“All I know is that I still didn’t feel comfortable walking around the show floor,” the second…”
“”All I know is that I still didn’t feel comfortable walking around the show floor,” the second retorts. “I also talked to two new female game designers who attended the show and both told me, ‘I don’t think I want to go into game design anymore.’””
The Man Who Promised Too Much
The Man Who Promised Too Much:
Peter Molyneux is crying. I’m not sure how to react to this. Legendary game designers don’t often get emotional with the press. But here’s Molyneux, who has made so many games and done so many interviews over the past two decades, openly weeping into my voice recorder.
The Impending Crash Of The Videogame Console Market
The Impending Crash Of The Videogame Console Market:
Natasha Lomas on how the numbers are shaping up so far in the gaming console space:
The thing is neither of these new generation console flagships is selling very well when compared with previous generations of flagship consoles. The console market appears to be shrinking significantly — and that’s evidently having a knock-on impact on games studios and game development.
…
At this relatively early stage the new generation stacks up as follows: Wii U at 6 million, XB1 at ~4 million and PS4 at 6 million: a total of ~16 million. So only around 244 million to go — just to perform as well as the last generation. But with game budgets increasing a flat console market isn’t a good thing. This new generation needs to be outselling the last, not looking like it’s going to have a really tough time shipping the same.
True-ish Grit
If you were to anthropomorphize the contemporary American mainstream video game, it would look, I think, a bit like a harrowingly male, shaggily haired, extremely confident 18-year-old capable of any number of astounding displays of strength or agility. Smart, too, in his way. Not incurious about things outside the realm of his immediate experience so much as oblivious to them. All the same, this young man has potentially interesting things to say. Most of us would be willing to listen, too, but for the fact that his breath smells like peanut butter and he’s wearing a Boris Vallejo T-shirt.
Despite the yada yada of video games’ growing cultural prominence, the amount of money they make (and lose), and the simple reality that maybe no creative medium has ever moved further faster, most people don’t take video games very seriously. I realize this comes as a shock to precisely no one who doesn’t play video games. Sometimes the fact that games are written off as adolescent nonsense bugs me. Sometimes it doesn’t, because a lot of games — a lot of great games — are adolescent nonsense. And sometimes I think that the worst thing to happen to video games would be for them to get taught widely in schools1 and reviewed in The New Yorker. As the novelist and critic (and gamer!) John Lanchester once wisely noted, “Respectability is a terrible thing for any art form. People wrote better novels when the cultural status of the novel was contested.”
On videogames in (North) American culture.