Absolutely. My eyes are delicate flowers!
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You've focused on videogames interactive nature as the precludes them from being considered art, yet you haven't really put forth an argument about how interactivity is mutually exclusive with the classification. For one, interactive art installations have been a staple of the modern art scene for some time. Audience participation has a long history in theater. Hell, no two performances of a play or piece of music are ever identical.
Far from being the being the thing that precludes videogames from being art, it's their most interesting and promising aspect for artistic exploration. Aesthetic appreciation isn't limited to what we see and hear. A system of gameplay can itself be beautiful. The intercourse between the player and the game system can impart a message or emotion with far more impact than a purely passive experience. Obviously, videogames are a long way from fully delivering on that promise, but the potential is there.
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@Rauno: I have no recollection of that in MW2, but it was the one game I don't have installed at the moment and didn't replay to capture screenshots while writing this. Let's see if I can find it on YouTube!
OK, here's a clip showing the level: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_l43ZatZsc
Good catch, but it does look like the civilians are pretty clearly characterized as such. I was thinking more in terms of the kind of judgement calls soldiers have to make in Iraq and Afghanistan where they have to make a snap judgement as to whether that's a pregnant woman or a suicide bomber with a brick of C4 under her burka. Or clearing a building and finding a family you can't be sure isn't aiding the enemy, things like that. In MW2, the Brazil levels are a little different in that Caracas isn't a war zone. It's more like a police action in that case and the non-combatants are clearly demarked as such. But your point is well taken.
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Yeah, the Chrono-Ping ability was great for letting you know which way to explore first so you don't pass a point of no return accidentally. Singularity had a lot of cool ideas in it.
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I think this is one of those ripped from the headline deals. I remember there being a story earlier this year about a woman who neglected her children because she was addicted to WoW or The Sims or something.
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I thought Alpha Protocol's hacking minigame was interesting, albeit difficult to control on the PC. You had to locate strings of characters in a changing field of ACSII.
Obviously, something like Bioshock isn't attempting to be realistic. And that doesn't bother me too much. These are often just MINI games, after all. They need to be quick, abstracted experiences with a mechanic that is actually fun!
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@Kenn: You should! Tell us what it's like!
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I think Danger Close and EA deserve some credit for not cynically trying to veil their narrative and themes behind some bullshit, fictional countries and factions. Modern Warfare has been making hay of current conflicts for some time now, making very direct references in incredibly impactful moments like the C-130 Gunship sequence. But using fake nation-states and fake terrorists strikes me as the commercial thing to do.
Would anyone have taken The Hurt Locker seriously if it had been set in Kerblankistan? I don't see any reason why games should shy away from acknowledging what conflicts they draw on.
And I especially think the "playing as the Taliban" controversy is a complete non-issue. I managed to play as the "Taliban" many times during the beta and never shot a single American soldier. I did shoot a bunch of dudes who happened to be playing against me, but the fact that they wore US military garb and equipment in the match was utterly inconsequential to competitive dynamic.
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@Bryan: My only intent was to examine the value proposition of a Gold membership and dispell a number of common myths about what, exactly, is provided by Microsoft. You can doubt the actual cost of running the service, but what is not debatable, as per Microsoft's own financial reporting, is that it is extremely profitable, between online sales and annual memberships, and that the money from Xbox Live "made up" for significant losses in other parts of the EDD business in previous years. And by significant, we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars.
I think this discussion would be more productive if you stopped trying to deconstruct my motive and actually address the points I've raised. You keep bringing up PSN and the PS3's price as if that has anything to do with anything. I haven't brought it up in the comments, but you never miss a chance. In my original article PSN was only one example of a number of services that do matchmaking without the need to charge membership fees. Likewise (and since you brought it up), Sony, Apple, Valve and others all manage to make content deals without passing along every administrative cost on to a paying subscriber. That expense is generally built in to the price of the thing being sold.
And since you keep going on about my "wild speculation", let's not pretend you know for a fact Sony would have made PSN a pay service had they been in a stronger position. I'll not deny they are probably envious of that ~600 million a year in free money MS in raking in, but I don't know that they necissarily agree, philosophically, that owners should be made to pay for the things Xbox Live Gold does. And even if they DID, I'd be just as opposed to similar profiteering in that context.
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@Bryan: No, what I'm saying is that Microsoft's take just from sales of movies, games and Avatar items through the Xbox Live Marketplace, $100 M+, is enough to pay for maintaining all of Xbox Live as a whole and make it a profitable service. The 600 Million they raked in from Gold subscribers last year was literally pure profit.
As for not knowing what I'm talking about, the only speculative part of my argument is the exact figure for operating Xbox Live. MS does not release that information publicly, and lumped the Xbox business as a whole into the EDD for a reason: obfuscating losers lie Web TV and Windows Mobile. The technical details in my article describing how little Microsoft's servers are involved in most of the features are completely accurate. It is also a fact that the wildly profitable Xbox Live business offsets the losses for things like Kin and Zune. This is all in Microsoft's own quarterly and annual financial reports.
And I'm not sure what you are trying to say with your last paragraph. How would Xbox Live not having a subscription fee negatively impact anyone selling content through the Live Marketplace? If anything it just means their potential customer pool will be larger and they will have an extra $60 a year to spend on content.
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@Bryan: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-07/xbox-live-sales-probably-topped-1-billion-for-the-first-time.html
So, Xbox Live membership fees and sales are estimate to be around 1.2 billion USD for 2009 and 600 million of that is just memberships. Let's be conservative and say MS only gets to keep 1/6th of the other half after paying the publishers, developers and license holders their cut for the games, movies, etc. That's $100 Million a year towards running the service itself without resorting to membership fees. MS doesn't publish exact operating costs on the Xbox Live service itself so it's difficult to say exactly how much they spend to keep it going, but it's surely less than $100 Million dollars a year. And if it is more, well, I think the their cut is probably closer to 30% for sales through Live anyway, so there should be a good amount of headroom there. The numbers are hard to come by because it is all reported under their Entertainment and Device Division which includes Xbox, Live, Zune, Kin, Surface, Windows Mobile, etc.
@Jason: Not completely immune, or course. They must have employees who expect cost of living raises. But they aren't a coffee shop where every change in minimum wage completely breaks the balance sheet. They are well cushioned from that. There aren't, however, immune to catastrophic failures like Kin and Zune and barely there products like Surface. The huge losses they face from such face-plants are basically where all the money from Xbox Live goes. So it's easy to see why MS likes Gold memberships, but hard to understand why gamers should be happy to pay $60 a year to smooth over a Microsoft disaster like the Kin.
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I was thinking more along the lines of Tyler Perry Presents: Call of Duty: Black Ops.
http://www.gamerblahhhg.com/?p=376
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