Aram Zucker-Scharff

The last year has seen the rise of the independent developer as hero. Does this growing consideration of the developer challenge an eight-year-running trend in game journalism?

The explosion of commercially accessible independent games on platforms like Steam or XBLA have introduced us to a new successful and far more accessible generation of game developers. These new indie game dev stars have induced a change in the approach of some game reviewers. A change brought to the forefront in Walter Garrett Mitchell’s piece on The Escapist, “Alfred Hitchcock Would Make Good Games.”

Mitchell’s focus on the developer is entirely unlike the experience-focused New Games Journalism style proposed in 2004 by Kieron Gillen. That experiential style has more recently been popularized by Zero Punctuation, the rest of The Escapist, @Play, and a variety of other reviews that approached games based on how they played, instead of how people created them.

Image used under Fair Use from EA

By integrating choice and multiple user-controlled view-points into the game, Dead Space 2 provides a refreshing alternative to traditional video game cutscenes.

In the extraordinarily crowded field of video games, many seek attention through cutscenes of increasing complexity or realism. I found it somewhat ironic then that Dead Space’s particular unique treatment of cutscenes was mostly ignored.

Despite increasing complexity, user interactions with cutscenes, excluding quicktime events since there are whole games based around just that mechanic, have been pretty limited. You have two choices with a rare third. Choice 1: Skip. Choice 2: Watch. Then some games, oddly, allow you to fast-forward through them.

As a result, video game players and participants in video media in general tend to present two types of video. You can skip this or you are not allowed to skip this. Video games, television, web videos, heck, video advertising in general all subscribe to this binary choice.

The problem is perspective. For almost all video engagements, only one point of perspective is presented and one line of narrative. Participants are only presented with the whole of the screen and its single focus. Despite our allegiance to single viewpoint video the technology (starting with …

By integrating choice and multiple user-controlled viewpoints into the game, Dead Space 2 provides a refreshing alternative to traditional video game cut scenes

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By integrating choice and multiple user-controlled viewpoints into the game, Dead Space 2 provides a refreshing alternative to traditional video game cut scenes

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