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Industry Leaders Frustrated With Game Culture
Well known designer Warren Spector let his opinions fly in a keynote at the Montreal Game Summit, reports Edge Online. From the article: "While admitting that the largest part of the criticism stemmed from general ignorance and misunderstanding of videogaming by the 'cultural gate-keepers,' he noted that simply staying the course and waiting for mainstream acceptance to catch up could lead not only to political intervention, but a 'coarsening of our culture,' and 'eventual cultural irrelevance.' Instead, he joined a growing chorus in the development community by strongly advocating the diversification of games to be more inclusive of women, older gamers, and traditionally excluded ethnicities." Next Generation is covering a similar statement by ESA President Doug Lowenstein about his views on the gaming industry's image. Unfortunately, societal parasite Jack Thompson took Spector's remarks to be validation of his viewpoint. GamePolitics has that story.
Seriously, all the major consoles have been talking about trying to expand gaming into a broader demographic, but I see at least Nintendo trying (not sure how successful it will be, but trying nonetheless) with their Brain Training and Nintendogs DS games, promise of a cheaper system in the Revolution, and a controller modeled after a TV remote for the express purpose of making non-gamers feel comfortable picking it up.
I understand that life's not fair, just why is it never unfair in my favor?
While his critisism of GTA is somewhat damning,
Haven't read his critisism, but I was playing GTA the other day and it occured to me that it's one of the few games I can stomach these days where I kill a bunch of virtual people. I think it's because there's no pretense about being the bad guy. It's the games where you're supposed to feel good about yourself for slaughtering the bad guys that really get to me. Or even worse, the sort of abstract slaughter of a civ or moo game where who's in the right and who's in the wrong doesn't even matter.
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