There are plenty of people out there who feel this strange, distorted need to attach their personal feelings of well-being to products. It's no different than the guys who define themselves as "Chevy Guys" or "Ford Guys." Uninteresting people need to identify themselves in some way so that they can feel like they're individuals. What you're witnessing here is legions of confused kids who somehow have gotten "feeling good about themselves" mixed up with "corporate loyalty."
Opening Sentence -- A strident sentence declaring your steadfast allegiance to one of three multi-national electronics companies, followed by a detailed description of exactly why said company cares about you deeply, both as a consumer and an individual. This sentence should include liberal usage of the terms "next-gen", "the gaming industry", and "fanbois", and should be followed by several line breaks and possibly an emoticon.
Martyr's Tale of Sacrifice -- Wherein the author should detail the trials and tribulations which he endured to purchase his product of choice. If possible, this dilemma should be immediately related back to the product's amazing sales performance, in contrast to the utterly dismal sales of its competitors.
Martyr's Tale of Martyrdom -- In keeping with the general tone of the opening paragraph, the next section of your post should be a desperate lament to those who are polluting the internet with $_SYSTEM bashing. It should also be mentioned at this point that Slashdot is now controlled by a shadowy cabal of $_OTHER_SYSTEM supporters who are misrepresenting the true public opinion of this issue for their own personal gain and popularity.
Links to Blog Entries -- Next, we move into the 'discovery' phase of the post. Here, a list of links to blog entries should be detailed. It is important that very few of these entries actually contain any useful information, and even more important that none of them are links to respected news outlets -- These should be remedially written diatribes about the superiority of $_SYSTEM that include a photograph of a display box on a shelf in Kalamazoo to demonstrate, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that nobody is buying $_OTHER_SYSTEM.
Reference to Overblown Technical Deficiancies -- Whether it's a faulty piece of nylon, or an unsupported specialty video mode, every technical product will have initial mechanical glitches. Exploit this to hammer home your opinion! Completely ignore all statements, fixes, or recall attempts issued by the company and make sure to do everything in your power to illustrate $_OTHER_SYSTEM as a faulty machine that was created solely for the purpose of fleecing computers. This is a good time to refer back to the theme of your Opening Sentence and mention that the manufacturers of these systems are simply money-grubbing capitalist automatons, while the manufacturer of YOUR system operates from a place of pure altruism, happiness, and flying unicorns.
Summary -- This can be anything from a simple rephrasing of your opening statement to something more dramatic and edgy, such as "I CANT BELIEVE YOU BOUGHT A $_SYSTEM SUCKERS!!!" in all caps. While the content of this may very, make sure to employ a tone of overwhelming gravity -- lest people forget, you are discussing video game consoles here and this topic should be treated as the massively important and life-changing decision that it is. No hyperbole could EVER be too overblown to emphasize the importance of your choice of entertainment products, so make sure to use plenty of phrases like "I'd rather die than...", "Sure, idiots might think that...", and "Jesus christ, are you fucking retarded?" Another valuable tactic is to use comically exaggerated descriptions of physical violence to explain what would happen to anybody who tried to "force you to buy/play a $_OTHER_SYSTEM", as electronics retailers are often known to do.
Hopefully this has been a helpful primer to entering the Great Console Debate of 2007. Follow these simple guidelines and watch opinions sway!
Agreed. Entirely. Linden Labs might be wise to take note that actually creating a quality product still does matter, no matter how much of your content can ultimately be blamed on "well, it's a USER-GENERATED world, so..."
I actually kind of see the point that the Courier guy is making here. I recieved a DS as a gift earlier this year and enjoyed it a lot. I played casually and I thought it was a neat gadget. Since I've moved from a small town to a thriving metropolis, I spend a lot of time on public transit and I've been loving my DS in ways I never knew possible. I think different people are going to be playing games for different reasons, but for those of us with 9-to-5's, handheld gaming is many ways more feasible. When I come home from work, I rarely have time to justify sitting around and play console games, but handhelds are great because it's easy to sneak a bit of play time in between more 'pressing' events.
So if a game company is going to release a game in a series held near-and-dear to the hearts of a lot of 'retro gamers', why not release it in a format that's more compatible with a 'grown up' lifestyle? I can't count how many traditionally 'respectable individuals' I see every day playing DS on the trains.
No, honestly, I doubt that any industry is looking after my personal well-being. And I do agree with you on the general principle of the issue. However, I can't help the fact that I'd vastly prefer the situation if "looking after my own best interests" was a job left to me and me alone.
Agreed. I'm reticent to equate the failure of a nylon strap to some sort of serious failing. On the other hand, the failure of a system to perform up to the specs it's sold under strikes a slightly deeper chord in my mind. Nintendo wasn't selling their systems with the fact that "THIS CONTROLLER WON'T FLY OUT OF YOUR HAND" as a point of attraction, however, the PS3 definitely touted the HD/Blue-Ray elemnts of their system as one of its major features. This, to me, is a very different situation.
To draw an analogy, if I were to purchase a brand new Lexus, and a couple days later, my cigarette lighter stopped working, I'd be annoyed. I'm sure that I would feel slightly cheated as a consumer, but I'm also sure that, in the long run, my overall enjoyment of the vehicle wouldn't decrease by any major amount because of the mechanical failing of what ultimately is a small part of the greater product. However, if I were to purchase that same car and then was later informed that "that whole 'engine' thing isn't quite working as intended yet", I would be absolutely livid.
Unless of course, you happened to enjoy a food item that had trans-fats in it and didn't really want the government deciding whether or not it was okay to purchase and consume it. Is our government now in the business of deciding whether or not our opinions are valid? If that's the case, I can think of several places I would start chipping away at long before I turned to dietary concerns.
As a fanboy of neither item, I wasn't accurate about the price. My apologies. I think my point still stands, though, is that the relatively more expensive price of the PS3 does, to a lot of consumers, push it into a different realm of purchase. I don't really see how that stands to be an arguable point, unless your concept of money is somehow different than mine.
As for "going to buy my fucking Wii", I'm going to wait a few months until it's cheaper, which is the nature of these sort of beasts. My world will continue to spin without a "next-gen gaming system" at its center.
While I recognize the appeal of attempting to frame all dissent as a "NINTENDO vs. SONY" war, I stopped investing my emotions in the goings-on of multi-national corporations with which I have no connection years ago. I made this post not to criticize the PS3 in any way, just to point out the fact that, for some of us, "potential" does not equate to a justifiably higher price point.
I agree with the fact that the Cell certainly does exhibit a lot of potential. However, I think that drawing the conclusion that excellent hardware marks an end to all criticism is ignoring the primary sticking point of the console itself -- The price. I don't think many people out there, aside from the rabid Nintendo types, honestly believe that the PS3 is a lackluster system without the ability to play great games. My sole issue with the console, and I'm sure it's one that's fairly commonly shared, is that $599 is a hell of a lot to play for a toy, no matter how amazing of a toy it is. Like it or not, the price-point difference between $250 and $599 is more than a marginal one, and there are plenty of more fiscally-reserved folks out there like me who will absolutely refuse to drop what amounts to the majority of a month's rent on a machine used to play games.
There are plenty of hardcore gamers out there that think this is a reasonable price, and I'm not knocking them for it. I'm just stating the "everyman" point of view here, and that is that Sony cannot expect to achieve any sort of pervasiveness with this unit until they adjust the price so it lands somewhere in the universe of a "casual purchase" instead of a "fairly serious investment." I could easily purchase a Wii and not feel like I'd make any major sacrifice for it, however, a PS3 would require budgeting -- and budgeting around a new game system is not something that the average individual is going to be willing to do when there are other options that there that could easily fall into the realm of general affordability.
The good news, I suppose, is that developers should really be starting to create some great stuff for the PS3 right around the time it becomes something I can justify purchasing without hating myself for.
I'll attempt to respond to this like a mature individual so at least one of us comes out of this with some modicum of respectability. Yes, I'm aware of the fact that not everybody lives in the same geographic location as the people that they might want to play games with. I also realize that the average person out there (i.e. not the hardcore gaming folks) don't really think of "online games" when they think about "getting in touch with distant friends and relatives." I also know that the entire marketing thrust of the Wii has been, to this point, to appeal to the casual gamer, to market the system's multiplayer functionality to people who might not otherwise be interested in buying a console by presenting their gaming as more of a "respectably socialized" group activity than an anti-social "I am by myself in my underwear with the blinds drawn" sort of pursuit.
So my point is: Why bother? You can look at it as fanboyism if you want, but truth be told, I have no preference. I plan on purchasing both systems as soon as they become reasonably affordable - but for completely different reasons. The PS3 and X360 are both consoles that seem to be designed to appeal to the 'online gamer' far more than Nintendo's, which seems to be well on its way to carving out an entirely different, more 'communal' style of multiplayer. Why should Nintendo spike their development costs on emulating competitors' functionality when the results would be catered to a niched subset of their market base that they don't even seem very interested in attracting in the first place? That would be completely INSANE, somewhat akin to sticking a three hundred dollar movie drive into their system or someth... never mind.
The Wii seems to me like it's designed to be a social device, the type of system you play with your family and friends. Online gaming is only 'social' at its lowest common denominator. I, for one, don't give much of a shit whether the Wii EVER "gets online right." In my mind, they've already gotten multi-player right by focusing on solid, fun, and communal play when two people are in the same room.
I play MMO's and I dig the pervasive online nature of the beast, but more than that, I love playing the Wii with my real life friends -- I, for one, have no desire to play Wii Tennis with STABZUFACE24 from Wisconsin. Am I alone here? I'm sure there's got to be more gamers than me out there who really don't care about online multi-player whatsoever, when half the fun of it is you and your buddies laughing at each other making asses out of yourselves.
The only way I see Apple getting into the console business is *after* they've taken the living room by storm with their other media offerings (iTV, etc.). Exactly the opposite of the way Microsoft and Sony are doing it.
Yes, because Sony is a relatively young upstart that sprung into prominence with the release of the Playstation. Never mind that whole Walkman thing, or VCRs, or televisions, or home stereos, or any of the other products that have been infiltrating American living rooms since the 1960's.
Will Wright is far from being the type of guest I would expect to see on Colbert's show anyway. Colbert's interviews ARE mostly vehicles for Stephen to deliver his patented deadpan and that's why having guests from the political world seems to be a far more comfortable fit -- it was somewhat uncomfortable to watch Colbert attempt to shoehorn his "overwrought conservative" persona into an interview with a fellow who was obviously not on board to promote any sort of political agenda whatsoever.
This, to me, was a case of "bad booking" at its finest. I would've loved to have seen Will Wright on the Daily Show, but the Colbert Report has always seemed at its best when it's 'guests' are little more than targets for the host's witticisms. Actual informative interview content has never been a strong point of the series.
Yeah, I sacrificed my point a bit in an attempt to be funny, I guess, and failed miserable on both counts.
My thoughts were that, while a compelling storyline is a bonus for ANY title, it's not the sort of thing that most gamers would list as a desired feature for a FPS, especially one lauded predominantly for its multiplayer mode, where the story is essentially inconsequential.
Anyway my points DO stand, even if some of my conclusions are unfounded. And ultimately it will be some time before we really know the impact of this interview. I mean, this is the game industry, I wouldn't be surprised to see people fall over themselves to pick sides on this one, and we'll see interview questions about this interview in other people's interviews. "What's your opinion of... blah blah blah."
I've spent a good deal of my professional life operating within the game industry, and I can almost certainly say that this will, if anything, do great things for Jaffe's career and undoubtedly will not hurt him.
Gaming has been looking for its "rock heroes" for a long time. Game designers have never been glamorous in the traditional sense, but publishers have been trying to cultivate this meme for a long, long time. Hell, why else bother to stage game events at the Playboy Mansion? Why the hell else would a second-rate Fabio lookalike be plastered all over the cover of magazines instead of the games he's developed? The industry in general is desperately tired of being perceived as a bunch of top-buttoned mouth-breathers lurking on the edges of social accepability, and has been looking for their "ambassador of cool" pretty much since its inception. If anything, I would expect to see SONY start trying to capitalize on Jaffe's new rebellious "TOTALLY RAW AND REAL" image long before I'd expect to see any sort of corporate backlash.
To draw a parallel, the band Rage Against the Machine made a fortune writing lyrics with an anti-capitalist perspective, but were marketed part and parcel by Sony's record division. It's not in Sony's best interest to support their "message", per say, but it is beneficial to them to cultivate an artist with that sort of "counter-culture" appeal because it smooths out their rough corporate edges in the eyes of the populace. Sure, it's conjecture, but if you ask me, all signs point to the fact that Sony would love nothing more to have David Jaffe be their own personal "renegade." I didn't exactly see that marketing fellow put the kibosh on any of the tirades in that video.
Trust me, it takes just as long to re-factor and "fix" legacy code that's been hacked and re-hacked for years as it does to write it from scratch. Speaking from experience here, the iterative nature of titles like Madden and FIFA leads to a more difficult, bloated production cycle than you'd expect.
Think about it -- You're a new developer working on a project and you get handed a library of code that's been 'resused' and 'modified' under 'tight time constraints' (aka "hacked") for YEARS. You have to spend time familiarizing yourself with this spaghetti mess, and as such, your productivity declines. Your managers see this occuring across the board and throw more people at the problem. Now you have four or five people who are unfamiliar with the project working on it, adding in their modifications, and making their own 'modifications' under 'tight time constraints' (aka "hacks"). What do you think ends up happening the next year when a whole new batch of people are thrown onto the project?
I'd suggest turning to your dog-eared copies of The Mythical Man-Month before you attempt to divy exactly what is going on behind the scenes at EA, and probably a lot more of the bigger developers out there. The cost of game development gets "crazy" because these huge companies are falling into the common trap where they've become convinced that the answer to any development problem is "MORE RESOURCES." The concept of working in a streamlined environment has long since been abandoned in favor of a "big business" mentality where the whole somehow is percieved as greater than the sum of the parts.
Valid points, but I'd say your entire argument is essentially negated by the fact that this interview has driven Jaffe's stock up in the public eye far more than any marketing campaign could have. You say "he needs to learn to be responsible for actions" -- it seems to me like he's doing just fine in that regard. I know that I, for one, have a new measure of respect for Mr. Jaffe after discovering first-hand that he's not another one of these slick salesman types (ahem... Romero). He seems human. I like that. I know I'm not alone.
You make a very good point. In-game advertising translates into real-world violence being caused by gamers. Teens that play games like GTA are far more likely to do the same thing in real life if in-game ads remove the "falseness" of the in-game world.
That's some mighty high-minded conjecture right there. Care to cite some sources for this little nugget of hyperbole?
I agree, to an extent, but sports is (in general) an activity that has almost always included a live audience, while video gaming has not. And I think there's a definite reason for this. People enjoy sports because of the vicarious nature of the competition -- they can turn their team or players into an 'avatar' that acts as a proxy for their own emotional involvement. I think the very nature of gaming (i.e. the fact that the 'competitors' are themselves projecting onto an avatar) tends to eliminate this sort of connection. People don't want to cheer for people that are 'just like them' -- a big part of the success of spectator sport is the idolatry inherent to it, and I'm sorry to say that the vast majority of the country just doesn't consider a finely-honed video game skill to be an admirable trait.
I love gaming, it's by far my favorite hobby, but I'm still keenly aware of the sheer and utter boredom that most non-gamers experience when I ask them to 'hold on a minute' and put them in a spectators' position for even a couple minutes of play. Video games are just not a vicarious pleasure.
How is watching a bunch of people get together and play video games (WSVG) from watching a bunch of people get together and play football(Superbowl)? These people practice hours on end just like professional sports players. Its just a new playing field.
Simple. Football is something that many people find enjoyable to watch, and the vast majority of the viewing audience are not football players themselves. The atheletic feats and physical mastery that a lot of the professional atheletes have is all but unattainable to the average individual, so a lot of people enjoy the ability to vicariously experience these contests.
On the other hand, find me a handful of people who DON'T play video games that would tune in to watch them being played on television, and I'd be very, very surprised. If anybody expects this sort of "coverage" to somehow mainstream Professional Gaming, I would suggest not holding your breath.
There's a part of me that thinks that choosing to spend your mindless recreation time watching other people engage in their mindless recreation time is intensely creepy and vouyeristic. There's also a part of me that thinks that the fact that many people are willing to passively watch people play video games on television is quite possibly the horrendously inevitable culmination of a 'do-nothing culture.'
But I suppose it's really no worse than watching people play poker, either.
I do have one question about your departure from EA. You mention that you spend the same amount of time working and that you were not exploited by EA. My question is what is the difference in what you are working on? From what I've read and heard, my suspicion is that you were doing quite a bit of re-writing and debugging of code that was not "yours" due to project changes and employee departures at EA. I am guessing that now you are working on your own code and seeing that move forward daily instead of being rehashed and "fixed" constantly. Please, help me understand your working conditions.
I don't want to get into too many details for risk of unwittingly violating NDA's or something like that, but yes, I will say that you're essentially correct. Part of the nature of such an 'iterative' project cycle is that you do spend a lot of time waist-deep in legacy code, and the high turnover and hyperspeed nature of EA's work environment did lend to a lot of that "one step forward, two steps back" you describe.
Now, I work for a company of sixteen, and you're right -- I do spend far more time with my own code than I did when I was working for Electronic Arts, which does lend itself to a much more productive workflow. It's interesting that, to me, huge parallels can be drawn between this and the threads about the Vista menus lately -- I think the hugest problem causing the underwhelming quality of EA games isn't exclusively the way they approach the monetization of their business, I'm more inclined to say that the most relevant issue is (much like the Microsoft blogs describe) the insane amount of productively that's lost when every decision at the lowest, most nuts-and-bolts level, has to get passed through and approved by ten or twenty people who have absolutely NO hands-on familiarity whatsoever with the codebase itself (project managers, producers, etc.)
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Art can not and must not be produced on an assembly line. EA's biggest fault is their attempting constantly to do this.
I'm a former EA developer myself, and I poured a lot of my own blood, sweat, and tears into titles that I never had much faith in to begin with -- but that is the nature of being a small cog in a very large machine. The bolded point up here is very valid, though. By tying so much of EA's commercial viability into pre-existing IP like movies and real-world sports, EA saves tons on the R&D costs on the actual creation of new concepts and ideas. However, they've also built themselves into a box where almost every title they release has a built-in "expiration date", which both increases the pressure on the developers themselves, and shortens the time available to develop a quality product.
I personally have always found this to be a counter-productive and short-sighted way to do business. The best-selling titles in gaming history were not slapped together in deference to a deadline instead of a standard of quality, and the assembly-line nature of developing iterative titles that must be released on a consistent yearly schedule does nothing to encourage innovation. Regardless of the effects, EA has made this their business model by choosing to base games on items that coincide with 'real world' events (the start of the NFL season, a movie release) and that will be continue to be the lynchpin of how they do business until the moment where they're confronted with a very real financial reason not to do so, which will require a far more significant backlash than rhetoric from hardcore gamers -- like a tangible decline in perception from the MAINSTREAM consumer.
That being said, though, I think the attempts to categorize EA as an 'evil empire' are missing the boat. EA is a corporation, like any other, and as such, its business is moving units. While smaller companies obviously are able to personify the individualistic ideals viewed as more honorable and dignified in a free market, EA's massive corporate structure has relegated it to ultimately being a "bottom line" company as opposed to the type of entity that can engage in 'prestige' work. This is a huge corporate monolith, there's no doubt about that, but to think that the company is operating from an "us against them" perspective is fairly inaccurate. Regardless of what the general consensus may be, the people making games at EA do care about creating a quality product, it's ultimately the business issues and the inflexible nature of such a gargantuan company that creates disasters -- not any ill-will towards consumers or the industry in general.
It's also become fashionable for gamers to rationalize their dislike of EA's products and stature by falling back on the "EA Spouse" claims and returning to beat the war drums that EA treats their employees inhumanly. This, I think, is at its heart a flawed argument which draws more from conjecture than reality. I left EA because I wanted to work at a smaller company and feel better about the quality products I was involved in, sure, but at no point during my tenure there did I feel exploited or taken advantage of in any way. The hours were long at times, sure, but I've worked in the industry prior to that and continue to do so today and I see little to no difference in the time commitment expected from me in those situations as I did when I was still employed with Electronic Arts. I know that the vast majority of my fellow employees felt the same way. It seems to me that the argument that EA is worthy of scorn because of how they treat employees is a conclusion being drawn far more from conjecture than any real-world experience. The argument that their employee treatment is somehow the motivating factor behind an overwhelming negative perception of the company seems to be a convenient way to mask the true cause of this sentiment, which falls somewhere a few inches to the right of the revolutio
Slashdot Mirror
There are plenty of people out there who feel this strange, distorted need to attach their personal feelings of well-being to products. It's no different than the guys who define themselves as "Chevy Guys" or "Ford Guys." Uninteresting people need to identify themselves in some way so that they can feel like they're individuals. What you're witnessing here is legions of confused kids who somehow have gotten "feeling good about themselves" mixed up with "corporate loyalty."
Proper format for posting here:
Opening Sentence -- A strident sentence declaring your steadfast allegiance to one of three multi-national electronics companies, followed by a detailed description of exactly why said company cares about you deeply, both as a consumer and an individual. This sentence should include liberal usage of the terms "next-gen", "the gaming industry", and "fanbois", and should be followed by several line breaks and possibly an emoticon.
Martyr's Tale of Sacrifice -- Wherein the author should detail the trials and tribulations which he endured to purchase his product of choice. If possible, this dilemma should be immediately related back to the product's amazing sales performance, in contrast to the utterly dismal sales of its competitors.
Martyr's Tale of Martyrdom -- In keeping with the general tone of the opening paragraph, the next section of your post should be a desperate lament to those who are polluting the internet with $_SYSTEM bashing. It should also be mentioned at this point that Slashdot is now controlled by a shadowy cabal of $_OTHER_SYSTEM supporters who are misrepresenting the true public opinion of this issue for their own personal gain and popularity.
Links to Blog Entries -- Next, we move into the 'discovery' phase of the post. Here, a list of links to blog entries should be detailed. It is important that very few of these entries actually contain any useful information, and even more important that none of them are links to respected news outlets -- These should be remedially written diatribes about the superiority of $_SYSTEM that include a photograph of a display box on a shelf in Kalamazoo to demonstrate, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that nobody is buying $_OTHER_SYSTEM.
Reference to Overblown Technical Deficiancies -- Whether it's a faulty piece of nylon, or an unsupported specialty video mode, every technical product will have initial mechanical glitches. Exploit this to hammer home your opinion! Completely ignore all statements, fixes, or recall attempts issued by the company and make sure to do everything in your power to illustrate $_OTHER_SYSTEM as a faulty machine that was created solely for the purpose of fleecing computers. This is a good time to refer back to the theme of your Opening Sentence and mention that the manufacturers of these systems are simply money-grubbing capitalist automatons, while the manufacturer of YOUR system operates from a place of pure altruism, happiness, and flying unicorns.
Summary -- This can be anything from a simple rephrasing of your opening statement to something more dramatic and edgy, such as "I CANT BELIEVE YOU BOUGHT A $_SYSTEM SUCKERS!!!" in all caps. While the content of this may very, make sure to employ a tone of overwhelming gravity -- lest people forget, you are discussing video game consoles here and this topic should be treated as the massively important and life-changing decision that it is. No hyperbole could EVER be too overblown to emphasize the importance of your choice of entertainment products, so make sure to use plenty of phrases like "I'd rather die than...", "Sure, idiots might think that...", and "Jesus christ, are you fucking retarded?" Another valuable tactic is to use comically exaggerated descriptions of physical violence to explain what would happen to anybody who tried to "force you to buy/play a $_OTHER_SYSTEM", as electronics retailers are often known to do.
Hopefully this has been a helpful primer to entering the Great Console Debate of 2007. Follow these simple guidelines and watch opinions sway!
Agreed. Entirely. Linden Labs might be wise to take note that actually creating a quality product still does matter, no matter how much of your content can ultimately be blamed on "well, it's a USER-GENERATED world, so..."
I actually kind of see the point that the Courier guy is making here. I recieved a DS as a gift earlier this year and enjoyed it a lot. I played casually and I thought it was a neat gadget. Since I've moved from a small town to a thriving metropolis, I spend a lot of time on public transit and I've been loving my DS in ways I never knew possible. I think different people are going to be playing games for different reasons, but for those of us with 9-to-5's, handheld gaming is many ways more feasible. When I come home from work, I rarely have time to justify sitting around and play console games, but handhelds are great because it's easy to sneak a bit of play time in between more 'pressing' events.
So if a game company is going to release a game in a series held near-and-dear to the hearts of a lot of 'retro gamers', why not release it in a format that's more compatible with a 'grown up' lifestyle? I can't count how many traditionally 'respectable individuals' I see every day playing DS on the trains.
No, honestly, I doubt that any industry is looking after my personal well-being. And I do agree with you on the general principle of the issue. However, I can't help the fact that I'd vastly prefer the situation if "looking after my own best interests" was a job left to me and me alone.
Agreed. I'm reticent to equate the failure of a nylon strap to some sort of serious failing. On the other hand, the failure of a system to perform up to the specs it's sold under strikes a slightly deeper chord in my mind. Nintendo wasn't selling their systems with the fact that "THIS CONTROLLER WON'T FLY OUT OF YOUR HAND" as a point of attraction, however, the PS3 definitely touted the HD/Blue-Ray elemnts of their system as one of its major features. This, to me, is a very different situation.
To draw an analogy, if I were to purchase a brand new Lexus, and a couple days later, my cigarette lighter stopped working, I'd be annoyed. I'm sure that I would feel slightly cheated as a consumer, but I'm also sure that, in the long run, my overall enjoyment of the vehicle wouldn't decrease by any major amount because of the mechanical failing of what ultimately is a small part of the greater product. However, if I were to purchase that same car and then was later informed that "that whole 'engine' thing isn't quite working as intended yet", I would be absolutely livid.
...they'd like their talking points back.
Unless of course, you happened to enjoy a food item that had trans-fats in it and didn't really want the government deciding whether or not it was okay to purchase and consume it. Is our government now in the business of deciding whether or not our opinions are valid? If that's the case, I can think of several places I would start chipping away at long before I turned to dietary concerns.
As a fanboy of neither item, I wasn't accurate about the price. My apologies. I think my point still stands, though, is that the relatively more expensive price of the PS3 does, to a lot of consumers, push it into a different realm of purchase. I don't really see how that stands to be an arguable point, unless your concept of money is somehow different than mine.
As for "going to buy my fucking Wii", I'm going to wait a few months until it's cheaper, which is the nature of these sort of beasts. My world will continue to spin without a "next-gen gaming system" at its center.
While I recognize the appeal of attempting to frame all dissent as a "NINTENDO vs. SONY" war, I stopped investing my emotions in the goings-on of multi-national corporations with which I have no connection years ago. I made this post not to criticize the PS3 in any way, just to point out the fact that, for some of us, "potential" does not equate to a justifiably higher price point.
Now, deep breaths and cool your jets.
I agree with the fact that the Cell certainly does exhibit a lot of potential. However, I think that drawing the conclusion that excellent hardware marks an end to all criticism is ignoring the primary sticking point of the console itself -- The price. I don't think many people out there, aside from the rabid Nintendo types, honestly believe that the PS3 is a lackluster system without the ability to play great games. My sole issue with the console, and I'm sure it's one that's fairly commonly shared, is that $599 is a hell of a lot to play for a toy, no matter how amazing of a toy it is. Like it or not, the price-point difference between $250 and $599 is more than a marginal one, and there are plenty of more fiscally-reserved folks out there like me who will absolutely refuse to drop what amounts to the majority of a month's rent on a machine used to play games.
There are plenty of hardcore gamers out there that think this is a reasonable price, and I'm not knocking them for it. I'm just stating the "everyman" point of view here, and that is that Sony cannot expect to achieve any sort of pervasiveness with this unit until they adjust the price so it lands somewhere in the universe of a "casual purchase" instead of a "fairly serious investment." I could easily purchase a Wii and not feel like I'd make any major sacrifice for it, however, a PS3 would require budgeting -- and budgeting around a new game system is not something that the average individual is going to be willing to do when there are other options that there that could easily fall into the realm of general affordability.
The good news, I suppose, is that developers should really be starting to create some great stuff for the PS3 right around the time it becomes something I can justify purchasing without hating myself for.
Would you like a bit of tea with all that bitter?
I'll attempt to respond to this like a mature individual so at least one of us comes out of this with some modicum of respectability. Yes, I'm aware of the fact that not everybody lives in the same geographic location as the people that they might want to play games with. I also realize that the average person out there (i.e. not the hardcore gaming folks) don't really think of "online games" when they think about "getting in touch with distant friends and relatives." I also know that the entire marketing thrust of the Wii has been, to this point, to appeal to the casual gamer, to market the system's multiplayer functionality to people who might not otherwise be interested in buying a console by presenting their gaming as more of a "respectably socialized" group activity than an anti-social "I am by myself in my underwear with the blinds drawn" sort of pursuit.
So my point is: Why bother? You can look at it as fanboyism if you want, but truth be told, I have no preference. I plan on purchasing both systems as soon as they become reasonably affordable - but for completely different reasons. The PS3 and X360 are both consoles that seem to be designed to appeal to the 'online gamer' far more than Nintendo's, which seems to be well on its way to carving out an entirely different, more 'communal' style of multiplayer. Why should Nintendo spike their development costs on emulating competitors' functionality when the results would be catered to a niched subset of their market base that they don't even seem very interested in attracting in the first place? That would be completely INSANE, somewhat akin to sticking a three hundred dollar movie drive into their system or someth... never mind.
The Wii seems to me like it's designed to be a social device, the type of system you play with your family and friends. Online gaming is only 'social' at its lowest common denominator. I, for one, don't give much of a shit whether the Wii EVER "gets online right." In my mind, they've already gotten multi-player right by focusing on solid, fun, and communal play when two people are in the same room.
I play MMO's and I dig the pervasive online nature of the beast, but more than that, I love playing the Wii with my real life friends -- I, for one, have no desire to play Wii Tennis with STABZUFACE24 from Wisconsin. Am I alone here? I'm sure there's got to be more gamers than me out there who really don't care about online multi-player whatsoever, when half the fun of it is you and your buddies laughing at each other making asses out of yourselves.
The only way I see Apple getting into the console business is *after* they've taken the living room by storm with their other media offerings (iTV, etc.). Exactly the opposite of the way Microsoft and Sony are doing it. Yes, because Sony is a relatively young upstart that sprung into prominence with the release of the Playstation. Never mind that whole Walkman thing, or VCRs, or televisions, or home stereos, or any of the other products that have been infiltrating American living rooms since the 1960's.
Will Wright is far from being the type of guest I would expect to see on Colbert's show anyway. Colbert's interviews ARE mostly vehicles for Stephen to deliver his patented deadpan and that's why having guests from the political world seems to be a far more comfortable fit -- it was somewhat uncomfortable to watch Colbert attempt to shoehorn his "overwrought conservative" persona into an interview with a fellow who was obviously not on board to promote any sort of political agenda whatsoever.
This, to me, was a case of "bad booking" at its finest. I would've loved to have seen Will Wright on the Daily Show, but the Colbert Report has always seemed at its best when it's 'guests' are little more than targets for the host's witticisms. Actual informative interview content has never been a strong point of the series.
Yeah, I sacrificed my point a bit in an attempt to be funny, I guess, and failed miserable on both counts.
My thoughts were that, while a compelling storyline is a bonus for ANY title, it's not the sort of thing that most gamers would list as a desired feature for a FPS, especially one lauded predominantly for its multiplayer mode, where the story is essentially inconsequential.
Topping the list of statements you will never hear:
"Whee! I'm having so much fun with this ALL-ENCOMPASSING STORYLINE!"
Anyway my points DO stand, even if some of my conclusions are unfounded. And ultimately it will be some time before we really know the impact of this interview. I mean, this is the game industry, I wouldn't be surprised to see people fall over themselves to pick sides on this one, and we'll see interview questions about this interview in other people's interviews. "What's your opinion of... blah blah blah."
I've spent a good deal of my professional life operating within the game industry, and I can almost certainly say that this will, if anything, do great things for Jaffe's career and undoubtedly will not hurt him.
Gaming has been looking for its "rock heroes" for a long time. Game designers have never been glamorous in the traditional sense, but publishers have been trying to cultivate this meme for a long, long time. Hell, why else bother to stage game events at the Playboy Mansion? Why the hell else would a second-rate Fabio lookalike be plastered all over the cover of magazines instead of the games he's developed? The industry in general is desperately tired of being perceived as a bunch of top-buttoned mouth-breathers lurking on the edges of social accepability, and has been looking for their "ambassador of cool" pretty much since its inception. If anything, I would expect to see SONY start trying to capitalize on Jaffe's new rebellious "TOTALLY RAW AND REAL" image long before I'd expect to see any sort of corporate backlash.
To draw a parallel, the band Rage Against the Machine made a fortune writing lyrics with an anti-capitalist perspective, but were marketed part and parcel by Sony's record division. It's not in Sony's best interest to support their "message", per say, but it is beneficial to them to cultivate an artist with that sort of "counter-culture" appeal because it smooths out their rough corporate edges in the eyes of the populace. Sure, it's conjecture, but if you ask me, all signs point to the fact that Sony would love nothing more to have David Jaffe be their own personal "renegade." I didn't exactly see that marketing fellow put the kibosh on any of the tirades in that video.
Trust me, it takes just as long to re-factor and "fix" legacy code that's been hacked and re-hacked for years as it does to write it from scratch. Speaking from experience here, the iterative nature of titles like Madden and FIFA leads to a more difficult, bloated production cycle than you'd expect. Think about it -- You're a new developer working on a project and you get handed a library of code that's been 'resused' and 'modified' under 'tight time constraints' (aka "hacked") for YEARS. You have to spend time familiarizing yourself with this spaghetti mess, and as such, your productivity declines. Your managers see this occuring across the board and throw more people at the problem. Now you have four or five people who are unfamiliar with the project working on it, adding in their modifications, and making their own 'modifications' under 'tight time constraints' (aka "hacks"). What do you think ends up happening the next year when a whole new batch of people are thrown onto the project? I'd suggest turning to your dog-eared copies of The Mythical Man-Month before you attempt to divy exactly what is going on behind the scenes at EA, and probably a lot more of the bigger developers out there. The cost of game development gets "crazy" because these huge companies are falling into the common trap where they've become convinced that the answer to any development problem is "MORE RESOURCES." The concept of working in a streamlined environment has long since been abandoned in favor of a "big business" mentality where the whole somehow is percieved as greater than the sum of the parts.
Valid points, but I'd say your entire argument is essentially negated by the fact that this interview has driven Jaffe's stock up in the public eye far more than any marketing campaign could have. You say "he needs to learn to be responsible for actions" -- it seems to me like he's doing just fine in that regard. I know that I, for one, have a new measure of respect for Mr. Jaffe after discovering first-hand that he's not another one of these slick salesman types (ahem... Romero). He seems human. I like that. I know I'm not alone.
You make a very good point. In-game advertising translates into real-world violence being caused by gamers. Teens that play games like GTA are far more likely to do the same thing in real life if in-game ads remove the "falseness" of the in-game world.
That's some mighty high-minded conjecture right there. Care to cite some sources for this little nugget of hyperbole?
I agree, to an extent, but sports is (in general) an activity that has almost always included a live audience, while video gaming has not. And I think there's a definite reason for this. People enjoy sports because of the vicarious nature of the competition -- they can turn their team or players into an 'avatar' that acts as a proxy for their own emotional involvement. I think the very nature of gaming (i.e. the fact that the 'competitors' are themselves projecting onto an avatar) tends to eliminate this sort of connection. People don't want to cheer for people that are 'just like them' -- a big part of the success of spectator sport is the idolatry inherent to it, and I'm sorry to say that the vast majority of the country just doesn't consider a finely-honed video game skill to be an admirable trait.
I love gaming, it's by far my favorite hobby, but I'm still keenly aware of the sheer and utter boredom that most non-gamers experience when I ask them to 'hold on a minute' and put them in a spectators' position for even a couple minutes of play. Video games are just not a vicarious pleasure.
How is watching a bunch of people get together and play video games (WSVG) from watching a bunch of people get together and play football(Superbowl)? These people practice hours on end just like professional sports players. Its just a new playing field.
Simple. Football is something that many people find enjoyable to watch, and the vast majority of the viewing audience are not football players themselves. The atheletic feats and physical mastery that a lot of the professional atheletes have is all but unattainable to the average individual, so a lot of people enjoy the ability to vicariously experience these contests.
On the other hand, find me a handful of people who DON'T play video games that would tune in to watch them being played on television, and I'd be very, very surprised. If anybody expects this sort of "coverage" to somehow mainstream Professional Gaming, I would suggest not holding your breath.
There's a part of me that thinks that choosing to spend your mindless recreation time watching other people engage in their mindless recreation time is intensely creepy and vouyeristic. There's also a part of me that thinks that the fact that many people are willing to passively watch people play video games on television is quite possibly the horrendously inevitable culmination of a 'do-nothing culture.'
But I suppose it's really no worse than watching people play poker, either.
I do have one question about your departure from EA. You mention that you spend the same amount of time working and that you were not exploited by EA. My question is what is the difference in what you are working on? From what I've read and heard, my suspicion is that you were doing quite a bit of re-writing and debugging of code that was not "yours" due to project changes and employee departures at EA. I am guessing that now you are working on your own code and seeing that move forward daily instead of being rehashed and "fixed" constantly. Please, help me understand your working conditions.
I don't want to get into too many details for risk of unwittingly violating NDA's or something like that, but yes, I will say that you're essentially correct. Part of the nature of such an 'iterative' project cycle is that you do spend a lot of time waist-deep in legacy code, and the high turnover and hyperspeed nature of EA's work environment did lend to a lot of that "one step forward, two steps back" you describe.
Now, I work for a company of sixteen, and you're right -- I do spend far more time with my own code than I did when I was working for Electronic Arts, which does lend itself to a much more productive workflow. It's interesting that, to me, huge parallels can be drawn between this and the threads about the Vista menus lately -- I think the hugest problem causing the underwhelming quality of EA games isn't exclusively the way they approach the monetization of their business, I'm more inclined to say that the most relevant issue is (much like the Microsoft blogs describe) the insane amount of productively that's lost when every decision at the lowest, most nuts-and-bolts level, has to get passed through and approved by ten or twenty people who have absolutely NO hands-on familiarity whatsoever with the codebase itself (project managers, producers, etc.)
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Art can not and must not be produced on an assembly line. EA's biggest fault is their attempting constantly to do this.
I'm a former EA developer myself, and I poured a lot of my own blood, sweat, and tears into titles that I never had much faith in to begin with -- but that is the nature of being a small cog in a very large machine. The bolded point up here is very valid, though. By tying so much of EA's commercial viability into pre-existing IP like movies and real-world sports, EA saves tons on the R&D costs on the actual creation of new concepts and ideas. However, they've also built themselves into a box where almost every title they release has a built-in "expiration date", which both increases the pressure on the developers themselves, and shortens the time available to develop a quality product.
I personally have always found this to be a counter-productive and short-sighted way to do business. The best-selling titles in gaming history were not slapped together in deference to a deadline instead of a standard of quality, and the assembly-line nature of developing iterative titles that must be released on a consistent yearly schedule does nothing to encourage innovation. Regardless of the effects, EA has made this their business model by choosing to base games on items that coincide with 'real world' events (the start of the NFL season, a movie release) and that will be continue to be the lynchpin of how they do business until the moment where they're confronted with a very real financial reason not to do so, which will require a far more significant backlash than rhetoric from hardcore gamers -- like a tangible decline in perception from the MAINSTREAM consumer.
That being said, though, I think the attempts to categorize EA as an 'evil empire' are missing the boat. EA is a corporation, like any other, and as such, its business is moving units. While smaller companies obviously are able to personify the individualistic ideals viewed as more honorable and dignified in a free market, EA's massive corporate structure has relegated it to ultimately being a "bottom line" company as opposed to the type of entity that can engage in 'prestige' work. This is a huge corporate monolith, there's no doubt about that, but to think that the company is operating from an "us against them" perspective is fairly inaccurate. Regardless of what the general consensus may be, the people making games at EA do care about creating a quality product, it's ultimately the business issues and the inflexible nature of such a gargantuan company that creates disasters -- not any ill-will towards consumers or the industry in general.
It's also become fashionable for gamers to rationalize their dislike of EA's products and stature by falling back on the "EA Spouse" claims and returning to beat the war drums that EA treats their employees inhumanly. This, I think, is at its heart a flawed argument which draws more from conjecture than reality. I left EA because I wanted to work at a smaller company and feel better about the quality products I was involved in, sure, but at no point during my tenure there did I feel exploited or taken advantage of in any way. The hours were long at times, sure, but I've worked in the industry prior to that and continue to do so today and I see little to no difference in the time commitment expected from me in those situations as I did when I was still employed with Electronic Arts. I know that the vast majority of my fellow employees felt the same way. It seems to me that the argument that EA is worthy of scorn because of how they treat employees is a conclusion being drawn far more from conjecture than any real-world experience. The argument that their employee treatment is somehow the motivating factor behind an overwhelming negative perception of the company seems to be a convenient way to mask the true cause of this sentiment, which falls somewhere a few inches to the right of the revolutio