fuck advocacy

Let’s forget for a moment that games are supposed to be fun. Fuck that. I’m going to argue on the basis that contemporary games are striving for one thing: respect as a medium, like film or poetry. Modern video games should want to be experiences, they should want to be more than just button-mashing. Hell, most contemporary games cost three times as much as a movie, contain ten times more content, and cost more people and more time to make. I’d be willing to contend that there is an even bigger independent side of video games than there is to the film industry, since making games is easier and more accessible now than making independent movies. Anybody can get ahold of a copy of Flash or Processing and make a game in a few days if they want to. A lot of people do (and there are a lot of shitty flash games because of it).

But there’s something killing games more than all the shitty flash games combined, and that’s multiplayer. Not multiplayer as a general concept, no, but rather the way multiplayer is driving the creation and marketing of games. Today, the best-selling and most far-reaching games are multiplayer-focused. Modern Warfare 2. The Halo trilogy. World of Warcraft. This is what’s killing the future of games, and it’s the same mistake movies made so long ago, an error that I hoped video games would learn from. But greedy people are everywhere, and video games turned big and corporate very quickly. The formula is simple, and we can painfully see it all the time at the box office: make a movie that has a highly marketable and simple plot and then make sequels. Video games are falling into the same formula.

People have praised games like Modern Warfare 2 and movies like The Dark Knight because while they were big-budget highly-marketable titles which made lots of money, they took risks or were generally unconventional. Immediately what springs to mind are the whole ideas of a superhero movie being successful and the now-infamous terrorist mission. Critics love this shit. They say these films and games deserve to make all the money, because they’re close to art. I fail to see what makes the MW2 civilian slaughter mission anything close to art. I read a similar critical review on Destructoid or something, but I’ll reiterate the point again, and with a broader focus: the whole point of video games and what sets it apart is the interactivity of it. I, as a player, have the power of choice. I control a character. But nowhere in the process of killing civilians in an airport can I choose to do anything else. There is no interactive narrative, just a linear sequence of events. However, most people ignore this and just go online to play the multiplayer.

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