Yesterday, we posted excerpts from Round 2 of the second annual
Slate Gaming Club, featuring four journalists discussing the year in
videogames. The lineup consisted of New York Times op-ed page staff
editor Chris Suellentrop, MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo, New York Times games reporter Seth Schiesel, and the staff of Level Up. Round 1 was cordial, while Round 2 got a bit more testy. How would we describe Round 3? Thoughtful. Heady, even. Some excerpts:
Stephen Totilo, MTV News: To
save us the embarrassment of not having deeply discussed 2008's biggest
gaming newsmaker, I must add that [Wii Fit] served a number of
interesting roles. It presented to average people the idea that playing
a game could be good for you, it convinced some gaming executives that
fitness gaming is the next trend that must be followed, and it expanded
the currently unlabeled category of Self-Help Video Games that
Nintendo's brain-workout Brain Age software opened up in 2006 (and
which may someday force gaming-sales charters to give self-help games
their own list, the way the New York Times had to in 1983).
Chris Suellentrop, New York Times: Stephen
is saying that video games are a Fourth Medium, then, something truly
new under the sun. (Maybe this is just a different way of saying that
games are an Eighth Art Form, as Dennis Dyack says.) I often think
that's right. But it also helps explain my long face, as Stephen puts
it. Don't I have the right to expect something more from this marvelous
new medium? Something more wondrous than beautifully and impeccably
crafted worlds filled with enemies for me to kill?
What I want is a game with the elegant gameplay and level design of
Gears of War 2 but with the story of The Force Unleashed. But I want it
told in a manner like Braid—or even You Have To Burn the Rope—meaning,
a telling of the tale that is consistent with the promise and the
mechanics of this Fourth Medium (or Eighth Art Form).
I haven't played this game yet. Have any of you?
Seth Schiesel, New York Times: [W]ith every passing year I grow deeper in my conviction that the most
interesting and meaningful games are massively multiplayer online games
in which you have thousands of people in emergent, persistent
communities with their own politics, their own tribes. In a massively
multiplayer game, every day is different because people are always
different. As I've played through dozens of games this year for my job,
it has been so vital to maintain a gaming home base, a center of
gravity with a group of people that I can just hang out and play with.
I've found that most of this year in Eve Online,
the hard-core science-fiction MMO that continues to grow. Eve is the
kind of game in which the group of people you play with is the most
important part of the experience. These are the people I'm on IRC with
even when I'm playing something else, and it is that sense of
community, of getting to know people from around the world just a
little bit, that is the most valuable thing in gaming for me, and it is
something that other media usually fail to provide.
N'Gai Croal, Newsweek: [I]n just 24 months, Nintendo has blown past
its rivals and continues to do so even though the 360 is now $50
cheaper than the Wii's suggested retail price. To put this
Nintendominance in perspective, for the month of November, Wii (2.04
million) outsold Xbox 360 (836,000), PlayStation Portable (421,000),
Playstation 3 (378,000), and PlayStation 2 (206,000) combined....
Yes,
the data show that the video-game industry's revenues continue to rise.
But how sustainable is that when development budgets are tilted toward
360, PS3, and high-end PCs and away from the market-leading Wii and
low-end PCs. If a remake of Resident Evil 4 sold extremely well on the
Wii, surely there was an opportunity for Dead Space. The liberating
sense of movement in Mirror's Edge could have translated well to the
Wiimote and nunchuk. But because EA built those games for the
top-of-the-line machines, the Wii wasn't even a possibility. So with
Nintendo as top dog, I think it's time for publishers to throw it a
much bigger bone by leading development on Wii, then up-porting the
games to the more powerful systems, which should result in a larger
addressable audience.
