Home
I'm currently in a university marketing class and we did a segment on the gaming industry. We had a real problem finding a good documentary about the beginnings and behind the scenes of the game biz.
I got to visit Turn10 during the development of Forza 2, and the process was riviting - pun intended - but to make a show out of it? I dunno."
Unless you're using the logic that getting $10 in trade credit for their game trade makes the difference in whether they get a new game or none."
Since when is it good business for a game company, or any company, to cater directly to people with NO MONEY? If you're broke, so what? Find a hobby that doesn't require state of the art electroncs and $60 supporting purchases. Wait until the games are $19.99 or run a generation behind, or just go get some cheaper hobby like kite flying.
What happens if you want to see a new movie at a theater and you don't have the money? Well, 1) You suck it up until it hits the dollar theater. 2) You wait for it to hit cable. 3) You rent it. If you're really broke, 4) you wait for it to go to regular television. Or if you're an ahole and you're a child of the baby boomers, 5) you pirate it or if you're an ahole and you ARE a baby boomer, 6) you sneak into the theater.
Do you think that a company that spends $10 million making a game doesn't deserve $60 from you for playing it, or $60 from anyone who plays it, including your friends you want to loan the game? Because that's what it sounds like to me. You all think they don't deserve to make some money off of every person who plays their game. They make $60 off of someone who plays a new version, and now they have a chance to make $10 off of someone who borrows one or rents one or buys one used.
Everyone is so quick to point how how they feel like they're being screwed over, and I hear very few people considering how the game companies are getting screwed over.
Finally, developers and publishers make games, and Gamestop just sells them. If this conspiracy results in the death of Gamestop, so what? You'll still have games to play. But if Gamestop's used game business results in the death of a number of companies who actually make the games, then not only does Gamestop go under too, but so does the entire hobby. If somebody has to go, it should be the used resellers, not the developers and publishers. If one of them should die, it should be for producing crap games, not because of a used game market."
Thanks for the shout-out to custom Xbox 360 faceplates."
Music is an art. Cooking is an art. Painting and sculpting are art. Writing is an art. Comedy is as much an art as tragedy.
Sticking with the writing part, you can write for a couple of reasons. You can write to communicate information, or you can write to communicate emotion. If you write to make someone FEEL something, it's art. If a video game is meant to make you feel something, then it's art.
Ebert plays chess and maintains that chess is not art. I disagree. Chess is more of a dance than a game. Yes, you will be hard pressed to ever convince me that Connect Four or Sorry! are art, but Ico? Halo? Gears? Super Mario?
If you go to an art museum, and see a sculpture of tubes and wires twisting and turning this way and that, how different is that from a Mario game that starts you at one end of a tube and moves you up and down, and around until you get to the end?
Lastly, the author of the original article, which prompted the remarks by Ebert, listed a bunch of corporate stuff involved in the creation of a game, to which Ebert pointed and said "I rest my case." Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Michaelangelo, da Vinci and Van Gogh were all paid to create the works of art that they produced. They were simply the artistic cogs in the machine. The same can be said for Kubrick, Coppola, McCartney, Hendrix, Clapton and countless others."
I like the guy and think it's sad that there aren't more people like him. The fact that he stands out is a testament to how little flavor and personality there is in this industry."