NY Times Disses Halo 3?

Okay, not really.

Jurie, over at Intelligent Artifice linked off this op-ed piece from the NY Times last week that I only got around to reading yesterday. I was honestly surprised at how insightful the article is. Normally games coverage in the mass media is dull and lifeless at best, or part of a blind witchhunt at worst, but this article really cuts to the core of important standing challenges in game development that people in the game industry are working hard to solve (even the guys at Bungie, whether Daniel Radosh knows it or not).

Radosh lines 'em up and knockes 'em down: Halo 3 is the Pong of of 2007. Cinematics undermine feelings of agency. Games are 'backward looking', and we game designers have still failed to fully formalize the language of our medium. "Transformers" is not art, Bioshock's reach exceeds it's grasp....

While any one of these statements is worthy of thousands of hours of debate, what's important here is that these ideas are starting to creep out of the pages of game design blogs, out of the post-lecture corridors of GDC, and into the popular press. There's not much in Radosh's article that I haven't said myself (and I'm not typically being original when I say this stuff) - but my 100 hits a day is insignificant compared to the Times. More people probably read that article on the day it ran than will ever read this one in the entire time it sits here.

You should read it to. 

Comments

[Flo]

I didn't expect much of Halo 3 when I picked up my copy (it was a day before Quake Wars arrived and I had some spare time) but I was shocked by the level of mediocrity (at least of the Single Player campaign). Gameplay seems to be stuck in the 90's and for a PC gamer, this whole thing is pretty forgettable. When gamespot.com gives a rating of 9.5 I expect a Single Player experience equal to that of Half Life 2 or Episode 2.

[Max Cantor]

I think you're absolutely right--the mere existence of that article is a fantastic step towards games being lifted up to the next level. I think the author's point about movies floundering for almost half a century before entering their "golden age" was one of the more salient parts of the article, though games might take more than 35 years to have a shot at "really becoming art".

[ArC]

I'm kind of unconvinced narrative games can "embrace the dynamics of failure, tragedy, comedy and romance" and "stop pandering to the player's desire for mastery". The very fact of agency completely changes those dynamics; instead of a protagonist who fails, it's the player him/herself.

(I want to cite, say, Grim Fandango as a counter-example, but then again most of its comedy, failure, tragedy, and romance come from its borrowings from cinema... (and Photopia, which borrows from text storytelling.) I dunno.)