Earlier today, we posted some excerpts from Round 1 of the second annual Slate Gaming Club, in which four writers discuss the year in videogames. The roster? 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. In Round 1, the group was pretty polite, but there are definitely some pointed remarks and glowering stares in this, Round 2, of our email exchange. Some excerpts:
Chris Suellentrop, New York Times: [W]hat to think of Gears of War 2? The game is even more shamelessly derivative than the first one. I picked up allusions to, off the top of my head, Independence Day, Battlestar Galactica (the Ron Moore re-imagining), The Empire Strikes Back, and the speeder-bike chase scene in Return of the Jedi. Mitch Krpata of the Boston Phoenix pointed out on his Insult Swordfighting blog that one of the game's levels is a tribute to, or a rip-off of, the final level of Contra....
[Yet] I think Gears of War 2 was the most fun game I played all year, and the game that most achieved the goals it set for itself. If you want to see what an interactive Sylvester Stallone movie looks like, play Gears. It's everything a big summer blockbuster should be. But this is awards season, right?
Stephen Totilo, MTV News: Gamers abandon games--even games that they like--before finishing them. Gamers get
angry at games--even games they like--for being repetitious or derivative or for
falling short of being as good as it seems like they could be. That's what you
get when you, the gamer, indulge in a creative form that was created to convey
satisfying-but-repeatable, controllable bits of action for a quarter per minute.
This is the creative form that has somehow evolved into a medium of 25-hour, $60
collections of satisfying-but-repeatable, controllable bits of action without
inventing many successful strategies for telling stories, figuring out how to
develop characters, or turning into a more interesting way to spend an hour than
listening to Beethoven or watching The Wire.
Seth Schiesel, New York Times: Over the course of this year, plowing through game after game, what surprised me most was simply how good most of them were. Though the crop of 2008 has demonstrated its talent in different ways, it seems clear that the overall level of production quality and creative talent is higher now in video games than it has ever been. This is the real golden age of gaming because only now is the audience large enough, variegated enough, and mature enough to support high levels of investment in such a broad portfolio of genres on such a wide range of devices and screens.
The major publishers have finally figured out that schlock is not a business strategy that can compete in the long term with producing a high-quality product. I have played through and reviewed most of the biggest games of the year, with a few formal reviews still to come, and the one word that keeps coming back to me is professionalism.
N'Gai Croal, Newsweek: Your point about professionalism also intrigues me. You're correct that, by and large, the level of craft in the video game industry continues to grow each year, and 2008 was no exception. I wonder if, however, by settling for the professionalism inherent in the acknowledgment that "we are those men, and we had fun with these games," we let games off too easily when they take the easy way out, interactively speaking....
Was Epic's handling of Maria's fate a failure of craft or art? I say it's worth thinking hard about, especially when writing for a mainstream audience like yours in the Times and mine at Newsweek. Because when we avoid such questions, we're gulling our readers into believing that story and gameplay are mutually exclusive--or that games are just like other media.
Feel free join in and take shots at us in the comments below, or just share your thoughts on the best and worst of 2008.
