this is where i would retweet that tweet if i had access to the selectbutton twitter hint hint
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wait some of yāall wrote in tgq, too? dang
wait also I gotta read these, @Mr_Mechanical takes are intriguing
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I agree with most of this but I think that, in retrospect, itās pretty clear the 2000s were the most dire decade for games, as all the small channels got locked up and we didnāt have distribution routes beyond flash platforms for smaller things.
The sheer amount of small games being shipped in truckloads onto digital stores, at budget levels of a 16-bit title and higher, is astounding. Weāre not equipped to sort through it but even looking at the quality bar of pixel art in the Steam new releases thread, and how itās shifted in five years, is terrifying. If someone compiled a list of every interesting game on Steam with a budget <$5m itād dwarf every console generation.
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games are More Art than movies because if movies were like games now youād be able to still make color tinted silent films or black and white sound films or whatever you wanted
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I should say Iām talking about the early 2000s, pre-PS360 era. TGQ started up at the very end of 2004 and ran until 2009 so it was operating in a PS360 context but for me personally (har) the sentimentality fueling my creative energies at the time were rooted firmly in the prior decade of the late 90s early 00s. Since this was still a year away from PS3 when we were starting up from a consumerist point of view (quite interesting that I canāt but escape consumerism while engaging with this particular hobby maybe I should write a blog about it) the current new thing was still the PS2.
God of War had that great Hydra demo (@legalstep mailed me the demo disc, this was before consoles were online!) and that was clearly the future, or at least it had a vitality to it that I was convinced I had only experienced in earlier action games like Contra 3. Not that there was any connection there beyond me having fond memories of Contra 3 as a younger person and playing the God of War demo as an older person.
But also during that time in the early 00s there were a lot of the big indie games getting released like Cave Story or La Mulana and it seemed like anyone could make a game and put it out there and that were on the cusp or the threshold of something amazing and instead all we got was a million games coming to steam or whatever other digital storefront people use now everyday with no curation.
Valve could probably elevate game criticism just by putting together a team or a small company dedicated solely to curation. Just a bunch of people who actually look at and consider every game coming out on their storefront and putting some kind of appraisal to it rather than just leaving it up to the userbase to generate a critical mass of yea or nay votes to push it to the front page or whatever.
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Apple has tried that as the solution to the iOS storeās dire situation for years and years
all it got us was a measly few thousand sales
As subscriptions are believed to be the next all-consuming business model, theyāre actually making a decent stab at it with Apple Arcade, seemingly purpose-built to curate for the games Apple People are supposed to be seen playing.
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!!!
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See so here we have to shift away from the consumerist point of view with regard to game criticism since it clearly doesnāt help people buy or sell video games anymore. So who is it for now? Is it something we do for an end, like catering to a market or something vaguer like āelevating the mediumā or is it now an end in itself, something we do just because itās fun or meaningful in itself for us to do it?
People who make game professionally read game forums and get the undiluted criticism first hand from their fans and customers and fellow game players. But people who make games professionally typically work for large companies who as organizations only look at the metacritic scores.
Maybe criticism is an end in itself now. Or maybe it always was. I know I liked reading Roger Ebertās reviews on movies not because I needed help deciding if a movie was worth seeing or culturally significant. He just had an interesting perspective and wrote well about movies and it was fun and interesting in itself to read his criticism. Where is the Roger Ebert of game reviewers? I donāt know if I want to see the answer to that question.
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noted chaser austin walker posting mpreg genderswap nier fan fiction on his website was the moment the medium truly had its roger ebert
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Are you talking about bug chasing?
no hes just another dude whose ultra-horny for trans women in a gross way lol
YOU FOOLS ALL BETTER BE REPLYING TO THIS DONT MAKE ME FRONT PAGE POST ABOUT TROPICAL ANGEL IN THE GAMERS QUARTER
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Speaking as someone who was ten, and therefore the only one whose perspective can be 100% trusted, every commercial game from 05-09 was just a brown and grey blur of the least charming 3D models imaginable (in 2009, Drive reminded people about pink and blue). 9/10 are about killing Iraqis. The last one is Nintendoās Mario Again: Play Mario Again 2. It was the single least stylish era of gaming - even though gaming as a hobby was suddenly very easy to defend. Perhaps these facts were as one. I felt alienated and betrayed by the medium that was supposed to reserve a space for me. Meanwhile the indie games scene felt like survivors of an atomic blast huddled in the wilderness worshipping vague memories from childhood. It felt like a fallen civilization that remembered being able to create and appreciate monumental works of beauty but had no knowledge of the secret arts that produced them. A drear age to grow up during. Nostalgia trips back to this era will return empty-handed. Nothing of honor buried here. Nothing to salvage but mustache memes.
of course I was ten and already curmudgeonly when I came up with these opinions. So this is just one piece of the puzzle.
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thanks so much this is exactly how i feel
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these shit sites have already shifted away from the consumerist point of view. consumerist implies that the primary reason the review (or the site) exists is to get you to buy something. in reviews, that was interpreted as telling you which specific something to buy ā but people found out that the sites already do that without the review. gamers are the center of āfanā culture, they donāt want to be told that anything is bad. they donāt even want to be told that anything is better than something else. itās impossible to register that concept anyway, because for most people video games are broken into two or three categories: 1) AAA games, which are functionally all the same game to the point where criticism as a means to distinguish a mythical idea of quality is superfluous, 2) games that exist to get you to play only that game, ie esports games, mmos, minecraft and the like, which each have their own hyper focused communities that act as the arbiters of value far more effectively than any writer at a generalist site could hope for, and 3) high end indie titles, which means metroidvanias and roguelites, which fit into the same pattern as AAA games and as such cannot be parsed.
so thereās really nothing to say, the selection process can really only exist for the indie games, and that takes place in what is covered long before a review would exist. so instead the sites gave up and just became mirrors, because everyone is already sequestered off into their own youtube and twitter fantasy lands anyway. you come to the video game websites to see confirmation of yourself, which is why itās memes and cosplay and check-out-this-hilarious-video-of-a-skyrim-bug ripped from reddit. there is no space for criticism, because criticism of the product is criticism of the self. that is the entire definition of late capitalism, and coupled with surveillance it is the entire point of the 21st century internet. prior to this, mainstream ācriticismā was limited to mistaking identification of traits for analysis, so in material terms we havenāt lost anything, but the ideological vaporization of an identifiable distance between person and product is dire.
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Well lookie here we just got our first page for The Realpolitick. I want you to restate this thesis four or five more times in slightly different, more creative ways and Iāll paste it up all over town using homemade wheatpaste. (Iām not being an asshole by the way I sincerely agree with you here)
The other day a Death Stranding review on youtube popped up on my front page (I donāt even log into youtube but my front page is personalized until I delete my cookies hi late capitalism) and it was a seven plus hour long video. I havenāt watched it because I donāt think Iāve watched any of this personās videos before and maybe Iām not going to start with this one but looking at that thumbnail all I could really think of was reading 20,000 words from Tim about Super Mario Bros. 3 or whatever back in the day.
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I think if I were to write a serious analysis of death stranding I would have no choice but to call it Jeff Stranding
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i feel like itās not too much to ask that anything on youtube thatās not a literal movie be like, able to be watched in less than an hour on the highest playback speed. that seems like a modest request
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anyway my take on games i wanna share with the world is: surely by this point thereās enough games that no-one needs to make any more while working for a living is a thing
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I only have the bandwidth for nice podcasts, about anything
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