A good part of the day of the typical Level Up staffer consists of inbox management. It's a game in some ways, as we try to determine which emails are should be read immediately; which should be saved for a later date' and which should be promptly deleted. We know that the game industry has a hard time coming up with creative names for their products, but when we see a subject line like "World Announcement--THEY debuts at Games Convention 2007," it's an immediate candidate for the trash bin. We're not going to Leipzig (if our editors are reading this, we'd really, really like to attend) and 'THEY' is neither appealing enough nor sufficiently descriptive a title to make us want to devote any mental energy to opening and reading the attached message. Yet for some strange reason, we did.

Generally, the role of a press release is to inform. But having read the THEY press release, all we've taken away from it is hyperbole and buzzwords, assembled Mad Libs-style for maximum unintended hilarity.

What is THEY? Apparently, THEY is a "next generation mystery first person shooter for PC and next generation consoles."

Who are THEY, you ask? "'THEY' are huge--'THEY' are different--'THEY' are hostile!"

How good will THEY be? It's "so mysterious, so stunning and so amazing--that 'THEY' might become one of the most anticipated world premiere titles from this year’s Games Convention!"

What is THEY's best feature? The "haunting single player mode," the "heroes to identify with" and the "diversified enemies--thrilling and intelligent" were all candidates. But in the end, the winner was its "unique weapon system that makes you 'love' your weapons." After all, one of the of the holy grails of videogames is to elicit emotions from players beyond excitement, frustration and fear. Therefore, we applaud the ambition of the creators of THEY--whoever they may be, since who they are is not part of the information contained in the THEY press release. Because if THEY can make us "love" our weapons, THEY might just become one of the most anticipated world premiere titles from this year’s Games Convention. Even if we're not there to see it.

Click on the link to see the full release, along with a screenshot of one of THEY's love-ly weapons.

Director Russ Meyer and film critic Roger Ebert

Anyone who faces the blank page or screen on a regular basis knows that he or she always runs the risk of filling it with b.s.; we've certainly dropped our share on this blog since its inception ten months ago. Over at the Chicago Sun-Times, film critic Roger Ebert seems to have similarly relieved himself, in "Games vs. Art: Ebert vs. Barker," a fisking of writer-director-producer-game designer Clive Barker's recent statements criticizing Ebert's two-year-old assertion that games can't be art. It's rare enough that one of the nation's foremost critics of a well-established medium like film deigns to address a newer medium like videogames; more's the pity that Ebert couldn't be bothered to address Barker's critique with Barker's own searching seriousness, choosing instead to spend most of his 1100 words vamping for the entertainment of his presumably gaming-illiterate audience. But since we've got our own blank screen to fill, we thought we'd do so by fisking Ebert's column.

Ebert: A year or so ago, I rashly wrote that video games could not be art. That inspired a firestorm among gamers, who wrote me countless messages explaining why I was wrong, and urging me to play their favorite games. Of course, I was asking for it. Anything can be art. Even a can of Campbell's soup. What I should have said is that games could not be high art, as I understand it.

If Ebert had done a bit more research--well, any research--he could have bolstered his argument by citing some notable game designers--e.g. Hideo Kojima, Shigeru Miyamoto and Keiji Inafune, each of whom has gone on record as saying that they don't believe that videogames are art--and engaged what game creators themselves have said. Or he could have elaborated on the distinction that he's drawn between high art and low art. No such luck. Instead, he'd rather dismiss videogames with the sarcastic magnanimousness of "Anything can be art. Even a can of Campbell's soup," as long as we vidigoths don't attempt to desecrate the Temple of High Art, where presumably the gods of Cinema stand comfortably next to those of Theater, Dance, Painting, Sculpture, Opera and Literature.
 

Ebert: How do I know this? How many games have I played? I know it by the definition of the vast majority of games. They tend to involve (1) point and shoot in many variations and plotlines, (2) treasure or scavenger hunts, as in "Myst," and (3) player control of the outcome. I don't think these attributes have much to do with art; they have more in common with sports.

Wow. Only two paragraphs into his column, Ebert proceeds to dismiss an entire medium in just five sentences--two rhetorical questions; a list; and an assertion--none of which display much familiarity with the subject. Ebert knows roughly how many games he's played; were the number high enough for him to speak authoritatively, he'd have said so. It's no accident that the one game he cites by name is Myst, because that 13-year-old title--whose reputation is somewhat tattered as befits its stature as one of this emerging medium's evolutionary dead ends--is probably the last game that he played for any meaningful length of time.

1. HMM...Sony's "Game 3.0" neologism is catching on
2. OLE...Before echochrome, there was OLE
3. POP...Prince of Persia's Jordan Mechner speaks
4. RND...No room for a dog? Why not rent?
5. RND...There she goes, Miss (Geek) America