator in our industry only highlights the disrespect with which the industry treats its own lifeblood. Am I being too harsh? After all, maybe this person has some useful insights. Why don’t we take a look:

I honestly didn’t start this journal intending solely to criticize dopey game industry articles, but here’s another that I can’t resist, entitled “Why Is Game Dialogue So Cheesy?” In order to investigate this issue (which is, to be fair, true and a legitimate concern), our author speaks to just two sources: a publisher-side producer at Vivendi Universal, and a fellow game journalist – incredibly, at no point is anyone who has actually written game dialogue consulted. I suppose it wasn’t deemed important enough for an article that is merely pretending to be about the dialogue and story in video games. Unfortunately, it goes downhill from there:

There is a deal done in the business of video game marketing called the review guarantee, which is what it sounds like: a guaranteed minimum score for the (as yet unfinished) game, usually in exchange for an exclusive preview of the title and an embargo on all other publications for a set period of time. I am no PR man, so I cannot comment on how widespread or common this practice is, but I do know it exists, between well-known publishers and magazines, for games you have probably heard of and may have even purchased.

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.

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.

The state of game industry journalism is still terrible. Everything seems to cling to the extreme of either gas-bag meaninglessness or rock-stupid fanboyism. Former ESA president Doug Lowenstein thought this was a big enough problem that he chose to mention it in his farewell address to the industry, describing our press as thoughtless, immature and lazy. Unsurprisingly, few video game news sites decided to make much mention of this, but it's impossible to disagree with him– especially when sites like GameDailyBiz concurrently present articles in which a supposed game critic puts forth the laughably absurd notion that “being knowledgable is not necessarily a prerequisite to being a good critic.” Actually, it is.

But instead of staying negative, I want to point towards something that I like, and this brings me to Insert Credit.

Game developers have big egos. We are always so proud of ourselves! Any artist or creator needs some self-belief in order to project himself or herself forward in front of an audience, but game developers seem to have more than enough. Universally, we seem to think what we are doing is rather remarkable. We are quick to criticize everything around us: publishers, press, other game developers, even our own fans. We are opinionated, even about things of which we know little. We ascribe our successes to ourselves, and our failures to marketing, or timing, or the stupidity of the masses.

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.

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.

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.

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:

Oftentimes I’ll happen across a discussion about the business side of games and someone will bring up sales figures, saying things like “but the game sold great, so they must be doing fine,” or “why do these big dumb publishers keep making such crappy games that sell so poorly?” Assertions like these are usually backed up by no data at all, or some anecdotal evidence that doesn’t inform how successful the title actually was from a financial standpoint. Unless you’re a higher-ranking employee of the publisher that released the game, it’s safe to assume you don’t know the complete picture of how a particular game is doing– even if you work for the developer that made the game (sometimes especially if you are the developer, since someone might decide that keeping you in the dark about the numbers that lead to your royalty payments is the best strategy).

PR materials of upcoming games find themselves under a lot of scrutiny, and sometimes intense debate. There’s always going to be an element of exaggeration in the old art of selling, but games in particular seem to have bred a culture of mistrust between the marketers and their audience. I’m not laying blame, though, because how to get people excited about a title in development is actually a more difficult question than one would first think. Speaking simply, we have three options: