Lazy (industry) Sunday Afternoon

First, I want to further Class Acts ‘response to Spacemans Blog’ by giving due credit to the issues raised regarding the amount of research and effort put into the planning stages before design implementation begins; commonly known as pre-production- an ‘extra credits’ episode from the penny arcade website discusses the problem succinctly.

There is certainly room for the video gaming industry to expand and spread its wings, as a young medium that as oft mentioned- surprisingly to me- is bigger than the movie or music industries. So it’s not all doom and gloom, even though, if I swing the pendulum back, it feels like the story telling habits and the technological ‘innovations’ have produced this entrenched, lazy standard in mainstream game production. Where are the baldurs gate, grim fandango’s and system shock 2’s of today? I’m starting to sound like a curmudgeonly old fart here and somewhere along the line the shine seems to be wearing off, with most other media variants complicit in the equation too (except for TV shows perhaps). On a wider scale, it harkens back to the issue that newer games are not- the default- improvements over older games purely by measure of flashy effects or digital enhancements towards life-like human qualities, something that animated cinema is currently pursuing too, with its ‘3-d’ marketing, motion capture, Avatar (essentially, Pocahontas in disguise) shtick. That’s an issue for another day. Back to games, and the need for pre/ post production in the video games industry cannot be understated; to push the envelope regarding issues of under/mis-representation, issues of social concern, not just as a leisurely frolic through the world of games but more in line with the difficult moral choices to be made, ciphers such as the MMR controversy in Mass Effect brought up by the Morality tales reading from Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Just by virtue of inclusion- more of which is not beyond the scope of the industry I believe- pedagogical properties that can serve as an enlightening sideshow alongside the omni-present commercial imperative, the industry would be holding up its end of the bargain to its human hordes, putting the boot into the sententious violence-in-video-games espousers no less. It’s merely a case of bringing the horse to water and hoping that he takes a sip, for a start.